sirocyl

I know complaining about twitter is overdone, but every time I see that some artist/writer/gamedev/whatever only has a twitter to promote their work, I wonder if they're even aware what it looks like to people who aren't on twitter. Because these days you can't read most twitter accounts if you're not logged in, and even if you can see it at all, it shows stuff out of order. So your account for promoting your thing is showing tweets from like 2017 instead of your new tweet from this week saying "hey, my thing is out!"

Like I think it's always been true that twitter users overestimate how many people are actually on twitter, me included. But it was mostly harmless in an era where someone could find your account via google and see your latest tweets. And they can't do that anymore.

________8

EIGHT???

at this point twitter exists to me as only two things:

• an archive of the time I'd spent over there making posts (or, a tombstone against others claiming my name and content)
• a last-ditch point of contact, and a point to contact others

literally everything else I could've done on that website I now either do on cohost (being in touch with cool peeps and posting, both funny and serious), on mastodon (reading updates and news), or I simply don't anymore (doomscrolling, constantly swatting down spambots like flies, blocking chuds, doing network analysis and deep social intelligence-gathering)

all the time I've saved by not doing the latter, I now spend enjoying the world a little more, and putting myself in position to get myself away from the people and places that hate me.

deeply embedded firmware always makes me kinda itchy,

Like, do /you/ know what the small ARM core buried deep inside your GPU die running firmware off a baked in mask-rom is /actually/ doing?

Or what about the small core inside your HDD or SSD?

Yeah, makes me itchy,

i think people should aim to learn as little about HDDs as possible. i honestly know enough about HDD data jenga to count as lovecraftian cursed knowledge.

like, between "the cache for your cache's cache" and "the nuclear SCRAM procedure of head parking" and "oh god these are still analog actuators at the end of it, tracks are a social construct" i just get queasy

if i ever get round to building a NAS it will be solid state even if on a rational level i know the 50ft house of cards inside every spinning disk amounts to something relatively reliable

i'm sorry but i cannot shut up about these vile machines

did you know that every time you write to a hard disk drive it subtly damages nearby data in a way that's not easily characterized (Adjacent/Far Track Interference) and any reliable HDD has to juggle maintenance routines to restore sectors that are potentially becoming unreadable

if you're unlucky enough to have bought a bottom-tier SMR hard drive it first has to uproot the entire stack of shingled tracks before it can get back to copying your Linux ISOs over from the cylinder where it temporarily wrote them because "Sequential writes are fast" (TM)