A geek, who no longer likes tech

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2025

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  • I’ve been following the software forge federation some time ago, and didn’t feel to pick up even when it was discusssed initially. It is a neat idea on high-level, though it requires forges to implement it, which has a risk of not picking up (just look at how much iterations of social media federation protocols was there, until ActivityPub arose).

    On the other hand, all of the forges are based on a distributed technology out of the box: git. Most of the “modern days” comforts there are, are just built on top, and there are different ways to approach it.

    As an example, you can send patches directly to the author in email. Is heavily implemented and suggested by https://sr.ht/ (1) — a software forge, which focuses on building a federated workflow by using email for communication (which is federated by design). This way, you can create “Pull Requests” without having account on the forge — all you need to do is just submit a patch. Author is very vocal about supporting it (2), and provides quite useful guides to learn (3), (4)

    Generally, I’d say that e-mail is the only federative implementation you can get so far :)











  • Me neither. The quality of roads is beyond excellent, and usually roads that are considered “worse” are still much better than those considered better right outside EU. And they are driveable by even low-clearance cars[1]! It makes even less sense for EVs, taking into account that added weight of an SUV increases cost and lowers the reach of a car.

    I have only two assumptions, first one being: everyone got into belief that SUVs/crossovers have more space than sedans of same size. Which really is an illusion, and even sellers usually say, where the sizes match. In fact, a kombi car will have so much more space, compared to SUV, that it is really impossible to compare.

    Another assumption is feeling like a Cool Guy®. Even today I saw a guy riding a BMW, which has bunch of “turbo power” stickers, while sitting alone in a crossover. It’s like Macs, which are very average laptops, but everyone wanted them, because of an Apple effect.

    [1]: Here I mean cars with clearance about 10cm









  • If it is a Zoom meeting, than I just allow myself to run around the room, listening to the meeting on the background.

    Otherwise, if it is an in-person meeting, I do lots of things

    • watch around, try to make notes of important things
    • practice active listening, trying to validate my understanding by parahprasing statements I heard as questions to validate correctness of my understanding. Even if I can’t ask them — I write them down, this also forces the muscle memory to make me recall more
    • if it is a presentation, I sometimes run further ahead, riding the content like waves — so when presenter gets to some point,

    The most important thing, though, always is to accept the fact that you can miss some parts. Neurotypicals miss bits and pieces of information too — they just don’t think it is a bad thing, so it is fine if you miss something, or hear something incorrectly. It is completely fine to ask to repeat something, or to get some information later by asking your colleagues.



  • Unironically, the “Soviet’s build to last” idea was nothing more than a propaganda product, like “cheap, natural and tasty ice cream” and “natural sausages”. In fact, comparing one-to-one tooling made in US vs Soviet tooling, it turns out that US was much higher quality and could last longer.

    The primary reason for that illusion to sustain is because after soviet union fell apart, general poverty caused people to use tooling until it broke down completely — which made quality degradation of modern tooling much more apparent. The old-created tooling was produced years ago, and it was economically unsustainable at that point of time, and it was produced in huge masses disregarding actual need — making it almost as cheap as the new bought (while the latter was lower quality).

    At the same time, the overall quality degradation for pricing lowering in richer countries was not noticed as much, because people were changing things over the time. I still see lots of projects, where people restore old European grinders, saws, etc — to the state that those tools look like new. They just got into awful shape, because there was an ability to replace thing, while in post-soviet countries you had no choice: either you take a good care of tool, or you don’t have it at all (because of poverty).

    p.s. The ice cream and sausages is really just a propaganda legent: they were adding margarine to the ice cream, and so much stabilizers to sausages, it wouldn’t be allowed even in US, not speaking of EU.


    Speaking of razors: I only recently learned that Gilette was producing their double-edged blades for safety razors in russia. IDK if they still are, but… yeah, that was a surprise for me.