Rubenerd

The mouth-foaming, hand-wringing responses to Greta Thunberg’s rise has been fascinating to watch, if entirely predictable. She’s become everything the anti-science crowd feared: an empathetic human face on irrefutable evidence. Her dissenters can’t even say truthfully that she doesn’t understand what she speaks of, given she consistently defers to those with expertise in her speeches. Listen to scientists, not to me!

The Murdoch press in Australia, and America’s latest impeached President feel the need to whinge about her incessantly. If she was ineffectual, they wouldn’t feel the need to rile up their base.

I haven’t always agreed with Nobel Peace Prize recipients, or Time People of the Year. But this is well earned.

Looks good! From the new site:

The KDE/FreeBSD team hopes this site will be a valuable resource for all who are interested in maintaining the high level of compatibility between FreeBSD and KDE Software (KDE Frameworks 5, KDE Plasma and Applications and Extragear) that has been seen to date. The goal is to facilitate the discussion of patches, finding bugs, suggesting features and hopefully becoming a valuable member of both the KDE and FreeBSD communities.

KDE was the first desktop I tried on FreeBSD back in 2007, and while I use Xfce on mobile, its my favourite fully-featured environment to use on my beefy desktop at home. I’m glad to see the project is still going well.

My Twitter followers outside Australia are likely bored to tears about my bushfire comments, and I’ve been tempted to blog daily about it as well. The situation is equal parts terrifying and surreal.

Yesterday and colleage of mine and I went out to Parramatta in Sydney’s west for a client meeting. The view outside the office window was a deep orange, and the heat was the most intense I’d felt since I left the airport in Dubai as a kid. The view above is of the Domain from earlier this month, but it was an even bolder colour than that.

But the biggest shock came when we were getting the train back. It was an express that started its trip in the Blue Mountains, and the air conditioning on board smelled more like smoke than outside. I thought of what horrid conditions it must have travelled to get to where it was, and how relieved the crew must have felt going the other direction towards the coast. As we got closer to Sydney, we couldn’t believe how quickly the sky changed from a rusty brown to a bleak grey.

Which leads me to a LINE message my dad sent to us yesterday:

I just came back from the north (bris n byron) its horrific - not a few burnt trees but 100s of kms of something that looks more like a scene from an apocalypse movie. At one point had to turn back bacause roads closed - not because of a burning fire but the aftermath- telegraph poles, bridges, fences, safety barriers, road signs all gone and bits of dead trees all over the road I’ve grown up with bush fires since i was a little kid but the intensity of this is on another scale

And on why people vote for political parties that keep turning a blind eye to the problem, or worse:

unfortunately thats very common with the “average joe” n why nothing is happening. And my feeling is the millions of “new Australians” (having been one !) want to fit in a keep a low profile so that they just go along with everything the pollies say

My dad’s side of the family emigrated from Germany after the war to Australia. I hadn’t even considered this angle.

I’m not informed of the circumstances; and I know it needs to go through the Senate. But after years of floundering and making a mockery of itself on the world stage, I feel the US took a positive, symbolic step in the right direction. It’s been hard to be a defender of America of late, so I’ll take what I can get.

But that’s not why I’m posting about this. I realised this morning I’ve been alive for two American impeachments. And naturally the people who demanded the office be upheld to certain standards under Mr Clinton are now the ones lining up to defend Mr Orange. It’s not hypocricy though, because they don’t call it that.

Anyway, I felt it worth posting something about it, given the gravity of the situation.

A site affiliated with another that’s in my personal doghouse published this about these new generation of personal home assistants:

It’s a pretty well-known fact that Alexa-enabled devices and Google Home products record everything you say to them. What you may not know is how to delete these recordings or turn this feature off entirely. In the video above, I show you how.

There’s a better solution: don’t introduce these devices to your home if you feel you can’t trust them. Some electronics are essentials in modern society. Barring specific circumstances, these are not. And in the meantime we let companies think we’re okay with this behavior by buying these devices.

As for the site in question, they were the ones who used a photo of me and asked their readers if they were willing to look as stupid. When I called them out for their bad faith use of my image, they said they had permission to under Creative Commons. This was a lie; it was published with ShareAlike which they were violating. Not that I hold it against them or anything.

Every attempt we make at distilling someone’s life into a number is an exercise in shallow futility. Age is less important if you’re a healthy, good person. Your income says nothing about your happiness or contribution to society. The month for your horoscope is bullshit. But it’s the single number at the end of school I always found particularly cynical.

