pfriedma

https://pfedi.pfriedma.org/users/pfriedma

Please read pins ; Queer hacker, reluctant greybeard, guerilla enterprise architect, futurist, experimental multimedia artist; Posts are a mixed bag of retrocomputing, software engineering, projects, science, social justice, interests, random nonsense, and nsfw smut 🔞 (be mindful of CWs). Posts do not represent the views of any past, current, or future employer/affiliated institution.

اقرا المنشورات الثابت من فضلك. هكر/مبرمج مثليين. مهندس الأنظمة ثوري. الحلم بالمستقبل. هناك كثير شيء هنا: حسوبات قدمة ، العلوم، مشروعات، العدالة الاجتماعية، وفاحشة.

formerly pfriedma (npub1zv7…454e)

profile photo is a picture of an anthropomorphic bear with a nose ring wearing an early 90s wearable heads up display (artwork by lirok)

The true measure of a society is how it treats its most marginalized

pronouns: he/they
location: Chicago
website: [www.pfriedma.org](http://www.pfriedma.org )
languages: English (C2), أدرس العربية(B1), मैं हिंदी पढ़ता हूं (A1), ich lerne Deutsch (A1)
music: https://pfunk.pfriedma.org/channels/pfriedma_discog
books I'm reading: https://bookwyrm.social/user/pfriedma
videos: https://pfideo.pfriedma.org
Git: https://pforge.pfriedma.org

Public Key

npub1a7hed9mh3tp700md5udr0v55j0g58uqp0853ptwax36wd3kjfsqqjn2e33

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqswltukjamc4sl8hak6wx3hk22f852r7qqhn6gs4hwnga8xcmfycqqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dszn6drh

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1a7hed9mh3tp700md5udr0v55j0g58uqp0853ptwax36wd3kjfsqqjn2e33

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Published at

2026-08-31T06:53:58Z

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0 Metadata

Event JSON

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Last Notes

2026-08-06 23:12:45 UTC

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Oh I'm kinda leaning into the geopolitical take that China is doing to us what we did to the Soviet Union with Star Wars (they're trying to get us to spend and spend and spend out of fear of falling behind until we completely go off the rails)
But in a lot of ways... Actually they do...money. power. Control.
Plus, ya know maybe the occasional nice thing like drug discovery, science, automation, etc.

2026-07-18 18:35:01 UTC

Things I've learned today:
* Live USB images are complex
* Unionfs is frightening
* IMO debugging system issues in FreeBSD is significantly easier than Linux because the documentation is pretty comprehensive, and the tools are more constrained in their scope
* USB flash drives are finicky and slow
* I should probably learn more about EFI

2026-07-18 13:21:13 UTC

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In the dream, my (nonspecific) colleague wanted one but was worried how long it would take to load all the audio.
They already had one picked out for him, in his favorite color, pre-loaded and ready when he walked in.

2026-07-18 13:05:37 UTC

I had a weird like alternate history timeline dream where for some reason I was at the Moscow airport in the (still extant) USSR and the KGB had a duty free store where you could get like a Bluetooth speaker pre loaded with audio of all the conversations you had during your visit.
most of the dream was completely unrelated; I was attending a conference and forgot to prepare my slides

2026-07-16 18:12:46 UTC

I wonder how viable a "move slowly and care for things" kernel fork really is. I can think of some distributions that could align that way.. Chimera on the small side, maybe Debian on the larger?

2026-07-03 22:58:33 UTC

A strong storm came thru and VeryLargeTree™ fell on the house.
We are shaken up, but unharmed.
The roof, gutters, fence, and porch, however....
(Already checked gas line and such)
Still assessing, mitigating leaks, and filing insurance paperwork to ride the adrenaline spike.
What a profoundly suboptimal holiday weekend.
https://media.pfedi.pfriedma.org/media/2c03617478dd6c1cd2e220f9314a99faf8633912b8e0695bf8bca879016c5b99.jpg
https://media.pfedi.pfriedma.org/media/5d5575eb47fe07c965643a4b74a44a43b76371386c4a24e3b9ff943a8715d644.jpg

2026-06-20 14:57:25 UTC

PSA: If you visit the US, and want to take ranch dressing home, it's also sold in dry packets that you can mix at home with mayonnaise, buttermilk and sour cream (depending how thick you want it).
It's much easier, economical, and will last longer to buy the packets vs the bottled product.

