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#rant

7 posts7 participants1 post today

I'm going to have a rant about our vacuum cleaner.
I'm doing it here because I know you lot won't laugh at me, judge me or question my life choices 🤔🤣

It's a very first world issue - I know that.

Here goes:
Some, or many years ago, She decided we needed a new vacuum cleaner and She knew that a Dyson was absolutely the dog's doodaas. It was expensive, but, honestly, it'd be worth it.

Within a week of having it, She declared it too heavy for her.
Since then I've looked after the vacuuming - which is quite a satisfying job.

But - here goes - Every Bloody Time I use that retched Dyson Vacuum it needs dismantling because there's dirt in one of its 10,000 mysterious crevices. Yes, dirt - what cleaners are meant to deal with.
I swear it spends more time in pieces trying to find the next blockage than vacuuming.

No - I'm not going to replace it - it works when it works, and it's got a very good suck on it, when it's sucking. It'd be a waste to ditch it.

Thanks for listening.

My friend asked me what I think the 2020s will be remembered for the most.

My answer was that it was the decade the younger generations of adults realized they all got scammed, and that our parents essentially sold us a fake dream of prosperity, then closed the door behind them when they squandered their own prosperity, giving us nothing.

Nothing cool, unfortunately.

Just bullshit.

#usa#writing#rant

As a guy who used to install #squid for #webproxy #caching on all his edge systems (before they were called edge systems), I'm still a little annoyed at HTTPS-everywhere for breaking caching systems.
If you have half a dozen or more machines running the same OS on your network, caching means not downloading those updates repeatedly.
Ditto if you have a bunch of machines (virtual or not) running the same docker images.
#rant #sysadmin #bandwidth

Shut the fuck up already about staying hydrated 💦

I'm going to die from getting hit by a car while in a crosswalk, or micro plastics, not dehydration

Find something original to post about, or just keep scrolling 📜

A quick and minor #rant on the #indiegame event last night:

I think some game types are *great* for these events, but some types of games just don't fair well with a user walking in blind and playing for ~5-15 minutes.

Its easy for #indiedev to walk away with a misleading impression simply because they got players who didn't grasp it or jumped on a game that was already part way through the level and so were missing some context.

That should be considered when making game changes post-event.

I love cats, but I am extremely allergic to them.

There are no cats at the house I stay officially, but there is a pack of stray cats that roam around and show up at night when our dog isn't roaming around the yard.

They really like chilling on the couch back there I discovered l....

... I fell asleep with bare arms on the couch for a while as it was warm outside last night. I now have hives all over my arms, and need to go get itch cream before I scratch my skin away.

I was talking to a #therapist about how people coming back from #war or awful circumstances get #ptsd in two different ways:

They are traumatized in horrible places they were trying to survive, and get used to those ways over time until it seems normal.

When they survive, they are traumatized adapting to peace as they are left with their thoughts and habits they no longer need.

She asked me if I felt this way.

I definitely do.

I am happy most of the time, though.

"You haven't read this urgent message yet."
"Yeah, how about you quit sending me mostly ads and restrict your messaging to urgent messages only. That would greatly increase the chances that I actually read your messages."

Schöne Grüße an den Arschloch-Fahrer, der uns trotz Winken an der Bushaltestelle im Regen hat stehen lassen. Er war auch noch 4 Minuten vor der planmäßigen Zeit.

Die "Hotline" von RVO-Bus war auch nicht zu erreichen (Mo-Do 8-16 Uhr, Fr 8-12 Uhr 🤡 ).
Der Takt der Linie ist ca. 2-stündig.

Wir sind dann die 3,5 km zu Fuß gelaufen.

Why does every IT/maths academic paper I read follows these steps?

1. claim to have a revolutionary algo
2. hide the reality and corner cases behind obfuscated formulas
3. provide an ambiguous and incomplete snippet of pseudo code
4. come up with benchmarks against other similar papers
5. "we are the best"

There is no way these people were able to implement properly each other algorithms and make legit comparisons.

And any time code is provided I find blatant flaws.

I hate #academia.

🆕 blog! “I'm never going back to Matrix”

I should love Matrix. It is a decentralised, privacy preserving, multi-platform chat tool. Goodbye Slack and your ridiculous free limits. Adiós Discord and your weird gamification. Suck it IRC with your obscure syntax and faint stench of BO. WhatsApp and Telegram can stick their heads in a bucket of lukewarm sick and sing sea …

👀 Read more: shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/im-ne

#foss #Matrix #OpenSource #rant

A list of errors saying "Unsupported Event".
Terence Eden’s Blog · I'm never going back to Matrix
More from Terence Eden

I'm never going back to Matrix

shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/07/im-ne

I should love Matrix. It is a decentralised, privacy preserving, multi-platform chat tool. Goodbye Slack and your ridiculous free limits. Adiós Discord and your weird gamification. Suck it IRC with your obscure syntax and faint stench of BO. WhatsApp and Telegram can stick their heads in a bucket of lukewarm sick and sing sea shanties! Let's join the future!

The problem is - Matrix is shit. Not just on a protocol level, but on an organisational level as well.

