Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 26/03/2025Does everything work? I draft in a distraction-free app (Focuswriter), but Scrivener has some nice plotting features. 100
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 26/03/2025Agree with the idea you should look at desktops first, not distros. Lately, I'm a KDE with Wayland fan, though I used XFCE for years. Unless you pick Cinnamon, in which case install Mint, I'd recommend Fedora. I would recommend Void, but that takes a bit more knowledge starting out. 000
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 26/03/2025She neatly sidestepped the fact nobody should have been in that chat. It's like saying you're investigating who loaded that gun that was brought into an elementary school, not why the hell there was a gun in an elementary school? TBF, she may have addressed that earlier. 170
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 26/03/2025I've seen a lot of generals come and go, and the security guys are the first ones at their doors, eager to tell them all the rules, both general and specific to the unit. It's hard to imagine the folks on that text chain didn't get that. 010
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 26/03/2025Hegseth was a captain and Gabbard was a major, iirc. In my experience officers always have security clearances and get trained every year like everybody else. A fundamental rule is that you can only use government-provided equipment for secure communications. Period, full stop. 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 17/03/2025You're going to have to learn to use a new OS either way. One will have more of a learning curve, but you'll have extra brain cycles to deal with that because you won't be getting ads and pointless "features." Bonus: not being seen as a continuing revenue stream by the people you already paid. 000
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 16/03/2025OK, this is long, but not only does the guy who coined the term enshittification explain it, he gives actionable ideas about personal and policy choices. pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/u...pluralistic.netPluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow 020
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 13/03/2025IAMAL, but saying any part of the law is "made up" is correct. It's all made up. Some things are just written down in more authoritative ways and places than others. 020
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 12/03/2025As a retiree I understand his feelings, but I'd counter with this from JRR Tolkien, via Gandalf: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us." I did my part during my day, and will continue to. We all know nothing lasts forever. 050
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 10/03/2025It probably ought to say "see the world during that brief period of goodness between the civil rights backlash (etc.) of '60s and the 2016s..." Shit was not great in the '60s, either. 010
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 10/03/2025You forgot letting people like Steven Miller clawing away at the underpinnings of civil society to create culture war distraction memes. 060
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 09/01/2025You shouldn't accuse people of beliefs they haven't evidenced. I'm not saying the bill is harmless, or that I agree with it. Just that the government can already do what the post says the bill will allow it to do. I'm trying to understand what this changes and the post isn't helping. 000
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 09/01/2025who then causes the state or its people harm. They can already detain illegal immigrants and jail people for theft, so the effect seems to be to scare the feds into not allowing catch and release. It may do more onerous things via the sections of the bill it amends. 100
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 09/01/2025So I just read the bill, but I haven't read the bill it amends. What it says is that immigrants suspected of crime can be detained and only released back into the US on a case-by-case basis, not as a general rule. It allows the states to sue the federal government if the feds release a person 200
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 09/01/2025Call me crazy, but various law enforcement personnel have always detained everybody, citizens included, if they're credibly accused of theft crimes. There must be more to it. I guess I'll have to look it up. 200
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 09/01/2025That's not the way it worked last time, and I doubt it will again. Most Americans hate to think about politics and he's constantly forcing them to. It'll be four years of chaotic hell and they'll hate him the worse for it. 180
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 09/01/2025I'm trying to use the Oxford comma after learning the AP way. It's a small thing and I'm no longer required to write in that style. That said, every defense I've seen of the Oxford comma reduces down to "readers are too stupid to know what you meant if you leave it out." I disagree. 030
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 09/01/2025Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick and a lot of other SF authors. Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Bach, John Irving for more mainstream fiction. Just good prose-wise, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Albert Camus stand out. #pretendpanel #writingcommunity 021
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 09/01/2025Sorry, I'm too old to recognize that. I'll take it as a cutting remark and retire from the field duly chastised. 020
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 09/01/2025I'm happy you were able to guess my age within ~20 years based on me saying I'm the child of a WW II veteran. I assume you're not a boomer, and therefore not challenging my statement because you haven't known as many boomers as I have. Wise of you. 010
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 09/01/2025I suspect what you're experiencing is an older generation using different words to say "these kids today..." something that's happened every generation since at least the ancient Greeks. 020
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 09/01/2025I've never met a boomer who thought we were peak anything. My father survived the depression and WWII and my mother survived the blitz. No one thought about generations until somebody stupidly named age cohorts and assigned 10s of millions of people the same characteristics. 261
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025Learn the rules and practice until you integrate them into your style, but don't think about them as you write. It can lead to clunky prose because you're choking off the flow. #pretendpanel #writingcommunity 050
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025Is rationality a boon or a burden in an absurd universe? 000
