Nel @Navertal@schelling.pt

Up until today I used The Great Suspender as a way to keep all my tabs from leeching up my RAM. Got a message saying that the extension has been disabled after being recognized as malicious. Something sordid is happening there that I intend to look into after my work for the day lets out: https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1263

“I heard in a talk today that Agile and Extreme Programming have shown that refactoring and tests allow us to make change with zero impact.

I never knew that.

I still do not know that.”

If Rich Hickey had a regular stand-up comedy compsci lecture hour, I would watch it https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

@srs @jdp Oh, another thought! It's interesting to take Signal's sudden adoption boom as a case study in FLOSS adoption and consider its similarities and differences with a platform like Mastodon.

Signal was elevated by preparation and opportunity - good UI and a stable community of dedicated users meets mass disillusionment with WhatsApp. This is/was the time for Mastodon, but setup isn't as simple and social media platforms have more of a "who's on there?" problem than messaging apps.

@srs @jdp But there are also ways that technical differences affect the platforms. Celebrities/influencers are able to amass more followers on Twitter, I think, than they ever could on here, partly due to the feed algorithms and trend summaries. I like that Mastodon isn't an engagement machine, but it may also cap size/slow growth.

Social infrastructure is weird - it's interesting to think about the different effects of construction and social milieu on the growing popularity of a platform.

@srs @jdp I'd say it's more a function of the size and shape of the community than the platform itself. Twitter’s sheer size makes it more “scene-y” than “community-ish” - more activity driven by social current, lower ratio of response-to-likes (I think) - so certain behaviors make more sense there. Here I scan my feed with more interest in writing responses.

Overlaps of interest with mutuals also affect what I say on which platform - my meditation posts all go to Twitter, for instance.

@pareinoia there was an article about the full historical context of both statues a while back which I still think about a lot: https://gregfallis.com/2017/04/14/seriously-the-guy-has-a-point/

@urshanabi @srs was about to write this. The best examples of good-UI FLOSS stuff seems to involve taking cues from industry-developed interfaces, and they do best when they’re contained tools as opposed to multi-purpose platforms. Doesn’t seem impossible, though - Signal’s spaced-repetition PIN system seems innovative in the context of secure messaging, though I might have just missed the precedent.

@pee_zombie I’ve heard this before but have been skeptical about the claim simply because execution introduces so many ways for things to go wrong (things like Gregory Jaczko’s history at the NRC and subsequent writing have kept me leery). Can you say more?

@srs Acting as a Schelling point for weirdos :D Trick is to scratch an itch that can’t be reached by a person’s existing communities, and I think our appropriately named server is getting its legs there. There’s a difference in tone and content between the feed I have on here and on Twitter and I find myself preferring one over the other for certain things.

The thing about tools for posting to Mastodon and Twitter simultaneously is that I sense when a person is just doing that, and it often takes away from the experience of this timeline because a person rarely does that without Mastodon taking an auxiliary role. My home feed is now full of Twitter RTs that have little to no engagement on this platform. I’m just not sure it works that well.

@funkyduffy “oh no they’re here, pretend we’re not home”?

It started as Longfellner system - I went Bb5 to see how they’d respond, the answer is Poorly. They went 3 ... Ke7 instead of exchanging bishops, then moved 4 ...Bd7 in response to 4. Nc3. Kf6 was totally unprompted. I feel a bit bad - I’m not a brilliant strategist, they’re just sort of flailing.

I think I’m about to massacre this poor guy

Am spending the weekend boning up on classes, methods, and ORM for Python, if these are things you’re passionate about I want to talk to you

Turns out that these devices were... not great for you. He hasn’t experienced any serious ill effects from them yet, though. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/when-xrays-were-all-the-rage-a-trip-to-the-shoe-store-was-dangerously-illuminating

Talking to my dad last night I learned that when he was a kid, there were devices in shoe stores that let you see live x-rays of your feet. Whenever he was there he would sneak onto one to watch his toe-bones wiggle until a clerk told him off.

@Connor Oh yeah, this makes sense. It sounds so homogenous to the untrained ear, but of course there’s all this particularity and deep meaning once you zoom in on the right areas.

@StevenFan that’s a reasonable fear, I think. A fair number of the Al and ML researchers I know and trust emphasize its limitations and the need to treat it as a tool within a larger array.

@Connor tell me more!