raffraffraff

Everything is a dogwhistle.

K3s + FluxCD. There's something nice about using git to add a helm repo, a helm release with a few values, then 'git push'. Shortly afterwards there's a new DNS record, TLS cert and I can hit https://mynewservice.example.com

I'm feel old.. My library of childhood games in my head are from the 80s, for the Spectrum. Dizzy, Jet Set Willy, Operation Wolf, R-Type, and original movie/game conversations for Robocop, Batman etc.

What's odd is the apparent chasm between those games and the earliest flash games, but really it's just a few years. That's just a trick of the mind. When you're a kid, turning into a young adult, a few short years feel like a lifetime. Man, it speeds up after that...

I sometimes watch (in horror) as my nephew uses his Dad's phone to play whatever shallow, glossy muck he finds in the play store. He spends as much time swatting ads, refusing to upgrade to the pro version and hitting 'back' to get out of the play store than playing the games. It's amazing to watch a 6 year old develop muscle memory on these things. I see him swat away an ad almost before I've even noticed that it wasn't part of the game. He has effectively learned to be an ad / upgrade swatting machine. That is the game. Because he has absolutely no "sticking power" with any game. It's the play store / game / ad version of doomscrolling.

I've realised that giving him a reduced hand-picked library of games, with no ads, no automatic prompts to try another game, might be a good idea. These flash games are easily as good as most of the junk I see him play anyway.

Ask her if she would prefer the government actually spend the money in ways that make it easier for arts / crafts people to actually make their own living. You know, instead of a handout. My wife doesn't think her self esteem would improve if she could only survive on a handout.

Ask her how much it costs for a stall at Showcase every year. Why does the RDS have this whole area sewn up? Why don't the government sponsor events like this? Why is the craft council absolutely useless? They can't organise anything, they just wait for gougers to set up ultra expensive events and then tag along.

Ask her if she'd prefer subsidised rent for her business in a decent location, in a city or town? Remember before Templebar got gentrified, it was an absolute shithole, decaying buildings that should have been condemned and torn down, and yet because it was cheap, it became the place for artists, designers, jewellery makers, cooks to set up, and became the most interesting part of Dublin. Sky High rent drove away all but the big chains, and now it's soulless. What do the small makers have now? Nothing.

What about subsidised shipping? Right now An Post are massively increasing the cost of their flat rate small parcel shipping within the country. Why invest in that, and make it easier for makers to ship their products at a reasonable, predictable price?

What about actual help with the "running a business" part, that many artists suck at?

I dunno. Giving free money to a few people, without even checking whether or not they need it, strikes me as unfair, lazy and short sighted. Why bother doing anything at all if you're getting free money? But reduce the cost and difficulty of running a business... That actually encourages it.

Teach a man to fish vs give him a fish.

My wife is an artist and she absolutely hates this.

For a start, it's a lottery. 2000 randomers who call themselves artists will get no-questions-asked income regardless of their skill or importance as artists. We have people who are full time carers for family members who get less money in their allowance, and it's means-tested.

So you can be a millionaire heir / heiress, independently wealthy and still be eligible for it. One artist on Twitter bragged about getting it, and has been using the "extra money" to go on long holidays. It's basically free world travel for her.

Also, what is an artist? There's one guy on twitter who gets this income and really, he just seems to take bad semi pornographic photos. Like the world really needs more of that.

Another lady my wife knows personally is a terrible artist, never had any talent and doesn't make money. No sense of colour, no line skills, just paints awful blobs in awful colours. She's 100% in favour of this scheme and won't shut up about it on twitter.

My wife has been struggling to make an income from her art for decades, but has created a small business around it, wedding stationery, other print fits. Guess what? She probably doesn't qualify as "an artist" she "runs a small print business". She also thinks that the government could do a lot of practically things to make life easier for artists but it's easier to take your budget and just give it to random artists. No effort, no real benefit. It's laziness and incompetence.

I know exactly one "real" artist whose paintings will genuinely be hanging on walls for hundreds of years. He has no business around his art, he literally paints and holds exhibitions to sell his work. His name is famous in art circles and you can instantly recognise his style whenever you see it. His work is truly amazing. He has a wife and two kids and struggles sometimes. The long gaps between exhibitions, the worry that an exhibition won't go well. Anxiety, depression. Did he get this magic lottery? Did he fuck.

> Creating a viable alternative to Visa and Mastercard requires “several billion euros” in investment, according to EPI’s own estimates. Low interchange fees under EU regulation make profitability difficult.

