Links, October 19, 2024

I’ve been heads-down working on something this week that I hope to share in the next one, so I’m a bit behind on this week.

Slack gave the Puppet community instance to Perforce

Perforce convinced Slack that they should own the community, and Slack removed all non-Perforce people as moderators, banned Ben Ford (Instance Owner) and transferred ownership to Perforce.

When I worked at Salesforce (Slack’s owner), it was drilled into us that the company’s number one value was trust; it’s been incresingly clear in watching their actions since leaving that this isn’t the case, but this should be the nail in the coffin for anyone. If it’s not clear yet, Slack is not for you

Why daylight saving time is worse for your body than standard time

Similar to how sunlight in the morning can pull our internal clock earlier, light from any source too late into the evening can do the opposite and “push” our internal clock later.

I know a lot of people want permanent Daylight Saving Time, and the North American West Coast wanted to adopt it permanently. In the US, this requires an act of Congress, so instead the plan is to abolish Daylight Saving Time instead. This is the right thing to do.

Daylight Saving Time is a perfect test for a UI designer

I have five clocks in my house. All of them I have to change manually twice a year: one hour back in the Autumn and one hour forward in the Spring. Today was one of these days.

Each clock presents a unique puzzle. Three out of five have no direct controls for changing time, and manuals have long been lost, so I have to figure it out every time.

You should be using an RSS reader

This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power.

It’s RSS.

I find Cory Doctorow’s writing bombastic and openly combatative, but he makes good points from time to time.

Modern Unix Tools

This is a collection of very useful utilities that I’ve collected by asking the internet “What modern utilities should be a standard part of a modern unixy distro and why?”

Remember a decade ago when new & improved alternatives to grep started coming out? Imagine that for everything, and a bunch of new fun things to boot. On my systems, I’ve replaced ls with eza, cd with z, make with just, cat with bat, bash with fish and use Starship for my prompt.

You Might Not Recover From Burnout. Ever.

In many ways, burnout is an attempt by the body to give us our freedom back — but it can only do so by taking away our ability to be exploited.

It’s been nine years since I published my piece about burnout, and I’ve been meaning to write a followup piece, but have been hamstrung by dealing with an ongoing, rolling burnout I was dealing with from 2017–2023. Now that I’m on the other end of it, I’ve come to a similar conclusion.

Cabel Sasser / XOXO 2024

This wasn’t up last when I posted last week’s links, and it’s not among my personal highlights from XOXO, but it is good, and the less you know about it going in, the more fun you’ll have watching it.