firebreathingduck

https://social.vivaldi.net/@firebreathingduck

(he/him/any) parent, software dev, leftist. BLM, sex work is real work, trans rights are human rights. Vegan. Living on land stolen from the Lenni Lenape.
No ICE, no Nazis. But I repeat myself.

Too busy with work and family to write free software, but I hope to someday.

Public Key

npub1gk54wjxzjx7ymqpprc82satxnya3nmgvlpwycx402zxdhn94zs6spq29cl

NIP-05 Address

firebreathingduck_at_social.vivaldi.net@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsyt22hfrpfr0zdsqs3ur4gw4nfjwcea5x0shzvr2h4prxmej63gdgprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqyxhwumn8ghj77tpvf6jumt96vpza9

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

yabu.me

nostr.now

Author Public Key

npub1gk54wjxzjx7ymqpprc82satxnya3nmgvlpwycx402zxdhn94zs6spq29cl

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Last Notes

2026-10-02 02:13:42 UTC

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Someone in Eugene city government sat down and thought, "Oh damn, once we release this information we're going to be sued for tens of millions. Let's try to stockpile some cash before that happens."

2026-09-08 13:47:48 UTC

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For cross-system executable format, you're probably referencing Justine Tunney, who is mentioned up-thread.
Tunney also does a lot of LLM work. 🤢
It's a damn shame, because - like many people on Drew's list - she's absolutely brilliant.
Aside from Tunney, I think the list has far more men than women because a lot of the toxicity in FOSS is misogynistic.

2026-08-05 20:57:41 UTC

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Ayn Rand’s free market fantasy is built entirely on this myth: that all of the kings of industry would never, ever lobby or bribe politicians.
It’s ludicrous blindness.
If Rand’s fictional hero John Galt was alive today, trying to build a business, he would be bought out or sued into oblivion by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, or Larry Ellison.
There’s no free market anywhere where men like Galt could ever thrive. The same minimalist corporate governance that’s supposed to pave the road for Galt to succeed also lets the robber barons buy all of the politicians they want and crush ethical competitors.

2026-08-05 13:46:47 UTC

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For anyone that hasn’t caught on yet: the Trump Administration has been flip-flopping on “A peace deal is imminent” and “We’re escalating our attacks” because they’re committing publicly documented insider training on oil stocks before each announcement.

2026-07-01 14:04:35 UTC

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Thank you for answering! I love your posts about rats. I think it's critical people see them as tremendously lovable, but not to be adopted on a whim.
Usually my daughter will put a favorite treat, often a dab of a vegan yogurt of some kind, on a spoon and hold it just out of reach with her right hand, so the rats have to climb onto the left hand to get it. Eventually they are comfortable just climbing right onto her hand, but it's a slow process.

2026-07-01 13:55:40 UTC

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One of my kids has rats. So much work, but unbelievably cute.
It takes her months to get her adoptees comfortable with being petted like you depict here in the video. She finds that the second most frustrating part of ownership. (The most frustrating part is their short lifespans.)

2026-06-11 18:45:41 UTC

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I'm Gen X. My two daughters are autistic, and their lives have been hard.
The autistic women my age had childhoods I wouldn't wish on anyone. I can't imagine what neurodivergent children in older generations suffered through.

2026-05-15 02:55:21 UTC

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Aw damn, we had to euthanize the last of my daughter's three rats yesterday. 😢
If the adorable little things lived longer, I would call them the best choice for pets, ever. But they're adorable, perfect little heartbreakers.

2025-12-26 21:37:28 UTC

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I love pluralistic's idea here, but I'm worried that world leaders will be too afraid to seize this golden goose for years.
I desperately hope I'm wrong, and after one or two bold leaders take the initiative, the others see the benefits and follow suit.

