Nothing

I can't believe I was stupid enough to think I could engage with state-level politics as an unaffiliated individual

2023-06-14T11:02:00Z

I can't believe I was stupid enough to think I could engage with state-level politics as an unaffiliated individual

Previously: Letter to Senator Prozanski and Representative Holvey in Support of SB619, and Really really sore about SB619 getting a bunch of pro-business amendments that strip the fun parts of the bill out

Hello Senator Prozanski, Representative Holvey,
I see that SB619 has been referred to Senate for passage without another public hearing despite significant changes to the content and character of the bill.
I must say I'm particularly disappointed in Senator Prozanski and his office. After listening to Mr. Prozanski speak at the Small Farms rally day in March I was excited to think that one of my representatives was actually accessible and cared about listening to his constituents, one who was very clear that he did not want to be in the pocket of big business interests lobbying in Salem and needed counterbalancing voices from local engaged experts. I no longer believe this is the case. Here we are with a bill that is, based on testimony from business lobbying groups, significantly watered down from a position which excited someone who voted for you both, with both positive and constructive engagement ignored entirely.
It's one thing to just tell me that I missed the one tiny window where citizens are allowed to engage with you on the text and character of a bill that received essentially no media coverage or public outreach beforehand. I'd balk at that but the statutory rules of the Senate aren't something I would hold you personally responsible for.
It's one thing if my feedback is off-base or misses a larger picture, you could respond with one sentence saying as much but thanking me for my time and civic engagement and I would only be disappointed but at least understanding of the tradeoffs you have to make to get work done in Salem especially with the Republicans holding the house hostage.
It's one thing if you're just the stereotypical capitol politician who is not even interested in hearing or engaging with feedback from experts who aren't affiliated with those policy and lobbying bodies who you are already speaking and who did manage to affect massive changes to the bill.
It's another thing entirely when you get up on a stage and lie to a group of constituents by saying you are interested in listening and then entirely missing when the rubber meets the road.
My support for you both going forward is tempered by this lack of engagement and I am loathe to waste my time participating further in representative processes. I was hoping state politics wouldn't mirror the disconnect of national politics but this doesn't seem to be the case all the way down to the empty posturing on the stump. In the end you've further entrenched the voices of lobbyists you claimed to want to a counterbalanace to.
This leaves a sour taste.
Ryan Rix, resident of 97401.

Another day filling up an entire bag of litter out in front of my house

2023-05-31T17:00:00Z

Another day filling up an entire bag of litter out in front of my house

About two month ago I finally was fed up with the constant litter in front of my apartment from folks who buy food at the 7/11 across the street and then cut through our yard to get to the alley and the Whitebird Medical Clinic down the street. Every week or two I go out and I fill up a bag full of plastic wrap and paper food cartons and random other detritus from the private resident dumpsters that get forced open all the time.

It's not like I can blame the people who do this -- there is not a single public trash can within 6 blocks of this place, I've looked. Whitebird doesn't have publicly accessible trash bins either as far as I can tell, so where else would it end up but on the ground? People are forced to litter, and a bunch of middle-class whites and young college students get upset about the filthy homeless or whatever, but this is the austere future we engineered for ourselves by privatizing the trash collection services in our cities and de-funding social work programs that could pay the very people struggling to find trash services to clean things up. We could have nice things but no, we have to live in hell and blame it on each other.

I'll clean up the litter, but that does nothing to stop my neighbors' dogs from shitting in the yard despite multiple emails from our building management company telling them that it doesn't fly. Big old Great Dane shits to dodge, but we're gonna get upset at homeless folks every time instead.

And it's not like I have picked up a single needle or pipe or any sort of cannabis paraphernalia, it's just trash that could go in a trash bin if our city was willing to pay for it. All the panic about "open air" drug use, and I have never seen it despite being literally equidistant from a 7/11, and two homeless support clinics. I've seen my share of people deeply unwell or psychotic but I can't really blame them.

Neoliberal privatization of socialized services is fucking trap.

I tried setting up [[https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs][deploy-rs]] and it's kind of not very good for what I am doing with my computers.

2023-05-29T21:00:00Z

I tried setting up deploy-rs and it's kind of not very good for what I am doing with my computers.

flakes still suck for how i use nix
- --impure is necessary without =git add='ing a bunch of files i don’t have the right to redistribute,
- have to remember to git add things when they are extracted from my org-mode notes automatically
- and even then have to use path: prefix for my flake path which copies the whole directory in to nix store every time any file changes, making local dev painful, Arroyo Literate Programming unviable
- nitpicking: the structure of the flake should IMO be host- or package-primary and not action/plugin-primary (host.nixosConfiguration, host.deploy, etc, instead of nixosConfigurations.host, deploy.nodes)
deploy-rs evaluates all of my nixosConfigurations twice to deploy one of them (1:21 on my system to return an evaluation error in my flake.nix file, or in deploy-rs’s)
the readme’s example of using an overlay to get deploy-rs from binary substituters doesn’t work, i have to compile deploy-rs from source on the deploying machine
deploy-rs checks use jsonschema with really shitty validation failure output as a result, took me an hour to realize that one option has to be on node-level while the rest of them were "generic" and could go anywhere in the deploy manifest.
deploy-rs doesn’t support password-based sudo very well (github issue open since 2021, workaround doesn't work)

i'll probably just write a better Morph wrapper, maybe finally set up a hosts.toml thing that both the network manifests and the tool ingest.

Testing [[id:20230331T181418.903306][Matrix Feedbot]] deployment and just walking away

2023-04-11T15:29:00Z

Testing Matrix Feedbot deployment and just walking away

I deployed it to The Wobserver.

Really really sore about [[id:20230315T124528.663189][SB619]] getting a bunch of pro-business amendments that strip the fun parts of the bill out

2023-04-01T00:19:00Z

Really really sore about SB619 getting a bunch of pro-business amendments that strip the fun parts of the bill out

sore that my state Senator, the sponsor of this bill, not three weeks ago got up in front of a bunch of people at a non-profit rally day to tell us how important it was for citizens to email their representatives and speak up about legislation that they care about

sore that not two weeks ago i spent hours drafting a Letter to Senator Prozanski and Representative Holvey in Support of SB619 that got no response from either of them.

sore that then, dang, all the good parts get stripped for the sort of things that all the businesses testifying and the lobbyists calling in would be vying for.

gee. what could i expect though?

It took me way too long to realize Goku's birth name "Kakarot" is just 🥕

2023-02-27T13:14:00Z

It took me way too long to realize Goku's birth name "Kakarot" is just 🥕

many of the other Planet Vegeta nerds are named after vegetables. Vegeta, Nappa, Radditz, Bardock, Karrot, Cabba, Kale, Caulifla... 🤦

Toriyamanames are very good.

SRE lessons: some components are too big to engineer around the failure of them

2023-02-06T13:14:00Z

SRE lessons: some components are too big to engineer around the failure of them

One of the things that came up a lot when I was helping harden systems to failure at Uber was the importance of realizing when problems are too big for you to fix yourself. "What if kafka goes down? my IPC will fail" -- well if kafka goes down, the entire company's messaging stack disappears and you can be sure someone will notice and remediate it faster than you can. Make sure your service is persisting state locally, but ultimately there are problems that are too big to be worth solving without inventing worse tech stacks that just for now happen to have smaller blast radii.