Michael Newton (@mavnn)

Michael Newton

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Christian, husband, dad, coder, trainer, speaker, rpg geek, adhd

blog.mavnn.eu

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605 posts 197 followers 398 following Joined Nov 2025

Michael Newton boosted

azett

@[email protected] · last month

Fediverse, can you please help me?
In family matters, I'm searching for Edward J. Garth.

Most likely US soldier stationed in Germany at the end of / after WWII.
Picture taken by a Wiesbaden photo studio, unknown date. Signature: "Will You Remember Edward J Garth".

Does anyone know this man? His heritage? His relatives?

Any hint, any boost (esp. to US), any forwarding to helpful people is highly appreciated. DM me anytime!

Thank you folks ❤️

#genealogy #helpneeded #fedipower

Old portrait of a young man in uniform (without any visible badges). The handwritten signature reads: "Will You Remember Edward J Garth"

Alois Mahdal

@[email protected] · last month

@mavnn "log in?"

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

@[email protected] hmm. Thank you for letting me know, looks like Bonfire and Mastodon handling hashtag links differently. I'll have to see what I can do about that.

Ellyse

@[email protected] · last month

sometimes i wish i can make a commit "intent", like, a pre-commit message saying what im trying to do. i have their super weird experience where once i'm done with my commit, i flush all memory of what i'm doing and have to look at diffs to remember. you'd think i was making large commits, but nope. just me?

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

@[email protected] I think this is actually how jujutsu is designed to be used github.com/jj-vcs/jj (and it can be used in existing git repositories). This isn't a recommendation, I haven't tried it myself yet, but I found the suggested workflow interesting partly for the reason you state ("have I actually done what I meant to do? What did I mean to do?"), and partly for the next morning issue ("I know I was in the middle of something yesterday...")

GitHub

GitHub - jj-vcs/jj: A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful

A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful - jj-vcs/jj

Michael Newton boosted

Martin Pigeon

@[email protected] · last month

The indispensable colleagues at @corporateeurope looked in detail at how the drive for "simplification" (destruction of EU legal protections for nature and workers) that has been storming through Brussels for the past year happened. Their report is out.

"This is what corporate capture looks like — and now it's documented. If you needed proof that corporate capture is real, structured, and operating at industrial scale in Brussels right now, here it is."

https://corporateeurope.org/en/2026/04/what-corporate-capture-looks

Cartoon by US cartoonist Khalil Bendib entitled "The EU Deregulation Machine". Enthusiastic corporate lobbyists feed with parcels an ominous, complicated machine perched on a cliff. The machine emits smoke through an old chimney, and musical notes through a flute. A very long treadmill represents the machine's tongue, and the parcels put on it by the lobbyists enter its enormous, gaping mouth from which two articulated mechanical arms are protruding to seize the parcels. The machine processes these parcels and, through another, smaller mouth, spits buses in the void. The caption says "omnibuses to nowhere", by the name of the legal texts adopted in the EU under the pretext of simplification and competitiveness. Ursula von der Leyen, the current President of the European Commission, is standing atop the machine, smiling, and welcomes the parcels with a welcoming gesture from her hands. Bird silhouettes in the distance, perhaps vultures, are on their way around a pale yellow sun.

Corporate Europe Observatory

This is what corporate capture looks like! | Corporate Europe Observatory

Where do the EU deregulation laws come from? From extensive talks between the European Commission and business groups, often in opaque new types of dialogue, according to the report “This is what corporate capture looks like!”

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

@[email protected] not making IP6 at least partially backwards compatible, or at the very least presenting a visually 'compatible' representation, has got to be one of the largest self owns in computing standards history. @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

Instant world building via cultural idioms.

"Today is a good day to..." #worldbuilding #creativewriting

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

"... change my mind"

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

Instant world building via cultural idioms.

"Today is a good day to..." #worldbuilding #creativewriting

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

chaos.social/users/weirdunit...

I've worked with enough Polish developers that I can probably research a reasonable estimate of this for several different projects 😀

abadidea

@[email protected] · last month

To clear up a mutual point of confusion:

To the USA: most other countries don’t sell pizza by the slice because their whole pizzas are all personal sized

To others, especially Europe: Americans sell and request pizza by the slice because the typical American whole pizza is over twice the size of a European one and is meant to be shared by the whole table

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

@[email protected] Italy also has a bonus extra option of take away pizza 'by the cut' (al taglio) which you order by weight - often in hectogram units. So you order 'tre etti' (three hundred grams) and the guy cuts a slice of the right size off a huge rectangular pizza, generally by eye, and generally very accurately. Great for much confusion in shops not used to dealing with tourists. Also genuinely convenient for ordering the amount of food you actually want/need.

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

ec.social-network.europa.eu/...

This is genuinely really good news; Erasmus has been such a positive life changing events for many people I know and the UK dropping out of it was one of many tragedies from Brexit.

Robert W. Gehl

@[email protected] · last month

@mavnn it's pretty much all wifi hotspots at Goldsmiths. They seem very much set up to block a bunch of things. I'm accessing all of it through the Tor browser now....

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

@[email protected] Yeah, there was a craze at one point in the uk of trying to configure hotspots to do all kinds of weird things, like try and take over your DNS, or prevent you from 'abusing the service' by using streaming services or - evil of evils - VPNs. You might be downloading anything over that VPN! I even once had one try and ask me to accept a certificate, presumably so it could man in the middle me to make sure I was following the hotspot usage policy or something.
Given that most coffee shops don't refit their wifi hotspots very often, a lot of them are still around.

Robert W. Gehl

@[email protected] · last month

update: was able to connect to Tor. It took a while, though.

Proton and my 2FA both show "TLS errors," as if the certs aren't trusted by the ISP.

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

@[email protected] Are you using a wifi hotspot somewhere? They're often configured really badly in the UK in my experience. If you're using mobile, that sounds stranger.

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

@[email protected] He was one of the first people to point out that's not really how humans work; 'high potential'/'profoundly gifted' humans don't think like everybody else more quickly, way instead tend to have more bandwidth, make more connections, make intuitive and emotional jumps that they post-hoc justify afterwards - all the things you're saying. Just with some scientific papers to wave in the face of professionals and teachers who are determined to double down on 'that child can't be bright, they aren't perfectly behaved!'.

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

@[email protected] (insert rant here about people needing to justify their lived experience with 'published papers' to actually be listened to)

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

@[email protected] I think that was a large part of his point - he was writing in the 70s so that was reasonably radical and it's not like there aren't still a lot of misconceptions about 'giftedness' (such a terrible term, as you say). I've seen his work and the follow on work that built on it (Silverman etc) used to push back against the idea of the 'gifted genius', mature beyond their years, striding forwards with logical certainity because being intelligent obviously means 'being able to do more of the same thing overbody else can.'

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

abadidea

@[email protected] · last month

I have an elderly neighbor; I always speak to her in Dutch (her native language, to be clear) and she always answers me in English.

I think she just noticed, after two years, that I can speak Dutch 😅

Michael Newton

@mavnn · last month

@[email protected] I love watching that happen! My mum once went through the whole process of ordering a meal in a kebab shop in the UK speaking Turkish (which is what the staff were using talking to each other). He not only replied in English, but then asked his co-worker why they'd complimented an English speaker on their Turkish...

Michael Newton boosted

Emelia 👸🏻

@[email protected] · last month

RE: https://mastodon.social/@fediversereport/116409387146814121

A massive thanks to @laurenshof for actually attributing FediMod FIRES to me in his coverage. It means a lot to receive credit for my work!