Syn-ACK, Pentagenerian :facepalm: / is on Nostr

Currently unemployed software engineer corpo drone by day, cyberpunk edgerunner by night, and opinionated armchair quarterback 24/7. I love the Oxford comma and believe that you should also. I tend to post a lot when I've got a bee under my bonnet. There are a lot of bees and I have a pretty big bonnet.

Other interests include everything #technology, #martialarts, #formula1, #books, #movies, #music, #grafitti, #streetart, #gigposters, #GraphicNovels, #boardgames, #cyberpunk, and witty repartee.

Akkoma: SYN-ACK (npub1qzu…nat6)
Iceshrimp: SyntACKtic 🧊🦐 (npub1hr6…0cnf)
Totentanz: Syn-Ack
Bookwyrm: SynACK (npub1aus…z4pc)
Matrix: @synack_ci:matrix.org

#nobot
#noindex
#nobridge

Pronouns: he/him
Home Base: Austin, US
Website: https://preemchro.me
Tech Stack: Java, PHP (under duress), Apache Solr, AWS. Primarily doing Search and RESTful API development.
Martial Arts: Okinawan Shorin-ryu Matsamura Seito (Kenshinkan) karate
Formula 1: Red Bull, McLaren
Music: Drummer (inactive), Singer (inactive)
Games: Video: Cyberpunk 2077, Citizen Sleeper, and the HBS Shadowrun games. TTBG: Scythe, Gloomhaven, Gangs of Night City

Last Notes

2024-07-10 20:25:08

I have a serious question for all'a youz tech folks out there that have been burned out by Big Tech and the corpo wageslave game that is "software development":
**When you decided that you were no longer interested in doing corpo software development, what area, industry, or career did you move into instead?**
I've decided that I no longer want to work in the tech industry anymore; I just don't agree with 99% of it at this point, and that 1% is proving to be ridiculously hard to find. So once you decided that you were done with corpo dev, where did you go and what did you choose?
Basically, I need some inspiration of what I can do next for my "second act" because I've been unable to figure out a path for myself. I need some ideas of what careers I can parlay my decades of software/biz experience into that will be more beneficial to society. High salary holds no interest for me at this point; it's more about the fulfillment of the work I do that matters.
And for the record, the Software Engineering Manager jump doesn't seem to be working. I've gotten exactly 0 responses to any of those types of jobs to which I have applied.
Boosts and replies welcome!
:boost_ok: :reply_ok:

2024-06-15 04:09:53

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Metal has always been misunderstood both literally and figuratively by anybody outside that culture. Like you likely did, I grew up hearing that bands like Iron Maiden, Megadeth, and Metallica were all "evil" based solely on their imagery. Once I was actually able to listen to them, it was clear that everybody railing against them had no idea what they were even talking about.
So many bands from the '60s onwards have super anti-political messages as their mainstay lyrics. I mean, Megadeth pretty much has two default topics: politics and mental illness.
The same people that misunderstand metal misunderstand punk as well for the same reasons.

2024-05-29 20:09:13

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I'm not sure that I can use Zelle to pay my COBRA insurance premiums. My only experiences with Zelle so far has been that it requires a phone number or email address, and I don't know how that would work for a business.
I guess I could set up my bank to make payments from my account, but then there's other fees associated with that (as they actually send a paper check rather than a wire transfer).
Like I said, it's onerous to pay any way other than cards.

2024-05-29 19:24:14

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"forced convenience" because we made it so "overly inconvenient" to do it any other way...

2024-05-29 19:17:07

It's awesome that most financial transactions really, really, *really* want you to pay via credit card (by making it a lot more onerous to pay with any other method) and then charge a 1-3% "convenience fee" for doing so.
How did we let them get away with this and make this the norm, people? How did we not push back on this the first time one of these profiteers tried to foist this upon us?
:facepalm:

2024-05-26 18:44:44

@npub1fdr…lvhs spreading some truth in *The Bezzle*:
> America will > *never*> make life better for the millions of souls it has imprisoned. Never. It is not in our character. To be an American is to live with the festering background knowledge that you are in a land that imprisons more of its people than any country in the history of the world—a land with more prisoners than Stalin’s USSR or Hu Jintao’s China or P. W. Botha’s Apartheid South Africa.
> With so many in prison, either you have to believe that you are living in the midst of a great many secret criminals, or you have to confront the fact that you live in a place where the only thing standing between you and decades in a prison (running at two or three times its nominal capacity) is luck … and > *connections*> .

