Ángel Ortega
@angel@triptico.com
Si cada vez que voy a responder un toot y me arrepiento os llegase una notificación os llegarían muchas notificaciones
a veces pienso que para responder un "Claro que si! o una afirmación cualquiera" mejor callarse pero luego a mi me decís cosas así y no me parece mal ni me molesta pero si lo hago yo mi cerebro me sabotea.
@Fitx0 sí soy totalmente 👉 👈
@CortoMunchausen @Fitx0 a veces los "me gusta" son "he descartado el toot respuesta porque creía que no aportaba nada, pero estoy contigo" xDDDD
Los like significan "estoy de acuerdo con todo lo que dices, así que apúntame como coautor".
CC: @CortoMunchausen@eldritch.cafe @Fitx0@paquita.masto.host
Located in the de Young Museum’s Sculpture Garden in San Francisco, this statue’s head was photographed covered by a beehive occupied by a live colony of bees.
It is incredibly frustrating that the only thing more stupid than Patreon is all the alleged Patreon substitutes that clearly don't even understand what Patreon does.
Pro tip: Patreon has no meaningful competitors, and also it sucks, so there's a huge opportunity for somebody to kick sand in its face and take its lunch money. But to do that you would have to understand what actually Patreon does that is worth it to creators to allow Patreon to take 5% of their proceeds (and then pass on to them a second 5% in payment processing fees).
Because I want there to be Patreon competitors, I will explain what Patreon actually does, so if somebody would like to actually compete with Patreon they will know what they have to actually accomplish.
Brace yourself. Some of this is a little complicated to explain.
And before explaining it, allow me to observe: these are the sorts of features you get when somebody who actually really understands the usage case designs the platform. Patreon was founded by and designed by an actual goddamn artist, a musician and music video maker, who understood what artists and other creators actually need out of a platform.
1) Pseudonym support.
Attention dumbasses: stage names and pen names have been realities of the business of being an artist for over 2,000 years.
Creators are not shoe salesmen.
The most basic functionality of any platform that intends to support *creators* earning money online – the basic, rock-bottom, sine qua non affordance – is people doing business using pseudonyms.
What that ACTUALLY means is the platform has to allow creators (the people who charge money) to be PSEUDONYMOUS (to use their stage name or pen names) in all of their interactions with their patrons (the people paying the money), AND the platform, which is legally required to know the legal identity of the creator and have on file their relevant tax ID numbers (e.g. SSN in the US), needs to keep that legal identity CONFIDENTIAL.
Relatedly, it is not enough for your creator patronization platform to HAVE fully supported pseudonyms. You must make that abundantly specific and clear, and a commitment that you make to your creators, UP FRONT. Ideally, it's part of your elevator pitch.
Patreon falls short of the standard but comes closer than any other payment accepting platform – as far as I know *at all*, of *any* type.
If you want to pull business away from Patreon, you will not do it if your platform, like umpteen zillion other idiot platforms, assumes that the creator is going to use their wallet name, and does not treat that wallet name as confidential information.
Listen, if all we wanted was a subscription platform that exposed our wallet names, we could have been using PayPal subscriptions all this time. What would we need you for?
Speaking of subscriptions:
2) By-works funding model support.
Patreon had two foundational funding models it supported, and while Patreon has introduced a variety of complexities and alternatives, these remain its core offerings.
One of these is trivial: monthly subscriptions. Like I said, creators can get that from PayPal if they don't care about pseudonyms. Every supposed Patreon substitute is just a monthly subscription service.
But Patreon's much more interesting funding model is not by-month, it's by-work.
This is where things get very hard for outsiders to understand. For emotional reasons.
People have trouble believing that this is actually so, but it is. This is the funding model I use.
The by-work funding model is where patrons pledge their support not by the month, but by the instance of whatever it is that the creator makes. If the creator makes stories, it's per story; if the creator makes music videos, it's per music video. The patrons pledge a certain amount of money for each work the creator makes.
If you're thinking, "but how many works does a creator ship each month?": no, that's the whole point of by-works. It can be ANY number. The creator makes no particular commitment to their patrons as to how many creations they're going to ship. They may ship NO creations in a month, so in that month their patrons are charged nothing. Or they may ship one thing. Or 10 things. Or a 100 things.
(My best month was 10 things.)
You might reasonably be thinking, "migod, what protects patrons from getting socked with an enormous bill because a creator ships many more things then they expected?"
Yeah, Patreon has a solution for that too: patrons can set a monthly upper limit for how much they're willing to support a given creator. If the creator exceeds that limit, that's fine, that patron is not charged in excess of that amount.
(Personally, I warn all of my patrons to set that limit, because every once in a while I go off on a productivity tear.)
This is where things get challenging. If you imagine this system, if you try to walk through in your mind how this would work, it will probably occur to you to ask the question, "Okay, but... How does the system know that you shipped something?"