I joined Matrix at FOSDEM - the largest gathering of open source nerds in Europe. We were all encouraged to use it - every talk had its own channel, all the official comms came from there, I was even invited to a top-secret private channel for speaker. This was going to be epic! Viva la rèvölūçïón, right? Wrong.

It was dead. Even among the most seasoned geeks on the planet, most people preferred to use other services like Signal, Telegram, and Slack. Why? Because those other tools actually work.

Matrix has two official Android apps - one of which is old and unsupported, the other is new and doesn't work with many of the basic chat features.

I want to be absolutely clear about this - the company behind Matrix have put out an app which doesn't work with their own product! Lest you think I'm exaggerating, here's a typical view of the official FOSDEM speaker room, using the official Matrix app:

It was embarrassing. People would pipe up in channels and say "this doesn't work" only to be told they were using the wrong app and should go back to the one marked unsupported. So they left, never to return. Even in the large talks, where people were encouraged to use the official Matrix chat, most of the conversation happened on other platforms. It was just too hard to use Matrix.

A few thousands geeks, all used to recompiling their own kernels and participating in the Fediverse, and most thought that Matrix was too much of a faff.

After FOSDEM, I kept the Matrix app on my phone. Occasionally receiving a ping from some long-forgotten channel.

And then, one day, I got hit with the most vile spam. A dozen notifications suddenly appeared on my phone with abuse, torture, and transphobic slurs in them.

You can view the screenshot - but, fair warning, it is grim.

This shouldn't be possible. It doesn't take an expensive team of moderators to add some keyword monitoring. It doesn't take a massive AI model to work out that a stranger shouldn't be able to bombard users with multiple notifications. You don't have to sacrifice your dream of a decentralised future - you just need to care about your users.

This stuff is basic.

I moaned about it on Mastdon and was surprised to receive a private reply from the official Matrix account.

Please do not encourage the spammer by giving them a platform and propagating their spam; you may want to consider deleting your post.

This is classic victim blaming. It is my fault for giving the spammer attention. I am the one who needs to take responsibility and delete the evidence. I shouldn't warn people that Matrix is actively dangerous to use.

Bullshit.

Here's what I expected them to say:

"We're sorry you had such a bad experience on Matrix. Rest assured we're working hard to block these spammers - here's a link to show what we're doing. You can protect your account further by doing x, y and z. Once again, sorry and we hope we can win back your trust."

I'm not saying scrappy open source projects have to hire anodyne corporate communications specialists; they just need to have a little empathy.

But, no, just constant whining about how it isn't their fault and how I am the one who needs to change my behaviour.

This is pretty typical behaviour from the team. Find any post complaining about some aspect of Matrix and you'll see their instant woe-is-me replies.

So I deleted the app. I would have liked to have nuked my account but apparently that's not possible.

I'm not the only one who feels like this. Here's an epic post by Marius, which concludes:

Between the slow performance, the increasing amount of spam, the miserable web client, and the unfinished state of Element X, the Matrix.org network is not something I am willing to continue to recommend, especially to non-technical users. Normal people are simply tolerating it to communicate with idealistic nerds like myself who insist(ed) on using it.

Matrix just isn't focussed on users. I'm not talking about user-experience tweaks like which shade of cornflower blue to use - I mean basic user needs like apps that work and a way to combat spam.

There's a long list of ways the protocol contributes to a poor user experience. It almost seems designed without regard for how it will actually be used.

While the protocol may be conceptually interesting and their intentions noble, I'm not prepared to suffer abuse in the name of technical purity.

Open Source and Open Standards nerds like me ought to know by now that the protocol is the least compelling thing about a service. Who cares if your home is built using only Stallman-blessed tools, when the walls are full of rats?

A list of errors saying "Unsupported Event".
Terence Eden’s Blog · I'm never going back to Matrix
More from Terence Eden

Why on earth was the #ActivityPub protocol even let out the door without a well-specified and mandatory graceful, non-destructive key rotation scheme?

Yes I know the privacy issues. Those are not valid reasons to not have such a mechanism; it's a valid reason to not enable or use one.

What we're stuck with now is a ton of instances with absurdly long, legacy-algorithm keys (RSA-4096) with no way to replace them with shorter/better keys without effectively losing everything ever posted on the instance.

The protocol is only 7 years old! EC crypto was well-established at the time, and should have been the default.

And what happens once everyone has to replace the keys, because RSA is broken by quantum computers (I know, probably 100 years to go)? The #Fediverse will be a wasteland, with no instances trusting anything from any other instance, so all #Federation breaks down.

Sorry if I got some details wrong about what the protocol says. If I get flamed to death for being wrong, then I'll consider that a Good Thing(TM). I've been trying to find a way to rotate/replace keys for a while and all my searching turns up is either 1) confirmation that most people don't know or care about cryptography, or 2) https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/key-rotation-notification/562 - which really isn't helpful.

If it is possible to gracefully rotate the key(s) of an instance/user, there really has to exist some documentation that explains clearly how to implement this in a server and how to exercise it as a server operator.

pleroma.anduin.netAnduin.net

#Rant If airlines insist on cramming passengers in like sardines, why on earth do they still allow the seats to recline? The bloke next to me nearly got into a fight with the woman behind him because he insisted on reclining and she was trying to use a laptop on her tray table. Flying is bad enough without adding these extra aggro-inducing circumstances.