2026-06-10 01:44:34 UTC

I think that high-level languages are great and wonderful and their use significantly increased the usefulness and utility of the computer started with the first ones in the 60s.
And I also think everyone interested in programming should at least...I dunno...write a simple blinking LED thing or something in like PIC ASM or MIPS or whatever at least once. I think it's good to at least have a 1000f view of how the machinery part of computing happens¹
¹Modern compilers do a lot of optimizations and now things like speculative execution mean that the reality is more complicated.

2026-06-10 00:05:29 UTC

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I think it depends on both your client and platform. Fedilab has a "mute for home" feature which will filter from your home timeline but if I use my instance's webui I see them, unless I mute them there which makes them go away entirely in Fedilab but in the webui (akkoma) just puts them behind a CW.

2026-06-01 21:12:16 UTC

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This isn't going to be new information for most folks probably but prompts are just suggestions.
They're a way to prime some of the weights, like when your predictive keyboard gets more relevant after you've put in a few words.
Prompts and anything in an LLMs context (like "skills") are not deterministic instructions, or rules or, importantly, actual controls.

2026-06-01 21:09:12 UTC

It's going to be interesting when the inevitable lawsuits and discovery happens with these ai deployments and so much of the underlying "logic" will be revealed to just be increasingly desperate pleads inside the prompts for it to do the intended thing.

2026-05-22 22:31:40 UTC

If conservatives want to bring back the 50s, how about starting with having soda, milk, etc sold in bottles you return to the store to get reused. Also local groceries. Lulz these ideas would have them crying about the extreme left and how it's socialism. There would be pro-plastic "consumer choice" laws.

2026-05-21 22:39:43 UTC

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Congratulations! We made the commitment last year (we had to run a new circuit) and could not be happier. Induction cooking is awesome and you can do things that require precise temperature control (like tempering chocolate) without the hassle of doing it over a water bath. Not having to remove heavy grates to clean - yes please. Instant responsiveness - very nice.
Not heating the kitchen in the summer - very cool
Also they heat things (like a kettle) to boiling *frightingly fast*
like "yup, I'm pushing 2.5kw into that skillet" the downside is that you can easily crack cast iron that way so step up the heat for those.

2026-05-08 21:26:48 UTC

Instructure is short for INSecure InfrasTRUCTURE

2026-04-17 23:15:24 UTC

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There was a deli on the west side that did this back in the 90s. I don't remember the name, unfortunately, and it closed I think in the 2000s :(
A deep dish is a fun thing to make tho. I found a dough that works pretty good for one (it has a texture like play dough so it's easy to work with if not a little unnerving). Deepdish from original Unos, or like Giordano’s or Lou Malnati's tend to have a enriched dough that's not too chewey, and this is kind of like it. But if you're making the spaghetti version you can use whatever because you've already lost the grace of the divine. Though also this recipe came from a 50s home economics film produced by the dry milk industry. You can omit the dry milk if you use real milk instead of water but don't boil it, just scald it.
For the dough:
Boil 1.5 cups of water
Add half cup butter (or veggie shortening) plus
2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp sugar
Let it cool then add yeast (1 pack)
In large mixing bowl add:
2/3 cup non-fat dry millk
2 cups sifted flour
The contents of the liquid pot
Mix into smooth batter
Add additional 3 cups sifted flour and kneed until dough comes away from bowl and smooth (4-10 min)
Cover and refrigerate
Grease/cooking spray a 9" high walled baking dish or spring form pan and line with the dough
Add layers of cheese, sauce, more cheese, meat, cheese, sauce, cheese, etc,
Or add the spaghetti before / instead of the meat layer. I would recommend pairing the spaghetti with a thick tomato sauce made using Italian sausage and ground beef. †
Bake 45 minutes @ 375°F (you may want to drop the temp to 350 after the first 15-30 min and cook an additional 15m, depending on how wet it is) check in on it though after the first 15min.
† Again, this is blasphemy
@npub15m5…pvxj @npub19qj…eda3 @npub1ucv…5a8g