Even in the mid 2000s we were told our New South Wales UAI, now ATAR, was just a number. If that was true, why were we working so hard for it? The reality is, regardless of your circumstances, interests, even your academic performance, a higher ATAR will statistically make your life easier; and anyone who says otherwise is lying through their teeth.

This of course doesn’t mean your life is over if you get a low one, or even that you’ll be guaranteed of success with a high one. I got a great ATAR, and my subsequent years were self-destructive and painful. And I’m sure the newspapers and social media will be full of well-meaning but pithy comments about how Steve Jobs didn’t graduate university, and Jeff Bezos literally had to lick the road clean with his tongue. Something something shrubberies.

But people pray on that insecurity. There’s an entire industry of after school tuition centres, with smiling faces on billboards plastered around train stations from Epping to Chatswood. I saw this in the high-pressure school system in Singapore, and it’s disappointing and gravely concerning seeing them grow here. A family friend once told me that then-CityRail drivers were terrified of choosing the short straw for the North Shore Line around HSC time, for all the teenagers who’d jump in front of trains after getting their results and not wanting to confront their parents. The pressure from family and educators is real, because people care about ATARs.

Which leads me to this comment my friend Cindy on Twitter:

Don’t bash people who worked hard for good ATARS to console people who got shit ATARS. As someone who got a shit ATAR, trust me that approach just makes peeps feel shittier. If you got a shit ATAR, don’t let it define you. Rather use it to self reflect where from here

I say that because every year there’s always clapback and ridicule of high achieving atar students if they show themselves being proud of their ATAR which is like probs just a manifestation of tall poppy lbr

Australian society does place a high value on humbleness; it’s why blustery Silicon Valley sales copy gets howled at and ridiculed when companies copy it across wholesale. But it does manifest in destructive ways like this.

I was proud that I did well, because I studied my damned arse off while taking care of my terminally-ill mum the entire time. At one point I was in the oncology ward balancing a chemistry textbook while one of her chemo drips had an adverse reaction and she was swarmed by doctors. I was in the Sydney Morning Herald back in Australia for my marks in the IT subjects! I absolutely hated high school; so it felt like a triumphant middle finger to a painful chapter of my life.

But! I could absolutely empathise with people who didn’t do so well. My year 10 School Certificate marks were entirely pedestrian, and while my parents and teachers didn’t say they were disappointed, I felt like I let people down who believed in me. And the last thing I needed to hear was yeah, but those high achievers are only tryhards… remember that slight? It feels like it shouldn’t need saying, but robbing someone of agency doesn’t make one feel better, it just causes resentment.

There’s a pernicious culture around these marks that needs to be deconstructed, though every indication shows that won’t be happening any time soon. So in the interim, we need to be realistic about this stuff.

Hugo 0.60 has switched to using the Goldmark markdown generator. It broke curly quotes and punctuation. It’s a known issue, and persists as of 0.60.1.

The official docs list these as options for your config file to enable support, or you can enable the old default markdown handler. But no combination of the below works:

defaultMarkdownHandler: blackFriday
markup:
  goldmark:
    extensions:
      typeographer: true
  blackFriday:
    angledQuotes: true

So stick with 0.59.1 if punctuation is important to you.

The Overnightscape Central is a fun weekly podcast hosted by the illustrious PQ Ribber. Hosts and listeners of The Overnightscape Underground participate in a topic each week, and you’re welcome to join.

02:48:29 – Frank Edward Nora, Doc Sleaze, Chad Bowers, and a note from Ruben and Clara answer PQ’s request for new topic ideas!!

You can view this episode on the Underground, listen to it here, and subscribe with this feed in your podcast client.

It’s the time of year where we can reference The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, that legendary series animated by our beloved KyoAni back in 2010. I can’t believe it’ll already be a decade ago next year.

Five years later, and I would be going to anime event dressed as Kyon, with Clara cosplaying as Yuki :’).

It’s Music Monday time again, that time of the week where I regail you with my misspelling of regale, and share some tunes for which I harbour affection or admiration, such that you may derive as much joy from them as I did. This was a long-winded way of saying music I like, but then, you don’t read this site for brevity. Brevity to me always sounded like a baking term. Leave your bagels before boiling for brevity.

Given the season, I thought it fitting to include one of my favourite holiday songs.

Michael Franks is my favourite singer/songwriter, and his 2007 holiday album gets heavy play at this time of year. He wrote all the songs himself, so you get a break from the overplayed standards.

This song is particularly biting, especially with lines like spend all ye faithful, but there are some warm tunes on the album as well.