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You know what really pisses me off about sexual reassignment surgery?

It's that my surgeon (may he rest in peace: he died of Covid 😞) didn't come in afterwards and say, "congratulations, Mrs Brown, they weren't cancerous".

Talk about a missed opportunity.

in reply to Sarah Brown

oh I'm sorry he died. We should all have such good vulva surgeons.
in reply to Ailbhe

@Ailbhe Thanks. He was never in the best of health, but I was quite upset when I found out.
Unknown parent



Fellow #Friendica instance admins. Is there any downside to turning off the Auto Discovered Contact Directory? I only ask because it's literally cooking my poor server once a week.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

Susan :potion_lesbian: reshared this.

in reply to Rui Malheiro

@Rui Malheiro yeah. Appreciate the input tho. Problem is one of granularity, I think. I can’t limit just that part without impacting stuff I don’t want to impact.

The ultimate answer is to migrate to a machine with better thermal management. At this time, it’s running on an old laptop and it copes very badly with heat.

in reply to Sarah Brown

if heat is the problem, you could look into airflow. But then, most laptops are very badly designed to handle close to 100% power most of the time.

You can play around with `cpufreq` but that's just going to hit the same all or nothing wall.



China: stop winding up America. It isn't big, and it isn't clever.

America: You don't have to use ALL THE WEAPONS. The balloons can't hurt you.

Seriously guys, grow the fuck up. The rest of us are watching this and it reflects badly on both of you.

in reply to Sarah Brown

It’s intent is to deflect the attention from domestic issues. Which is working:(


Best thing about driving an EV (Nissan Leaf): coming up to the autoestrada, single lane sliproad, 270º bend, some guy behind tailgating me because I refused to speed round the bend. A lot of people do this. I guess they see a family hatchback EV and decide it must be a "little old lady"-mobile, and they have a desperate need to show me how I'm holding their impressive petrol burner up.

Bend straightens out to join the main carriageway, and I just press the "tailgater begone" switch (the accelerator, all the way to the floor).

And then suddenly an obscenity of kilowatts is delivered to my wheels, and I'm just ... gone.

About a minute later, he does a spite overtake when he's finally got up to >120kph and caught me up.

But I know I'm living rent-free in his head for that 😊

in reply to Katie Fenn

I enjoyed the next five minutes of 30 MPH driving through the next village. He didn’t get another opportunity to overtake me before I turned off for Sheffield.

I do get the same satisfaction from driving the Golf GTE. The GTE mode that runs the petrol engine and the electric motor at the same time for ridiculous throttle response is brilliant to catch show-offs out, but I’ve knocked it off lately because men do scarily dangerous things when they’ve been shown up.



We live in a world beset by people who live a sufficiently charmed life that they are able to spend their entire time “fucking around” without ever encountering the “and find out” stage.

Be nice if that changed, wouldn’t it?

in reply to Sarah Brown

I would very much like to have a chance to even drat around without finding out. Somewhere in the middle.


in reply to Sarah Brown

i hope you're right. i worry that it's just easier to kick down sand castles than it is to build them
in reply to Sarah Brown

Couldn't find a way around the paywall, but did find plenty of reasonably researched article confirming the worst. My age cohort is being brainwashed in record time. Maybe I escaped by drinking distilled water.


Today the wind is blowing from the east. This generally creates very choppy waves and today is no exception. As a result, the port of Lagos is “closed to all traffic”, as the entrance is considered risky.

Portugal does this. It closes ports in conditions judged to be unsafe. This is a very different attitude to UK port authorities, which can generally be summed up as, “it’s your own stupid fault if you die”.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

always amazing hearing how things are done in non-waspy countries
in reply to aesmael

@aesmael No sense of adventure. TODAY IS A GOOD DAY TO DIE! FUCK YOU, NEPTUNE!


Just seen the worst take about the ChatGPT thing. It was basically “we should support open source chat models instead”

A bullshit fountain is still a bullshit fountain even if you can pull its source from Git.



The TERF game

For all the people wondering about why there’s so much fuss over someone personally deciding whether or not to play Grand Theft TERF or not, consider that there is a campaign to drive trans people from society in much of the English speaking world right now.

Trans people need to know who has our backs. Anyone who won’t cross the “please chose literally one of a thousand alternate and equally creative ways to get your dopamine hit” picket line (and let’s be honest, it’s the easiest picket line to not cross ever) certainly, does not have our backs.

We are used to this, but some of us persist in being optimists and expecting better of people anyway.

Meanwhile, this is an utterly amazing dopamine hit. It’s basically Tetris meets 2048, and I guess no queer people were harmed in its production. I’ve been playing the same session for weeks on and off now and have a 2^25 cube.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

The adverts on that 2048 thing (on android) are insufferable. Is that what casual games are like now?


