Airgoa @airgoa@qoto.org

@alex Funny, I was thinking about this yesterday without knowing about this anniversary. It's a pretty big deal.

@skeptronus Hello!

@berkes They also use actual telephones to communicate with server computers, right? Using touch tones? That's the big one I remember.

@berkes I remember reading Shockwave Rider a long time ago after it was often listed as a classic, and it's fascinating how he got a lot of the tech quite wrong but the social stuff is prescient.

@victorhck The save icon should be a diskette precisely because the people who grew up without ever using a diskette, now see it as the international symbol for "save file."

It's perfect iconography, unmarred by overly precise or vague metaphors. Today it literally just means "save file" and those old enough to remember using floppy disks can just enjoy the joke.

The down arrow tends to mean "download" which is appropriate if the file is being... downloaded. A floppy with a down arrow is an interesting compromise for "save." But it still suggests the data is changing devices.

@crazypython Sounds intriguing!

@thor One day we'll have actual robots doing that work, who won't get bored so they'll sound LESS robotic

@thor She probably does so many calls like that every day she FEELS like a robot

@crazypython It's kind of the nature of indie communities, it seems. Like how people use Linux for the geeky independent right to have choice and control, and so it's hard to get people to just rally behind one distro.

It's always "oh I like X and Y but neither has perfectly what I like so I'll combine them into Z distro."

Geekiness is about being so into a topic you get super fussy about it, and also love tinkering with it. And it's kind of a bit self-centered in the sense of caring about your own pet favourite features and interface over compromising for what the majority wants.

In contrast, the motivations of proprietary software are always largely external, since success is measured by how many other people use it and how much they like it, measured in dollars paid.

And you also see less fragmentation because if proprietary competition is strong enough, few new players will bother entering the market.

After many years watching this, I don't know how much it can be changed, but it does mean free software needs good leadership that cares about new user adoption.

@deavmi@mstdn.io Sup! Hmm I guess in older dialects of English that would mean: eat!

@vertigo @Elizafox There's so much complexity to the Neanderthal story though. For one thing we kind of merged. Humans naturally spread much more quickly and were comparatively hyper social, so to some degree we might have just overwhelmed them by spreading and procreating both with and around them.

Seems like in a fight we'd have beat them mostly the way we also hunted all the megafauna to extinction: by coordinating and overwhelming them in bigger groups. They were good in a small fight but early homo sapiens were truly made for *war*.

Still I really wonder to what degree the two groups fought. I keep saying "we" to mean the early homo sapiens but in reality like most modern humans I'm also some part Neanderthal.

@gopiandcode @p @nerdman @lain @nosleep @sjw @rin @lanodan @Dave I think of it in the opposite way, like, if you've never programmed for fun, wtf are you choosing it as a profession for? I remember being shocked to learn that a ton of people in undergrad comp sci had never coded before. How do you even know you like this then?

Ideally kids should get exposed to it in elementary school. But then I knew a guy who did a whole other degree, came back and did a comp sci degree, and loved it. Never programmed before that.

I get that if you're working long hours coding full time you might mostly devote your free time to other things. But if you've never had joy in it, for fun, coding is not your calling.

@thor It's crazy how as a result of the term black being gradually adopted as "correct" in the US instead of other older terms, it brought into the dynamic all kinds of negative associations built into the English language with the word black.

It's not surprising that when Britain was all Nordic peoples, much like Norway, there were negative associations with the word black because of how early peoples are afraid of the dark (rightly so) and actual blackness (not browner skin tones obviously) gets connected with less pleasant things in nature, like being burnt, getting dirty, mold, rot...

Of course in some cultures black has the positive associations, like in China and some other cultures, where black represents strength and white is death. That's actually pretty common, and it also seems likely that the Chinese cultivated that thinking because they had ink writing on paper so early.

When you're writing black on white, it's easy to see the black as the living, strong good part and the white as the dead, inert, empty part.

But either way, the choice to embrace calling humans black and white was clearly a bad one from the start. Black and white have such embedded cultural associations in English with bad and good that can't simply be shaken: blackballed, blacklisted, pure as snow, white night, black heart, the list goes on and on.

I really don't know how we can solve that, and it would be amazing if Norwegians could skip that whole mistake to begin with.

@thor That's just because also, every chat system sucks at least partially.

I looked hard for one chat app to rule them all, which I could then pressure all my friends to adopt (ha) but all of them had a dealbreaker where it just wasn't justified to switch or couldn't work for some people.

And usually people try to solve this by jist creating yet another chat app with a major flaw.