Profile for jessebot
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- @jessebot@social.open.engineering
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- admin
About jessebot
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- https://jessebot.work
- https://git.open.engineering/jessebot
- https://codeberg.org/jessebot
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- 33
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- Europe
Bio
I've been on the fediverse since 2023, but originally started out on a very large instance before starting to self host. This is the domain associated with my company Open Engineering, through which I do FOSS work professionally.
You can find me on on codeberg mostly these days, but I've been known to show up to tech cons here and there. If you need help with a repo, you should reach out on codeberg.org. All open.engineering repos are mirrored there 
When I'm not doing tech stuff, I'm drawing, playing videogames, or trying a new recipe. Sometimes I post tech related art here, but it's mostly tech stuff, so if that's not your thing, this probably isn't a great account to follow. Follower requests only on to prevent spam and bad actors, but for the most part I accept anyone interested in open source as long as they're not rude. I hide my followers and following for privacy and safety. Your fediverse client may display the follower/following count as -1.
This profile and the posts, images, and links within it may not be used with or by any LLMs/AI for any reasons, especially to train them. I don't like services that force people to opt-out rather than allow them to opt-in.
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The computer center is empty,
Silent except for the whine of the cooling fans.
I walk the rows of CPUs,
My skin prickling with magnetic flux.
I open a door, cold and hard,
And watch the lights dancing on the panels.
A machine without soul, men call it,
But its soul is the sweat of my comrades,
Within it lie the years of our lives,
Disappointment, friendship, sadness, joy,
The algorithmic exultations,
The long nights filled with thankless toil,
I hear the echoes of sighs and laughter,
And in the darkened offices
The terminals shine like stars.
- Geoffrey James, Zen of Programming
I'd really love to see a KDE team split where we get a new KDE (NDE?) that doesn't do AI at all and then old KDE can just be an AI slop fest or whatever. Let me know if/when that happens. I'd love a desktop environment that was AI free.
On choosing an ethical Tech Ecosystem
Try to start using as much FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) as possible. If you're on the Fediverse, you're already doing it! 
Start small on your phone:
Download the Aurora Store and Fdroid and disable the Google Play store on your phone. Both will have less trackers than Google does.
Have an app you would normally use the Play Store from? Delete it, and reinstall it from the Aurora Store.
Disable/Delete YouTube. Download NewPipe from Fdroid.
Disable/Delete google maps. Download CoMaps from Fdroid. If you need transit info, there are specific apps for transit info in your country. In the Netherlands you can download 9292 on the Aurora store. In Germany, there are also a few apps on Fdroid.
Do you even use all the apps you have downloaded? Delete the ones you don't use. Can't delete them? Disable them.
Search Fdroid for alternatives to your favorite apps. Can't find what you're looking for? Ask on fedi! We're happy to help (seriously there's some FOSS fanatics that are salivating at the idea of helping you switch to FOSS apps)
Do you have discount card/membership apps for groceries, IKEA or whatever? Try the Catima app on fdroid. Take a screenshot of the bar code from within the discount card app, and then save it, and import it into catima. Most android phones have a configurable tray you can slide out from the right hand side. Add catima there and after you've imported all your discount/membership cards, delete all the apps. Don't worry about disconnecting from those memberships yet. You're starting small. You're removing the habits of checking the grocery app. It's fine.
Weather app? Try Quick Weather.
news apps? Download an RSS feed reader! Nunti will be available on fdroid, and a tip for getting into RSS is that most news/blog websites will have an rss endpoint at either domain.com/rss or domain.com/feed which you can plugin to that app. You don't get ads this way and you can stay informed of all your favorite sources. You will end up with a curated feed of all your news apps, without having to have a bunch of news apps, and you can export and import into other rss apps on other platforms too, it's great!
