Brecht Savelkoul

@glow Happy to help. Despite my ongoing attempts to learn it, my Chinese still isn't very good yet. But I reckoned it was probably a relatively well-known poem, so just a matter of trying to recognize a googleable sequence of characters. And it worked!

@glow @syscrash It should be read vertically, starting from the top-right corner, so that's why the machine translation is confused. In simplified Chinese characters it reads 人性直节生来瘦，自许高材老更刚.

Here's a translation I found on reddit (under "Painting 2"): https://www.reddit.com/r/translator/comments/8ef6mi/comment/dxuuf0u/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

@linmob Right, the first time I tried it I was spooked by a memlock warning on startup, but digging into it now it doesn't look like it's as big a deal as it seemed. Gonna give it a go.

@evelyn @thor London-appointed colonial governor tells teary-eyed story about the decline of "democracy" in his assigned fiefdom. Sorry if I'm struggling to feel the vibes here.

@thor The writing system is a very important part of Chinese culture, but it's not the only one.

There's the alternative view that communism found a receptive audience in China because its traditional philosophies were all fundamentally collectivist, and therefore made more sense to people than liberal individualism, which only took hold in trading hubs like HK.

I think if you want to get a sense of traditional precommunist Chinese values, it might be better to look at Japan than HK or Taiwan.

@evelyn @thor That would be a great story, if only for the minor quibble that HK wasn't a democracy until 1995, two years before the handover. That's the first time they had a genuine free election. Before that is was a purely colonial administration appointed by London.

@thor This is not a technical problem. Most young Chinese people know how to use VPNs to securely communicate with people they trust in the West.

The problem is that you're a random guy on the other side of the world, so there's no basis to establish trust.

@thor I doubt they particularly care about democracy as such. Going mostly on my first-hand experience of China there, and assuming Russia isn't too different. They just don't strike me as the kind of countries who are interested in proselytizing their own ideology (anymore).

That said, they're definitely waiting for the US to fail, though under present circumstances I'm not sure I'd still call that "the long game".

Anyone out there using #sxmo (sway variant) who's managed to get Numberstation to work? Or any alternative 2FA setup?

I've installed both the "numberstation" and "gnome-keyring" packages, but I keep running into errors.

@BazookachinKevin Yes, lots of HTTP-over-SSL (a.k.a. HTTPS). It's pretty sweet: solid privacy and security, large adoption.

@benjaminhollon I've used a lot of "rainy" followed by "vogue", or some similar combinations to cross off all the vowels.

@baldur I don't remember anyone else publicly repeating accusations of white supremacy, so it can't have been very many of them. The overwhelming majority seems to have been very disappointed with the way management handled the situation, which is hard to argue with.

So in summary, I don't really object to Fried and DHH getting a good roasting over this, but the way in which Singer has been publicly branded a white supremacist based on very thin evidence makes me uncomfortable.

@baldur I followed a lot of the departees (is that a word?) on Twitter afterwards, and most of them were reasonable and insightful, but Stephenson started linking these weird opinion pieces (not his own) saying stuff like "if your company insists on using written communications, that's a sign of white supremacy". So that made me in fact more suspicious that some of these accusations of white supremacy might have been overblown.

@baldur Have you tried reading his non-Shape Up stuff though? Because that is exactly why I do think it's possible: it's totally incomprehensible. Especially in a company that communicates almost entirely in writing.

And yes, their entire reaction to this was bad, but let's say the charitable view of Singer is right (even if maybe it isn't), what would be the first step to try and handle it?

@baldur The other part is that the 30% who left got six months of no-string-attached severance. I'm not sure I've had a job yet that I wouldn't have left if offered those conditions.

@baldur I definitely agree about the bad management part. I just don't see enough evidence that Singer is in fact some kind of right-wing extremist. I started following him after Shape Up, and a lot of his writing is quite obtuse and hard to understand, so my assumption is that he was misunderstood.

So if through a series of misunderstandings, a lot of people start believing their colleague is a right-wing extremist, but you're sure he's not, what should you do as a manager?

@baldur @markusl The one thing that bothers me of this version of the story (which is the only one publicly available, so I'm not blaming you for this), is that said "pro-Trump" manager was on Twitter supporting Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 primaries. That means he should have gone from center-left Democrat to MAGA in little over a year. That's not impossible I guess, but unlikely I'd say. The alternative is that accusations against him were unjust, which muddies the waters quite a bit.

@kev I once talked to an engineer who worked for a major toiletries brand. One of his recent projects was to redesign soap bottles so that they always released slightly more soap than people wanted, so that it finished quicker and customers had to buy new soap more often. I'm 99% sure something similar is going on with baby wipes.

@jawsh @normandc @kicou I think I did, but I don't quite remember why I didn't stick with it. Maybe it only displayed PDFs but didn't do the mobile-friendly reflow? Not sure though, all the apps I tried have gotten kind of mixed up in my memory 😅

@normandc @kicou Yeah, if you're just reading epubs Foliate is probably the better option. I reckon it feels more native inside a Gnome environment too.

Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff I like to read (such as academic history and philosophy books) is only available in PDFs. The way KOReader can somehow make a pesky format like that readable on a small screen feels almost like magic to me.