Becka Sutton @Shutsumon@tootplanet.space

Sometimes I just don't need to know what's behind the headline

https://www.army-technology.com/news/blast-proof-pants-remain-effective-even-cement-mixer-wash/

So one customer was updating their content in the CMS, and then called us, saying "Euh, my D is gone?"
"What? Impossible. Must have been a typo."

Next thing ofc you start looking form html format problems, and then on to more exotic things like invisible utf-8 chars that get copypasted from Word or something.

Finall I made a tiny html file with nothing in it but pathological text, that could trigger the bug at will.

The partner responded by being vague and playing dumb. It was never fixed.

Our company had this tech partner who offered a html processor which had the most peculiar bug in one extremely specific input case:
- an opening html tag, like <p>
- then an occurrence of the string "ring" somewhere up until the next closing tag.
- this would trigger a bug which would strip all word-starting d's from sentences in the text content, unless the D was followed by a number.

Probably a hard-to-see regex typo in their code, but we'll never know.

someone pointed out the other week that we are not below the stars but among them ... and it just hit me that even if I never leave Earth I'm technically already in space

blessed image

current mood:

an uncut video of someone installing windows 98 from THIRTY-NINE FLOPPY DISKS

https://youtu.be/zWuJxKtF3gk

@InspectorCaracal Don't forget backups!

#mastoadmin

These are not unique to mastodon, however. These are costs of running a social media website at all - fediverse or otherwise.

You're running and managing a service. Other people will rely on you to keep that service up and running. That's a much higher cost than the dollars involved.

#mastoadmin

A larger instance doesn't just cost a little bit more money, it also requires far more labor hours to maintain.

Running a mastodon instance means things like, getting online in the morning and discovering that a stupid clock error on your server's machine took down your instance several hours ago while you were asleep, or coming back from dinner to discover that your instance was flooded and crashed by a bunch of celeb-fandom teenagers...

#mastoadmin

I'm seeing a bunch of posts today about how hosting a mastodon admin doesn't cost a lot of money, and first I want to say that this is true; you can run an instance on $10-20/mo entirely reasonably.

But I don't want anyone to forget that there is a labor cost in running and maintaining an instance. It's not just pushing a button and feeding in some money, it's also monitoring your server and keeping it secure and handling reports and doing upgrades and all fo that.

the irony of someone who doesn't CW anything and says so in their bio complaining about people improperly CWing things

Me: *has serious and important online conversation*

Conversation partner: "It's hard to type atm because cat on my arm."

Me: "please do [important thing] becau-... I WANT CAT, SEND ME CAT VIA MESSENGER, GIVVVVE!"

it's not gonna get fixed overnight, so if you can, put that out of your head (or learn to deal with it just being there regardless), as best you can, imo.

not any more than the same tune yards album i've been playing for a week, because that shit is in my head for...well, however long it wants to be there, frankly. :P *hint*

@Shutsumon they were the only advertiser I actively whitelisted, because their business model - curated static ads competing in a fair and open market - was the only one that felt honest. The internet feels a little colder, now.

Oh no! Project Wonderful - onbe of the only (if not the only) ethical ad serving place out there is closing down August 1st https://www.projectwonderful.com/thanks.php