Microposts

I am watching House of the dragon S3 and it’s a bit frustrating how they are dragging things out. Really the only interesting thing in the show is the dragons. The rest is just a worse GoT.

The last episode of S3 is next week and I have to wait till 2028 for the final season. It’s trying hard to get us to care about the characters and plots but it is not working.

At this point I am watching just to get my epic fantasy fix.

The rings of power has the exact same issue. I have 4 episodes left of S2.

I recently watched Happiness. It was so good. The ML and FL looks very cute and the chemistry between them is awesome.

It’s a better zombie series than All of us are dead. I am not sure why that show gets hyped so much.

I keep saying this in class, people agree, and then somehow forget it.

Unless a math question explicitly asks for the answer in a particular form, you are under no obligation to simplify it.

5C2 is just as valid an answer as 10. 27!/26! is just as valid as 27. If an exact answer contains irrationals or rational fractions etc., keeping it in exact form is mathematically correct and preferable to using an approximation. I might go ahead and say that in the last case questions shouldn’t even try to ask for an approximate solution.

I have always awarded full marks for these. After a stage, exams are not meant to test routine algebra or arithmetic. For the same reason, I don’t require a scientific calculator, and I try to write exams that don’t require one.

I think my biggest mistake was choosing to contribute to projects started by other people. In the end, it’s always their show, and somehow people come to think you’re beholden to them simply because you joined, were invited, or were brought on board etc.

I believe that people come and go on their own individual merits. Beyond the initial gratitude for the opportunity and mutual respect, contributors should be treated as independent and equal collaborators.

The role of the person starting or running “the show” should be primarily to bootstrap the process and ensure continuity, rather than exercising their authority left and right. Remaining in that role for too long or too frequently exercising such powers will create contention eventually.

That kind of non-democratic power dynamic simply doesn’t work for me in the long run. I’ve come to realise that I probably should never have put myself in those situations in the first place. I’ll be correcting those mistakes over time now.

Discourse must have the most hideous authentication and account deletion system I had to interact with.

Apparently if you are a site admin, you cannot downgrade your own admin status without asking another admin to do that for you. Also while you are a site admin you cannot even delete your own account without, well, downgrading yourself. What a chicken and egg, wow!

Anyway I /dev/null-ed the email and password to solve the problem. Peace!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=715h-XJ9Wzg 🥹

I have never done anything ‘useful’. No discovery of mine has made or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. ~ GH Hardy

I learnt about this quotation from GH Hardy today and if I cherry-pick the first two lines and post it out of context, I can pretend that it is almost applicable to me.

I started watching A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder after I saw a bunch of ads for S2 on Instagram. I love this teenage dark mystery crime solving genre so I instantly fell in love with the show. Not sure why I hadn’t heard about it earlier. Emma Myers is too cute!

I finished watching Absolute Value of Romance yesterday. I liked it mostly. I think it’s a reasonable take on the teacher-student relationship genre. They didn’t make it weird or did too much tropes.

The fdsdk incident has been very depressing for me. I am trying hard not to dwell on it, but it keeps coming back and I get angry and depressed every time it comes to mind.

This morning I am thinking what’s the entire point of everything in if the person spending the most time has no say and their words carry no weight. Why did I even bother to burn years of life for this…

Sigh.

Loved The Cure by Olivia Rodrigo. The music video was so retro and comic-y. So excited for the album!

Finished watching all four seasons of Invincible last week. I really liked how different it is from most superhero shows.

I also loved the underlying idea that, despite being named “Invincible”, Mark is anything but invincible in his own universe.

He’s constantly overshadowed by beings far stronger than him and he is constantly trying to live a normal human life filled with mistakes, compromises, and struggles, which is so far from a what a “superhero” would be doing.

I was thinking about writing a whole review posts but I don’t think I have gathered enough thoughts for that.

After thinking for a while, I just decided to leave formally by removing myself from Gitlab. I think it’s best for me and everyone else. I don’t have any willingness left to collaborate where I don’t receive the respect, gratitude and trust I think I deserve.

I wanted to archive some of my own projects I created in the namespace but Gitlab in their infinite wisdom has restricted that to the ‘owner’ role which I didn’t have. So none of those repositories will be maintained by me anymore. I may mirror/move and/or fork some of them which I perssonally need, elsewhere.

I don’t have anything against the software or the project itself; they are great but the some of the people, not so much, sorry.

I’m sorry, the first two of these microposts were me venting. I’ll try to post something fun later on…

Apparently, only I am not allowed to make certain decisions, citing maintainability concerns and past history of disasters on projects that I have maintained almost alone for 4+ years while everyone else can do the exact same thing, for example, block the inclusion of webengines or drop webengines citing, suprise, maintenance and CI concerns, and for which other people will get spammed with issues whenever private ABI goes out of sync and crashes apps to kingdom come.

If I dare, I will have my authority to reject a change questioned on a project that I maintained or will be told to “take a holiday” or get shouted at publicly.

I was not aware that, project maintainers weren’t allowed to “out-of-scope” certain changes or give a direction to the project.

It seems to be a common practice everywhere else. So common infact, might I say, some specific projects overuse it!

I’m sorry that I am sceptical about some things, that I didn’t drink the kool-aid of “progress”, that I wanted stability, that I wanted to sleep in peace, and that I am suspicious of hypothetical “paid work promises” after 7+ years of unpaid volunteer effort.

I wouldn’t have to vent if I thought any of this was fair to me.

I guess I learnt my lesson. Next time, either I’ll move away sooner or if the instance and permissions allow, ban certain people right away, instead of arguing for days. The constant stream of “AI slop” leads me to use the ban hammer way more often than before anyways, so it’s not a problem.