Yeah about that. I log into Patreon, and I basically make a little blog post that says "Look! I made the thing you pledged to pay me for!" with the associated ticky box for "Pay me for this" ticked, and click submit.
That's it.
Patreon and no way, shape, or form attempts to validate that I actually shipped the thing. That is between me and my patrons. And, personally, I'm smart enough not to use Patreon as my delivery mechanism, so delivery of what I am paid for happens through a completely other channel.
There will be more on that subsequently (probably item three on this list of Patreon competition sine qua nons).
So you might be wondering, "but that's basically just a 'pay me' button, more or less directly connected to the patrons' credit cards!"
Yes. Precisely. I mean, it doesn't charge them until the end of the month, but yes.
"But what's to keep a creator from just hammering the 'pay me' button?"
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Like I said previously, individual patrons can set their own monthly maximums. But really the only thing that prohibits the creator from doing that is that it will piss off their patrons, and if the patrons don't feel that they're getting their money's worth, they can cancel their patronage. Which they will do.
And that's totally sufficient.
It helps to get over the emotional hump if you realize that it's not actually any different than invoicing somebody through PayPal. If somebody hires you to landscape their yard, and you send them an itemized invoice through PayPal's invoice system, PayPal isn't going to check to make sure that you actually edged the lawn and planted the begonias like agreed.
To my knowledge – and, BOY, would I like to be wrong about this – there is not a single other platform in the world that supports the by-works model that Patreon offers.
To be crystal clear, it entails:
• Patrons pledge to pay $n per work, on an ongoing basis, in advance of the work being done.
• The creator then generates works on an ad hoc basis, not to any set schedule, and each time they do, they check in with the UI to bill their patrons.
• The platform aggregates these bills, and submits them to the patrons' credit cards monthly.
Part of the reason this is hard to understand is that people who are not creators (and even some who are) think of what Patreon affords as "selling stuff". Which is incorrect.
There are two problems with the selling stuff paradigm: the selling and the stuff.
First and foremost, Patreon does not require you to sell anything. I mean, you can use it for that. Lots of creators do.
I don't.
I use Patreon for patronage instead. Kind of like it says on the tin.
So this is the next item on the list.
3) Non quid pro quo patronage
Patreon is not a platform for selling things, even though you can use it that way, and Patreon seems to prefer it be used that way.
But Patreon can also be used to collect support that is not tied to directly providing the person who pays the money with something just for themselves.
There is an entire little universe of people using Patreon to be funded to do good works in the world. These may be open source contributors. They may be activists. They may be journalists or bloggers. They do not make things that they exchange for money with the people who pledge them on Patreon.
Their patrons do not pay these creators to give things *to them*. Their patrons pay these creators to give things *to the world*: to release code for anyone to use, to engage in activism that changes the world for the better, or to write things that anyone can read.
I'm one of them. The number one reason I signed up for Patreon as my funding platform 9 years ago, was because it was literally the only way of funding my writing that did not entail my SELLING it: my withholding it only for those people who paid me for it.
People get confused here. I'm not talking about my intellectual property rights. I'm not worried somebody is going to steal my copyright in my writing. (I mean it's a legitimate concern but that's not what I'm talking about here.)
I'm talking about the very basic nature of what it means to sell a work of writing, as a book or a magazine or a stand-alone article in a PDF.
If I put my writing into documents that then I sell on Amazon or Kajabi, then the only people who get to see it are the people who pay me for them.
That is the antithesis of what I want to do. What I want to do is write openly on the internet where anyone can read what I write. Where what I write can be cited by anyone who wants to refer to it in any internet discussion.
The audience of my writing is not my patrons, and it is not just the people who pay me for it. It's the whole world.
And that, quite explicitly, is what my patrons pay me to do.
Most would-be competitors to Patreon think it's some sort of DRM system. There are definitely people who try to use Patreon that way, and it works about as well as any DRM system does.
We have lots of other "pay us to access this document" platforms, starting with the 800 lb gorilla, Amazon. If you think there is some benefit to wedding a membership system to a document storefront, I think you're probably wrong. I could be convinced otherwise – since I'm not actually in that business, I assume there's a lot I don't know about it – but my guess is having to join a club just for the privilege of buying a PDF introduces friction that reduces revenue. Heaven knows I resent it as a customer.
(All that said, I also absolutely someday intend to write books that I will sell for money. But that is a very different project.)
And this brings us to number four:
4) An audience relationship management system, ideally one with an API one can build against
Here's where you can really kick Patreon's ass in the market for alternatives, because Patreon's game has been slipping very badly in this area.
I just invented the term "audience relationship management" system, by analogy to "customer relationship management" system. Like I said patrons are not the same thing as customers. But if you're a creator you do need to keep track of them, and you do need to keep track of their payments, and you do need to be able to communicate with them.
Also you would probably like to be able to tell what's going on with your money: with the amounts pledged, the amounts received, the fees deducted, the credit cards declined, stuff like that. You might also appreciate some analytics.
