@dentangle@chaos.social

Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 2w ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/117329097729481810

IMHO good ALT text reads like the description in a text adventure. I present Professor Lawler's toot as a perfect example:

go north

You see an orange hen nesting in a large cardboard box with some random bits of twine. She looks evil.

get hen

The hen attacks you.

go south

You are pursued by an evil hen.

Quoting

Prof. Sam Lawler

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social

Every year there's always one hen who goes and hides in the barn and makes her own nest in September, which is rather late for chicks in Saskatchewan. This particular mama did this last year too. I was going to see how many eggs she's sitting on, but I forgot that she's kind of evil and she tried to peck my hand off. My teenager named her "Motherclucker" which is delightful. (Except she's a jerk. Good protective mama hen, though!)

Open quoted post

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 1w ago

Programmers be like pirates arrr! We keep to the code. 🏴‍☠️

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 5mo ago

Great news on the UK elections - well done UK.

Lots of folks lamenting the Reform gains, and yes, the right has shifted a bit further right, but look at the bigger picture.

Just looking at England here for the moment:

LEFT (Greens) up 211
RIGHT (Reform + Cons + Labour + Dems) *down* 185

That's huge news, and shows what can be done.

Yes, yes, Reform is scary, but the big news is the Green gains, not the shuffling of the deckchairs on the right.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 2mo ago

Some projects have a BDFL, and then there's #Linux, which has a DFL. I suppose at least he's honest about that.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 5mo ago

What's your favorite #Pratchett novel?

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 50mo ago

Heard the story of the girl throwing starfish into the ocean? A man watching her says "don't you know there are miles of beach and you can't make a difference?"

The girl bends down and scoops up another starfish and gently throws it into the ocean, turns to the man and says "it made a difference to that one".

I often think of this story when world events make me feel powerless. I can't help everyone, but I can help *someone*.

So... if anyone needs me to throw them into the sea, I'm here.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 10mo ago

Frustrating to see new #IETF drafts and mailing list discussions etc. continuing to use legacy IPv4 in the examples with no mention of #IPv6

Normalize IPv6 by using it in your documentation and examples. The same goes for #OpenSource projects.

It would be nice if, at least within the IETF standards body itself, we could start dancing like it's 1998 🕺

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 8mo ago

I've been asked a few times in the past week to use #GitHub, and I'd like to be helpful, but I keep seeing Renée Good's face and it would seem disrespectful somehow.

Happy to email a patch, but I'm done with that site.

#GiveUpGitHub

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 5mo ago

Shakespeare's linguistic nimblicity allowed him to make up many new words.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

The week previously I had no idea I would be leaving Australia at all, or that I wouldn't be going back. Sometimes the wind just ... changes.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 3mo ago

As the kernel.org restore continues the kernel bot on the #gentoo kernel channel is announcing each restored kernel like it's a new release. We're listening to the #Linux kernel's greatest hits... "Hey, try some o' this 6.15.10. It's real smooth." "Yeah, this was before AI, man. They don't make em like that no more."

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@amcooper@toot.cat @onepict@chaos.social I've been meaning to take a look at emacs for about 30 years now 😉 , it's just never hit the top of the priority list. vim has always been sufficient for my needs, and, until the LLM sloppification, never sufficiently annoyed me to go shopping for a text editor.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@onepict@chaos.social @amcooper@toot.cat I've been running #vimclassic for a few weeks now. Hard to tell the difference really. It was forked before the vim9 script was introduced, but I never used that so I don't miss it. No release as yet, but there's a small team getting it ready. Come join us on libera.chat on #vim-classic 😉 I have an ebuild ready to go for #gentoo as soon as a release is announced - we want to provide LLM-free alternatives for users. eVi is another fork that we're looking at.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 2mo ago

This is getting ridiculous... https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/06/stable-channel-update-for-desktop_0175352312.html #GoogleChrome

Chrome Releases

Stable Channel Update for Desktop

The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 150 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out ov...