Need nutrition tracking? Try Energize! It's a free app on fdroid for tracking your nutritional intake. It doesn't export your data anywhere and you can still scan barcodes. Notice a food is missing? Download the Open Food Facts app, and add it there, and then it will appear in energize, not only for you, but for anyone else using the energize or open food facts apps.
Also check fdroid for games! I have 1024 and Richochlime and those are my go-to open source idle games when I'm waiting in line :D
I'll leave it there for phones for now, but I may add to this thread at a later time.
Just always keep in mind: Does this info need to go to Google, Microsoft, Apple? Is there an alternative?
Please never feed anything I post into an LLM or AI of any sort. I do not consent to that.
Ablest language in FOSS and tech generally
"Stupid", "Dumb", and the dreaded R word are all useless terms in our profession (on top of being ablest).
"What do you mean by that?" is something I started saying in response to sexism and racism in the office, but it applies here too.
As my followers know, I work in tech, and it's common to hear people call software, or themselves, stupid or dumb. Let's unpack that:
Calling software/infra stupid
The biggest thing I can say to someone calling something stupid, as someone who is often in team lead roles, is: "That is not actionable." What do you really mean by the software is "stupid"? Do you mean it...
- is convoluted? feels disconnected from another part of the same program?
- poorly documented?
- doesn't support a specific standard or protocol? missing a parameter?
- doesn't have an SDK in your favorite language?
- is slow to start/run/finish? Hangs in the middle?
- doesn't give an error message? gives too much or too little logging?
- crashes often?
- doesn't serve a purpose you understand or need?
- is resource intensive? uses space poorly?
- requires too much config?
- reinvents something that already exists?
- isn't accessible?
- is literally vibecoded?
The reason it matters that you describe what it is you don't like, is that, especially in the FOSS world, we can fix it. To fix it, I need more in my bug report than "this is stupid". Maybe it's not FOSS and you hate the software anyway. Well, then I need to justify to management why we need to contact the vendor or use other software instead. I'm going to need more than "this is stupid" to justify changing a corporate product though. A project manager needs details. You need to be specific on what it is that upsets you, or we can't improve. And if you're not interested in improvement, then you're just being negative for no reason, in which case, that's toxic and will wear on the team over time. Stop that.
Calling yourself stupid
You have imposter syndrome and you think the mistake you made proves something about you that everyone else secretly knows, that you're not very smart. You are not stupid or dumb. You were likely ignorant of something, misinformed, or the documentation was confusing. Perhaps the design of the thing you're interacting with is over-complicated or poorly implemented. Maybe the software is new and hasn't finished adding all the features you'd expect. Maybe there was bug in the code no one caught yet. You are not lesser for not understanding something though. That's normal and part of learning.
Let's say you know something you did was a "stupid mistake" and you feel like you should know better. I don't think it's then helpful to say you made a stupid mistake. Just say you made a mistake and chat with your coworkers about how we can put in guard rails prevent that. Maybe the answer is a pre-commit hook. Maybe the answer is access controls. Maybe the answer is no pushes at 17:00 on a Friday. Chances are that you're not the only one that made that mistake. You're just the only one to own up to it, and that's great! Let's make software that prevents users, including you, from making mistakes though.
Does anyone know the artist here? I want to buy stickers of this so badly 
Edit 1
Please do not use AI!!
Edit 2
It looks like it was originally from a reddit user, but they could not be contacted. See: https://chaos.social/@FlohEinstein/117270005619165049
You can download PNG and SVG versions from @FlohEinstein here:
https://codeberg.org/FlohEinstein/vectors/src/branch/main/we_do_not_test_on_animals_we_test_in_production
So the Token 2 PIN+ Mini-C Release3.1 has been working out really well! It's large enough that I can easily unplug it, but, small enough that it doesn't seem like it will break off. I haven't needed to do anything special to get it to work either. It's been working great as a two factor for sudo and I plan on setting it up as two factor for my laptop and tablet login screens as well. Super happy with the product thus far, and pretty excited to play with their other toys.
