Tootfinder

techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.

#Framed 1164
🎥 🟥 🟥 🟩 ⬛ ⬛ ⬛
https://framed.wtf

On the same day I signed an initial IEP plan, I find out the US Dept of Education has cut half its staff.
Fuck POTUS47 and anyone that voted for him. And fuck any #ProgressivesForTrump that didn't have the maturity to vote for a better future. There's a million ways we will suffer for your single-minded refusal to see the future. You think people will "try harder&quo…

"Malgré des semaines de couverture médiatique négative, des déportations très médiatisées de migrants et d'étudiants munis de visas, et une décision négative de la Cour suprême, l'immigration reste le dossier le plus populaire de M. Trump : 47 % l'approuvent, tandis que 51 % le désapprouvent, selon un sondage New York Times/Siena College réalisé ce mois-ci."
#Trump

Project Espresso alpha now available
"We are excited to announce that Project Espresso, our project to port Adélie Linux to the Wii U console, has just released alpha repositories. We will be providing root images for SD cards in the coming days. For more information, including links to the repositories and how to set up your existing install to use these binaries, see the linked blog post. Happy computing!"

I looked into buying a solar charged battery bank. This product category is completely dominated by no-name 3rd party sellers. 🚩
Charge time is key. No listing had even a rough estimate for solar charge time. 🚩
An example unit claims max solar power 1.13 w, with enough battery power to charge an iPhone 14 Pro twice. Working from that, you'd need ~25 hours of full sun to fully charge. I'd roughly estimate that means at least 3 days in summer. Not quite worthless, but close…

uspolitics, trump
I keep seeing smart people writing stuff like
> [the US] kept peace through strength balanced with restraint, and wielded influence through culture, values, and diplomacy
I understand that #Trump is terrible and some people feel tempted to idealize what they had before him, but we should be more discerning, or otherwise it becomes impossible to understand how this happened in the first place.
Let's start with some questions:
- peace where? and for who? was it true peace, or "Pax Romana"?
- are we going to take seriously that statement on "restraint"? after all the lies, internal witch hunting, sanctions, coups, wars, invasions, genocides, and last but not least, 2 unnecessary nuclear strikes on Japan?
Now, on "culture, values, and diplomacy". Sure. Why not. Not everything was going to be bad, right?
But the thing is, abusive husbands aren't bad all the time either. From time to time they know how to be sweet and seem to care: one present here, flowers the next day, a little bit of gaslighting, and fake apologies after that "accidental" slap.
Given enough time (if the wife is still alive), at some point the victim decides to leave, and then all hell breaks loose. Trump is the manifestation of that moment. He does not represent a change in #USA's nature, but a hidden side that was "always" there, just waiting to play its role.
Others believe this is because #US citizens have been intentionally dumbed down by a combination of propaganda and a disfunctional education system, and I'm sure it's partly true... But let's see what many of their most brilliant and educated citizens are choosing to do with their lives today: https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/12/stanford-students-want-in-on-the-military-tech-gold-rush/
So, all I'm asking is: please drop the act. It was always a clusterfuck.

Today is Employee Appreciation Day, announced by mass email to all employees. Get ready for (tokens of) our appreciation next week.
#OfficeWorkerGripes

Rant about PHP
You know a technology is declining when the most basic questions about its most bizarre quirks are left completely unanswered for years.
#PHP is like that. Every day I have many of these questions. I look for them. No one asked them before, no one wrote about them before.
I'm baffled by the lack of curiosity and proactivity of its community.
I know it sounds like me piling up on people I don't know anything about, but I used to invest a lot of time programming in PHP. I went to conferences, I made some open source libraries for it, like a PHP kernel for Jupyter Notebooks, I even made a library to work with dataframes, tensors and matrices in PHP (although I lost this one because my laptop was stolen before I released... and I didn't had it in me to rewrite it again).
Then, the ones who I admired the most in that space, like Nikita Popov, started leaving it to work in more intellectually vibrant communities... and it shows.
I'm sure Nikita Popov would be much more gracious than me when talking about it. I can only speculate about his motivations, but at least I can tell you about mine: It was precisely about that same lack of curiosity and creativity that I mentioned before, it felt unbearably grey and sad.

One thing I think about is how flat-earth types could convince themselves, without having to trust anyone, their model of the earth is wrong. I don't think the earth is flat, but it is an interesting problem in #epistemology.
A model needs to explain observations if it is to be believed.
Lately, I've been thinking about day length as seasons change, and how cycle is opposit…