frandroid: Hammer and sickle logo, with the hammer replaced with a LiveJournal pencil (lj)
« What's the biggest example of the domino meme in my life? I'm gonna have to go with "I got bored on the sleepy overnight shift at the data center -> Russia invaded Ukraine". »


This is an epic thread by [staff profile] denise about how she came to be involved with LiveJournal and how the creation of DW came about, with some bad stuff happening along the way.

(this is a post where this icon fits very well)
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
Hey it only took me a year to setup the adjustable desk I bought! Yay me! Now to do my taxes...
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
I'm a bit behind (~3 months!) on my podcast listening, and behind that on my writing about them, so here's a few more late reasons to dislike Jesse Brown and Canadaland these days.

1) Brown interviewed the Israeli ambassador to Canada, and the only real criticism he had for him was how settlers illegally attacking Palestinians in the West Bank was making HIM unsafe in CANADA. Unreal.

2) Brown's Lebanese pet, Noor Azrieh, interviewed Francesca Albanese and stuck her about how she mixed up Jews and Zionists one in 2014. Nuuuts.

2) a. On the "pet" comment. On one of their episodes together, when they do their duly noted segment, Azrieh thanked Brown for "letting her" bring on some mundane topic. To illustrate how that relationship goes... From what I gather from the show, she's a permanent resident so she's pretty dependent on Canadaland for her continued stay in the country, and you can see the colour of that relationship. Either way I'm not a fan...

3) Brown interviewed Norman Spector again for no reason and Spector straight-faced told Brown that he thought the NYT and the JP (which he used to edit, natch) were the most reliable news sources on Israel, putting in a dig at Ha'aretz along the way. To Brown's credit even that was a bit much for him, but let Spector get away with it. The rest of the interview was as you could expect with these two.

4) Brown commented on the Canadaland break up with Karyn Pugliese, the senior indigenous editor he had managed to pluck from APTN to be his Editor in Chief. Turns out that Brown can hire indigenous people to work for him, but he absolutely cannot take direction from Indigenous people, and basically said so. Whew. There's probably a share of sexism in there as well, as many past WOC employees would vouch. Pugliese is back to reporting with APTN, but she was the EiC or something close before so that kinda sucks for her.

5) The good news is that Brown did say that they had lost more subscribers this year than any other year before. They even split up the Thursday show into two shows to push more ads to listeners to make up for the lost income. Whew.
frandroid: A stick drawing of a woman speaking at a podium (podcast)
Back when The Onion bought InfoWars, there was this whole thing about how "Onion owner Global Tetrahedron buys InfoWars for undisclosed sum", and this seemed like a fun mock company name to describe the Onion owners. Except... That's actually the name of the company. It turns out that The Onion itself was bought mostly by Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson, and is run by Collins, former disinformation reporter at NBC. The idea of buying The Onion was floated by Collins on Twitter, Lawson got interested, and they eventually bought it off the hedge fund (!!) which was the owner at that time. They brought the print edition back, they have a subscriber base even though the content is all free, and the whole purchase thing was done in collaboration with the paper's union. Lawson was basically interested in keeping The Onion alive and is not interested in doing a flip at some point. (He said he hopes he still owns The Onion when he dies.) It's really good media news overall. You can hear them discuss this with Nilay Patel on Decoder, The Verge's "how does this [tech] company actually work" podcast.
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
This is a dull plague. With cold meds, my cough doesn't hurt too much and I have no headache. I have a bit of snot but I'm not really congested. But I'm weak and tired. I went out yesterday to get a package and a library hold that were threatening to be sent back to origin. (I paid $15 duty for a second shaver I didn't order. I don't even recall paying duty on the first one? I thought this was a Canadian product. Didn't open it yet. Will resell it on Karrot.) I also recuperated the $18 loaf of bread I had left behind at the green grocer on Sunday. Oops. Bought a new phat acrylic marker. That all wiped me out. Evening was slow. Went to bed at midnight. Got up at noon. Same for F. Very uncharacteristic for both of us. (The going to bed early, that is.) Made breakfast, felt woozy, have been back in bed since. F isn't eating because "she's not hungry". Yesterday I had to insist that she accept that I make ramen noodles for her. But she ate and liked them; other than some apple, that was her only food. I've received my new Mac Mini and I'm not even setting it up. That's how tired/blah I am. :P
frandroid: (pirates)
It's been a while since I've highlighted an episode from the Pirate History podcast, but here we go: Episode 269 - Scurvy Schoolmasters