Patreon's infrastructure for doing all of this is kind of falling apart. In some places they've just taken things down rather than fix bugs.
The really big example of this, I'm not wholly familiar with, because I don't really use it, and I was hearing about it and its problems from other people on the creator forums that then patreon took down.
I'm talking about Patreon's API.
So here's what I think I know, and my information is kind of old, and the pandemic happened, and I wasn't directly involved myself, so I might be misremembering.
But as I understand it it goes something like this:
Patreon has the affordance of allowing creators to establish "tiers", where the creator associates certain dollar amounts of pledges with certain package deals they put together. Patreon has – had – has – an API that creators can have their own software query, so that the creator's other systems can tell in real time whether one of their users is a paid up patron over on Patreon, and if so at what tier level.
So for instance, if you (a creator) wanted to run a private discussion forum on the web somewhere just for your patrons, and you're willing to do some programming, you could implement a system whereby your discussion forum software checked in with Patreon.com when someone logged in, comparing their email address with the one on file for patrons, to see whether or not they should be let in in the first place, and if so which forum features they should have access to, based on their tier.
Well, you could.
They were creators whose entire business models were based on this. I gather there were also a third party integrations, companies that actually developed against the Patreon API so that their own services could be integrated with creators' campaigns on Patreon – that is to say there were companies that made products that they sold to creators, that relied on the API.
Well Patreon decided that they're not supporting the API anymore. Apparently, from the screaming on the (now long defunct) creator forums, for a while there it looked like Patreon was going to turn it off. The Patreon walked that back and said that they wouldn't turn the API off, but they wouldn't be supporting it anymore, and they wouldn't be doing any further development on it.
So in a really important sense, these creators (and these companies that had third party integrations) were (are) using Patreon.com as an identity server. But not just an identity server. It doesn't just serve the identity of patrons, but their status as patrons. That's part of what makes it "audience relationship management".
If your supposed Patreon competitor does not support doing that, well, you're certainly not going to seduce all of the creators clinging to the sinking wreck of Patreon's API into abandoning ship on your account, are you?
Patreon also has removed key functionality from within the web interface that creators used to tell what's going on – particularly if their campaign is by-works, as discussed previously.
More generally, Patreon's UI for creators is really kind of terrible. I could itemize why but we'd be here for a while. A company could go far that offered the same services as Patreon, but let creators actually see what was happening to their money.
For instance, the creator UI used to have a page that listed all of the works a by-works creator had submitted, that listed, *for each work*, how much money was pledged in the first place, how much revenue was actually collected (declined credit card charges are a thing), how much Patreon's cut was, how much Patreon took out to pass on to the payment processor, and how much you, the creator, would actually net.
They took that away.
So there you go: four crucial aspects of what Patreon is ACTUALLY up to – what its value proposition is to the creators that choose to use it – that you're not going to be able to compete with Patreon unless you implement, and ideally improve upon.
@siderea
This is blistering.
I'll just add -- as someone who does not use Patreon as by-work but as "monthly recurring charge", which you characterize as the easy part, that anyone else could do -- well, they are remarkably bad at that as well. Finding out which of my patrons are currently paid up? Rocket science. Actually charging my signed-up patrons, every month, even if there was a network error? Rocket science.
They had ONE JOB, and then they got VC money, and now they and we are fucked.
P.S. I would be remiss if I didn't also mention a fifth thing that Patreon did which was part of its secret sauce, the feature nobody realized Patreon was giving us until they tried to take it away and broke everything: charge bundling.
In December 2017, Patreon announced that they were changing the rules of the game, in a way they tried to pass off as advantageous to creators, but was something very else under the hood. What that was, well, nobody's quite sure because of how much lying Patreon did and because of how they swore parties they told things to to secrecy.
What Patreon had been doing up to that point was if a patron pledged more than one creator, then Patreon would submit a single charge to the payment processor for the total amount that patron owed all of the creators they had pledged for that month.
What they proposed to do instead was run a charge for each creator a patron supported. A patron who pledged three creators would be charged three times in a month.
That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is. Because the fee structure of the payment processors includes, in addition to a percentage rate, a per transaction flat fee of $0.30.
And because the average patron pledge across Patreon is less than $2.
So where previously a patron who pledged three creators each a dollar a month would have had a total of 39 cents deducted in payment processor fees, leaving the creators to split $2.61 three ways, under the new system there would be a total of 99 cents deducted, leaving the creators to split $2.01 three ways.
Put another way, for a patron who supports three creators each for a dollar, the payment processing fee is 13%. Patreon was proposing making it 33%.
Only, no, what they actually proposed to do was even worse than that.
Patreon tried to play a shell game with how fees were charged. The system they had deducted fees out of whatever patrons pledged, as I described in the above example: if a patron pledges a dollar, the payment processor fee would be deducted from that dollar, along with Patreon own fee, with the creator receiving the difference.