2025-12-18 23:31:15 UTC

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Are you thinking of "The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." ?
Politifact says that one is a hoax. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/mar/27/viral-image/no-joseph-stalin-didnt-say-statement-about-electio/

2025-10-22 16:36:52 UTC

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For all of us that can be helping food charities, we should. I'm already giving a modest amount, I'll see what I can do to increase it.
As for cheap food, as long as you have a place to cook and pots and utensils: about three times a month I make a few pounds of black beans, a few pounds of lentils, and a few pounds of jasmine rice (we like it better than other rice variants). Mix with a lot of onion powder, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and whatever other spices you have handy.
I haven't found anything cheaper that gives an equivalent amount of protein, or leaves you feeling as full after meals.
You can add cooked veggies or meats if you want (I'm a vegan, I don't add meat). But it's good enough without it.
If you think it sounds boring as hell, it just means you haven't added enough spices 😁

2025-09-25 17:30:56 UTC

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I used to believe that, but I don't any more. Here's an excellent and altogether depressing discussion of the topic: https://theferrett.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-persuadable-spectator
Edit: to be clear, I think you're absolutely right that a lot of people are led into bigotry because of economic insecurity. I'm just not convinced they can be led out by compassion and reasoned discussion. I spent twenty years trying to convince some family members and dear friends that immigrants and Muslims aren't evil, and then gave up.

2025-09-25 14:46:04 UTC

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Since when have bigots ever permitted facts and logic to influence their hatred?

2025-09-18 14:26:32 UTC

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Thank you! I had seen the name GrapheneOS before, but I had not taken the time to research it. Now I will.
Unfortunately I don't have any of the supported devices.

2025-09-17 19:52:05 UTC

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What operating system do you use?
I'm off Big Tech for many things - though not as many as I'd like - but I still have Android. 😔

2025-08-16 18:52:59 UTC

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I'm just some idiot making wild predictions, don't give me any credence. But here it is:
I've been convinced by Ed Zitron's research and writings that we're in a colossal AI bubble that's going to collapse.
I think that collapse is going to hit, and a lot of people with large AI investments are going to switch to crypto. So I expect the AI collapse to trigger a crypto value spike.
Then I expect crypto to collapse.

2025-08-05 11:47:54 UTC

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Respectfully, you have your order backwards. The Jewish people were under 6% of the population of what's now Israel before World War 1, and crucially there was no antisemitic violence. Muslims and Jews existed in peace.
Then after 1917 and the Balfour Declaration, the British started slowly driving Palestinians off land they had lived on for *centuries*, even *milennia*, and giving it to Jewish immigrants.
Then in 1948 the UN unilaterally gave half of the land in the country to the Jewish settlers and the Israelis violently displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians without compensation.
That's what caused the spike in Palestinian antisemitism that exists to this day. They lost hundreds of thousands of homes and have been second class citizens in their home country from then until now.
And now? The IDF has killed a hundred thousand people outright and starved to death tens of thousands more. Do you think the Palestinians will ever forgive that? Would you forgive if invaders did that to you and your neighbors in your country?

2025-08-03 12:42:53 UTC

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I'm a third of the way through his book The Hundred Years' War on Palestine right now.

2025-07-16 21:48:15 UTC

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I've posted this elsewhere, but I think the most plausible explanation is this:
Trump planned to remove references to himself and release the rest of Epstein's list. Some of the other pedophiles on the list obtained a complete copy, and told Trump that if he releases a redacted version that implicates them, they'll release the original to bring him down with them.
I'm open to other possibilities, but this one seems most likely to fit the facts we have available.
I will note that a lot of prominent Democrats (or oligarchs that own Democrats) must be on the list, too, or else Biden would have released it.

2025-02-22 13:43:21 UTC

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Thank you so much. I admit that does make me nervous. And while Tuta's *client* code is open source, I don't know how many qualified independent cryptographers have checked it. Their website lists a security audit, but it was from 2013.
But I'm not aware of better options. I could use PGP with any email service, but none of my recipients use it.

2025-02-22 01:30:49 UTC

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> I had thought there was some ideological issue with tuta, as well
Oh no! If anyone is aware of problems, please let me know. I'll feel like a buffoon for not doing enough research before choosing a landing spot from Proton. But I would rather be informed than not.

2025-02-21 22:10:16 UTC

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I switched from Proton to Tuta because of the Proton CEO's comments. It's frustrating, because I had prepaid for two years of Proton in October. But I don't regret the choice.
Tuta has been fine so far, and I've been using it with my domain.
I have been getting slightly more spam than before, but I've had the domain for seven years so I don't know if that's a problem with Tuta or just an account age issue.
I also run an email server for myself using the mailinabox.email software. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but then ongoing maintenance isn't bad.

2025-01-15 16:21:31 UTC

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If the rest of the world is extraordinarily lucky, the EU will realize the problem with X/Twitter and Meta is less specifically about Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and more about billionaire ownership of massive social networks.
The solution is to fund ActivityPub projects, or other federated social network equivalents. With no single owner (and no equally bad small owner cabal), nobody can subvert the entire social network into a propaganda machine.