Do you remember when I was posting about Pirate Utopias, and being rather upset that some of the core trade that the pirates at Salé engaged in was slave-trading and kidnapping? One of the early incarnations of Libertalia, another "Pirate Republic" in Mauritius, decided to ally itself with a local tribe, marry their women, and all benefited thanks to the trade that they were doing, mostly in cattle meat for other pirates to stock provisions. Eventually they started selling weapons to only that tribe, and the pirates and the tribe started raiding one of their rival tribes. First they were capturing cattle, but eventually they decided to capture their women, and enslaved them in a bordello for the use of the local pirates and other visiting pirates. So we're once again very far from progressive anarchist fantasies of piracy. The slaves eventually manage to make something good out of the situation but I won't spoil the episode further...

I was kind of tired when I was listening to the episode and can't recall why it's called that, sorry.
frandroid: (black sails)
KPFA - Against the Grain
Ernst Bloch’s Utopianism


So this guy Jon Greenaway wrote a primer (pree-mur!!) on Ersnt Blöch writing on utopia, and he's being interviewed on Against the Grain. It's a good interview. They go through his personal history and how he got there, interactions with Marxist thought, etc. It's making me want to read the book. Unfortunately my public library doesn't have it and the closest academic library which has it is... Harvard. BOO.

I mean who am I kidding, I'm not really reading. But I like reading about utopias. Your suggestions are welcome.

---

Beaux-Arts de Paris
Penser le Présent - Autour de Paul Virilio

La fille de Paul Virilio, Sophie, travaille à documenter les carnets de son père avec une académicienne. Elles parlent pas mal de sa vie et comment sa pensée a évolué. C'est sidérant les opportunités de l'époque, il s'est mis à enseigner à l'école d'architecture sans avoir de doctorat. Il était auparavant peintre, et vitrailliste (!!!!) avant ça! Un autre balado qui me donne envie que lire qqun où je ne me rendrai pas... :P

#PodcastFriday explanation )

phonetics

Feb. 1st, 2025 04:24 pm
frandroid: Library of Celsus at Ephesus, Turkey (books)
Did you know that "primer" is pronounced differently if you're talking about a book or a coat of paint??!

This is so annoying to me because people misuse/misspell the cognates premier/premiere all the time, and I thought I had primer down too...
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (palestine)
The 100 Years War on Palestine has come back from the hold loop, so I'm resuming reading that. Currently in the First Intifada, reading about how the PLO tried to get a grip from this genuinely organic uprising while its cadres were mostly in Tunis and other Arab capitals, and its smartest on-the-ground cadre got killed by Israel. (Their take, later on: "Oops, it might have been a mistake to kill him.")

---

As a linguistic aside, I'm wondering how "cadre" has become a term to discuss high-level organizers and bosses in radical movements, whereas in French (Québec French at least) it just means a managerial bureaucrat in a regular corporation or government department. The term (in its radical sense) has even made it to Kurdish (and possibly Turkish, it's hard to dissociate the two in the company I keep) where it is known as kadro. The word literally just means "frame" in its non-metaphorical sense.

Canadaland

Jan. 18th, 2025 07:52 am
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
So I think Canadaland was hit hard by Jesse's Zionist convulsions.

The first thing I noticed was that CL had joined the Acast network. It's basically a podcast advertising network. CL never had one of these before. I also just heard Jesse do an Audible recommendation. Audible has an affiliate network which is available to most podcasters I think, and I think CL had done Audible ads before, but it's literally been years since I heard an Audible plug on CL. The program seems to have generally lost favour with most podcasters, probably because other affiliate programs pay better.