In addition to unbundling the charges, such that there would be dramatically higher payment processor fees, Patreon explains that their plan was not to deduct it from what was pledged, but to add it. No longer would the amount that a patron pledged be the amount that their credit card would be charged. The amount a patron will be charged would be the amount they pledged plus the payment processor fee. If you pledged a dollar, you would be charged a $1.33 – the dollar you pledged plus 2.9% (3¢) plus the 30¢ flat fee.
The internet, understandably, lost its goddamn mind.
Now, Patreon did back down – temporarily. They ultimately grandfathered all of the extant creators as continuing to enjoy payment bundling, but I understand that after a certain flag day, new creator accounts work in the new unbundled way they wanted to roll out all along.
But the important thing to realize here, as a whole lot of us suddenly realized back in 2017, was that the numbers didn't work without bundling.
Part of what made Patreon explosively successful, in the first place, was that Patreon had apparently cracked the code on one of the hardest problems on the internet: micropayments.
By the time Patreon had come along people had been discussing the problem of micropayments on the internet for at least two decades. The problem with micropayments was that there was a huge amount of things that people buy for very small amounts of money, and a huge amount of what people wanted to buy on the internet where things that could not reasonably be priced more than a few bucks – one track on an album, for instance – but the transaction costs for very small purchases were such a large percentage of such purchases that they weren't economical. The payment processing fees put so much friction on small purchases that they pretty much killed them dead.
Then Patreon came along, and this was the deal they offered: you can do your thing and accept pledges of any amount, even tiny amounts, even amounts of less than $1, and we will charge you 5% for ourselves and approximately 5% for payment processing.
It was the right price point. Micropayments worked at that price point.
Nobody knows how Patreon made that work.
There's two major hypotheses.
PayPal, which is one of Patreon's payment processors, was offering a deal there for a while – and while all this was going down in December of 2017, I got on the phone with PayPal and asked if the deal was still available and it was – where one could opt into an alternative fee structure, with only a 5¢ flat fee, but a 5% fee rate.
So one hypothesis is that that was what Patreon was using, either through PayPal or through another processor that offered equivalent terms.
The other hypothesis is that, well. There was an old joke about Amazon, "We're losing money on every sale, but will make it up in volume". It may be that Patreon actually did that, for real. They may have assumed that they could subsidize the processing fees for small value pledges out of their own fees that they charged for high value pledges.
Only that math doesn't quite work.
I sat down with a spreadsheet and figured it out back in December 2017. If my math was correct, the point at which the 5% they said would cover payment processing actually did was for pledges of $14.29 and above.
"The Fourteen Twenty-Nine Hypothesis"
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1371510.html
This meant that if they weren't getting a special deal on payment processing, if they had tried to keep to 5%, they would have been losing money on any pledge less than $14.29.
Now they *weren't* trying to keep to 5% – they did in fact charge larger amounts for smaller pledges.
But the amounts they charged didn't seem remotely as large as they would have had to be to cover those payment processor fees if they were 2.9% plus $0.30.
But notice how bundling made this more plausible.
If a patron pledges one creator $1 a month, a huge amount of that would be lost to processing charges – either Patreon cuts deep into the creator's share, or they lose money. But – with charge bundling – if a patron pledges 15 creators each $1 a month, the fee stops being so bad, because the $0.30 is only charged once. The fee works out to 2.9% (3¢) plus 2¢ per creator, so each creator's fee on their $1 is only $0.05.
Fundamentally, charge bundling is what made Patreon able – in so far as it was able, and it's not actually clear they were able – to offer what really was the first functional micropayment system on the internet.
But even then, you only get to a sweet spot if a given patron pledges enough across different creators. That $14.29 is even WITH bundling.
From my back of the envelope calculations it looked like Patreon was either losing money on every patron who pledged a total of less than $14.29 a month, or was otherwise struggling financially with low value patrons at some other threshold.
This is actually a horrendous problem, in light of that datum that the average pledge was less than $2.
And it's a horrendous problem for pretty much any business remotely shaped like Patreon. This is "the long tail".
That term was coined and popularized by Chris Anderson of Wired here https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/ which is behind a paywall.
Investopedia explains it: "The long tail is a business strategy that allows companies to realize significant profits by selling low volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The term was first coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, who argued that products in low demand or with low sales volume can collectively make up market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters but only if the store or distribution channel is large enough." (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/long-tail.asp)
The long tail was a revelation as an idea and a revolution in commerce. Part of what made commerce on the internet different was that on the internet you could leverage the long tail. Whole types of businesses came into existence or rose to prominence by realizing many tiny transactions could dwarf blockbusters.
Fundamentally, Patreon is a long tail business. It doesn't sell a million of something at $100 a pop; it doesn't sell 10 million of something at $10 a pop. It sells ("sells") millions upon millions of different things at $1 a pop.
The problem with the long tail was, and apparently still remains, micropayments. Transaction costs are what causes friction in the long tail. This is why long tail businesses have to find ways to batch transactions.
