Notices by linear cannon (linear@nya.social)

@foone@digipres.club one time my wife (then girlfriend) admitted to me while talking about something she was doing that she accidentally was compiling firefox on her phone. twice. simultaneously. and she didn't see anything wrong with this

i have just been laid off

if anyone has any good leads on a job for me, please reach out

i'm good at embedded linux, programming microcontrollers, and old-school unix sysadmining, and have done a mixture of those things professionally for almost a decade at this point

@aral@mastodon.ar.al i work in embedded and this is disturbingly accurate. thankfully most of the customers i've worked with who are clearly trying to do this (whether or not they are being transparent with us that they're trying to do this) end up failing and running out of money before they can do too much damage

with one notable exception, but they were already well-established (and i would've refused to work with them. thankfully that's possible for me here)

it would be nice if it were actually as easy to contribute to free/open source software as the developers and maintainers of such software claim it is

but meritocracy is a lie, and bullshit policies and procedures (see: "real name" policy) scare away minorities who might otherwise do important work

i have outright deleted a major patchset i wrote for a project under freedesktop.org stewardship, which someone else is probably going to write again in a year or two, because i realized the project had a real-name policy, and decided it wasn't worth it. i then lost motivation for the cool thing i was working on that needed me to write that patch

this is not the intended effect of a "real-name" policy, but it is the actual effect. and, as the cool kids say, "the system is what it does".

there is no such thing as a "real name". the concept of a "legal name" is fraught, and most certainly is not what you think it is, or what you are looking for, if you are a software developer. many assumptions you have about what a "legal name" is probably are not true.

consider this: the name on my birth certificate is different than the name on my drivers license, and that is different from the names i am called by my friends. those names are all different from what is likely to be on my passport when i get it, and all of those are different than the name i publish my open source projects under. all of these, in different jurisdictions, might or might not be something you could consider a "legal name". which one do you want me to use when i submit a major feature to your library? are you going to turn me away if i try to submit it as "linear cannon"? why? if i have a website and contact information under that name, why does this matter? how is it substantially different than an author of fiction novels publishing under a pen name? does it change if i produce a piece of government-issued documentation with that name on it? why, or why not?

if your real name policy does not answer these questions adequately, then there's a very good chance i'm just going to assume that you're going to turn me away, as has happened to me several times already

open source software projects and standards organizations need more people willing to say "no. fuck you" to corporate entities, sponsors, and other bad actors putting on a polite face.

i think the reason linux works so well is precisely because the maintainers will happily tell a corporation off and reject huge amounts of work out of hand, if they aren't actually making things better. much as they may try, you cannot buy your way into making linux do something for you. you can buy insurance that it will continue to exist, and you can buy labor to submit improvements that benefit you, but your money will not afford you any lenience, and it will not direct attention to your own goals

i wish i could see more of the same elsewhere

remember folks: tech is politics. you cannot keep one out of the other. they are inseparable.

the technical problems you choose to solve, and the way you choose to solve them, are an expression of politics.

building open source software indicates that you think information should be free, which is a political stance. building closed source software indicates that you think information should be controlled, which is a political stance.

building software that discriminates against people of color is a racist action and reflects upon you as such, regardless of your intent in building that software (hint: that's how racism works everywhere else, too)

building software which can be used to remove control from the masses and give it to corporations and rich people, indicates that you think that corporations and rich people should amass power, and regular folks should not have freedom.

it does not matter if a company for whom you work paid you to do that thing, or if your intentions were good, or if you were only trying to see if a particular technical challenge could be solved. technical problems are political problems. business needs and decisions are political ones.

if there is a mismatch between the politics you express via your actions, and those you express via your words, the actions are the ones people will care about, not the words. you cannot fix bad actions by saying good words.

do good actions.

@xianc78@gameliberty.club right now i'm cheering for Ladybird

fuck it.

the web bubble's about to pop

mozilla needs to die with the rest so something better can rise from its ashes

how can we make sure it does

tiny pc builds are extremely underrated. just look at this little thing i just put together (powermac g4 and quadra 700 for scale)