Then I noticed that many of CL's old collaborators moved away: Mattea Roach went to CBC, Karyn Pugliese stepped down from her role as inaugural (and last, it seems) editor in chief, Jonathan Goldsbie is ostensibly on an 8 month Massey fellowship but that basically ended the Wag the Doug podcast. Justin Ling was an occasional collaborator who had been slated to take Goldsbie's Thursday slot but basically left after Brown forced edits/re-recording on an episode about Palestine (though not to actually censor things, but it just rubbed the wrong way).

As she was the most left person on CL, I was kind of upset that Émilie Nicolas kept with Brown. She even recorded a fairly earnest crowdfunding ad for the December campaign, highlighting how she felt that her interview with a Palestinian person was the highlight of her career. (I don't even remember the interview so I've requeued it--trying to recall if it really was that good?) But as the year ended, Nicolas announced that her show was over, in a fairly terse last episode. I personally think that her listenership declined and Brown ended her show due to both that and declining revenues.

She was never a challenge-the-interviewee type of person, but I was quite upset when she interviewed Michel Cormier, a respected former foreign correspondent at Radio-Canada/CBC who later was its director of information (he's retired now). She never asked him a single question about Israel/Palestine coverage in the middle of this genocide. I thought that was an immense miss. As a retired person, I'm sure he could have handled a couple questions about that.

So anyway. These are all symptoms...
frandroid: A large sandworm in front of the fremen invoking him (Dune)

If you have been living under a rock, let me tell you: Tech Won't Save Us is one of the better podcasts out there. Now we're kind of living in the golden age of tech-critical podcasts (Better Offline, This Machine Kills, etc) but hey, the more the better. But this makes Podcast Friday even more important to really surface the best episodes to the surface, since we can't listen to them all. ;)

So I was browsing TWSU' archive and the golden words hit me in the face: Time for a Butlerian Jihad?: A ‘Dune’ Chat w/ Ed Ongweso Jr & Brian Merchant. As a committed Dune fan, I could not skip this episode. Basically discussing the necessity of a Butlerian Jihad in the age of AI, while geeking out on the release of Dune part deux. No great insights but a lot of fun all around. Apparently there's even a hammer ready for the jihad:

frandroid: "There's always room for tentacle porn!" Some sort of squid is grabbing the leg of a lightly clad girl with a tentacle (porn)
"MORALITÉ: groupons-nous et demain la branlette internationale sera le genre humain!"

(I don't know how well automated translation will work on this quote or the whole post, but anyway: Branlettes du monde.... (NSFW in case you didn't catch the drift already)
frandroid: (doomsday clock)
I have so many episodes to post here. Instead of trying to make a mega-post, I'll reduce the mountain one pebble at a time.

---

One of the maddening problems that people who want to fight global warming face is twofold:
1) the people who think greens are asking that we stop all consumption
2) the greens who are fundamentally asking that, even though they know they can't just say that out loud.

I found this Ezra Klein interview of Hannah Ritchie quite interesting:
Is Green Growth Possible?

She debunks a lot of received ideas about what is and isn't possible, and why every step we take is important even if we exceed +1.5C by 2030 (if we haven't exceeded it already...) Of course we must also defeat capitalism, and AI is a new and potent threat (which I suspect is going to resolve itself much faster than anticipated, due to lack of patience from Wall Street plus efficiency advances in AI itself), but these battles are not over, and she explains why every gain matters.
frandroid: camilo cienfuegos in a broad-rimmed hat (anarchism)
Currently reading: I've restarted reading Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples from the beginning, because it had been so long since I had started it and barely remembered anything. Good thing I did because even re-reading the material, not very much is coming back to mind. I must had been reading it too fast last time. There are a few things I'm not grasping but I'm too lazy/sick/reading in bed to bother researching. Hopefully I can keep up.