It's why Amazon really really really wants you to order at least $n of goods at a time, and incents you with free shipping at that number.
So it turns out one of Patreon's biggest features was the fact that it was a vast marketplace of patronage, where one patron might find very many of the different creators they wanted to support – allowing Patreon to bundle their pledges when it came time to charge their credit card.
Now, to be clear... No I can't be clear, because I have no idea what Patreon actually did, or why. Patreon has now moved away from this apparently? And I guess no longer bundles for newer campaigns?
When I think about how breathtakingly complicated their bookkeeping must be – two major funding models, by month and by work, plus various variations like annual memberships and pay at the start of the month versus pay at the end of the month, needing to keep track of when during a month a patron pledges or changes their pledge for reckoning by work pledges, plus they now somehow support merch payments? and also apparently they have two different approaches to handling payment processing depending on the age of the creator's campaign, one that deducts and bundles, one that adds and is unbundled – this is one of the things I'm thinking about, when, as I said to a commenter, I think maybe Patreon bit off more than it could chew, technologically speaking.
I look at the complexity of logic necessary to just reckon how much they should charge whose credit cards and deposit in which bank accounts, and I look at the difficulty they seem to be having both managing credit card charges and presenting creators with an informative UI that tells them what is happening to their money, and it makes me wonder whether these things are indicative of Patreon's core bookkeeping system being the software development equivalent of a train with no brakes, headed down a steep hill, fast and getting faster.
The thing is, a bunch of those options arose well after I began to surmise that Patreon was struggling with the implementation necessary for the by work model. Patreon had done a number of things that seem to be deprecating the by-work model, most obviously their tearing out the part of the UI that by-works creators relied on, which suggested to me they repented of the decision to ever have it in the first place, given its complexity and difficulty to support in the code.
So on one hand, I was getting the impression that Patreon was struggling with the complexity of its bookkeeping already at that point, and then on the other hand, Patreon was forging ahead with new variations on payment models, multiplying the complexity further.
This is one of the things that inclines me to suspect that Patreon, as an organization, suffers from an especially acute case of neophilia. It looks from the outside like simultaneously Patreon is trying to reduce complexity in its code and in its bookkeeping, while it's rolling out new features and new options that add even more complexity. And the new features and options don't look like things that are mission critical, or fixes for terrible problems: they just look like somebody's Cool New Idea(tm).
@siderea This is an epic post, well written with excellent points - it's quite informative to get an inside view of how Patreon has been treating its content creators, and where you feel it's failed. The shortform Mastodon format doesn't do your work justice. Have you posted it other spots in its entirety yet? I'd like to see it posted it as a thread on the @13thFloor - I think it brings up great discussion points for content creators everywhere.
Oh my. This thread is the most valuable and eye-opening miniessay on artist patronage platforms I've seen in years.
Do you have this same content in a less temporary, time-proof format, like a blog post or whatever?
@angel @siderea Here is the main thread in a top-down manner, with comments branching out to the side:
web.archive.org/web/2023092600…
Courtesy of mathstodon.xyz/@Chartodon/1111…
@angel Soon. I'll let you know when it's up, with the URL.
@angel
Here you go. I've bloggified it and expanded it further:
"How to Compete with Patreon"
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1824441.html
I hope nobody is using Chromium on OpenBSD 7.3 
The packages chromium, ungoogled-chromium and iridum haven't been updated since 7.3 release 6 months ago.
https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/chromium/?only_with_tag=OPENBSD_7_3
https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/ungoogled-chromium/?only_with_tag=OPENBSD_7_3
https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/ports/www/iridium/?only_with_tag=OPENBSD_7_3
@solene why? If I may be so bold...
I have an old Toshiba notebook with OpenBSD that is i386 and so there is no Firefox there, so yes, Chromium is my only option...
Apart from the recent vulnerability, what more thinks I should be afraid of? End of support?
@angel it hasn't been updated for 6 months
@solene Why?
I can understand it could be complicated to keep them up to date, that's a huge work (the thing has like > 1000 local patches to compile on OpenBSD)
@solene
Yes. So far no complaint. The alternate browser is dillo.
@quoidian it's unfortunately insecure to use Chromium
@solene what is an alternative for i386?
@quoidian none 
@quoidian or webkitgtk based browsers
@solene
OK. I'll follow that up.
@solene
/usr/ports/www/webkitgtk4
su
make
first error on list is:
/usr/ports/pobj must be on a wxallowed filesystem (in lang/ruby/3.1)
no joy.
@quoidian why do you want to compile it locally? The binary package will provide the exact same thing.
And the error just tell you that you need the flag "wxallowed" on the mountpoint where /usr/ports/pobj is located. (could be done using mount -u -o wxallowed /usr)
@solene
unknown user -o
@solene
No wxallowed in Absolute OpenBSD.
Off to read man pages.
