Orbital Owl @Zuph@octodon.social

It's been over a year since I've been here! Things have changed a lot! Here's a new #introduction

I'm Brad, 33, he/him (mostly), in the US midwest, working on space science hardware (as far as I can get from the military-industrial complex)

I'm into:
#electronics, #embedded, #cooking, #hiking, #tabletop, #knitting, #sewing, #rats, #anarchism

I'm getting into:
#rust, #MushroomGrowing, #clarinet, #ukulele

I want to:
- Live in community with friends
- Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism

Request for Suggestions (Please boost!):

Hi all! My reading group is looking for anarchist texts that get a little deeper into theory, praxis, and history of anarchist thought, but are still modern enough to be accessible. Kropotkin, et al, are great, but we're looking for something that's more like a modern summary/analysis of Kropotkin (if y'all get what I mean).

Happy to hear any suggestions you might have!

Probably none of you need to hear this, but yo, code is not neutral! Any decentralized code collaboration platform that doesn't enable moderation is dead on arrival, and no better than a corporate platform that helps ICE and bans Iranians.

extremely cursed idea: use some of these cheap thin mini-ITX boards and a pile of laptop drives to make an extremely smol ZFS NAS device. 36 TB of usable data in a 17 cm cube?

Got my @PINE64 PineTime today! Can't wait to noodle around with this lil' thing!

This is basically the first time I've had to reinstall my main PC from scratch in.... 5 years?

My main budgeting app (YNAB4) and Dropbox have changed so much in that time, that getting everything set back up is a herculean task.

YNAB4 is out of support, so guess I'm gonna have to make something myself from scratch?

They fired a totally non-productive coworker today.

On the one hand, no one deserves to be so quickly cutoff from making a living. And indeed, making employment a condition of housing/healthcare/etc in the US is cruel and inhumane.

On the other hand, he was annoying, arrogant, overconfident, and full of himself, and I'll be happy to never have to work with him again.

I have a new desktop! Everything in my old one was between 5 and 10 years old, and now everything is completely new. It's so weird to have a smol case, and reasonable processing power and ram.

lo AND behold? In THIS economy?

I apologize for what I said when I was big mad at computers last night

I keep in my room a chunk of monocrystalline silicon with googley eyes on it just to remind me of the folly of teaching rocks to think

How in the hell have we managed to build a world of computing on fragile standards, invented by committee, implemented by companies that consider their wrong interpretations of the standard "trade secret", running on software written by people who aren't paid and only barely give a shit?

Hell is a futile search for PCIe SATA controller ICs and finding nothing but proprietary bullshit

But I still at my core don't understand how they can have so much empathy for corporations, and so little for individuals.

Like, the company screwed up and won't fix their mistake because it would cost them money to fix it! They know it's wrong, it's clearly wrong, the people working there aren't incompetent.

The individual contractor probably isn't in that same boat! And if they are willfully taking advantage like that, it's pretty easy to see.

I've noticed that my coworkers and I differ a lot in this respect:
Our company shops a lot of skilled labor out to other folks-- companies and contractors.

If a company screws something up, my coworkers are slow to blame and quick to forgive. While if a contractor screws up, my coworkers are very quick to never work with this person again.

I am the exact opposite.

I'm sure some of this comes from the culture of capitalist "individualism" in the US...