---

I think I'm on day 8 of this throat infection. I went to the walk-in clinic and the doc said it was viral, so no antibiotics for me. I think it's getting slightly better today. We'll see tomorrow, as it seems to be going better and worse all the time.

My boss has had another COVID infection. He had skipped the latest vaccine booster. I seriously worry for him. He has kids so they bring every virus back from school. He had RSV a while ago. I'm going to bet on him getting the norovirus by spring.

tattoo

Jan. 1st, 2025 11:55 pm
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
I have won a tattoo in a solidarity fundraiser auction. I don't have any tattoo yet but obviously bid because I wanted to change that. [personal profile] sabotabby I might brainstorm with you to workshop the design once I've had a chat with the artist to understand her process... It's just a 1-2 inch thing though so it's a bit less than what I was thinking lol.
frandroid: Lotte Ritter from Babylon Berlin (lotte)
So I just had a Kati roll (think Indian taco bell-style burrito) which was warmed up in the microwave in a "crisping sleeve". I had no idea that you could get food to become crispy in the microwave. Game changer!
frandroid: YPG logo, Syrian Kurdish defense forces (ypg)
I had posted my takes on FB and BlueSky, but in case you didn't see any of that...

Don't get me wrong, I am overjoyed at the overthrow of Assad, but anyone claiming that HTS did this on behalf of the US and/or Israel (!) is an absolute idiot. (In case you wonder, the people claiming such things are campists, i.e. people who think that the only lens for looking at political action is whether the U.S. supports it, and oppose that.) HTS are actually close to Turkey, because they're Islamists, not in spite of it. The Syrian National Army, the SNA, is the umbrella-group even more closely linked to Syria, and they also took territory in the last week, particularly Manbij, which had been held by the SDF. Isis also emerged from their underground status and captured a city or two in the south "east", as much as Syria has that.

Israel has been relentlessly bombing all military infrastructure in Syria since Assad left, over 300 air strikes now since Assad left. The Syrian army had good Russian-made anti-aircraft defenses, but with the fall of Assad, people stopped manning them and the IDF has been going to town, destroying these. Even the SDF hasn't been able to put their hands on much of the abandoned hardware in Qamislo before the IDF dropped their bombs. This is going to leave this new Syria even more vulnerable to Turkish domination in the north and possibly lose more territory to the IDF in the South as the latter grows Eretz Israel. Syria is today an even more failed state than it was last week, but a differently-shaped one.

Turkey is also going to use this opportunity to try to attack Kurds in Syria in the near future. If they can figure out a way to mediate a split of the country between HTS and the SNA, then they will push towards Rojava.

The SDF has been facing some popular resistance in their areas with larger Arab populations. The DAANES' (the official acronym of Rojava) feminist agenda (I'm not kidding. I can expand if you want) has not been popular with the rural Arab population and they don't like sharing the land with Kurds, so there are protests in the south in particular. Turkey has been bombing some Kurdish positions to help SNA takovers already. One Arab brigade has defected from the SDF to the SNA already.

CW: gruesome executions by HTS )

So it looks like this HTS/SNA takeover is bringing democracy to Syria, one bullet a time. A bit slower than the neighbour's 2000-pound ballots, but to each their own. Syrians are far from being out of the woods yet. :(
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
I have three gift subscriptions for Margaret Killjoy's substack, if anyone's interested.
frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
Content notice: I'm talking about how much I love my work situation, where I'm fairly spoiled with the things that matter in life. My partner gets weirdly jealous about it so I thought I'd prefix with this CN, for others who don't like to read about how some jobs are actually good. :P

We're getting the Holidays off, from Dec. 23rd to January 3rd. We had the same thing at my previous startup last year. We're "on call", esp. the 30th and 31st which are big deadlines for our customers, but still. We aren't pushing major changes so nothing should collapse.