@solene pkg_add luakit installed but erred out when run authorization protocol & cannot open display :0
midori obsolete
Can't find eolie, nor tangram
pkg_add epiphany worked but dbus segfault when run
@solene that’s just unmanageable, doesn’t surprise me it’s not updated!
@solene I saw this and realised that it is one of the problems with OpenBSD is package maintenance. How many more are like Chrome? I removed OpenBSD from my laptop because too many packages quote the OpenBSD mailing list as maintainer aka nobody maintains: is that correct?
@vanitarium this doesn't mean nobody maintain it, but there is no dedicated people. This is not really an indication of the package update tracking at all though.
Many packages are up to date, but only -current is really up to date, the release receive some backports but I guess many important updates are missing in the backport.
@solene I hope nobody uses Chromium in general. Google products should get the same level of support that this company is giving us.
@piero I don't care what people use, but they should know that if they think the browser is secure because they use OpenBSD release, it's wrong.
@solene so, is firefox on openbsd in a better position with regards to security? I had read long ago from some openbsd dev that chromium architecture was better from a security point of view and was sticking with iridium ever since.
Right one last boring computer thing then I'm done posting about computers for a while, deal? deal.
So I've got a brain that spongs around like a pinball and if it ever twangs against a good idea or registers as something I'd better remember then I've gotta write it down. Some folk have like fancy programs on their computers to do Mind Mapping Weirdness and I've never, ever wanted that, I use plain text files stuffed full of notes and ideas and just put them in folders on my hard drive, then I sync them to and from my phone.
It's a system that's worked absolutely fine for me for years and years because it uses absolutely as little technology as I can practically get away with and it works on any machine that'll ever be made, but now I'm thinking I wanna use still use plain text files but be able to LINK them to each other, rather than writing, like, "See 2023-09-08-server-bollocks.txt" and I'd like to be able to search through these files.
So, like... that's Dokuwiki, innit? That's just Dokuwiki but I tell it it's storing its files in my /notes folder, right? Am I barking up the wrong tree here or is this what I wanna do? The text files will still be readable with my basic Dan Eyes without needing to squeeze them through some fancy software, right?
Well DokuWiki works GREAT for this as it turns out, just put a symlink to my Notes folder inside DokuWiki's pages folder and told Apache to pretend to be me so I don't have to worry about file permissions, a couple people reading this just went 🤨 but what the hell right, this stuff's only living on my local machine
@ifixcoinops HTH
@florian this looks like a significant step up from your normal bsd conf talks please tell me more @ifixcoinops
STOP DOING ML
If there is one physics formula everyone knows, it's E = mc².
Einstein proposed the famous equivalence between energy and mass in his second special relativity manuscript, which he submitted to Annalen der Physik #OTD in 1905.
https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/www/
Hoy me he visto #HistoriasDelKronen en RTVE y me ha decepcionado un poco. Había oído hablar de ella como la historia de una generación y demás, y resulta que son cuatro niños de papá con pasta que se ponen hasta el culo de todo y están hastiados de la vida.
Destaca algún momento que otro particular pero no mucho más. Mola ver el Madrid de los primeros noventa, eso sí. Y ya.
@VictorMoral Es la historia de una generación si el mundo son niñatos pijos de Madrid.
@VictorMoral Creo que tiene un cierto valor precisamente por éso. Por el retrato del pijazo que tanto lo era que hasta de Pachá pasaba. No caben muchas más lecturas.
Siempre se ha considerado como la historia de la generación ochentera de los niños de papá, ricos, aburridos y sin talento para hacer nada más que holgazanear y gastar dinero.
@VictorMoral totalmente. Si le quitas los escenarios para recordar lugares, la peli vale poco o nada.
Si te sobra cocido, puedes desmenuzar la carne, hacer un roux (una bechamel o una velouté), mezclarlo con la carne desmenuzada y rebozarlo para hacer croquetas.
Si te sobran croquetas (en el caso muy improbable de que eso pase), puedes desmenuzar las croquetas, hacer un roux (una bechamel o una velouté), mezclarlo con las croquetas desmenuzadas y rebozarlo para hacer METACROQUETAS: croquetas de croquetas.
No dejemos de aprovechar la comida. Aquí no se tira nada.
Una pregunta mastodon ¿tenéis alguna peli que sea "de confort" para vosotros pero que sois conscientes de que es raro de narices que algo así os dé paz? Rollo que si estáis mal elegís ver esa peli, pero nunca se la recomendaríais a nadie en esa situación.
Os leo 👌🏻
@An_laetificat claro. Está Mad Max: Fury Road. Y tampoco sé por qué.
Muchas: La Cosa (la de Carpenter), Mulholland Drive o El club de la lucha.
También, como dice @VictorMoral@mastodon.social, cualquiera de las de Mad Max menos la de Tina Turner.
Acabo de escribirle a un amigo «Tu salud mental es más importante que reducir la incertidumbre en el cálculo de la masa de las supergigantes rojas». A ver, él es astrofísico, pero aun así no vi venir que algún día fuera a escribir esta frase.
