Olivier Forget @teleclimber@social.tchncs.de

The underlying assumptions of Big Tech projects are fundamentally different from those of Small Tech projects.

I am collecting my knowledge on this topic on this page.
https://njoseph.me/mediawiki/SmallTech

^ This is a wiki page and is unfinished by definition.

#bigTech #smallTech #GAFAM

Every name in Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson is a last name. He's literally the antithesis of John William Oliver.

https://waynehale.wordpress.com/2019/09/25/oops/ Imagine being the guy who has to sawzall a hole in the side of the shuttle to let a trapped astronaut out

@lanodan we have the absolute worst standards of any engineering discipline, we have a million poorly educated programmers using toy hammers and orbital lasers to build bridges out of popsicle sticks and children's toys out of refined uranium and everything is on fire and WHY ARE WE OKAY WITH THIS

If I'm measuring it correctly, ActivityPub is a fourth-order abstraction

Don't get me wrong, computers can absolutely help us regain our environmental efficiency. They just *aren't*.

Not as long as we're:
* constantly syncing everything to the cloud,
* expecting same-hour delivery,
* funding our clickbait via surveillance advertising,
* buying a new phone every year,
* using AIs because they're cool rather than useful,
* running bloated software & webpages,
* buying into "big data"
* etc

Computing is environmentally cheap, but it rapidly adds up!

47. Optical Adjustment
In the course of creating visual designs, designers very very often accidentally create optical illusions. This usually *isn't* desirable. Objects the same size appear different sizes. Lines that are meant to be straight look curved. The only way around this is to carefully adjust things by hand until they "look right". This is called "optical adjustment"

A long list of annotation tools: https://beepb00p.xyz/annotating.html

https://baremessages.org

@teleclimber centralized moderation is a proven failure and is just getting worse over time. I like how decentralized platforms like Mastodon are in effect like submarines - you can isolate the broken parts (eg Gab) rather than letting every compartments get flooded.

Personal opinion of a Facebooker who personally would use its products only under duress

60 second demo of cabal's subjective moderation system
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYGm4ImO7-4

Apparently, some people on Hacker News sincerely believe Google's trying to protect people from scams by hiding the URL in the latest Chrome.

And HN supposedly has a somewhat informed audience.

We're doomed.

aaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE RUNS FUCKING JAVASCRIPT

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1270778176617107456

https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/resources/ISIMmanuscript.pdf