2024-05-08 22:28:51

Yes, I know our system is broken. I know that a 2-party system is untenable. And I know that this whole "lesser of two evils" argument is complete bullshit and that pretty much everyone in this government is a bad person. I'm as tired of it as you are.
But please - PLEASE - honestly tell me what we, the rank & file, are supposed to actually *do* about it? The broken system is all we have and not participating in it out of protest, however righteous that protest might be, just means that either way we'll still be left with one of two candidates. The system will go on without us and we'll be stuck living with the results determined by those that chose to continue participating in it.
I'm absolutely, genuinely asking. Everyone seems to be complaining about it, talking about how terrible it is, and there are other viable alternative systems of government that would likely work much better, but they're all essentially a moot point because the current system won't allow them to even have a chance to be tried.
So what is the average citizen supposed to do? Please tell me.

2024-04-20 22:48:08

I really wonder what society would look like if people weren't forced to do jobs they hate just in order to live.
The fact that a capitalist system makes money by denying people the basic necesssities of life and then lays the blame for not being able to live at the feet of the people that the system has screwed is despicable.
Capitalism profits the most on the misery that the capitalist system itself creates. The fact that "work" is seen as both an ideal state of being as well as an "incentive" to get the basic necessities of life is reprehensible. Forcing people to start work as young as possible and then work until they've been completely used up through decades of constant work like so many cogs is abhorrent.
And the capitalists who perpetuate this system have likely never been anything less than affluent their entire lives. The irony is that their accumulated wealth allows them to be more of a "freeloader" than any person without a job. They have transferred their "work" to their money and the only "work" they do is to say, "put this much here".
Capitalism is a lie. It is the ultimate ponzi scheme. It is a system of control by which the wealthy control the rest of us. Capitalism devalues humanity to the point of insignificance.
I hate it here.

2024-04-19 03:53:07

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Thanks for the response and the tips! And I certainly didn't mean to imply that I was demanding features or anything like that. I wasn't sure how many developers are working on Tuba, but I just assumed from the issues list that it's something that isn't anyone's full-time job. And like I said, it's not a dealbreaker.
I suspected that it might also have something to do with GTK because I notice that the top processes alternate between dev.geopjr.Tuba and gnome-shell and also the indicator that this issue is reduced significantly by turning off spell check.
It's frustrating, but havnig the context that it's a known issue and it has a lot to do with the underlying OS (or at least DE) makes a lot of sense. And it's clearly something that has not gone unnoticed, so that's good enough for me.
As I tried to put forth in the OP, I am quite enjoying Tuba and find it to be a great alternative to the web UI via a browser! I am enjoying it! Sure it has some small issues, but what client doesn't? I have yet to find the "perfect" client, so the fact that Tuba has gotten as far as it has is a-ok in my book!
Thank you for all your work in bringing it to life and making it available to us!

2024-04-18 21:55:32

I've been using [@Tuba](https://floss.social/@Tuba) for several days now and overall, I like it quite a bit. It's nice to have a stand-alone client sometimes and I think that the dev(s) behind Tuba have done a pretty good job with it. There are some minor issues or missing features that would be nice to have, but they're not deal-breakers for the most part.
There is one thing that is driving me nuts, though: I think Tuba could really benefit from some multithreading because the update behavior locks the app during TL update fetches.
This might not be an issue for most people but as you may have noticed, I am quite verbose. And since the Compose box is modal (and also immovable and non-resizeable), that means that text input pauses during the update requests.This manifests itself in pauses while typing and then necessary corrections when the letters get missed or come out in the wrong order (depending on how fast I type during an update ping). Turning on the spell-checking makes it noticeably worse. I feel like spawning the compose window in a new thread or a new child process would eliminate this problem.
It might be that this is in some way related to the Ubuntu or Gnome DE, so if anyone knows of a solution, please share! I don't see any github issues on this, so I'm kinda hoping that it's just me somehow. I might need to open an issue.

2024-03-29 06:04:49

Getting kind of tired and irritated with all the recent hand-wringing pieces by the media with headlines like "Are we witnessing the death of the Internet?"
On the one hand, yes. But it's the death of the centralized, surveillance internet, not THE Internet. And to that, I say good riddance!
On the other hand, absolutely NOT! What we are witnessing is a huge opportunity for the Internet to not only live on but thrive as it was MEANT to be - a free and open exchange of ideas. People are starting to host their own servers again; FOSS software is on the rise and reclaiming its rightful place as the "software that runs the Internet"; projects like #Veilid, Sessions, and Signal are giving us new and secure communication frameworks; federated social media, webrings, personal servers, and point-to-point chat are gaining in popularity every day.
Sure, it might be the death of the overly-monetized, surveillance-capitalized, AI-twisted, ad-fueled, spam-filled dumpster fire that the media knows (but doesn't understand) as "the Internet", but the Internet is not dying. It's just being recast into the image that it should have been in the first place and not the techbro gift that we were swindled into accepting.
It is becoming the Internet that we were promised. And each one of us can help make that happen!