Bit butter over transphobia on social media
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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in reply to Sarah Brown

I've often heard the phrase "separate the art from the artist". Makes sense that I can hear a song about drugs and not be inclined to snort a ton of cocaine, and I may know an actor has a faith which doesn't align with mine. The phrase can apply to such things. I also don't care what goes on in anyone else's bedroom.
But that cannot and should not apply when the "artist" uses their platform to spread hate targeted at a group of people who are just trying to be themselves.
in reply to Helena Rigby

and tbh I think that is where the whole mess started - not being aware they needed to draw the line and so not specifying it in the rules of posting on that instance.


Hello! We are DOCKER! We are a serious company providing services to the THE BIGGEST COMPANIES IN THE WORLD.

If you use our product and don’t pick a name for what it creates, we will randomly name it after an Ann Summers vibrator.

Thank you for choosing DOCKER (version 69.69, dangling-donkey).

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mention of suicide

Your regular reminder that John Money lied about the results of what he did to the Reimer twins, covered up the fact that David appeared to express an innate gender identity of male, and that both twins died by suicide, likely as a result of what Money did to them.

Furthermore, through his covering up the damage his wholly unethical experiment did, he gave legitimacy to subsequent decades of mistreatment of trans and intersex people by quacks.

It’s a shame hell isn’t a real thing, because by god, he deserves to rot there.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.



Running your own #Fediverse server? Want to give your users the authentic #Twitter experience? It’s quick and easy! Just pull the Ethernet cable out!

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US Pol, police, racism, murder
Even before clicking through to this, it was obvious to me what the victim’s skin colour is. American police murder a man for … crossing the road while black.
in reply to Sarah Brown

US Pol, police, racism, murder
If the US were reported on like a lot of countries are, their police would be referred to as “state sponsored death squads”.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

US Pol, police, racism, murder
right?? So much power- the ability to use state sanction lethal violence but with no accountability, transparency, reporting, or standards is just so mind blowing and appalling.
in reply to Sarah Brown

US Pol, police, racism, murder
I saw a tiktok from someone that kept getting kicked out of police academy for asking too many questions and having the sense that the training went against "the ethics of policing" (which, uh... that's a whole thing they need to unpack). They said they were told to should things like "drop the weapon" and "stop resisting" after firing their gun because people's memory will rearrange the events to make them make sense. It's so horribly fucked.


My dockerised homebridge was logging using the American date format, and I found this incredibly annoying. Worked out how to fix it: you add this to the docker-compose file...

    environment:
      LANG: en_GB.UTF-8

Took me long enough to work that out though.

in reply to Sarah Brown

building a fancy tool using MS's cloud services a few hours

Getting it to write and read out in non-fucked dates on the other hand...



Shoutout to Nginx Proxy Manager, which if you host some websites on your home internet connection, is a really nice bit of software that installs in Docker in about 30 seconds, has a nice GUI, handles SSL for you, and requires no Nginx knowledge. Even @Zoe O'Connell was impressed and that takes some doing!
This entry was edited (1 year ago)


What the cock is this shit? Someone had to go and integrate the stupid crypto scam bollocks into the fediverse. Oh dear.

Rui Malheiro reshared this.

in reply to Sarah Brown

oh, joy! Looks like something I will block on principle.

"Likecoin is a digital currency that the authors of content are rewarded for each YouTube like.

Likecoin is based on Blockchain technology using the mechanism called “Proof of Popularity”: the higher the popularity of the video and the more likes it gets, the bigger is the amount of cryptocurrency rewarded to the author.

This technology makes it possible to monetize video content easily and to get a decent reward without adding any advertising or attracting advertising agencies."



Me and the lads on our way to intercept a Chinese Spy Pigeon

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I am, unusually, awake for the sunrise. This means I just got to see a bird fly straight into my window with a loud THUMP!, turn round, and fly away again.

I guess this is the bird equivalent of me randomly walking into things. Hope it’s ok.

in reply to Sarah Brown

Zoe cleaned the windows yesterday. Save the wildlife, leave them a bit mucky.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Normally they lie down stunned for a few minutes. You obviously have thicker skulled birds down there.


The mission architecture for the ESA/NASA Mars sample return mission is becoming clear. As the spacecraft approaches Mars, it will break into an entry vehicle and an orbiter (from ESA). The entry vehicle will land and the samples will be loaded onto it by rover or helicopter.

It will then launch into Mars orbit to rendezvous with the ESA orbiter and deliver the samples. The ESA orbiter will then burn for Trans Earth Injection and coast to Earth.

