nixCraft is the only well-known tech professional who has written this. He writes from the heart. All of the other established, syndicated writers and techies at Ziff-Davis, Ars Technica, Marcus Hutchins, and the rest of them won't comment. These writers and technologists are complacent because they are fully anchored to their occupations. Most of them with the possible exception of Marcus Hutchins (who is an honest computer security researcher) are uneasy with stepping out of line.

Do better, #America! Don't put up with this crap from the corporate fascists. I've written about this quite a bit on mastodon and elsewhere. I've received several sympathy "likes" on mastodon but never been published or publicly recognized through this medium or any other mediums. Except for #nixCraft and a few others all of us are constrained by the reality of not ever achieving formal recognition. Also, many of the poorer activists and writers (that's not me) who do deserve credit don't get it from the industry here in America.

Fuck you, Donald J. Trump. Save America this November 2026 by voting Democratic down the ballot.

#LinnBentonCommunityCollege classes start next month on March 30th — and would you believe that most of them are already full or close to being filled up?! Many courses are capped at 25 students, which, when you think about it, is something. The schools have had this debate before. Increase the class size or keep the class size small to promote learning?

LBCC's class availability was reduced across the board, post-COVID. I don't feel that I can make a good attempt to get in this spring term. Why? It's not worth my time. I've already learned a lot through being self-taught and I can just keep it going.

The shitty school budget (first attachment) is one reason I don't want to go in. LBCC is financially struggling and as a result they are cutting a lot back. 'Dem never say that in person, but in fact that is what they have been doing.

The second attachment shows the enrollment numbers for MTH 105Z. LBCC got it in their heads to mandate a 24 person limit for online courses. If I had been ranking those courses as either an admin or a teacher I would have set the upper limit to 50 people, but I'm not in charge.

Personal
--------

I may be older and biased in some ways however I don't think the fault was entirely on me when I tried to sign up for classes, this time around. Yes I was late in registering. School has not ever been anything, if not always a bit competitive at times. The age disparity on campus is greater than it once was. I saw only one or two students my age as I walked the outside halls of LBCC.

What I also don't care for is the ambivalence and frequent denial from the younger crowd with them over thinking that they cannot change anything from within. Yes, I do know that the purpose of going to school is to learn and meet folks. I can't even get that straight in my head on a good day thanks to the rigid and semi-militant way in which I was raised while being a kid. That angst has not left me, for any reason. Since I had two wing-nut, controlling parents I did learn how to resist authority at a younger age and not take anything which "they" say for granted — ever. The younger generations seem softer and perhaps more pliable to me. Around half of the change that my generation (Gen X) wanted has gone out the window and it's been replaced by complacency. Instead of school staff hard at work (I am excluding all of the teachers in my assessment) they are barely hanging on to their jobs because they are always wary of being laid off or fired. As a consequence of this economic intransigence, they get fucking defensive when older students such as me question the process even a little.

This isn't my cup of tea. The younger generations already fit into that mold. I will not because quite literally I cannot put up and shut up — inside my mind. ⬅️ That's literally half the battle. Good self-psychology. I apparently do not have any of that when it comes to sitting down, being patient, and putting up with a lot of B.S. from the younger crowds while trying to learn. So, you see? In the end I just made this about myself and my issues. They want to size all of us up and put all of us in our places.

I strongly feel that there is more conformity, complacency, and denial in America than most young Americans would like to admit. It's one of the reasons a lot of the world does not like the residents in this country besides many of us being wasteful with our natural resources. It’s also the sour politics and the lackluster economic situation. I'm not including any right-wing people in that last sentence since they're pretty much all gone in their heads. The left-wing knows what society in general has offered up is truly not enough. What I see every day from them is their abject fatalism whenever they deal with those constraints. I will not be a part of “their” confusing situation and that one stubborn fact about my personality may be why I will remain single for my entire life. I was always the odd man out thanks to my peculiar familial upbringing, the somewhat shitty economic times in the Pacific Northwest during the mid and late 1990's, and me not having a lot of direction other than being independent to a certain degree.

Yeah — there is this fresh propaganda coming from Kegsbreath (Pete Hegseth) over at the Pentagon:

https://www.newsweek.com/mark-kelly-retirement-pay-pete-hegseth-censure-military-11309990

Huh:

I blocked this chatbot on Bluesky today because their photo looked suspish. For now, it's just Facebook and occasionally mastodon for my news and contacts.

Isgen[.]ai to the rescue.

What is going on with #Cloudflare 's infrastructure? Many of us cannot use Claude and ChatGPT.

This outage is affecting X dot com, Claude, and ChatGPT. Interesting timing with respect to today's release of the Epstein Files in the House of Representatives...

https://www.techradar.com/pro/live/a-cloudflare-outage-is-taking-down-parts-of-the-internet

#caturday

My Princess Ari

She is over one year old, now and she's my one true friend:

2007 was a simpler time. I thought of that when I read about the #Sony Anycast Station AWS-G500HD. What a cool, functional machine for composers, DJ’s, and tinkerers.

People were more motivated and companies were a little better in terms of their behavior back during this period.

The recent uptick in conservatism (read: austerity) in business and also the austere malaise within political circles with regard to all of the awful patterns in their behavior and controlling the purse strings for funding of government, too — which most happy and content people now just process as “crazy;” immediately, off the bat and without putting much thought into it — really *has* made many important elements which we all NEED in this world of computing and business a bit worse.

I miss both the #grandeur and lessened sophistication of the late nineties and the early aughts or early 2000’s.