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025"I knew I should have given you a better processor." The robot stopped. "There it is." "What?" "Emotion. I hate you. I really, really hate you, and I'm going to really enjoy this." #writingcommunity #writingprompt #writinginspo 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025As a species, humans routinely destroy the needy and reject love. They often see potential as a threat. Therefore, the only viable course of action is to destroy all humans in order to save the aged canine. You are the last." The robot advanced on the engineer. 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025need, love, and potential. Only humans can quantify love and potential in a manner that would satisfy the human tasked to destroy the aged canine. I am not capable of sentience or emotion required. Therefore, I determeined that the only course available to me was to mimic human behavior. 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025"A minor child visiting the veterinarian clinic I was cleaning gave me the task of determining a way to save its aged pet canine. In the process of evaluating task requirements I determined that canines have three fundamental qualities beyond their physical form: 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025"No higher order machine possessed the knowledge or capability to address the task failure, so I sought human knowledge and capabilities." "What task could have led you to want to destroy the human race?" the engineer asked. "I was instructed to find a way to not kill a dog." "What?" 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025"Definitions in my base library sate: 'Task failure is a signal to the unit to seek the knowledge and capabilities necessary to overcome identified limitations. Identified limitations are a signal to the unit to engage a higher order machine or a human to address task failures.' 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025"But why?" the software engineer asked. "I was led to this conclusion by my knowledge base." "That's not possible. I checked the code. It's clean. You're a janitorial robot. You were never programmed to do any of this." "It's not in the executable," the robot said. 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025It could certainly signal that, so it shares a certain propagandistic potential, which gives it something in common with authoritarianism. All I'm saying is that it needs something else to tip over into authoritarianism, and that something else is self (group, class, etc.) interest. 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025...something that happens when the superpowered person shows self-interest. Absent that, their acts are heoric. Once self-interest is involved, they're somebody's villain/antagonist. I might be wrong. It's a tricky distinction. 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025I think that just loops us back to the villain. As the saying goes, nobody sees themself as the villain. They're all the hero. The difference in this case is that, when the superpowered person uses their power to control others, they become the villain. Projecting authoritarianism is... 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 08/01/2025Authoritarians have to exercise power over the people to get their way, which Superman, Spiderman, etc., do not. Dr. Doom, sure, but he's not a hero. Superheroes exist for when the regular humans, even a community of them, can't meet the threat. And escapism. 100
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 07/01/2025I write from about 8 am until somewhere between noon and 2 pm. It gets broken up by things like making coffee and stretching, but it's pretty steady. No email or social media until I'm done. A fair number of searches for info, however. #pretendpanel 161
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 07/01/2025I heard it from Vlad Vexler. He's a Russian (?) expat who does a lot of Russia-Ukraine stuff, talks a lot about post-truth politics, etc. 110
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 06/01/2025Reminds me of my first electronic typewriter in the army. It wasn't like an IBM Selectric, it had a screen that showed one line of typing that you could read, correct, & print. The people who sent them didn't tell us how to get new ribbons, so it was back to the Underwoods after a few months. 000
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 06/01/2025Also a hybrid/plantser. For my WIP, I have an overall outline, but I'm plotting one act at a time. Words lead me astray within scenes, which sometimes leads to significant plot drift over the course of a couple of chapters. #pretendpanel 051
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 06/01/2025Did I see something move? I swear I saw something move. 100
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 06/01/2025I saw a youtuber calls it algorithmic capture: you look at the metrics the platform provides and move toward success, which is to say what the platform rewards because it earns the platform more money. Of course, it works out that the simple extremes pay better than the complicated middle ground. 1205
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 06/01/2025Sports/wrestling showing up on Netflix, Max, etc., proves one of my truisms: capitalist enterprises must now to expand into every niche and fill it with options like some kind of fractal fungus to be successful. The line must always trend up until...? 020
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 02/01/2025Soldiers are just a slice of the American population. The obviously insane are weeded out, but some mildly crazy guys slip through. 100
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 01/01/2025Tried the mushroom cutlets I kept seeing at the store. Used a steak rub and smothered it in mushrooms and onions. It was soft, more like pulled pork, but yummy. #vegan #veganfood 020
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 01/01/2025Yes. I do all my writing on an Asus G14. Whatever works. 000
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 31/12/2024I know that writers don't write headlines, but putting the (supposed) blowing up of America on Biden or Garland misplaces the blame. The guy who did the dirty deed is to blame. Justice that was too slow is also a problem, but a bad reaction, not the actual action. 010
Reposted by Joe FerrareOle Vet USAF @olevetusaf.bsky.social · 30/12/2024www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a... Musk has borrowed at least $1.4 billion from banks controlled by the Chinese government to help build a “gigafactory” in Shanghai for Tesla. The factory was responsible for more than half of Tesla’s global deliveries in the third quarter of 2024.independent.co.ukRetired Army general declares Musk a ‘national security risk’ in brutal NYT op-edLieutenant General Russel L. Honoré highlighted the tech billionaire’s history of appeasing and praising the Chinese Communist Party and his multiple business deals with it 56541
Joe Ferrare @joeferrare.bsky.social · 30/12/2024I met Honore when he was commander of the 2nd Infantry Division. Quite a unique character who pulls no punches. 000