2026-04-17 18:32:14 UTC

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As a Chicago native I can confirm that:
1) this is blasphemy
2) this actually exists, where you replace one of the inner sauce layers with a tomato and meat sauce and spaghetti
3) if you like the textural variation, it's pretty tasty
4) it's still blasphemy
@npub19qj…eda3 @npub15m5…pvxj

2026-04-05 23:15:45 UTC

And here, mounted to the upper shelf of my desk, with pens.
My desk isn't super deep (or wide, really) so this placement was the reason I made the thing in the first place.
#fountainPen from top to bottom:
Jinhao 10 retractable (like a Pilot Vanishing Point but significantly more affordable, if not quite as reliable due to the seal) in blue (inked with Diamine Sherwood green)
Montblanc 221 (I got this cheap at a thrift store and the window is slightly leaky but it writes pretty nice if you hold it carefully 😂) inked with Waterman tender purple.
Lammy 2000 (this was my first, and so far only "expensive fancy pen" purchase) it's inked with a blend of Sherwood green and carbon black for documents. I got it and the Lammy 2000 mechanical pencil (.5mm) as my 40th birthday gift to myself.
A .3mm Pentel Graphgear 1000 I've had since college
The Jinhao and the Lammy are the two pens I use the most.
https://media.pfedi.pfriedma.org/media/30f73156cbb85059bd979c235f938cb228101af2bcac60f466c9cb19292e88ed.jpg

2026-03-13 00:36:37 UTC

Great finale... God I love SAM

2026-03-12 20:12:30 UTC

Most of the "big problems" people claim AI will "solve" (like hand waving away the climate concerns of data centers, because AI will fix it) reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of why these things are problems in the first place.
They're not problems for lack of solutions
They're problems for lack of commitment to fix them.
Largely because the people with the power to choose otherwise have a vested interest in the problem continuing to exist.

2026-02-28 18:23:20 UTC

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Alright Upgrade from #NetBSD 10.1 to 11RC1 went very smoothly... Packages upgraded (only had to run it twice for dependency resolution) and everything seems to be working (or at least, nothing appears to be seriously broken!). I swear it boots up even faster (though it was already very fast compared to e.g. my fedora box).
Wine still doesn't really work, sadly. Everything throws some flavor of missing ntdlls error, but wine on NetBSD seems universally weird. TBH the only reason I'd like it is for Kiwix, but there is a firefox/librewolf extension that works well enough for downloaded Wikipedia and other zim archives. That and the Brother design transfer utility for my sewing machine. Both run fine on linux. NetBSD notsomuch.

2026-02-28 15:12:42 UTC

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Well this is going to take some time 😂
I'm pleasantly surprised it booted cleanly (enough) with 11 base and 10.1 packages, I was worried I'd have to do the package upgrades from the installer image.
Edit for image caption clarity: there are over 800 packages to upgrade or replace. This machine is an older Lenovo T450 with an Intel core CPU from about 2015. The transaction will take about 2 hours.
https://media.pfedi.pfriedma.org/media/912060cc0904facbecfe9527989d360618351561320447b31f1f73af8e2b2d47.jpg

2026-02-28 04:10:54 UTC

Alright core updated to 11rc1... Gonna do PKG tomorrow
https://media.pfedi.pfriedma.org/media/fdf093d3aa277ec2bc1d51123310fdb9c1c35b67effac6a237b07c81fb2588a8.jpg

2026-02-17 16:23:53 UTC

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I realize there are, effectively, a finite number of ways to represent gitflow, but given everything that literally just happened..
https://media.pfedi.pfriedma.org/media/97fda4ce165e27f8c7ec90deabdb50025f7b1237d01875a98bc9bb4e9de543a2.jpg
https://media.pfedi.pfriedma.org/media/bbb08d1d47a1cabf9fbf1a5edf166b45d77fbef18199407a31fafcb859d4e0c8.jpg

2026-02-17 15:45:18 UTC

Looks like MSFT finally cleaned up that slop documentation on their GitHub page.
Microsoft: Don't call it slop!
Also Microsoft: CVE In notepad due to bad continvouch morge.

