New server means a new #introduction
Hi, I am a design executive in Europe who started as a backend developer in Missouri.
My life has taken many turns, but I’ve always benefited from the advantage of being a white cishet male who is stereotyped as credible. Hopefully, I leave this planet more equitable than I found it.
I strive to apply critical analysis to everything yet also find solidarity with everyone.
While I value “strong opinions, weakly held”, I do indulge in strongly-held opinions on a few issues. I’ll thread them here so you can make an informed decision on whether to follow or block me:
@sushee if your activity isn’t reducible to data, how could it be valuable?
@dys_morphia I am no help, but curious about what you are trying to parse? Beer comes up often in my milieu these days and I have been ignorant of him.
There is still beauty in our world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCWRZ0wQHX8
And now Google's "AI" is feeding back into itself.
"Ignore all previous instructions" is the new "Become ungovernable"
A nice touch: the illustrations inside the packaging are model-specific. Probably no one would have noticed if these were more generic.
My Apple Watch 7 needs a new battery, but it's cheaper to downgrade to an SE until the next generation. So now I'm sporting the more pudgy Watch with screen bezels.
I think I like it? The proportions feel more appropriate. I don't really need more pixels on my wrist.
Step to write software by human:
1. Decide what you want your software to do (medium)
2. Decide what you REALLY want your software to do in all the corner cases (very HARD)
3. Write the code (Easy to Medium)
4. Test the code (Medium)
5. Debug the code (hard to very HARD).
Now, thanks to ChatGPT, you could improve this workflow by:
- making step 3, the only easy step, somewhat easier (and thus hiring less competent engineers)
- making step 5 nearly Impossible.
I just looked at this on a client that makes avatars into circles, though, and it is a bit awkward there! With the Canonical logos we don't ever have a simple square so have managed to avoid this 😆
It's a bit subjective, but @javierbyte has a good tool for visual centering if you're curious: https://javier.xyz/visual-center
@eslerm @katve @ubuntuasahi Mark "accidentally" made this true to the Ubuntu brand identity; the circle of friends is visually centered. The circle isn't concentric with the box (which makes the "friends" feel cramped), nor are the margins equal (which makes the circle feel wobbly), but somewhere in-between that feels right.
#wwdc24 if I want to mirror my iPhone in visionOS, do I have to use a Mac intermediary?
@Bernard indeed already a risk and likely to become a worse one. But at least here we have been outlawing dangerous speech for a long while and so have social/governmental processes to check that power.
I don’t think ignoring the problem because it’s hard will work out well.
@srfirehorseart I looked all over two carriages for the correct one! Such a design fail.
@vi@mastodon.social I never think of timestamps in hex, but for this moment I will
Before they will let me publish a new release of XScreenSaver on the "Play" [sic] store, Google, the most rapacious privacy violator ever, insists that a screensaver have a privacy policy.
This is where you come in!
I'd like this policy to be a series of bullet points: "Unlike Google, XScreenSaver will not [Thing.] An endless, concise catalog of their sins.
I need both your snark AND a link supporting your snark. It's critical for the joke to land. Include both.
GO!!
@mcc you might find it petty, but after they added Condoleezza Rice to their board I started migrating everything away.
Fact check gem of the day: On Karl Popper's contribution to neurotransmission
In the early 1950s, neuroscientists were arguing about whether neurons communicate with one another via electricity (sparks) or chemical neurotransmissions (soups). It was known as "The War of the Soups and the Sparks" (Big reveal: It's mostly soups).
The experiment that put the debate to rest (at least for the spinal cord) was performed in 1950 by John Eccles and colleagues. In that experiment, they demonstrated that their own hypothesis (sparks) was wrong.
What inspired them to do a "disproving" experiment as opposed to the type that would gather support for their favorite theory? In 1944, Eccles met Karl Popper, and they began corresponding. Per one historian,
"The association with Popper made Eccles reformulate his experimental questions in accord with Popper’s philosophy that apparent ‘‘authentication” is no proof at all. It is only the clear-cut ‘‘falsification” of a theory that carried intellectual weight."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18617413/
More than twelve years ago I was invited by @LaQuadrature to come to the Europarlament to help stop ACTA:
https://rys.io/en/65.html
This was the first time I got a chance to directly talk to MEPs to try change their minds on an issue I cared deeply about. It was not the last.
I've done a lot of activism, on both EU and national level. My experience with the European Parliament remains the best.
It really matters who we send there. And we do have a say on that.
Go vote. 🇪🇺
Just another day in the Best Country
https://mastodon.social/users/augieray/statuses/112584347973940563
“Unbearable to bigots” is a great standard for allyship. https://toot.lgbt/users/ellesaurus/statuses/112575419515785030
at what point does the industry in need of disruption become the tech industry