Jaycie @jaycie@vulpine.club

If regulation like GDPR was just a hassle with no real wins for user privacy, surveillance companies like Google wouldn't be scrambling to work around it by creating "cohort ids" which can be triangulated to track people down

https://github.com/WICG/floc/issues/100

Friend Camp has about 50 active users and I just noticed we have more than half a million posts here since August 2018! I mean that's 11 a day per person on average but still. That seems wild to me.

Last I checked something like 75% of our posts are unfederated. That's still 125 thousand posts sent to the fediverse. I think local-only posting increases the vitality of community, increasing the volume of overall activity, and contributing more to the fediverse than a less vital instance would.

the joy of discovering cool computer science books in your boyfriend's personal library, the pain of struggling to understand their content (or his enthusiastic explanations of it)

A #programming language often on the receiving end of disparaging remarks is #Fortran. And yet, within the scientific community, Fortran is still very widely used. The majority of supercomputer workload is Fortran code. Without Fortran, no climate modeling or weather forecasts.

The language is under active development (latest spec is 2018) and is now a feature-rich modern language. However, in practice, in terms of features, most scientists write effectively Fortran 77 code. This is not because they are stupid or resist change. It is simply because the Fortran 77 core is a perfectly adequate domain specific language for many scientific domains. (And of course they don't write it in all caps with fixed column width etc, that was how it was done when the source code was encoded on punch cards. Modern Fortran looks in fact quite similar to Ruby or Python.)

i realised that i can just put away projects in progress in large esd-safe bags. ordered some A4 sized bags to put away larger boards yesterday but i can just as easily use them as "project boxes" for a fraction (17c/bag) of the cost!

I joke a lot about NFTs a lot as they are obviously ridiculous. Digital deeds for jpegs, lol. The tech companies putting these together have a nefarious goal that is well beyond a jokey punchline though. We know about youtube algorithms that scan videos and enforce copyright for matched songs/vids. Imagine that happening with memes or photos you grab from the news. You repost that image, and then an algorithm finds it, contacts the NFT owner, and you get charged.

@stokes here you go!

"You have to finish what you start" is the most bullshit lesson and if I ever have kids, may I not saddle them with having to "see through" something that sucks out of some kind of misguided principle. I was forced through all manner of shitty extracurriculars to keep me, I don't know, well-rounded, and I never learned anything except that if it sucks, hit da bricks

You, a barbarian: Primitive, manual, low-tech, dumb, neatherthal light switches.

Me, enlightened:

If you've registered for #railsconf #RailsConf2021 https://railsconf.org then you can now watch my prerecorded talk "How To Get a Project Unstuck" https://railsconf.org/program/sessions#session-1099

random thoughts on gamification in learning (1/2):

both old arcade machines and evil cellphone games are made to exploit your psychology to impulse-pay just one more microtransaction.

arcade games were generally enjoyable, engaging skill games with too much challenge. the evil ones were fair up to a point, then killed you randomly. the good ones were hard but rewarded skill.

in any case the 3rd-world kid approach was universal: never take continues. ever. always restart, a lot of those games I never went beyond stage #2, but they were so enjoyable, you wanted maximum game time per token.

with evil cellphone games it's the opposite, the game hooks you with Skinner reinforcement but it's so boring and slow and unpleasant that you pay to *skip* the game.

punching people on Street Fighter, shooting spacebugs in Galaga is highly pleasurable, you pay to have more of that. Mining ore in random mobile game is a chore and you pay to not do it.

Capitalist profit motive aside, I think of these as good and bad gamification: only the good one gives you a good time. You don't regret time at the arcade.

anyway this is part of why it is a HUGE deal that gay people, and aspects of our personal lives that cishets share openly, are considered inappropriate for children and for public spaces where children are present.

it is a defining nature of our oppression, like that of ableism, that gay people arise in every setting from every background and are largely raised by people who do not share our oppression. and parents have a frightening amount of control over their children.

while it is almost never true of any period in history or in any place that *adults* are truly ignorant of gay people, it is *often* true that for a substantial portion of our childhoods, gay children's only exposure to gay people is threats and dire warnings.

the illusion for gay adults that there are no gay people in the past is relatively incomplete. by contrast, the illusion that there are no gay people, in the past or now, is relatively complete for gay children.

openly gay teachers are life-or-death.

Sketch for Waga
#MastoArt #digitalart #kobold

Wendy Carlos, early prolific synth centric score producer and personal trans hero talking about her Moog Modular for nearly 4 minutes.

Your welcome:
https://youtu.be/4SBDH5uhs4Q