Now since that wasn't specified in my contract, I don't know how that works out with the vacation allowance I negotiated. (My previous company had it written in there so it was clearer. They were more experienced at the small startup game.) But my manager/former roommate says "no one's counting" and "I don't care, take the time you need". :)

It's kind of interesting because many times he's asked me if I like the work, and I would say I like 80% of it. But I'm getting a bit annoyed of being asked that question? Like it's happened half a dozen times at least, what's going on? So if he asks again, I'll tell him that I would watch paint dry with him, because he's very competent and he's chill. Those are the things I care for in a boss and co-workers. That's what makes me productive. That's what I care about. I had that last year, lost it, and I'm happy that I found it again.

Another thing that's interesting. At previous companies, we had daily stand-up meetings. For those who don't know, a stand-up meeting is a meeting which happens early during the workday where everyone on your direct team (hopefully not more than 7 people in a meeting, otherwise you should split the meeting). Everyone takes turns giving their updates: 1) What are you're working on, 2) what's blocking you 3) what you're going to work on next. If you can help your coworkers on something they're working or blocked on, that's a good time to speak up. This is a standard practice for modern software development teams, part of what's called SCRUM or generally Agile methodologies. It's called a stand-up meeting because you're supposed to meet stand up; it discourages people from blathering on and on, no one wants to stand for more than a few minutes. If someone goes on for too long they're going to get told to wrap it up. At the Star we had an actual 1-minute timer to get people to keep it short, because we had a meeting of 10+ people. But of course in our remote work era, no one's standing up anymore.

My manager is basically anti-meeting and has told everyone else outside the dev team to send him meeting notes, he's not going to attend meetings. He does sometimes, but he got burnt out on them during the pandemic and just pushes back on them. So he's not too keen on regularly scheduled meetings. He wants us devs to keep him regularly apprised of what we're doing and ask him (and each other) for help if we're stuck. I'm a bit of a lone ranger, so eventually he got sick of my isolation and scheduled me a daily 16h30 meeting. A couple of my coworkers are in Calgary so they start later than me, and my boss himself has morning duties to deal with, so I rarely hear from anyone in the morning. Anyway, I basically just have a daily 1:1 with him, and it's pretty productive. Eventually the goal is to wean myself from the scheduled meeting but I'm not there yet. :) Oh yeah: we also have no ticketing system for tasks. The daily 1:1 is also for getting direction on what to work on next. My manager is my human JIRA. And sometimes he changes his mind on the fly. So you gotta roll with that. But as much as I thing Kanban is the ideal state, I'm fine with this, with the right person, which he is.

Now I don't want to sugarcoat it. In spite of all of this I've had tons of anxiety about the work, imposter syndrome, getting stuck on the most stupid problems and taking the long way around to resolve them, in particular not asking for help quickly enough, because I'm a Stubborn Man. But it's much better to deal with that in a supportive environment. Which my previous jobs were, but this is even better, I think.

Also, after my previous stint working on a lot of back-end development 2 jobs ago, I thought I was done with the back-end, I initially was happy to go back to React at my last job, but I'm really enjoying this Lambda stuff. It's basically re-branded micro-service architecture, and I'm sold. I'm also writing tests for the first time in my life. Just integration stuff for now, so no stupid mocking problems, but still. It's helping a lot. Unit testing is not the most useful thing for Lambda, and you need more integration testing than in a monolith architecture, so integration it is, for now.

(Back in early 2020 my 2-jobs-ago work had paid for all of us to actually go to the Amazon office (which was conveniently in the next tower over) to get a course about Lambda architecture, but they taught it to us without any framework. Like we were composing the architecture by hand, creating permissions and creating resources manually and stuff. Talk about turning people off! No one in my then-office ever touched the stuff again. A few years later now, AWS has this SAM framework which is getting pretty mature, or you can use the CDK if you feel you need to get programmatic about it. Or a mixture of the two. We're currently using the Serverless Framework, the granddaddy of this stuff, but we might switch to SAM, we'll take the decision in the next few days.)

I'm going to keep my old AWS tag on this post, but my opinion of this whole stack/type of work has greatly improved. :)

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frandroid: A key enters the map of Palestine (Default)
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