Discussion

On a totally related note, if you're looking to get into coding or fine tune your skills I'm currently able to take on a few more people/small groups teaching web programming (frontend and backend), basic game development with #godot, or narrative game creation for non-coders. I've got enough experience with the UK school system I can also help you present evidence to the local authority for home educators.

I've started doing some mentoring with general coding skills as well as the online VisualInk courses, so to avoid any privacy concerns (waves at current world situation) we now have a private code server where mentees can share their code (using #forgejo).

Given I now have the server, it also makes sense to start moving the rest of my open source code there. The first public repository? VisualInk itself: code.mavnn.eu/mavnn/VisualInk

@[email protected] I'd be more worried by them specifying natural potatoes. Unnatural potato​ crisps sound like something from, well, a @[email protected] novel.

@[email protected] @[email protected] does "reminding myself sternly not to build a project management tool every ten minutes" count? I'm not even completely joking.

More helpfully, org mode in emacs hits the best balance point so far for personal projects, but it is still very hit and miss how successfully I use it​

@[email protected] @[email protected] ​it's a really deep rabbit hole - rgb is actually a terrible way of representing colours even at the basic level of being able to try and define all visible colours (see colour spaces en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_...) and that's before you even get to things like how different pigments change in different ambient light vs how projected colours are perceived in different brightness of light or how the texture of your paper changes the apparent ink colour...

@[email protected] @[email protected] it also (confusingly) depends on who is quoting you how. If you see a post from someone on an instance that doesn't support quoting who has pasted a link to your post manually, you might just be seeing your instances preview of the link with the same ui - but because it's not a quote I don't think it triggers any notifications. ​

Things that should have been an #adhd tip off, part 3478: realising most people probably don't habitually check their sponge is wet as they leave the shower because of how often they forget to wash themselves inbetween the 'getting wet' and 'getting dry' parts of showering

@[email protected] @[email protected] ah, that moment when you're grateful to have had something clarified so perfectly, while also being deeply upset by your newly deepened understanding of certain part events... ​

@[email protected] I have yes - like ​@[email protected] I was commenting on them that I wouldn't be able to give the information they wanted even if I decided it was worth doing so.

It's just... so far I was kind of assuming pride and stupidity, the idea that America is so important everybody will put up with the crap and be grateful for it. But this is tipping me towards "I don't care how stupid you are, surely you wouldn't do this unless people not coming was the point, not just a side effect"

@[email protected] Are they... deliberately trying to keep people away? This almost feels like an attempt to isolate the US on purpose rather than just offending everybody and assuming you're so important it won't matter. Which I suppose could be the next step in an authoritarian take over, but it seems at odds with the vast narcissism displayed so far.

@[email protected] Dang. I was about to say that cider was available this side of the pond (or at least something very similar to some cider I was given in Seattle), and then I realized that the producer I was thinking of is UK based. And, well, Brexit.​

But if you're ever in the UK for any reason, Copella pressed apple juice might be worth trying.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] This isn't a boast about my amazing skills, I'm not even primarily a front end developer. ​I just built a website and only added the features it needed to do its job.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I've recently finished building a website which is a full coding environment with a built in game runner. Because it exists for running coding courses I didn't try to optimise​ for size or loading speed, but according to resent stats I saw it is still barely a bigger download than the average size of most landing pages and because it has no ads it feels snappy even though it's served from a Raspberry Pi in my home office. There's really no excuse for the slowness of most websites.

@[email protected] @[email protected] ​it doesn't just look dangerous, it looks actually impossible (legally) for many of us if that goes through. I don't have access to all of the information they're asking for even if I did want to give it to them (which I don't).

@[email protected] and @[email protected] (posts infrequently but normally with links to longer articles) might be of interest

@[email protected] @[email protected]

I'm not saying we shouldn't make things better, and I'm not saying there aren't a lot of low hanging purely technical fruit we shouldn't try and improve (I'm looking at you, most package repositories for most languages) but its worth remembering that improving things for everybody has to include everybody actually being able to use the improvements.

Most people either need to pick a level of trust and use a device as it is, or not use the tech. This isn't an elitism argument; I know something about software but if it comes to medical or legal matters, I'm in that same boat. Yes, we can educate people about the threat vectors they don't understand exist if and when they're relevant, but trying to make individuals responsible for the security of their mobile phones via verifying their software stack is like making me responsible for the safety of the drinking water coming out of my tap.

Watching @[email protected] post about trust in computing and being reminded just how little most of "us" (developers, open source advocates, even just anyone with a senior administrative job) understand the amount we've learned about tech over the years. No, people aren't going to check the hash of their downloaded open source binary blob. You don't because you're lazy, or you trust the mirror server you got it from. Most people don't because they don't know there is a binary blob, and you're about 3 layers of understanding they don't want and shouldn't need away from even telling them it exists.

@[email protected] @[email protected] ​In this time of "this is not a both sides issue, stop it" Card is a refreshing reminder of a simpler age where I could look at someone's views and go: "you know what, I disagree, and I think that your views are problematic in ways you aren't seeing, but I can respect both you and the thought you've put into them."

(this assumes that I haven't missed anything personally reprehensible about Card, in which case I'll just sigh and go back to my doom scrolling)

@[email protected] thanks! I'm aware you didn't mean it that way, but... triggers be triggers, and I guessed you'd want to know 🤷‍♂️​