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#WearAMask

#Q60
#Q18419

pronounshe/him
Five years ago I made a Twitter post calling for employees of @wikimediafoundation to organize a union. Yesterday a group of us came out publicly to all other staff as being actively engaged in that effort. I’m proud of everyone who has helped get us to this new milestone and I look forward to being part of a recognized bargaining unit in the future.

If you just got a computer (holiday or otherwise) and are thinking of installing Linux on it, shoot me your questions!

I'm going to collect a bunch of them for an upcoming livestream, maybe this weekend after holiday parties are wrapped! Either that or next week sometime.

You can ask me here or ask (at) veronicaexplains (dot) net.

"Justice Department Says Filming Immigration Raids Is 'Domestic Terrorism'."
https://reason.com/2025/12/26/justice-department-says-filming-immigration-raids-is-domestic-terrorism/

This is the best evidence yet that the #Trump admin is turning the term "domestic terrorism" into an all-purpose pejorative for whatever it dislikes.

Three quick legal notes:
1. In the US, it is not a crime to video police making arrests, provided one does not interfere with their work. So said #SCOTUS in Glik v. Cunniffe (2011).
2. If an act is not already a crime, then even a high-level decision to call it "domestic terrorism" does not make it a crime.
3. Making an act a crime requires legislation (yea, constitutional legislation). In a country with no kings, an executive diktat does not suffice.

#EmptySignifier #FloatingSignifier #FirstAmendment #Terrorism #USLaw #USPol #USPolitics

Could the feds throw you in jail for merely filming ICE immigration raids?

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said "videotaping" agents was violence—but Border Patrol brought a film crew to Chicago-area raids.

Reason.com
@taavi try changing OS TZ and see what happens? consult printed/PDF timetables?
starting to prep my wmhack session and found this gem on the internet

FYI, when a website erases your text that you just spent an hour writing, you can use this little trick to recover it 99% of the time:

1. find the firefox pid

$ pgrep -l firefox

2. attach gdb to firefox and dump its core

$ sudo gdb <pid>
gcore firefox.dump
<this takes awhile>
quit
<firefox dies>

3. find your lost text in the coredump

$ strings firefox.dump | grep "a unique word/sentence from ur text"

i just did this today to recover a long post i wrote, and figured i'd show others!! 

Software should not require permission to be written.

Software should not require permission to be distributed.

Software should not have a central entity controlling it.

The future is decentralized, fuck your centralized signature verification checks.

since november ive been putting together a memorial to the martyrs of gaza. it is complete enough that i am sharing it with the world this afternoon. boosts welcome.

https://gaza.memorial/

it is a simple list of the names of the dead read aloud, bearing witness to their loss, acknowledging each one of them as a complete human being, a story cut short by ethnonationalist projects and empire, someone who deserved more.

A Memorial For Gaza

@luckytran https://varrobio.com/how-varro-plans-to-make-money-while-giving-away-its-pathogen-detecting-breakthroughs/

I would love to help with testing this. I think I'm a pretty good bug writer and I find edge cases often.

How Varro Plans to Make Money While Giving Away Its Pathogen-Detecting Breakthroughs - Varro Life Sciences

A lot has changed inside the labs of the St. Louis-based startup Varro Life Sciences. In just a handful of months, its space inside the Cortex Innovation District, at 20 South Sarah Street, has gone from mostly empty lab benches to a more vibrant biomedical development space. Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe will be in town this morning to…

Varro Life Sciences

I wrote a blog post on my thoughts about the future of the #Wikimedia Beta Cluster (aka deployment-prep).

https://taavi.wtf/posts/deployment-prep-needs-a-replacement/

Wikimedia needs to re-think MediaWiki staging environments

Wikimedia’s Beta Cluster (aka deployment-prep) needs to be replaced with something competely different. The Beta Cluster Wikitech page describes the projects' ambitions like this: The Beta Cluster aims to provide a staging area that closely resembles the Wikimedia production environment. It runs MediaWiki and extensions from their master branch, allowing developers and power users to test new code before it goes live on Wikimedia websites. This was written in early 2013, nearly a decade ago.

Taavi Väänänen