La salud mental es importante, pero no sé si es TAN importante.
@angel Desde el punto de vista de la Humanidad igual es más importante lo del cálculo, no te digo yo que no. Pero a ver, hemos vivido muchos miles de años sin ello y mi colega necesita menos preocupaciones en su vida. No pasa nada por descubrirlo más tarde.
Ya, era coña. Por supuesto que la salud mental personal es lo primerísimo.
What’s the second one?
invented the computer and provided significant contributions to ending WWII in the allied nations favour
And that’s even before you get to someone called Donald Fart attempting a coup against the US Government.
"Supervillain has a non-aggression pact with a country with winters hard as fuck and then decides to invade the frozen-balls-country in winter anyway"
Do you screenwriters want us to believe this shit? Are you even trying?
You forgot the bait
Qué bien me lo pasé ayer en la presentación de T.Errores: en el bosque ya estás muerto. Qué antología más chula, por favor.
Así da gusto escribir.
Te recuerdo que hoy presentamos el libro _T.Errores: En el bosque ya estás muerto_ en la biblioteca San Fermín de Madrid. Allí estará la gente de Dentro del Monolito y algunos de los autores que participamos en esta antología.
Si no vas, más pierdes tú.
Feeling a bit jealous because he can do the Elvira nipple dance.
Han detenido en Gibraltar a un juez por enseñar los genitales. ¿Cómo se llama el juez? Pitto.
Los guionistas que escriben la realidad cada vez se esfuerzan menos.
https://www.europasur.es/gibraltar/Detenido-juez-Pitto-acusado-genitales_0_1829818402.html
Curiously, none of my cats want to be touched while monching. Eating is a very 0-human process for them.
Yo lo entiendo todo excepto eso de «si pagáis 333.333 pavos, publico un capítulo» y luego no publicarlo. Eso es feo.
Do you know who this person is? (This is likely to be a tough one.)
Give your answer or make your best guess below. (No reverse image search or peeking at other responses.)
Her name will be revealed tomorrow.
Please boost for more responses.
¿Hay que gente que no entiende retroalimentación pero sí feedback?
Respecto al color del culo de un camello, pues ahí me has pillao porque no tengo ni idea. Tendría que buscarlo.
A ver si va a ser como cuando la gente llama "color vainilla" a algún tipo de amarillo y luego vas a ver cómo es una vaina de vainilla y es marrón caca-de-oca.
Retroalimentación.
No pasa nada si estos términos se usan en el lenguaje coloquial o en un documento técnico, pero si escribes un artículo sobre el uso correcto del castellano hay que tratar de evitarlo.
Que tampoco es tan grave, claro, pero queda feo.
"Lo tomó muy bien, lo de ir allí, con mucho estoicismo. Los niños pequeños son estoicos. Lloran por un simple porrazo, pero las cosas grandes las toman como vienen, no lloriquean como tantos adultos."
-- "Los desposeídos", page 384
Sometimes I close my eyes trying to force it to finish faster, but even that doesn't work. They smell anxiety
Excepto en el caso de que tengas una ETS y vayas a ponerte a algo con alguien. Entonces sí es obligatorio decírselo a la otra parte.
El psiquiatra puede decir misa en copto si quiere. Nadie está obligado a decir nada sobre su condición médica a nadie. Estaría fino.
Pues no me había dado cuenta. Es verdad que cada vez me puedo permitir salir menos y lo poco que veo por ahí sigue siendo, pues eso, hamburguesas de las de siempre al precio de siempre.
O igual el/la OP se refiere a que ya no son de carne o algo así.
Bueno, claro, si les puedes dar uso tú misma, pues genial. Como has comentado que la puerta está hecha una pena, pensé que tenías intención de sustituirla por otra nueva.
Y si no sabías que la Iglesia Católica apoyó a Franco, es porque has vivido debajo de una piedra desde 1936.
If you like Agnes Obel you may enjoy Hania Rani. Somewhat similar, more intense and hipnotic, with as much as instrumental themes as vocal.
Agnes Obel is a gift. I had the opportunity to listen to her and her band live last year in Madrid and it was an unforgettable pleasure.
Acabas de llegar al Purgatorio:
ve la pendiente que en redor le cierra;
y ve la entrada en donde se interrumpe.
I know that I'm like an unfrozen caveman but any piece of software should not have 392 external dependencies.
Lo siento, sé que esto es muy triste, pero he leído «merluza vegana» y me tirado encima el café de la risa
This amused me greatly. #marx #socialism
On the radar: git replay and jj
The git community is considering a "replay" command as a variant of rebase:
https://lwn.net/ml/git/20230907092521.733746-1-christian.couder@gmail.com/
As I was reading through the description, I saw that one of the motivations for this work is "jj is slaughtering us on rebase speed". Not being familiar with jj or its murderous speed, I dug and found:
https://github.com/martinvonz/jj
Google, it seems, has put a full-time developer on creating an alternative to git.
