Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

Reddit mod.

see ya in Philly, Trumpy.

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

YouTube blew up the year I went to college and got access to a T3 line. 🤤 My school had pretty robust security, but it was policy-based. Turns out, if you are on Linux and can’t run the middleware, it would just go “oh you must be a printer, c’mon in!”

I crashed the entire network twice, so I fished a computer out of the trash in my parents’ neighborhood, put Arch and rtorrrent on it, and would just pipe my traffic via SSH to that machine. :p

Ah, and the short era of iTunes music sharing… Good memories.

Ah I am not sure. I just assumed it was W3C.

My unpopular opinion is that Flash was perhaps one of the greatest media standards of all time. Think about it — in 2002, people were packaging entire 15 minute animations with full audio and imagery, all encapsulated in a single file that could play in any browser, for under 10mb each. Not to mention, it was one of the earliest formats to support streaming. It used vectors for art, which meant that a SWF file would look just as good today on a 4k screen as it did in 2002.

It only became awful once we started forcing it to be stuff it didn’t need to be, like a Web design platform, or a common platform for applets. This introduced more and more advanced versions of scripting that continually introduced new vulnerabilities.

It was a beautiful way to spread culture back when the fastest Internet anyone could get was 1 MB/sec.

Honestly it’s a little staggering how much better web video got after the W3C got fed up with Flash and RealPlayer and finally implemented some more efficient video and native video player standards.

<video> was a revolution.

i am old in terms of internet years, and Bill Gates really is living proof that billionaires can essentially destroy the lives of thousands and thousands of people to gather their wealth, and then spend the autumn of their years choosing which countries or causes get a splash-out of the unfathomable excess, like a little kinglet.

i am happy his money helped fix stuff in the world. but that’s called “catching up to what has been expected of you for 60 years.” he does not get a cookie for working out of the Andrew Carnegie playbook.

the mergers & acquisitions leviathan eats yet another beautiful thing, just like it ate my precious linode.

i just wanted to drop my personal favorite self-hosted git alternative, Gogs (gogs.io). i have very modest git needs (i just need a place to host code and interact with the git client), and i think it fits the bill well.

i am not associated with it at all, i just want folks to know that self-hosting your own git service has really never been easier or better; there are so many good options, like a similar project, gitea.

if you are uncomfortable with exposing your home network to the internet, you can use tools like tailscale funnel or a reverse proxy server like caddy and a $5 VPS from any cloud host of your choosing to obscure your home IP, while still keeping the storage and the brains somewhere closeby.

imo, the only way forward for all of us to stay safe is to keep repeating a simple mantra: “let’s go back to making websites.”

Damn, I was looking this publication up on Wikipedia because I hadn’t heard of it before. When Radar started in the mid 2000s, it was financed by Epstein.

The magazine Radar published articles on entertainment, fashion, politics, and human interest and was founded and edited by Maer Roshan in September 2003.[7][8][9] After a series of three test issues focused on satire, he relaunched it in 2005 and again in 2006 with help from investors and family members, including Jeffrey Epstein .[10][11][12]

(Emphasis is mine).

It is owned by a completely different set of people now, but, wow. This dude had his beak in everything.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_Online?wprov=sfla1

Your last point is a fair one, but it’s also still important to mention because that specific strain of “it’s all political, who cares” is what creates tolerance for a lack of transparency and public accountability.

If anyone wants to take this problem seriously, it is also important to understand that even if what is released as an executive summary is deeply flawed, there are real civil servants there still trying to do the best they can with as little as possible. The data is all still published. We, as consumers of journalism, really should be pressuring editors to actually fix the way they uncritically gobble up and report anything that the DoL puts out.

Or, really, reporting on it ourselves and trying to learn and maintain a common set of journalistic ethics.

To be honest, this is just kind of how jobs reports have tended to work since Bush. It is kind of a consequence of both how reporting has failed to really contextualize how jobs reports tend to release in the US, as well as some (arguable) juking of the stats that make it easier to show positive growth in one area and then use the correctance to show the worse numbers.

Basically the Bureau of Labor and Statistics releases a monthly report, and at the beginning of the year it is based more on statistical modeling (“hockey stick growth! I got $5 today to mow the lawn, and $10 the next day to do it. If this rate keeps up, by next year I’ll be pulling in a couple billion.”), then they issue corrections as the actual data rolls in and either confirms or denies their modeling.

24 hour news (cable and online) got into the habit of basically reporting on the monthly reports like they are gospel, when realistically they are only reliable around November or December. I think the Fed encourages it too because it’s quietly one of the levers they can use to inspire foreign investment.

But, it is difficult to adequately describe how seriously the nerds at the BLS take their jobs. They gather and report real-ass data that you can go look at pretty much back to the 60s. This rhythm must be their compromise with the partisan pressures of the executive.

it’s a random event that happens sometime in the beginning of any new game — in story, it’s a military black hawk helicopter flying over the Knox County area looking for survivors.

The effect in-game is that the zombies in the world all gather around to follow the noise source, which controls and drives a gigantic crowd of zombies around where you’re at. It can be very overwhelming, especially when you’re just starting out and don’t have much by way of structures built.

my friends and I utilize a mod that records your skills in a notebook that stays on your zombie after you die. so you actually have a motivation to go back into somewhere dangerous and clean it up.

still eagerly waiting for the stable release of the next version.