Once it hits the atmosphere, it will decelerate rapidly in a blaze of fire before slowing to subsonic speed and deploying its parachutes.

At this point, the United States Air Force will scramble an elite F22 Raptor squadron and shoot it down for being a Martian Spy Capsule.

jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia25338-n…

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I now understand why you can’t share photos from a Mastodon client when using it with #Friendica:

In Friendica, photos have permissions. Mastodon doesn’t understand this, so when it uploads the photo it doesn’t set any. The Friendica server seems to see this and decide it needs to default to the most restrictive set, i.e. private.

So the created post does not contain a shareable photo.

If you then go into your gallery and edit the photo permissions to be public, then make a bullshit edit to the post, so that it refederates, it’ll suddenly appear.

HïMY SYeD🟩:mstdn: reshared this.

in reply to Sarah Brown

I have the exact opposite problem (and have already pulled all my hairs out trying to solve it), the Friendica instance I incompetently installed sees pictures but not text from the non-Friendica parts of the Fediverse.

github.com/friendica/friendica…

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You guys! I think this fediverse thing might have legs! These are the stats from my micro instance, and I guess there are loads more corners that it doesn't know about!
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

Rui Malheiro reshared this.

Unknown parent

Sarah Brown
@Evil Bee Permissions issue. Try again?



What is the deal with this balloon thing the yanks have got? Is it still there? Is it doing anything strange? Why not a satellite?
in reply to Sarah Brown

It's still hovering somewhere, and the more excitable right-wing congresscritters are trying to convince folks to take random pot-shots at them.

Because that'll totally work...



@Elk works with Friendica! This is very relevant to my interests! It presents it as a microblogging experience, but work it does.
@Elk
in reply to Sarah Brown

@Elk Interestingly, I can use Mastodon features with it that I can’t use on the friendica native UI, such as changing audience mid thread.

It can’t upload pictures though.

@Elk
in reply to Sarah Brown

@Elk It’s also limiting me to 500 characters, or at least displaying a countdown to 500.

This is actually very nice. Currently I’m maintaining two fediverse accounts: one Friendica, one Mastodon, because Friendica is great as an aggregator, but it makes a very poor Twitter replacement. Mastodon is much better at that.

But elk gives me the mastodon experience on my friendica account.

And I’m now wondering if I really need to maintain both.

@Elk

Sarah reshared this.


Formerly the richest man in the world, now selling MLM schemes. Whatever.

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Sarah reshared this.


An interesting fediverse quirk. On Mastodon, you can change visibility midway through a comment thread.

This makes sense because Mastodon is a Twitter-like microblogging platform and each response is a post in its own right.

But this is a federal system and your toots may be going to something that isn’t Mastodon.

This, that you are reading now, is not a Mastodon post. It’s a Friendica post. Friendica is not Twitter-like; it’s Facebook-like. That means that a post includes all responses as comments on that post and not first class posts in their own right.

Which means you can’t, e.g., change the audience midway through a comment thread, even if the people you’re replying to are on Mastodon, because the idea of changing the visibility midway through a comment thread is absurd in Facebook-like parlance.

As different fediverse protocols become increasingly popular, we’re gonna have to het used to these quirks.


Sarah reshared this.


Sent an email to our conveyancing solicitor. Got an automated reply back:

Thank you for your email, which has been safely received


It’s SMTP, guys, not a consignment of dynamite sent through bandit country.

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Unknown parent

Sarah Brown
They’re an admin assistant. I don’t think they’re legally trained. They just either think, or have been told, that being endlessly verbose makes them look “professional” instead of like a space alien that taught itself English from garbled police radio transmissions.
in reply to Sarah Brown

me, an American, searching for a definition of "conveyancing solicitor" that doesn't just say "a solicitor well specializes in conveyancing". I finally found one, but I was facepalming hard for a minute. I already knew that solicitors are what we call attorneys or lawyers, so I was really trying to determine what conveyance meant here. I never would have guessed residential property/real estate law.
in reply to Tim

funnily enough, if you see a sign on someone's property in the US that says "No Soliciting" it does not mean you can't practice law. We call door to door salespersons solicitors, because they "solicit" goods. Which to be honest, feels like an old timey word.
in reply to Tim

Some might be so unkind to suggest that conveyancing solicitors are those who couldn't hack the legal profession and barely scraped a pass.

But that would be a very unkind stereotype.

Might explain their apparent inability to fucking read, though.


Sarah reshared this.


#Friendica server now migrated from a 2 gig RPi 4 to an 8 gig early 2015 retina MacBook Pro running Ubuntu.