TIL that Studio Ghibli contributes to Open Toonz (open 2D animation software):
My Compressed Archives?
Yeah, I love that band.
Hoi Photography Fedi, I come with questions!
I have a Nikon D3500. I'm currently looking at repair options:
Option 1: get a replacement SD Card slot then re-solder it onto the board
Option 2: just get a new main board
I wouldn't really know where to start in the EU, and I'm not sure how to go about this. Questions:
- Where do you buy such parts out here? Is it at all possible to do cheaply?
- Which option would you select? Replacment SD card slot or new main board?
#photograpy #cameras #camera #nikon #dslr #duckduckfedi #askfedi
I continue to check this open printer project every month or so to see if it has launched, because it sounds infinitely better than my current awful printing situation on Linux with my HP printer.
Asking for a friend:
She has a Bachelor of Arts, a Master of Social Work and she is a Licensed Master Social Worker in the USA.
Can she utilize her skillset/degrees and licensing here in the Netherlands as an English speaker? Is there any sort of jobs she could get as a highly skilled migrant here? Do her skills transfer at all? Is she allowed to setup a business here using the DAFT (as in, is it legal for her to practice social work here given her US credentials?)
If you have a need for remote backups, I've been really enjoying using Scaleway. They're a French company with datacenters in both Amsterdam and Paris and they give estimates on your carbon usage per S3 bucket if you give them your estimated data usage. I use restic to backup some of my k8s PVCs to Scalway's buckets and it's been pretty smooth sailing. We selected them in part because we wanted to be able to do full metrics on our carbon footprint as we go.
Today my internet is finally supposed to be upgraded to 10G symmetrical! If that happens on schedule, today will be the day I get the fastest home internet I've ever had! 
Why do none of the cool open source and open hardware ereaders ever support PDFs? PDFs are like... the majority of my book collections, especially when it comes to comic books. If you buy direct from an artist online, it's likely to be a PDF.
Was checking out the MNT Station, and its power consumption is so low that it feels like it'd make for a great node in a solar powered k8s cluster.
Are there any popular forks of neovim yet? (Preferably FOSS, but not on GitHub if possible)
Tabbed up to the wrong command and deleted my entire forgejo app of apps, including the database and PVCs and just everything, but I have such a good backup and restore process that I was able to restore it all in less than 10 minutes, including the database, because I already wrote and extensive backup and restore program. It backs up remote every 6 hours and locally every hour, and the few things that didn't restore, I did already have locally, so just repushed some of it up and we're rolling again. Holy smokes, it is so satisfying to have done the work ahead of time to have disaster recovery down to an absolute science for every app I run. Thanks a lot to @cloudymax who has been instrumental in getting us to be more resilient than even a lot of the places I've worked
In situations where a website uses Algolia search, how do you write a bang for searching? Typically I would write a bang that uses the URL, so for example, here's my bang for searching the k8s docs:
https://kubernetes.io/search/?q=%s
And I have that mapped to !k8s so I can just hit ctrl + t to pull up a search bar and then, say I forgot how to set the default mode for a PVC, I could search for something like:
!k8s defaultMode
And it would search the kubernetes docs for me, rather than me having to first plug it into a third party search engine and sift through a bunch of AI slop results, or actually remember the exact URL of the k8s docs.
But for say, the helm docs (located at helm.sh), I don't know how to write a bang for this. Anyone have any ideas? I use Uruky as my primary web search site, if that's helpful.
#search #websearch #searchBangs #bangs #uruky #algolia #duckduckfedi #helm
Was going through my old posts on my old fediverse account and found the open source small low profile yubikey alternatives request post. Before I lose them again, here were the top candidates:
only key:
https://onlykey.io/products/onlykey-duo-dual-usb-c-and-usb-a-security-key
If you publish software with persistence of any kind, including databases, you should have a publicly available backup and restore guide.
