Profile for kelson
- Display name
- Kelson
- Username
- @[email protected]
- Role
- admin
About kelson
Fields
- Home
- https://kvibber.com
- Main Website
- https://hyperborea.org
- Photos
- @kelson_photos
- Coffee or Tea?
- Yes
Bio
Techie, software developer, hobbyist photographer, sci-fi/fantasy & comics fan in the Los Angeles area. He/him, pronounced KELL-son (rhymes with "Nelson").
- Joined
- Posts
- 6004
- Followed by
- 457
- Following
- 280
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I've realized over the last few years that my political position boils down to:
- Don't be cruel unless you have to.
- You usually don't have to, even when someone's going to get hurt.
- One of society's goals should be cutting down on situations in which cruelty seems necessary.
That's the bare minimum. Actually helping people, of course, would be better.
Where else you'll find me online
I joined the Fediverse in 2017 on mastodon.social, and I've been branching out ever since. I moved to Wandering.shop for a few years, and most recently to this self-hosted site (powered by GoToSocial).
Currently active:
- Here!
- @kelson_photos (also GTS), where I've started posting photos
- hyperborea.org, my main website, which goes waaay back to 2000..
- @KelsonReads (Bookwyrm), where I cross-post my book reviews.
- @kelson (ClassicPress+ActivityPub), a.k.a. K-Squared Ramblings, the blog I've been been writing for years (originally on b2, later WordPress, now ClassicPress).
- @interesting (Postmarks), public bookmarks / linkblogging.
- KVibber.com, my IndieWeb-style profile.
I also have a Gemini capsule, where I've been trying to cross-post stuff from my website, but I don’t keep up with it as well as I’d like to.
Occasional Fediverse:
- @KelsonV (Lemmy): link sharing/discussion
- @kvibber.com (Bluesky), or you can follow this account via the bridge at @notes.kvibber.com
Old Fediverse:
- @KelsonV (Mastodon): my old general account at Wandering.shop
- @kelsonv (Mastodon): my old photography account at Photog.social
- @KelsonV (PixelFed): my other old photography account
Yeah, I should've varied my username a bit more across sites!
New post on my website:
A short (~10 lines) JavaScript fragment to select an entire code snippet when someone clicks, taps, or presses a key on it.
Well, that was fast.
At the grocery store today
#HolidayCreep
If Spock and Pike got combined in a transporter accident like Tuvix, they'd be Spike.
The teenager locked himself out of his school account by setting up two-factor authentication on it, which requires his phone, which he's not supposed to have on campus. 🤦♂️
Huh, DoorDash is actually handling doors now.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/what-if-riders-dont-close-a-robotaxi-door-after-a-ride-try-doordash/
Disingenuous statement on the GitHub Blog on the flood of AI-generated slop "contributions" that have been overwhelming project maintainers with busy-work:
"At GitHub, we aren’t just watching this happen."
That's true. You actively pushed things to get us to this point.
Last month, the teenager broke the screen on his Fairphone. He bought a replacement screen and installed it himself.
Today, while out with his friends, he managed to drop the phone and run over it with his bike.
It's fine.
He called home on Signal - in video mode - to let us know what had happened.
I'm impressed with the resiliency of this hardware.
New short story review on my website!
Solitude, Ursula K. Le Guin
★★★★★
The people of Eleven-Soro live alone except for a bare minimum of human interaction. But what is that bare minimum, and what does it mean for people who avoid all other contact?
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/books/solitude/
#UrsulaKLeGuin #ScienceFiction #HainishCycle #alienation #community
Techdirt on how Republican and Democratic politicians (and pundits) are both wrong about Section 230 for different reasons:
One side is furious that platforms can moderate. The other side is furious that platforms don’t have to moderate. Both sides are attacking the same 26-word provision of a 30-year-old law—and if you understand why their complaints are contradictory, you understand what Section 230 actually does.
> git statue
You now have the statue
> |
Apparently Unicode did in fact add half-filled star symbols to go with the filled and unfilled stars ★☆ way back in 2018
https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-11.0/U110-2B00.pdf
⯨⯩⯪⯫
...but font support is still spotty.
They display in Windows 11, Debian 13 and Fedora 43, but not in normal text on Windows 10, macOS or Android (unless they work in a newer Android than I have).
Way too often, parenting feels like guiding the kid to a bridge, only to have them insist on jumping the chasm instead and then getting mad at you that they didn't reach the other side. Edit: And blaming you for any metaphorical injuries experienced as a result of that jump.
Me: "Yeah, it feels like time broke in 2016"
Wife: "When did the weasel fall into the LHC?"
(quick search turns up an article)
Me: "Oh. 2016."
Me: "Huh, I didn't know that chain had a location here."
Goes to OpenStreetMap to add it.
Sees it's already on the map.
Sees that I was the one who added it a year ago.
"A certain set of skills," indeed... 😂
https://social.tinyview.com/adf6xDMLu0b
If your response to someone complaining about harassment is to harass them for making the complaint, you are part of the problem.
That includes telling them the problem isn't as bad as they think it is, because chances are they've seen things you haven't. (DMs, replies that only reach some servers and not others, other platforms, etc.)
And if your response to someone pointing out that you are part of the problem is to double down and harass the people pointing it out, you are really part of the problem.
And if you're more likely to do these things based on what variety of human the original poster appears to be, you need to take a long look at yourself in the mirror and think about why that is.
It sounds weird at first, but this is one of the strengths of immutable systems. Instead of downloading and updating only the files you need, the system grabs a whole new image. When I first tried Fedora Silverblue, I compared its update process to cars. While mutable systems are like stopping at a garage and having someone tinker with the innards for a little while, immutable systems are like stopping at a garage, jumping into a near-identical car with the tweaks pre-applied, and driving off.
I've been aware of immutable systems for years and it still sounds weird to me.
RoboCop: A Glorious, Scathing Satire of America
https://reactormag.com/robocop-a-glorious-scathing-satire-of-america/
Depressingly, everything it satirized about the 80s is par for the course today.