2026-02-15 23:24:43 UTC

So I saw this fabric at IKEA the other day - we went to look at ideas for book shelves and it caught my eye. Apparently it's been around for a while.
Anyway this is my first attempt at making clothing from scratch. I've mended things before, and sewed a hat pattern but this was my own self-drafted pattern based off of a pair of loungy pants I have.
The elastic waistband is a hot mess. I should have sewn the band in it's entirety then attached it to the pants, but instead I sewed it like you would a binding *while pinning the elastic* and it was a nightmare and broke two needles. Next time I know better.
At some point I will probably unpick the stitches and redo it, but other than that I'm really happy with the result. All of the main seams are overstiched French seams so they should be pretty durable.
#sewing #sewqueer #queersew
https://media.pfedi.pfriedma.org/media/62e8900eccefde4596a0fd0f8fb81f96a14ab59553156681a8d9740b24b0deba.jpg

2026-02-07 23:44:55 UTC

Am I just feeling some kind of way, or have sites (like xda for example) gone from "here's how to [do this thing]" to a lot more "I tried doing [thing] and gave up, here are 5 reasons you shouldn't question the status quo and should just pay money for some subscription" ?

2026-01-19 01:30:26 UTC

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I think what defines slop is the low effort and low engagement in the creation of the thing. Like, a story written by AI where the "author" doesn't really care about the story, the character and their motivations, the world in which the story is set. They're just looking to get an end product. When asked about it, they really can't say any more. slop.
Versus, say, someone for whom writing is difficult (for whatever reason) and they've got this world in their head and spend a lot of time working slowly maybe paragraph by paragraph using the help of a language model and editing the result...I'd have a hard time calling that slop because really they did the creative activity. Like, if you understand what the code is doing and you used a model to suggest ways of doing it...like going from pseudocode to $lang, that's the kind of thing ML has been doing for a long time. But you also don't need a GPT to do that.
@npub1kup…u6xg

2026-01-18 17:38:22 UTC

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Personally, I take a similar view I do about recycling - I try to not buy lots of plastic in the first place, re-use what I have, and recycle the rest when that's an option. But individual consumers aren't really the problem; it's the people making and profiting off it that cause the biggest harm, so I don't like beat myself up when I the best option for the situation is something made out of it.
Also full disclosure, I work in a place that develops Ai models (academic ML), so not staying up to date on the state of praxis isn't really an option, but that also puts me in a position to advocate for harm reduction wherever possible, which is better than e.g. leaving and having an AI sycophant in the role.
Here is my current gen-ai use case: We bought into the Alexa ecosystem years ago. Getting rid of voice devices entirely isn't a compromise my husband is wiling to make, and he won't use it if the interactions don't "feel" at least somewhat natural. So, I have a local whisper and LLM that generate natural sounding responses to queries. Originally I just had templates that put in the variables and spoke them, but hubby didn't like them and thought it sucked. Hubby accepts this solution, and likes that it can give ideas for things (like recipes). In the grand scheme of 'harms caused by LLM use' this case ranks pretty far down the list, and I'm always on the lookout for models which have more mitigations around resource consumption and development harms.
That being said, I don't think people that look at that, roll their eyes, and tut me for it are wrong. I think it's 100% reasonable to be staunchly anti gen-ai based on what it is today and to go nowhere near it. So to for people that won't ever own a car, or use commercial software. We all have compromises we are willing, and not willing to make. I mean, the point about what went into making our phones, laptops, etc is true. I don't think the Amish are at all that weird for eschewing aspects of modernity in favor of collective ownership and craftsmanship.

