I don't think that Wario & Waluigi are dark mirror versions of Mario & Luigi — not exactly. Mario & Luigi are two sides of the same coin, working together in moderation and harmony. Wario & Waluigi take those same differences which set the Mario brothers apart and exaggerate them to excess.

If you're going to talk to a smart assistant out loud in front of other people, at least give your shortcuts names which sound like like trashy thrillers.

Tired: Hey Siri, turn out the lights.
Wired: Siri, activate the Hades contingency. Alexa, initiate project Dædalus. Okay Google, proceed to omega phase.

Start with a dramatic action verb like "engage", "commence", or "execute". Throw in a mythological figure which needn't have any actual relation to the action set. Then round it out with a nonsense word from an espionage drama, like "protocol", "sequence", "directive", or so on.

Your privacy is important to us. infosec.town/notes/a03857vnctgmnq20

RE: infosec.town/notes/a03857vnctgmnq20

I've heard a couple of times this week something to the effect of "Nazis aren't people.". I know that it's really appealing to dehumanize them because that makes it easier to fight back and resist. And because it is horrifying to imagine people acting this way.

But it's so much worse than that. Nazis are people. Every single heckin' one.

They aren't forces of nature or hivemind aliens or demons without free will. They are people who are actively choosing to keep doing Nazi stuff. They wake up in the morning and decide to harm other people because they hate them.

That's the scariest thing about Nazism: from a few terrible seeds, these brainworms took over German society. Many Germans, nice decent people, were complicit in things which I would call unspeakable if it weren't so vital for us to name and remember them.

And now, again, people we know or knew are tumbling into that vortex. And it's horrifying to look around and see Nazis coming for the US with everything they've got. But what's even scarier are all the people in the middle who aren't sure whether they want to live under fascism alongside concentration camps, or elect a black woman.

While I’m out here fantasizing about digital library technology, you know what I really want? I want a file format which smushes audio & text editions of a book together with timestamps connecting them. Taking separate files of voice-acted audio & plan text and lining up the timestamps is one of the few non-evil uses I can imagine for modern ML tools. And I simply cannot imagine a better way to read a book than having the audio edition in my ears, but with readable text to jump back to whenever I want to quote something, or see the spelling of a name, or ⌘F for my favorite passage. We have the technology! We could do this!

Good news, I have invented an exciting new yak to shave!

It would be an understatement to say that I have a lot of ebooks & audiobooks. I think it would be fun to build a virtual card catalog slash index which doesn’t need any extra software to browse — just a nest of symlinks on the file system.

Imagine: you could have all the files named something like Title_Author.m4b, and then another directory with symlinks named Author_Title.m4b. A collection of symlinks organized by Dewey Decimal, another by genre/tag, and yet another directory containing every series, with the symlinks inside numbered so they sort nicely.

Of course, this maze would need to be organized & maintained by software. I’d probably want to store all the metadata in the book files themselves, with the symlinks on disk just being a representation. That would make it relatively easy to rebuild or adjust whenever a new book is added or something changes, and it would be relatively straightforward to support additional labelling system without needing an army of scrivs to constantly prowl about the filesystem. For some reason, my heart tells me that this would be a perfect job for a little collection of shell scripts, even though my better angels warn that way lies madness.

"You can't just live in fear all the time!"

Actually, I can, and I am extremely good at it because of years of practice. What you mean is that I *shouldn't* live in fear all the time. Which is completely true. I would be absolutely thrilled not to live in fear, and will get started as soon as the world stops being utterly terrifying.

What I will not do is blithely business-as"usual" myself off a cliff just because your preferred way to deal with risk and danger is denial. And frankly it's pretty frustrating that you're pretending everything is fine, because that actively prevents you from helping us deal with with these real, substantial, but ultimately solvable problems.

Fear is what tells you to run from the bear. Being unafraid doesn't mean that you are no longer surrounded by bears. You can't be brave and face your fear until you have acknowledged that there's something to be afraid of.

Tragic news for audiobook lovers who depend on accessibility features & tools unsupported by Libby. Pouring one out for the age of open audiobooks from libraries.

Good morning to everyone except Wube for rudely releasing Factorio on a Monday and forcing me to choose between sleep & work and expanding my factory to meet the needs of my expanding factory. Goodbye for approximately four to six weeks as I return to Nauvis. Send food and water.

I am once again trying to solve Problems with Email using technology. I am destined to fail because email problems are social problems. So adding technology just leaves me with two problems.

Nevertheless. I would like to store archived mail on my own hard drive, in an easily-accessed, portable format — like a maildir. Then I should be able to copy, move, access, archive, sync, whatever, using regular tools which interact with files. Ideally all the mail clients I use could just work with a maildir directly, but as you may be aware… kids these days… get off my lawn &c. &c. So I think that the practical compromise would be to run a little local IMAP server which just serves to read and write to the maildir in my home directory.

My question for the lazy/indie/fedi-hivemind is this: what’s the safest, smallest, simplest tool I can run to speak maildir to my filesystem and IMAP to my mail client? (And, implied: why is all of this the absolutely wrong way to go about this?)

I feel a little guilty asking a question like this at 5pm on a Friday; I worry that I’m going to nerdsnipe someone’s entire evening. Well, someone else’s, at least.