Toots for bpettis@benpettis.ninja account

Written by Ben Pettis on 2025-01-29 at 18:08

Big Monty Python energy from the constant stream of confusing and conflicting information coming out of the OMB regarding the federal funding freeze/pause/whatever the fuck is happening

[#]uspol

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2025-01-28 at 22:27

Will writing to Congress do anything? Perhaps not. (Even less likely since I'm represented, in part, by Ron Johnson)

But it's still worth directing the frustration and anger at the people who are supposed to do something about it. Don't let them get away with just calling this a "pause on grants" - let them know how actual people will be hurt in specific ways.

Two versions of the poster - 1 local to Madison, WI and 1 with a generic "Find my Reps" link. DM me if you want PDFs.

[#]uspol

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2025-01-21 at 21:55

"Democracy isn't just a system of government - it's a collective act of faith. It works because we believe it works. It survives because we believe it will survive. When we stop believing, we stop participating. When we stop participating, democracy starts dying. Not because it was destined to fail but because we talked ourselves into letting it fail." -- @Daojoan

https://www.theindex.media/democracy-isnt-dead-stop-writing-its-obituary/

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2025-01-20 at 03:00

If you don't do this, when your NAS disconnects and the filesystem unmounts, your web app may write to the /mnt/mountpoint directory on your root drive and then fill up all the remaining space.

Ask me how I know this. 🙃

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2025-01-20 at 21:21

In case you saw just the still frame of Elon Muk's sieg heil and thought "okay yeah, that's pretty bad" just know that if you watch the whole video it's so so so much worse...

[#]uspol

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2025-01-20 at 21:23

The Musk/Muk typo stays

[#]uspol #pokemon #musk #muk

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2025-01-20 at 23:51

I took some of my initial thoughts and reactions to the whole TikTok ban situation and tried to put them into semi-coherent words.

The whole thing is stupid and blatant political theater. But it unfortunately still matters—not because of the app itself, but because of what it represents about the current state of the country and the relationship between technology companies, billionaires, and our institutions of government.

https://benpettis.com/blog/tiktok-ban

[#]uspol #tiktok

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2025-01-20 at 02:59

Putting this out into the world because it helped me solve my own "Mystery of Where All The Disk Space Went" and maybe it will help someone else:

Make your mountpoint directories immutable to prevent processes from writing to it if the drive/network/whatever device is ever disconnected:

chattr +i /mnt/mountpoint

(With the device unmounted)

[#]selfhosting #selfhosted #linux

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2025-01-14 at 17:35

Woohoo! Very proud to be a part of the team that just received this NEH grant for our work examining text and image re-use from Hollywood studios' publicity materials throughout US newspapers. We're very excited to hit the ground running to see what insights we can learn!

https://hcommons.social/@wcftr/113827726139858368

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2025-01-14 at 07:37

Students writing their AP exams in the future will get to write a DBQ which analyzes the end of Jack Smith’s report alongside Trump’s statement that he could shoot someone on fifth avenue and get away with it.

[#]uspol

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2024-12-19 at 15:50

update: they have been on a speakerphone call for the past 90 minutes. Still complaining about kids and their phones, but I'd say that this still counts as a gotcha

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2024-12-19 at 14:14

Person in the hospital waiting room loudly talking at anyone remotely nearby so they can complain about how "kids are always in their phones these days" and that they'd "never be on Facebook all the time" then gets the staff to crank the volume on the TV, but not without complaining that they can't change the channel to Fox news.

You really can't make this shit up.

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2024-12-11 at 17:09

Yes, the US government technically filled a suit against two dogs.

But it's because they were being used in a dog-fighting ring, and this is how they were removed from the previous owner.

So not quite as wild as it may seem. But still strange to list this as "approximately" when they know that it's exactly two dogs?

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2024-12-11 at 17:07

approximately...?

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.insd.218574/gov.uscourts.insd.218574.1.0.pdf

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2024-12-07 at 00:43

The best driving advice I ever received is this:

Assume that everyone else on the road is a moron, and that they're out to get you.

The advice I'd add onto that is this:

Get a dashcam. Because of the aforementioned morons.

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2024-12-02 at 23:11

https://www.wpr.org/news/dane-county-judge-strikes-down-act-10-restoring-public-employee-union-bargaining-rights

huge shutout to unions and labor organizing

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2024-12-02 at 05:50

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24701475.2021.1968657

I guess I gotta do a little shameless self-promotion, too. Send me a DM if you want to read but don't have access - I can send a PDF

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2024-12-02 at 05:49

There's probably some follow-up project or paper to be written here. But until I figure out what that is, I will just sit back and enjoy the ridiculousness.

Sure, we brought the planet to environmental disaster and razed forests to build this technology, but on the bright side, it wasn't always very good at what it was supposed to do anyway.

[#]captchas #captcha #AI #academicMastodon #academia

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2024-12-02 at 05:46

I've been fucking around a bit with Google's NotebookLM and the podcast summary tool, which takes PDFs and other sources that you provide and turns it into a ~15 chat-cast with two hosts that talk about the content. It's... interesting.

Anyway, I pointed it to an article that I wrote a while back about reCAPTCHAs (those "Are you a robot" challenges that supposedly distinguish computers from humans). Ironically the computers don't know how to say "CAPTCHA" and fumble the pronunciation each time

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Written by Ben Pettis on 2024-11-20 at 03:59

Under Trump 2.0, we will have the first cabinet secretary who was also a playable character in WWF No Mercy for the Nintendo 64. (Linda McMahon, Secretary of Education)

So like, there's that 🙃

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