The MBP was headed to the skip, but it turns out it makes a pretty kick-arse #ActivityPub server.

Reuse is better than recycle.

Here it is, in my server cupboard! If you're reading this post, that dilapidated Mac in the corner served it!

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Is the wire propping open the Mac's lid stopping it sleeping?
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

No. The wire is underneath the Mac. That's a trick of the perspective. The Mac is configured not to sleep. The lid is not closed because I think the hinge is slightly warped.

Sarah reshared this.


Dateline: a petrol station outside Tavira on the main road between Tavira and Faro last night. Action: I park there and, a few minutes later, an older gentleman in a jeep pulls up and I hand him a brown paper bag through my car window.

We then both drive off.

I’m sure this all looked perfectly innocent to anyone observing.

(I was selling the old autopilot unit from my boat)


Sarah reshared this.


Ordering a McRoyale Cheese meal from McDonalds’ coeliac menu, because I can. So ner.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Weirdest thing about Portuguese malls is their addiction to playing 70s, 80s and 90s Britpop

Sarah reshared this.


Discovered why my Friendica server has an occasional massive load spike for several minutes: it’s running out of physical RAM and thrashing the swap.

Machine it’s on only has 2 gigs. I have an old 2015 MacBook Pro that is in a very dilapidated state, but it works perfectly as an Ubuntu server.

Will migrate to that. It has 8 gigs of RAM. That should be plenty.

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Sarah reshared this.


The longer I live, the more I come to the inescapable conclusion that most "successful" captains of industry, managers, and politicians are literal psychopaths.

We are ruled by psychopaths working for psychopaths. The only way you can succeed in their hierarchy is to be a psychopath.

This is the Bad Place.

in reply to Sarah Brown

because 'success' means exploration. A normal human doesn't seek to exploit humans as mere objects. Psychopaths however, do
Unknown parent

Charlie 🏳️‍🌈♿💖
My girlfriend and I are currently writing a book called A Better Algorithm; A Manifesto For Democratic Communism, which we think has some pretty good ideas. We're just starting the pitching to agents / publishers stage (with the first draft written) so hopefully we'll be able to share our ideas soon 🤞🏻


Sarah reshared this.


UK Pol

Oh, Britain needs me, and other early retirees, does it? Maybe it should have thought of that before Brexit, before all the transphobia, before I got so pissed off I said “fuck it” and buggered off to Portugal with its, *checks notes* 300+ days of sunshine and subtropical beaches.

Well, Jer, old buddy, Britain may indeed need us. We, however, do not need it.

Off you fuck, now. Toodles. Mwah.

in reply to Sarah Brown

UK Pol
this makes me joyous and sad in equal measures. You shouldn’t have had to leave, but I love seeing people thriving.
But yes, off they all fuck. GTTO

Sarah reshared this.


I challenge anyone to read this without thinking either of the words, "phlogiston" or "epicycles".

Sarah reshared this.


UKPol

Hey, Liberal Democrats! People are keen to try and fix Brexit, they want standards on clean air indoors for public health, and we really, really need proper and urgent action on Climate change. What can you offer?

"We'll try and make sure that if you need a doctor, one will phone you within a week"

It's utterly, utterly tragic how far my former party has fallen. What an utter, utter lack of ambition. It's just, "The future is going to be shit and there is nothing we propose to do about it".

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Unknown parent

Sarah Brown
UKPol
Probably some from column A, some from column B. There is definitely a dominant ethos of "don't scare the horses" in the Lib Dems now that the properly progressive wing of the party has tried for years (and, sadly, failed) to replace with actual radical politics.
Unknown parent

Sarah Brown
UKPol

They have got into a situation where the MPs care first, and foremost, about defending their own seats. This means never doing anything that might cause strong feelings in the people who are currently electing them, on the basis that if they don't spook the horses, they will vote for the name they did last time.

That tactic, however, goes to only one place: eventual total extinction.


Sarah reshared this.


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in reply to Sarah Brown

@Mabande it’s interesting; I hear many people say they’ve been hounded by moderation etc but I’ve used every major social media platform, some of them extensively, and never experienced it myself. Maybe they don’t speak Swedish?
in reply to Amanda

Before I left twitter, I learned that the way to tell people to "get in the fucking sea" safely was to do it in Portuguese.

Sarah reshared this.


UK Pol, GRA reform
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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in reply to Sarah Brown

I sorry to hear that, that is so frustrating. I hope you can find a way to proceed and not need to use those words! 😢

The US only requires a "declaration of intent" and a pronouncement from an officiant (a license easily obtained and needn't be religiously associated). The wording of the declaration is very flexible.