Libraries are awesome

Mon 07 April 2025

About a week ago, I had the pleasure of answering some interview-style questions from Hyde that got posted to his blog series, Over/Under.

Give it a read, as I had a lot of fun writing my responses, such that I forgot to actually answer "Overrated/Underrated" to some of his questions. 😄 (Luckily, it was easy enough to infer what I was saying from the novella I provided in response to each question, and he was able to add in the implied one-word answer 🤦‍♂️ 😂)

This morning, as I was getting ready and having some quiet time to read, I was excited to see there was a new episode/post, with our mutal fedifriend Amin answering the questions.

The first question was about libraries, and I'm obviously in agreement with both of them: libraries are incredibly underrated!

Some of my warmest memories as a kid were from spending long hours at the enormous six-floor library at the university where my mom was a graduate student. I always found something to do there: working on homework, looking at children's books, and later technical magazines like MacWorld, and of course, playing around with the amazing IBM 3270 terminals that the library catalog was accessed through.

I could wax poetic about how libraries are like grand, holy temples to human knowledge, but more importantly, they are the very last remaining truly public gathering space in our modern lives that aren't built, regulated, and controlled by corporations.

Libraries are truly of and for the people, and are a safe space for children and adults to go to to pursue their own betterment.

I simply can't think of anything better than that.


100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 16

Category: Ethics Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Beauty Ethics Hobbies Life Non-religious post Non-technical post Philosophy Productivity


Technology has promised so much, has *delivered* so much, and yet, I'm horrified.

Sat 15 February 2025

I was an 80s kid. I grew up in a booming and optimistic time. The future held so much promise: all kinds of cures for disease, technology and automation would free humanity from the drudgery of labor (heh), and the Information Age would bring an acceleration to learning and innovation …

Category: Ethics Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Ethics Life Non-religious post Non-technical post Philosophy Polemic Science Fiction

Read More

"Ableism" and the Linux Aristocracy

Tue 07 January 2025
This is Part IV of the series, "Don't use what works for you."

Being an armchair FOSS advocate, there are a lot of anti-FOSS arguments I've become quite used to seeing and answering. Some of them are honestly just pretty dumb:

eloquent_FOSS_apologia();

Well, I just don't CARE about that!

Well …

Category: Ethics Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Life Linux Non-religious post Philosophy UNIX

Read More

Mozilla and the Death of Virtue

Sun 08 September 2024

A fedifriend mentioned me yesterday on a post about a recent kerfuffle regarding some decisions that Mozilla has been making, particularly in regards to buying an advertising company (and integrating advertising into the browser) and adding "A.I." features into recent builds of Firefox.

I had intended to reply with …

Category: Ethics Tagged: Computing Ethics FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Non-religious post Non-technical post

Read More
Page 1 of 2

Next »