@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

The backlash when there's progress part is undoubtably real; I saw at least a couple of people who were nominally egalitarian just flat out refuse to believe that #metoo was real, for example. And when someone points out to the meeting chair that they have asked the only non-male person to take the minutes again they basically have the choice of deciding they want to change or just deciding that maybe "the women" were really always the problem after all. Doesn't stop the pushback grossing me out though!

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] about the age range thing: I hope that's true. I'm also in a smallish town in Italy, so gender related social dynamics have a bunch of other factors playing in.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I think there is some of that, but honestly I think the reality is a lot more complex than a single chart (or my initial exasperated comment). People feeling 'allowed to say what they really think' is a thing, but so is people changing opinion, even quite fast, and not having the self awareness to notice. We all tend to assume we've always been like we are now, and a lot of people don't challenge the assumption.

@[email protected] @[email protected] As a man, can I just say... W. T. A. F?

My 18 year old son complains regularly about the attitudes of his cohort but I was hoping that was more along the lines of "I know it's bad, but at least it's better than it used to be" rather than straight up "you're right, and it's getting worse"

Turns out the standard drag and drop for controls in #godot is really well thought out and nicely implemented, which makes it a pity that the first several pages of hits I got when searching for the docs were about hand implementing your own with the physics engine. Which, if dragging objects that interact with the game world is actually part of your gameplay fair enough - but I don't think that's what a lot of the tutorial authors were actually thinking about.

Also, it really does feel that internet search is much less of a solved problem than it was ten years ago.

Random shout out to @scottmccloud.bsky.social@bsk... for his fantastic Understanding Comics book, which despite me having the drawing skills of a wet haddock is still one of the most practically useful introductions to visual communication I've ever read. Hugely recommended, I've been coming back to it for many years now.

I'll be referencing it repeatedly in introduction to creating digital assets for #visualnovel course I'm putting together for next half term. #gamedev

@[email protected] @[email protected] Probably doesn't really need saying that they were a founder who had just received funding for an AI start up.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I once heard someone say straight faced that they were excited to see 'the beginnings of Accelerando coming true' (exact wording might be incorrect, it was a couple of years ago). I was... surprised? Baffled? I felt something, at least. And it wasn't excited.

@[email protected] @[email protected] yeah, for better or worse my accent is pretty Queen's (King's?) English. I have ample experience of being told I sound posh from my time living in the Midlands! So not that similar in the vowel sounds between the two. Brains are weird though - in writing this post out it has occurred to me I've made the typo both touch typing with a Dvorak keyboard and using a swiping keyboard on my phone and now it makes even less sense.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I have typed 'good' instead of 'code' with reasonable frequency over the course of years and I have no idea why. I don't associate them as concepts, they don't sound the same, they don't repeat letters in the same places. Just my fingers have decided that's how 'code' is typed.

Putting together a grant proposal where a lot of the point is making the end result easy to deploy, easy to backup, and fool inexperience proof to upgrade and it is hard to hit the balance between 'the actual functionality is this super straight forward thing' and 'the point of funding it would be to make using this thing super straight forward' without the whole word count becoming either implementation details or vague fluff unrelated to the actual idea.

Ironically, I could put together the whole thing much more easily as a SaaS product running on servers I control than as a project people can run for themselves, but when the point of the project is to allow you to keep control of your own data that doesn't really help anyone.

@[email protected] @[email protected] The ships in the Lensmen books (the series the name Triplanetary comes from) are described as huge metallic spheres for the heavier ships ("maulers") and teardrop shaped for the faster classes. So - sounds about right.

@[email protected] Write once, run anywhere

@[email protected] The lights and shutters in my house are triggered via the OpenWebNet protocol which is controlled by a single company, and is a bus protocol not designed to be exposed on the web. I do access it via a tcp gateway but that's just to get the raw bus messages on and off the physical bus wiring, so even net is a stretch. I think they just saw Microsoft call something .NET and went "why didn't we think of that first?"

@[email protected] I was very bemused the first time I applied to an IT company over 20 years ago when the first question was whether I could whiteboard code how I'd check if a word was a palindrome in the language of my choice. Afterwards the interviewer apologised but said that it allowed him to eliminate nearly half of the applicants who made it to interview (i.e. had CVs that looked fine). I can only imagine how much worse that is getting in our brave new world of today.

In this time of the world being a pretty heavy place I wanted to take a moment out to suggest following feeds with a regular pulse of things that are just beautiful, like @[email protected] (fine art/cover art) or @[email protected] (stunning pictures of birds in nature).

Sometimes it is really what you need in the middle of your feed to keep the mental health, er, healthy. The apple a day of the brain.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I can also see a fairly credible world in which Microsoft decides the best possible business plan at this point is to pretend the last fifteen years never happened and hit reset.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Careful though, it probably goes both ways. I could see smorgasbord.py getting quite large quite quickly.

@[email protected] Very nice. Reminds me of Ed Alleyne-Johnson, who've I've known about and been listening to for decades but only today noticed was also the violinist for New Model Army at their peak. Some of his solo busking tracks are spectacular (e.g. youtube.com/watch?v=vizUjKLv... )

Some of the loopstation beatbox is great, but some gets a bit too 'crowded' for my taste (as does some of the competitive skill based beatboxing, honestly). One of the things I love about the Jo Quail track you posted, and Ed, and Wing, is how the skill underpins a love of the actual music. I have the same problem with some jazz, that it starts bleeding from music into technical demo.

Serendipitously, Wing actually ranted about the same thing at length recently in a video where he breakdown how he judged submissions for this years beatbox 'world championship' if you wanted some philisophy in a pre-selected beatbox smorgasbord. youtube.com/watch?v=XKkYLmyT...

@[email protected] That is quite the scenary! For the beatboxing deep dive I won't point you at other stuff by Wing as that's just a case of clicking on his channel, but I don't know how obvious it is that he's also part of a group who do some pretty impressive bits and pieces: youtube.com/channel/UCWuLbEA...