I think it's absolutely amazing that "crypto" (from bitcoins to shitcoins) have turned out to be no more useful as a currency than chips from the local casino. This has damaged their ability to function as a simple currency that can be used to pay for goods and services. And they have damaged the reputation of the whole distributed ledger technology to the point where, in 2026, banks aren't even considering implementing a closed circuit inter-bank distributed ledger as a way to send euro from one bank account to another. If the digital currency in this closed system was actual euro, there would be no reason to speculate on its value and turn the whole thing into a circus.

I'm sure I'm missing something (a lot actually)

How the hell is it possible that they're still using the ATI domain and HTTP 2026? They acquired ATI 20 fucking years ago.

It really makes you wonder what level of dysfunction is actually possible inside a company. 30k employees and they can't get one of them to hook up certbot, and add an 's' to the software.

Their own people too

I don't know why these aren't used more in building fabric. There's a youtuber who makes these phase change solutions out of various salt mixes aiming for the correct change temperature for a specific application. Eg he made panels for his shed roof (keeps it cooler in sun, warmer at night). Obviously this works better to smooth out large, reliable daily temperature swings, and offers little to someone in a constantly hot or constantly cold place.

I live in Ireland where night/day temperature swings are small. To cool my attic on a hot summer day I'd need to move that heat into a large water tank that gets used for laundry, cleaning, showers etc and is refilled from cold mains water. But fitting an air to water heat exchanger inside my attic would be a big expense and I would have to make sure I didn't freeze the attic.

Regular air to water heat pump could be hooked into my existing tank I suppose?

So if you had a pension mostly in all world indexed funds, you'd switch them over to "boring" investments like cash.

The next stage in all of this shit is to turn what you have into a service. What's the phrase? I don't want to talk to the monkey, I want to talk to the organ grinder. So when you kick things off it should be a tough interview with the manager and program manager. Once they're on board and know what you want, they start cracking. Then they just call you in to give demos and updates. Lol

If you're going running with your Walkman I think 30 hours on a single AA would be fine

There is the code, the recorded state of the infra when you applied the code and the actual state at some point in the future (which may have drifted) . You store the code in git, the recorded state (which contains unique IDs, ARNs etc) in a bucket and you read the "actual state" next time you run a plan, and you detect drift.

These days people store the state in terraform cloud or spaceliftor env0 or whatever. Doesn't have to be the same infra you deployed.

If you were a lunatic you could not use a state backend and just let it create state files in the terraform code directory, check the file into git with all those secrets and unique ids etc.

Generally, across most DAP manufacturers, the android devices are all of those things that I don't want, and the non-android devices tend to be cheaper, lighter, with better battery life. I don't specifically choose non-android, I specifically chose those other parameters and have simply noticed a pattern. I don't doubt you, but you haven't given any examples and I'm not going to spend my life searching for the exception that proves the rule.

Well, I had something like this back in the late 90s (can't recall the year exactly)

https://walkman.land/aiwa/hs-px297

    Battery: 1AA gets 30h
    Dimensions: 111.4 x 29.1 x 80.7 mm
    Weight: 132g

Ok, so you were limited to 90 minute tapes with slow seek. But aside from that compare it to the specs I posted for the android vs non-android mp3 players. Remember, this cassette player has some seriously impressive clockwork inside that case and it's still smaller and much lighter than the android.

Also remember you can just buy another AA battery, and keep a few spares in your bag.

Never mind mp3 players, I'd love a small phone again also. It's ridiculous that there isn't a single decent android phone

Shanling OS is trash. Absolute trash. Hiby OS is decent.

For me it's not arbitrary. An android device is a general purpose handheld touchscreen computer that happens to be used for music. That means a bunch of things to me:

1. "Touchscreen first" UX

2. Heavier than it needs to be

3. Worse battery life compared to a non-Android device

Using a touchscreen in the rain is impossible. Running out of battery sucks. Going for a run with a 240g brick is no fun, it'll pull your pants down to your knees and trip you.

Compare the specs:

    Hiby R1
    Dimensions: 86.9 x 60.6 x 14.5 mm
    Weight: 118g
    OS: HibyOS
    Battery: 19 hour play time
    Price: $159.00

    Hiby R4
    Dimensions: 129.6 x 68.3 x 18.5 mm
    Weight: 231g
    OS: Android 12
    Battery: 11 hour play time
    Price: $249

These are the things matter to me, in addition to the UX, sound quality, Bluetooth support, expandable / removable storage and sane file-based playlists.

You can write an agent.md file and gradually add to it as you develop the project. The reason junior developers get better is that the context goes from low to high over the time you spend working with them. Yes, "learning".