2024-12-04 17:57:25 UTC

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Not all heroes wear capes.

2024-11-29 20:19:11 UTC

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I eat vegan most of the time. A childhood favorite meal of mine was beef stew, and when I try to make something similar substituting beans for beef, it's just painfully bland.
My easiest way to consume beans is salads - a large portion of beans turns a salad from a side dish into a filling entree. If I'm really in a hurry for a meal or out of salad vegetables, I'll just heat beans up and dump barbecue sauce on them.
Ten or twenty years ago, the vegan meat substitutes were, in my not so humble opinion, inedible. Now, some of them are delicious. But to my immense frustration, they're costly. If a product's packaging states, "made with 87% less water and 92% less land than an equivalent amount of beef", then why does it cost more than premium ground beef?

2024-11-29 12:04:05 UTC

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Awesome, thank you. I want to cook a larger variety of foods than I do, but for some reason I find trying unfamiliar recipes physically and emotionally exhausting. I don't know why.
I like bean soups, but most of my attempts at bean-heavy soups have been bland even if I dumped an obscene amount of spices into them.
I should look up homemade bean burger recipes, thanks for the idea.

2024-11-27 20:36:21 UTC

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So what beans and rice dishes are you making? I like legumes and rice, but I'm not fond of curry flavors so my flavor options are limited.
I'm sorry your budget will be limited. The modern era sucks.

2024-11-06 21:49:14 UTC

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Signal has, as far as this non-infosec professional understands it, the best end-to-end encryption in the world. But accounts require phone numbers and all communication goes through their servers.
So Signal never knows what you say, but they know when you say it, and who you say it too.
As far as I understand it - again, not an expert - Session is better. Session uses Signal's encryption algorithm but TOR's routing, so it's harder to track when you use it and impossible to track who you say it to.

2024-10-31 17:52:05 UTC

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Again, I voted for Harris (by mail), and Biden, and Clinton, and Obama, and Kerry, and Gore.
But I absolutely do not trust any claims that Harris will do better with respect to the Palestinian people. The timing is suspect - the Biden Administration has been sending weapons as recently as September. Now that the Palestinian genocide issue might affect the election, suddenly the people defending Israel against UN Security Council resolutions, pushing for censorship of anti-IDF media, and sending 17.9 billion in military aid for the purpose of slaughtering Palestinians suddenly grew a conscience? Nonsense. Absolute nonsense.
I would absolutely love to be wrong. It would be the best thing that happened in the world in the past decade if Biden or Harris follow through and pressure Israel to stop. If it happens, I will be celebrating from the rooftops - and voting for Harris again next time. You have my word (for what that's worth).
But I'm 90% sure Biden and Harris will give speeches about humanitarian concerns and then send Israel more weapons.

2024-10-30 22:55:43 UTC

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Before I continue, I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden in 2020, and Harris by mail this year. I haven't been ignorant enough to vote Republican since the 1990s, and I'll never make that mistake again.
The centrist rage against third parties is unfair. Our enemies are the people supporting Trump, not the people voting third party. "You're either with us, or you're against us!" is exactly the kind of false dichotomy fascists use.
If Harris loses, it will be because the Biden Administration would literally - literally - rather support the Palestinian genocide than improve their odds of beating Trump. (And before anyone else says "Trump would make the genocide worse!" - "The other guy would commit genocide too!" is not a valid argument.)

2024-10-30 20:06:48 UTC

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That's awesome. (No sarcasm.)
Don't let anyone put you in a box, including weird randos (ahem 😆 ). You're a woman.

2024-09-30 20:50:22 UTC

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Because unless society gets dramatically different than it is now, these are all things they will have to manage. And if they trust other people to manage them instead, they're likely to get ripped off.
I would add that a basic understanding of the mathematics of gambling would be good, too. That might reduce, however slightly, the number of hopeless gambling addicts.

2024-09-29 16:04:25 UTC

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The math we should be teaching kids is budgets, loan payments, investments, home and car buying, and taxes.
I think there's a reason our schools don't teach kids those things in detail. Kids educated on those topics would be more likely to radicalize when they understand in detail how terrible their long term financial prospects are.
And for the record, I have a bachelor of science in math.