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
Christian, husband, dad, coder, trainer, speaker, rpg geek, adhd
Michael Newton
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@inthehands one specific thing that triggers majoritized folks in power so deeply is people without the fear that they have
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@grimalkina
Oh wow, I had not even thought about that specific intersection 🤯
@[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...
Michael Newton
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today i'm back to reading this paper by @grimalkina about contest cultures and brilliance traps in software and I'm going to try to live tweet some notes because reading papers is hard
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/2gej5_v2
(1/?)
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Michael Newton
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@grimalkina makes me think of this amazing poem
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Michael Newton
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Replay for the morning crowd:
I have launched a Patreon to do Visible Zork 3, followed by all the rest of the Infocom games. One per month for, well, two or three years, right? There's an associated Discord for game discussion as we run through them.
https://blog.zarfhome.com/2026/01/the-visible-zorker-patreon
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@cstross @mavnn I saw that and thought I need to warn Spousal Unit that it would *not* be a good idea to provide my social media details. And ideally not go to the US on business again. I'm on an Android - I assume the secret police already have whatever access they want to my activity.
Also, I doubt I could even provide all my email addresses. I've used a lot of burner addresses over the years as an anti spam and phishing measure.
@[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"
Why NOBODY with a sense of self-preservation should go to the Winter Olympics: you'd be putting yourself in the gunsights of masked murderthugs:
@[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.
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Things I actually miss about America:
— Halloween
— Waffle House
— Goldfish crackers
— Pumpkin pie
— Apple cider (nonalcoholic)
— the way honey comes in those little bear-shaped bottles
@[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] 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] @[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.
@MichaelOpal @pluralistic The crazy thing is it doesn't take great technical knowledge or effort to make a website fast and accessible. Companies invest a lot of money in things that make their websites slower, harder to use, and more buggy. I benefit financially from their proclivity for complexity, but I would change it in a heartbeat if I could.
@[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.
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I'm British, white, male, aged 60-ish.
Prior to February 2016 I typically visited the USA 3 times a year for up to six weeks.
Since February 2016 I have visited the USA twice in a decade, for a total of 10 days.
Entering the USA as a foreigner, with a Republican POTUS in the White House, *never* felt safe, but under Trump it looks diabolically dangerous. (And to a glance I resemble "one of them": I'm not female or dark-skinned.)
@[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).
@databasecultures I suggest:
@timnitGebru and @alex
@[email protected] and @[email protected] (posts infrequently but normally with links to longer articles) might be of interest
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Michael Newton
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"on the average, we get about two percent efficiency out of schoolbooks as they are today. The future of education, as I see it, will be conducted in the medium of ____ where it should be possible to obtain one hundred percent efficiency"
Wat hoort daar op het streepje?
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Michael Newton
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We are opening an investigation into Grok because we believe that X may have breached the DSA.
We have seen over the last weeks and months antisemitic content, non-consensual deepfakes of women, and child sexual abuse material.
In Europe, no company will make money by violating our fundamental rights.
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Michael Newton
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Build communities. Find people you trust and place more faith in their recommendations. Don't trust anyone who says there's a magical solution here.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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@Fishercat He's disreputable, and I may take them off the list soon on morality grounds, but it's Card's _Ender's Game_ and _Speaker for the Dead_.
@[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)