I've found that maintaining a file that is designed to increase the LLM's awareness of how I want to approach problems, how I build / test / ship code etc, leads to the LLM making fewer annoying assumptions.

Almost all of the annoying assumptions that the LLM makes are "ok, but not how I want it done". I've gotten into the habit of keeping track of these in a file. Like the 10 commandments for LLMs. Now, whenever I'm starting a new context I drop in an agent.md and tell it to read that before starting. Fella like watching Trinity learn how to fly a helicopter before getting into it.

It's still not perfect, but I'm doing waaaay more work now to get annoyed by the LLM's inability to "automatically learn" without my help.

Resizing windows on xfce (most themes) is next to impossible though. You have about a pixel sized border to grab.

I used xfce since Unity came out. Switched to KDE Plasma about 2 years ago.

Plasma is the most "sane" out of the DEs right no IMO. Not perfect by any means but good enough.

That's like xfce!

While it's possible to write an ipv4 address in a bunch of different ways (it's just a number, right?) nobody does it because ipv4 standard notation is easy to remember. Ipv6 is not, and none of these attempts to simplify it really work because they change the "format". I understand it and you understand it, but the point here is that it's unfriendly to anyone who isn't familiar with it.

I used it to get around proxies back in the 2000s

Ok very simple, left wing media lie by omission and push agenda via slanted headlines and opinions, as much as the right do. As a traditionally left wing person I did not know the extent of this. I no longer exclusively read left wing news.

The left, in 2025, have a dreadful fear of seeming Islamophobic, and this is evident in their handling of this current situation and of the unrest in 2022 when a woman died in police custody, arrested for the crime of not wearing specific headwear. BBC headline commented on how the economic situation created the perfect conditions for unrest. How about oppression creating the perfect conditions for unrest? No, we're not allowed to comment on Iran's culture/religion, only their economy.

Think of it like phone numbers. For decades people have accepted gradual phone number prefix additions. I remember in rural Ireland my parents got an extra digit in the late 70s, two more in the 90s, and it was conceptually easy. It didn't change how phones work, turn your phone into a party line or introduce letters or special characters into the rotary dial, or allow you to skip consecutive similar digits.

For people who deal with ip addresses, the switch from ipv4 to ipv6 means moving from 4 digits (1.2.3.4) to this:

   2001:0db8:0000:0000:0008:0800:200c:417a
   2001:db8:0:0:8:800:200c:417a
   2001:db8::8:800:200c:417a

Yes, the ipv6 examples are all the same address. This is horrible. Worse than MAC addresses because it doesn't even follow a standard length and has fancy (read: complex) rules for shortening.

Plus switching completely to ipv6 overnight means throwing away all your current knowledge of how to secure your home network. For lazy people, ipv4 NAT "accidentally" provides firewall-like features because none of your home ipv4 addresses are public. People are immediately afraid of ipv6 in the home and now they need to know about firewalls. With ipv4, firewalls were simple enough. "My network starts with 192.168, the Internet doesn't". You need to learn unlearn NAT and port forwarding and realise that with already routable ipv6 addresses you just need a firewall with default deny, and then add rules that "unlock" traffic on specific ports to specific addresses. Of course more complexity gets in the way... devices use "Privacy Extensions" and change their addresses, so making firewall rules work long-term, you should use the device's MAC Address. Christ on a bike.

I totally see why people open this bag of crazy shit and say to themselves "maybe next time I buy a new router I'll do this, but right now I have a home with 4 phones, 3 TVs, 2 consoles, security cameras, and some god damn kitchen appliances that want to talk to home connect or something". Personally, I try to avoid fucking with the network as much as possible to avoid the wrath of my wife (her voice "Why are you breaking shit for ideological reasons? What was broken? What new amazing thing can I do after this?").

> One of those devices (stove or kettle) transfers more heat per unit of time into the water. Just use that device for the full amount of water.

But.. Applying heat from two sources is better than applying heat from only one?

I have a large open plan kitchen with one counter surrounded by hanging pots and pans, knives on a magnetic wall mount, all chopping boards stored vertically in racks and most of the condiments on a wall rack or in the drawers

Yeah my point about aircon (and to an extent, big vehicles) is that we have the ability, to a degree, to avoid or work around the problems that climate change is throwing at us. I personally take individual action on climate but I don't think it's possible to make other people change their lifestyle so I don't even try. Do what you want to do people. I live my way because of my own conscience, that's all.

I haven't used Windows in years, but surely a clean install addresses some of that? I don't think I've ever used whatever default OS was preinstalled on a laptop or PC that I bought.

Or is the default Windows 11 just that full of shite?