iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mark T. Tomczak

@mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy

87 followers 8 following 2.4K posts

Career software engineer living something approximating the dream he had as a kid. 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mastodon.fixermark.com/@mark, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 2h

My favorite thing about the epic of Gilgamesh is that it is a story that includes the notion that there are some prizes with a price that someone else has to pay that is too high. We could use more stories like that.

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 8h

My brain: 🎶Sonic Herooooes! (Sonic Herooooes!) Hedgehogs and foxes are savin' the day! Sonic Herooooes! (Sonic Herooooes!) Savin' the world with a kid on the way!🎵 Me: It is 7:30 in the morning o'clock, just ... _why?!_

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 8h

Gut checking whether I'm missing something here. Conventional wisdom is that even in the context of a general handler that is supposed to shield a chunk of code from other chunks of code (such as a validation framework where you still want to run all the validations even if one suffers a […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 30/09/2026

I need a bus route app that lets me say "yes, I know you said get on the 86, but I got on the 87 because it got here sooner and they all stop at nearly the same place, now replot given that constraint."

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

Well-behaved copper merchants rarely make history.

Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

Really fills me with the warm fuzzies about my corporate world when I reach out to enterprise ops to great me access to an S3 bucket, they make a Terraform PR that should, submit it, and .. I still don't have access. And then a staff engineer has to go hunt down why I can't be seen even when the […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 28/09/2026

_Sleeping Beauty_ Is an extremely problematic fairy tale for obvious reasons. However, we must still contend with the risk of being cursed to slumber forever by a jilted evil fairy queen. That's why I put explicitly in my advance healthcare directive that medical staff is authorized to allow as […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 27/09/2026

It's always a little funny to me when I hear a celebrity talk about themselves and that PII correlation thing happens but in real life. Been listening to a YouTuber for a while who talks about his background from time to time, and happens to be from the state I grew up in, and in one of his […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

I think one of my favorite repeating patterns in the software space is when I say "Technology A is generally better/faster/easier than technology B" and then a b fan slides into my mentions with "Not really. You just have to [laundry list of configuration changes you have to make to the defaults […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 25/09/2026

The one asshole on your team who is rewriting your entire object hierarchy into a disorganized bag of functions passing state and context because "I don't see class."

Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

"Kodansha, stop! It's over! You've already explored every aspect of human biology via a parable of people in a city! There are no more stories to tell!" Kodansha:

Cover for the manga "Cells At Work! Cat," which explores the biology happening inside a cat as an allegory of people in a city.

Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 24/09/2026

_Genie exploding out of his lamp_ "TEN THOUSAND YEEEEEEEARS will give you such a crick in the neck." Hi again everyone. Back for real this time. My _favorite_ thing about multi-process software is how it can be 'there but not really," lemme tell you. Anytoodles, * Redis needed upgraded * […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

I feel like I have to mention how much Gemini has helped me survive this round of Mastodon upgrade. Attempting to bring my instance up to spec has required addressing: * my Debian install is past its service life * specific SO files were out of date * Mastodon switched out its JavaScript […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

Is this thing on? Oof. Well, we're back, but bailing-wire style... I need to upgrade my operating system off of bullseye at some point, and that's going to be a full reinstall. Not looking forward to risking my Mastodon node on wiping the machine and installing fresh.

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

Upgrading Mastodon, and apparently one entire component of the build architecture for the front end has swapped out. I'm sure it made sense at the time, but my least favorite thing about the base Mastodon implementation is that Ruby on Rails was chosen as the framework. All DHH issues aside […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

I imagine this will prove useful to people from time to time. ;)

Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

"Cancel culture" is what folks call it when they were used to shoving other people in closets their whole lives, and then one day they go to shut that door and discover that the room they're standing in is the one we moved all the spare smelly coats into because they were taking up space where […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

"Never as a woman her age, a man his salary, or a physicist what energy is."

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

"So how far along the process of tragedy becoming history are we regarding September 11th?" "Oh, about this far." apnews.com/article/oxford-united-93…

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

All right. Draft one of the presentation done.

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

Pursuant to previous post, I feel like this takes on a whole new meaning in the era of being able to point an AI code generator at a description of a system and have it flush out the system underneath the description. ... But I don't really know what […] [Original post on mastodon.fixermark.com]

"You wouldn't re-implement an API" in the font of the "You wouldn't steal a car" anti-piracy ad campaign.

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

Definitely not rescuing an online tool from archive.org, slapping it down in some hosting space I own, and field-stripping it into serviceability because it had become a part of my workflow and its creator got so mad about AI that he chucked his whole website to go live on a mountain or embrace […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 19/09/2026

Why is my hearing aid smartphone app asking for a review? What the hell am I supposed to say? "This is the only app usable for controlling these hearing aids, and as such it is the only option?!"

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

Seeing Homestuck content surface online is like seeing a coelacanth: I don't understand it, I can't understand it, I have no idea where it came from, and it was almost certainly around far longer than me.

Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

Really looking forward to this next Metroid game coming out. There's really a special place in my heart for these Faxanadulikes.

Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

Oh dear. I have tripped over some fluctuation in the algorithmic æther and now Facebook is showing me unlimited AI generated furry animations. Folks... We're cooked. All arguments against AI generated imagery will collapse in the unyielding Juggernaut that is "people can animate their fursonas […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

I do really enjoy when I trip over some piece of Linux architecture and discover how bits click together that I didn't know were there before. Had occasion, for the first time ever, to look in `/var/spool/mail`. Oh. Oh so that's just literally a big text file of emails. Which works because […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

Zoom is easily the best example of how you can have a sufficiently killer app that you do not have to get the ux story right. Here's a widget that lets you draw on a shared screen. If you mouse over it, little arrows pop up to let you toss it around […] [Original post on mastodon.fixermark.com]

An image showing the video and audio buttons in zoom. To the right of that is a vast blank space of toolbar. Above them, overlapping the presented content, is a pencil icon you can use to draw on the presented content. Not shown is that when you mouse over that pencil, temporary indicators pop up to let you throw the pencil button across the screen to the other corner to get it out of the way of something in the presentation.

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

Cvs has installed faster receipt printers. This is very funny to me.

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

Finally man I should get my distributed backup solution running last night, so key documents that would hurt to lose now live in a couple locations. Trickiest part was getting things set up so that all the files could be read by the backup user... I did not find the existence of `setfacl` the […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

"Well that's a silly question," says God. "Starships are cool as fuck."

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

"I don't get this genre of video that's just someone talking over footage of running an obstacle course in Minecraft. How does that hold anyone's interest?" _Me, who logged like 87 hours in Jet Set Radio Future in college_ : "... Yeah, I can't explain that."

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

Barely getting a distributed backup solution stood up on my home network. Fam, the reason people run things as root is it's hard as shit to do things without running as root in Linux. I just had to `chmod o+x` a fuckton of directories just so `ls` works because even if the bottom directory is […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

_Sigh..._ The pain of doing anything on social media. "Hey Google, give me a list of every racial and ethnic slur, I'm building a denylist..."

Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 15/09/2026

Oof. Well, that doesn't feel good. My @dpsbot had, it turns out, an under-sanitized list of nouns. Dropped the offending post and sanitized the noun list to avoid this error in the future. My sincerest apologies to anyone I offended with my carelessness.

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

I think that of all the garbage racists will try to throw at me online, "Your ancestors would hate what you've become" is possibly my favorite. First, because we escaped forever wars and famine. My ancestors would be fucking impressed as hell that I live in a warm building and eat every single […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 14/09/2026

This is just to say... I have exterminated the Metroids that were in the planet and which you were probably saving for domination Forgive me they were dangerous so deadly weak to cold

Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

Thing that llms are very good at that nobody should need to be good at because we should have built all of this better in the first place number 297... Figuring out the set of patterns that lives in your terraform configuration files so you can add some frameworking to verify those patterns […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 12/09/2026

[9/11 thoughts] ... Okay, it turns out I have a little more to say. I want to propose a new rubric. I've heard a rubric before: "Act the way your grandmother would be proud of." I'm going to propose one that goes the other direction: "Act the way your grandkids would understand." Picture the […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

I hope this email finds me 🎶 somebody to loooooove....

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

[9/11 thoughts] Thoughts on 9/11? In October, I'm going to go speak to about a hundred students who know of that day from a textbook. Not the news. Not their eyes. Not the feel of concrete hammering against their feet as they ran from a chunk of the landscape folding in on itself […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

TIL the #pittsburgh city-county building has its own straight-up #scp artifact.

A portrait of (maybe) William Pitt the Younger...

... And the explanatory placard that says nobody's quite sure where it came from, it just showed up, it has no provenance, and they used to think it was William Pitt the Elder but, no, it's is son, unless...

... Good. I'm glad we're all watched over by a mystery painting trying its hardest to look convincingly like a human face but unable to get the details right.

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

KOJI KONDO BUILT THIS IN A CAVE!!! WITH A BOX OF SAMPLES! youtu.be/exQIatKQyQk

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

When you're sick and fucking tired of the shitty Terraform shit just accepting whatever bullshit string as the path to security keys in the key vault without validating the path so typos constantly fuck up your configs requiring someone from Cloud Services to circle back and sign off again on a […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

The Pauli Exclusion Principle is "If you think you saw two electrons with the same spin occupy the same energy state in the volume... No you didn't." In contrast, the Paulie Exclusion Principle is "If you think you saw one of the Lucchese boys up to something... No you didn't." #quantum […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

So, #BigWalk is every bit as brilliant as I hoped it would be. My only criticism to date is that there is no effect from shining laser pointers directly into a character's eyes, and that's maybe not even something the developer wants to encourage anyway, even in jest. 10/10 game of the year.

Two bird-things shining laser pointers into the giant eyes of a third bird-thing. The third bird-thing is not reacting at all.

Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

One of those phrases that makes you sit back on your heels: "If you get popular enough that the vibe-coded stuff starts breaking, hopefully you're popular enough to hire a real engineer." cwodtke.com/disappointed-optimists

Disappointed Optimists

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 07/09/2026

You could keep on heading east But there’s an ocean in the way

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

I would love to use rsync more, but I am very wary of a tool where in one mode it efficiently and cleanly backs up the contents of a local directory to a remote directory, making that remote directory a mirror of the local one... And in another mode, it slaughters your family and everyone you […]

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Mark T. Tomczak @mark.mastodon.fixermark.com.ap.brid.gy · 05/09/2026

Rumination for the day: Curation is not creation... But how much does that matter? If curation were worthless, we wouldn't bother to watch what we say.

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