Olivier Forget @teleclimber@social.tchncs.de

@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

honestly, none of this person's complaints about the (A)GPL sound valid

"they're too long"
and basically the most clear licenses because of that

"i can't change them"
that prevents anyone having to dig through *two* "overly long" licenses to find the differences

"they define the word freedom"
is that better than *not* defining their exact goals?

"this reads like a manifesto against commercial software"
if you knew the depths of microsoft's patent war you'd want one.

@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

@alcinnz

I like the "DNS over wikipedia" concept

it only really works for "notable" sites but it's definitely a start

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.

@alcinnz. "Why not use SVG for everything"

Unsure if genius or madness.

(SVG rather than HTML for Web content.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23512333

aaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE RUNS FUCKING JAVASCRIPT

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

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

So a work colleague sent out an invite over Google Calendar to a videoconference hosted on our company Jitsi server yesterday, and because Google is "smart" they decided to add prominent links to *its own service* to the invite...as in more prominent than the actual link to our Jitsi server that we were using. It did so without asking permission or prior warning.

After the customer sat in an empty Google meeting for 10 minutes we phoned directly to direct him to the proper meeting...

What features or aspects of Mastodon do you like the most, and what do you like the least?

Re our discussion from yesterday.
From Nathaniel Tapley:
"It's only tear gas if it comes from the Têar region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling white supremacy."