2026-01-18 16:54:18 UTC

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There are at least two dimensions to AI ethics - the first one is the one you're talking about - the operation of the model, the resources it consumes to do so, the privacy in the prompts, etc. That's mitigated to a large extent by running locally on e.g. renewable energy.
The second dimension is the model itself - what data was it trained on? Was that data acquired with the consent of the creators? How biased was that data? Once trained, did the weighting and fine-tuning of the model rely on exploitive labor? This one is harder to mitigate. There are very few 'ethical' models in that sense.

2026-01-17 00:54:20 UTC

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I'm already thoroughly in love with several of the characters

2026-01-17 00:50:55 UTC

Oh wow
What a fantastic pilot

2026-01-14 20:21:56 UTC

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The effect of it all is breathtakingly frightening when you consider the whole plausible is sometimes way worse than wrong thing

2026-01-14 20:20:44 UTC

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It's a pile of weighted linear algebra.
When you prompt // instead of /* it, has, from other pieces of the data trained that "x instead of y" corresponds to a smaller probability of y occuring compared to x, and a larger probability of x occuring from other data. So to with all grammar.
LLMs give you a plausible output to a prompt. So the plausible response to, basically, "what would this look like with more +=1 and less ++ ". And then the rest comes from ... Well source code. Hundreds of millions of millions of lines of code written over the last 50+ years. There are fundamentally a finite number of operations a CPU performs and at the level of abstraction an LLM operates at, it's pretty good at spitting out code. The devil is always in the details - the mistakes LLMs make in coding are almost always the result of their being more occurances of a particular pattern compared to what is needed for the language which is why you see it making up class names because it's seen millions of classNamesFormedByAParticularPattern etc
At least this is how I wrap my head around it.

2025-12-03 15:19:20 UTC

Assign a mathematic meaning (eg 'forall', 'congruent', 'therefore', 'maps to', etc) to this symbol
https://media.pfedi.pfriedma.org/media/0e7a5aa1be3ec726b5270578ea8d44c13d22206a2e67c2f061f2b9db64c6ee25.jpg

2025-11-09 02:33:43 UTC

Well Beefy seems to have gotten over some of his skepticism.
As they've been playing (and tiring each other out) they've been laying together more.
#dogsOfMastodon
#dogsOfFedi
#DogsOfPixelFed
https://media.pfedi.pfriedma.org/media/ced6f686119e5838a92940d9e4e0362c0024699d4adf9414a902d332008c93fd.jpg

2025-10-12 19:43:54 UTC

My humors feel misaligned
I should do leeches and cocaine about it

2025-08-13 16:45:37 UTC

Dear recommendation algorithm: just because I've purchased some bottled ink does not mean I'm just starting a collection of bottled inks.
(( A few hours later )): has started a collection of bottled inks.

2025-07-31 20:19:30 UTC

I found the radioactive WASPs
They're in the Cabinet.

2025-07-19 21:03:34 UTC

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Haven't personally noticed this issue, but I'm also not a huge user of fp things that don't just get launched from the GUI's launcher.

2025-07-19 21:01:49 UTC

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Also been a zsh user since...like forever.

2025-07-17 16:25:20 UTC

Sigh
Is listening to an audiobook the same as reading? No. It's obviously a different verb, a different skill.
Is listening to an audiobook somehow less than, or not equivalent to experiencing the content? Can you only interact with the written word by reading? No. That's a weird, ableist, elitist, and gatekeepy thing to suggest.

2025-02-21 20:45:47 UTC

We need to bring back these font/typographic choices in modern technical papers
Source:
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/4669801
https://media.pfedi.pfriedma.org/media/6a4926b11652a91b157e014a448cc2de895433cfe670cd22f46cfd1018c026a5.jpg

2025-01-22 18:34:12 UTC

Does anyone know what originated the piano note progression you hear in dramas or whatever when there's something enigmatic, as a theme that like: A#, C#, C, B, A# or similar?

