Rusty

unimpressed by symbolic excess

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

Time to pull my organizing practice out of dormancy and get started on the Ways To Throw Things Away megathread.

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

@kitten_beloved The User Interface is clearly the ultimate form of socio-political organization. It merely needs to be perfected ...

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

in some sense there can be no such thing as permission.

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

the system only respects you after you change it.
https://t.co/r4bKjX0IE3

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

@forthrighter a culture of hoop-jumping, education and credentialism, encourages this mistaken belief.

you jump the hoop, the system offers you a token of respect.

you mistake the token for the real thing, but the system does not *actually* respect you.

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

your action becomes “retroactively legitimated by the fact that it worked.”

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

@forthrighter a culture of hoop-jumping, education and credentialism, encourages this mistaken belief.

you jump the hoop, the system offers you a token of respect.

you mistake the token for the real thing, but the system does not *actually* respect you.

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

@forthrighter related: the mistake here seems to be thinking that following the rules gains you *credibility*. In fact it gains you something different, something like "toleration" or "indifference." Your presence is tolerated because you're irrelevant/invisible.
https://t.co/TFu7jWHrhu

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

I really admire the move of “Golden Boy burns all his credibility on one righteous rant against the system” as a noble effort to tap dance out of this double bind …. but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it really WORK.

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

one for the slavs, the melancholics, and the garret-dwellers

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

Anyway this is all really maddening because you can't even figure out what the computer is interpreting your keypresses AS. The Linux system settings doesn't show you. You need a terminal package called "wev".

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

Low-effort draftpoasting this bit of "How to Switch From Mac to Linux" bc it's fresh in my mind rn.

So one of the first big problems if you put Linux on a Mac is the keyboards are different.

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

Alt is still alt, even tho the "Option" label on it is more prominently displayed.

PrintScreen is the key still lacking from the standard Thinkpad Layout now.

It seems to be a default key for use in a lot of the screenshot key combos.

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

I want there to be defaults.
I want the defaults to make sense.

"Configurable" is a way to avoid the hard work of doing this properly.

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

it takes talking to like, real computer guys before you realize how deep they are in this. most people have never actually spoken computer language to a computer guy and watched their brains turn it over while blocking out everything you think is common sense.

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

exactly, which is why all the systems get more complicated, so the nerds can become ever-more-perfect fall guys, and everyone making decisions can avoid any responsibility.

[Hazard @natural_hazard]

conflict theorists psyop nerds by pretending to be dumb machines that just never got code that fully specified what to do

nerds who spend all their time figuring out how to specify things well for dumb machines and who don't really get what's up with people find this plausible

[Rusty @Rusty_Swarf]

@owenbroadcast I would assume it's because the computer menus the tellers are using don't match whatever menu you're ordering from, and nobody knows how to fix that or is responsible.