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jalefkowit They've carried a torch for you for years.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 3mo ago

RE: https://disabled.social/@tomkindlon/116884159536839731 👀 "In their study, the researchers found long-term inflammation and deterioration of several eye functions controlled by the nerves in the brain." ... "Many of those affected became highly sensitive to light. The researchers can now provide an explanation: their pupils let too much light into the eye. The impaired pupil function was furthermore linked to headaches, difficulty reading text and in focusing the eyes."

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@mray It seems odd to need to use Microsoft to contribute to Free Software.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

I've sent them an email. I guess the Open Souce community will soon see if they're serious about their mission.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@fluconf @onepict Esther's Digital Poppet concept is powerful. We talk a lot about tracking and Digital Footprints, which is all about recording our past and predicting our present. The Digital Poppet is the active threat that stems from this data collection: that our data is used to construct tools (poppets) that are used to influence us and control our behaviour in the future, influencing how we vote, our view of the world and how we feel. 🎎 #FluConf2026

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@revk@toot.me.uk Oh no! Wishing you a speedy (and full) recovery.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@T_X I don't understand why people love these webby interfaces to git so much. I worked on a bug the other day that required me to create accounts and sign in to 4 different forges. Some had capchas, or required me to verify my email. One had inexplicable failing CI tests that had nothing to do with my patch. git send-email is right there, folks. It always has been. No need to create an account. You already have email. No need to leave your terminal. 🤷

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@amcooper@toot.cat @onepict@chaos.social While I was working on the gentoo ebuild for vim-classic I unexpectedly found myself without another text editor during the switch and briefly used ed(1) - it's surprisingly usable - fortunately I'm used to sed(1) commands. I could *almost* get by with ed, though I'd miss split screen editing when writing serious code. Have used it a few times since when I've had small sysadmin jobs to do, and it really does 90% of what I want.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

A bit later... 😩 "Honey, it's me again. They've pushed my office out into the middle of the harbour now and left me here. I don't think they're coming back. Can you see if you can get hold of Brian, or any of the others... or just anyone with a boat, really. It's getting cold." 🙄 "..."

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@ainali Nice snappy intro to the topic. I've noticed WikiData turning up in more places recently (eg. Repology), and have been meaning to look at it more closely.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@FediThing @mray Good thinking. I should do that more consistently.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 8mo ago

Replying to

@davidculley @T_X Indeed. GitLab is rather easier to avoid, thankfully. There are a few projects that self-host the MIT-licensed software, but I've never had a GitLab account, nor needed one to contribute to FOSS.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 32mo ago

Replying to

@jejb @onepict @austriancoder @linuxplumbersconf If the CFP is open, the policy should already be set. How can anyone make an informed decision to submit a paper? Take a look at @phpledge recommendations. Set a policy now, with the caveat that it "may change, but will only be strengthened, never weakened" and then people have something to work with. As it stands the conference is excluding anyone #CovidCautious from participating.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

@meljoann@topspicy.social Oooh.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 9mo ago

Replying to

@meljoann@topspicy.social Cool! I've bookmarked that to look at later. Hello @limebar@mastodon.social - the site has an IPv6 AAAA record, but the server isn't responding on IPv6, so I can't see the site. Might want to poke whoever is doing the infrastructure and ask them to fix. 🙏

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 32mo ago

Replying to

@jejb @onepict @austriancoder @linuxplumbersconf I'm afraid that doesn't address the issue. Whether or not someone is planning to attend in person, knowing the details of the CoC and Health Policy in advance is essential to know if that conference is a safe space. I would not participate in a conference (even remotely) if that conference did not have a robust #CodeOfConduct and a #PublicHealthPolicy. I know I'm not alone in this. There's no valid reason to delay publishing the Health Policy

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@RuthSalter That looks amazing!

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 2mo ago

RE: https://floss.social/@FOSSBackstage/117070155399807511 "If your tools aren't open, your culture isn't fully open either" The choice to use proprietary tools in your FOSS project excludes people from participating. Thought-provoking presentation by @ainali@social.coop at FOSS Backstage.

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Brett Sheffield (he/him) @dentangle@chaos.social

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@webmink@meshed.cloud @fsfe@mastodon.social It's fascinating that they somehow believe this will improve security, especially as the kernel, operating systems, libraries and other tools their code runs on top of will remain Open.

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