2025-01-18 02:25:40 UTC

Rumors are that the screaming anus deamon is about to unload his racist BS on my home city first...
Nah uh. People about to find out how we do things in Chicago.

2025-01-17 19:14:00 UTC

PSA
If you have to call CVS and actually need to speak to the pharmacy, this is difficult. Their new automated phone tree really only lets you leave a message which isn't good if you have a time sensitive question.
Pharmacists are over worked, and I understand that they don't want to be interrupted, but this is ableist.
If you *need* to speak to the pharmacist, dial 8003 *as soon as the system picks up* and you should get put into the pharmacy phone queue to actually speak to someone.
#PSA #CVSPharmacy

2025-01-16 14:43:28 UTC

Biden warns Nation about thing we elected him to address, but didn't.

2025-01-09 02:28:17 UTC

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We bought a set of 4 hue bulbs on launch day in October of 2012. The hubby had to go to an apple store and the employees didn't know what they were. They are 13 years old. They have moved with us to three different places, they're on for many hours every day, and they still work perfectly. We have gotten a few more over the years
That being said, we have one newer one that got a little funky after a brown out and power outage and a few Phillips (non hue) LED PAR bulbs that were very disappointing in their lifetime comparatively (like 3 years?)
@npub1lxy…k4m5

2024-12-23 18:02:21 UTC

Usually, we use the thanksgiving leftovers to make a casserole. This year, however, there wasn't really enough for that, we had some stuffing and a small amount of turkey...so we just froze them until we figured out what we wanted to do.
Croquettes.
Ran the stuffing and turkey meat through the food grinder to homogenize it a bit and made them into patties, then pan fried them

2024-12-16 00:06:44 UTC

So I had leftover pineapple juice from making rolls for Thanksgiving, and decided yesterday to make a batch of dough and make, like, larger sandwich rolls.
Anyway, I added the shortening far too early in the dough making by mistake, but not like, at the beginning.
What I ended up making were basically giant sweet biscuits (but not entirely like biscuits because the interior is more bread like).
I wouldn't really know what to call these, but they're delicious.

2024-12-14 17:05:03 UTC

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Unfortunately the news media is working exactly as designed for the people that control it.
@npub1e32…wh5r

2024-12-13 15:45:00 UTC

Moderates be like
At first they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak out because let's be honest, some trade unions have unreasonable demands and people are busy worrying about the price of groceries..

2024-10-02 20:54:01 UTC

It would be amazing if there was a taxpayer provided wireless data service that let anyone with a receiver (which would use open hardware designs and foss drivers) connect to the Internet at a reasonable bandwidth.
The regulatory process would be a pain (no idea of there's public spectrum allocated for this) and there's tons of considerations and nuance (what is *reasonable bandwidth* ?) but it'd be nifty

2024-10-02 19:59:56 UTC

I have a hard time understanding folks that treat Twitter/Facebook/etc as like... public infrastructure (presumably because of their ubiquity) and not the private, corporate entities they are.
Like even if you feel like it *is a defacto public square* it is in fact, not. It's just a really big private garden, and like all private gardens, it's subject to the whims of its owners.
I get that it sucks to leave a place that's eg become a Nazi bar, or instituted bad policies..but ... Yeah that's one of the known risks of corporate platforms? You either accept that risk for exposure/audience/convenience/ease (which has its own risks), or you put your time/effort elsewhere.
This is also true for Gmail/Google workspace, Office365, etc etc.

2024-09-28 19:02:47 UTC

I haven't seen it but based on the trailer and some reactions I've seen, it sure does seem like the "men think about the Roman empire
.." meme but by someone that has enough money to finance a film.

2024-09-26 02:40:18 UTC

When was the last time you thought about AUTOEXEC.BAT ?

2024-09-10 00:38:07 UTC

We should bring back referring to online services on the Internet collectively as "the net" like in the late 90s.
"I saw this post on The Net this morning..."
"Oh I bought it on The Net"