Original vs. Remake
Today’s film: Night of the Living Dead
Which do you consider to be the superior film?
Please boost for more responses.
| 1968, directed by George A. Romero: | 56 |
| 1990, directed by Tom Savini: | 10 |
Closed
Awesome. Discovered that I forgot the master passphrase for my server's encrypted disk. Again. After the last crisis, I saved a copy. On the laptop I just nuked. Fortunately, I still have all the disks setup from last time to just copy everything back. Always one disaster ahead of annihilation.
No sé cómo, pero voy a estar en la mesa redonda del día del tentáculo. Si os apetece ir, ya sabéis ❤️
"Alone with Everybody," by Charles Bukowski
Almost impossible for me, given that 80's music is the music of my life. But, let's say one from the top of my head:
Tears for Fears - Shout
«YO NO SOY PAVEL», DE ÁNGEL ORTEGA | Retrato Literario
https://retratoliterario.wordpress.com/2023/09/05/yo-no-soy-pavel-de-angel-ortega/
Escribir una novela es un trabajo duro, farragoso y algo deprimente que te da pocas alegrías. Pero a veces te llega esa reseña que te recuerda por qué lo haces y que te dice: sí, melón, ese trabajo tan antipático merece la pena porque el mensaje, con sus múltiples capas, llega.
Reseña de mi libro YO NO SOY PAVEL:
https://retratoliterario.wordpress.com/2023/09/05/yo-no-soy-pavel-de-angel-ortega/
@yogthos Similar story... Guy goes to return software, but they won't accept an opened box for a return. They will, however, exchange it for an unopened box with the same software. After getting an intact box, he waited for a shift change to return it to a different worker.
Yeah, both the book and the movie are pretty cringy. What I meant was that the creepyness of the story is dilluted due to a casting error.
These four movies are good, Barry Lyndon a bit boring. In my opinion, The Shining is the best of the four, or at least the one that is a unique piece.
I'm a big fan of the movie and the Stephen King's book. I consider both to be totally different stories with a somewhat similar plot and characters with the same names and I like them for different reasons.
Regarding the movie Lolita, it's OK, but the depiction of the eponymous character there invalidates somewhat the overall idea: Sue Lyon (the actress) looks too adult for what the book is trying to convey. The character in the book is clearly pre-pubescent and looks like a child.
Tampoco es tan triste que desaparezca como marca. Los que ya tenemos una edad y hemos tenido coches de esos no la recordamos con especial cariño (salvo nostalgia simulada).
Lo que sí sería triste para mí es que esa desaparición supusiese pérdidas de puestos de trabajo, que no lo sé aunque tampoco me extrañaría.
El 22 de septiembre a las 18:30, en la biblioteca púbica de la avenida San Fermín, 10 de Madrid, el equipo de Dentro del Monolito presentará la antología T.Errores: En el bosque ya estás muerto, de la que forma parte mi relato HÁBLAME DEL BOSQUE. Por allí habrá unos cuantos autores de probada calidad y reconocido prestigio y también iré yo, que hago muy bonito en las mesas de presentación.
Y ya estaban todos con el «Joé con el Perro Sanxe que nos espía no sé qué» y cuando se han dado cuenta de que Protección Civil lo llevan las comunidades autónomas ya, pues nada, Ayuso que nos cuida y tal
Por lo que yo he leído es un «dispara y olvida», no hay colas de reintento ni nada porque es algo a muy bajo nivel. En mi casa, a mi mujer le llegó y a mí no, y los móviles estaban uno al lado del otro (somos de compañías diferentes, pero se supone que eso no debería afectar).
Mi experiencia personal: es un error. @luisgarciareal@social.politicaconciencia.org lo ha comentado muy bien. Te echarás encima un montón de trabajo muy poco (es decir, nada) agradecido. Y más aún si lo que le estás poniendo es un equipo antiguo, porque eso empeorará aún más su experiencia.
Cómo desactivar Utiq y que no entregue el id de tu línea móvil Movistar, Orange o Jazztel a los anunciantes
https://bandaancha.eu/articulos/como-desactivar-utiq-no-entregue-id-tu-10654
@ac that sounds like they will completely block me. The email they send me sounded like they will block me from certain features. Thanks!
Why not 2fa: they claim this is to secure the supply chain. I'm not a supplier - nobody pays me. I provide code as-is. Me enabling 2fa will not magically provide any guarantees about the quality of my code.
It's the wrong solution for an actual problem and I don't want to participate in normalizing this solution.
(Edit to fix visibility)
Tips on how to structure your home directory (unixsheikh.com):
https://unixsheikh.com/articles/tips-on-how-to-structure-your-home-directory.html
A bit cumbersome for my taste, but there are some good ideas there.
History
they invaded in June hoping to get it done before the winter. It’s just that the Russian weather doesn’t fuck around. (also that the dumbfuck nazi leadership didn’t consider halting the advance and reinforcing supply lines when the going got tough)
