coperob @coperob@qoto.org

Any experienced programmer worth their salt will tell you that •producing• code — learning syntax, finding examples, combining them, adding behaviors, adding complexity — is the •easy• part of programming.

The hard part: “How can it break? How will it surprise us? How will it change? Does it •really• accomplish our goal? What •is• our goal? Are we all even imagining the same goal? Do we understand each other? Will the next person to work on this understand it? Should we even build this?”

Folks, if you see someone without obvious scientific credentials interpreting a study with inciting results, be skeptical. Lots of people out there saying bullshit that they literally yanked out of an orifice.

Artwork I made a while ago: A balloon over Jupiter.

Though our inability to search Mastodon for words is occasionally momentarily vexing, I concede my inability to seek out things to anger me is better for my well-being.

I know I am extremely culturally biased but “Silicon Valley Bank” kind of screams “Juicero Pets.com Savings and CryptoLoan” to me.

I was woken up today by a phone call letting me know that due purely to budgeting changes I’ve been let go from my full-time contracting position I just started in January after being laid off in September.

I am a former #Apple #engineer with 15 years of experience making apps for #iOS and #macOS. I also have experience with #Ruby. Available immediately for full time or contract work.

Please boost. #Swift #RubyOnRails

"Let me be blunt: encryption is either broken for everyone, or it works for everyone. There is no way to create a safe backdoor."

@Mer__edith calls the #OnlineSafetyBill what it is, a menace to privacy and a way to impose mass surveillance via our messaging apps.

#privacy #surveillance #e2ee #encryption

A must read 👇

https://signal.org/blog/uk-online-safety-bill/

If the people who write the call center scripts had ANY idea how enraging “I understand that you want to…” is the 45th time they say it…. They’d probably put it in the script more often.

Apple Pundit: The iPad is Doomed: http://beardyguycreative.com/blog/2023/03/10/apple-pundit-the-ipad-is-doomed/

If you see NetNewsWire for Android, or anything other than Mac and iOS, don’t download it — it’s a scam.

https://nnw.ranchero.com/2023/03/09/there-is-no.html

Hello world! Elon Musk picking a twitter fight with Icelandic philanthropist and man of the year 2022 Haraldur Thorleifsson ended up being the final push that we needed, so now we are here on Mastodon. We don't know how any of this works, but follow us for posts on vision science, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, and stupid memes.

Tech industry, please hire more writers. I can happily read docs for 3h and get much more out of them than watching a video for 3h. And while I'm watching the video, I'm making copious notes so that I don't have to watch the video *again* later to refresh my memory. If it was written down in the first place with good indexing I wouldn't have to do that. Video is such a crap way to document things.

I'm posting this partially to acknowledge progress and to thank all who made it happen, but also to encourage those who get discouraged and think that one individual can't change anything big.
In 2018, I received my Census code in the mail. I'm totally blind and had difficulty performing OCR on the code, so I asked the Census Help Line if I could have the code texted to me. They first said that would be fine, but then said they couldn't do it for "security reasons" a standard phrase that is often used to fob people off.
After I issued a media release, being interviewed by several. media organisations and the Minister being asked to comment, a senior official from Statistics NZ actually came to our house on a Sunday afternoon to read me my code, which was absurd.
I started a Parliamentary petition. I appeared before a Select Committee. The Committee was sympathetic. I got a personal apology from the Minister sent to me as an inaccessible PDF image so they had to send it a second time. But in the end, I got a commitment that yes, blind people count and this debacle would never happen again.
Here we are in 2023 and its census time again. This year, I went to the fully accessible website, completed a fully accessible form to get my code texted to me, and have now completed the fully accessible form. I know this wouldn't have happened had I not taken a stand.
So when you think you can't change things for the better, please don't sell yourself short. Each of us have the ability, and I maintain we have the duty, to make good change in the world.
Thank you to all those involved in Government at all levels for getting it so right this time.

The fine folks at Tweetbot and the Iconfactory need your help.

If you were a subscriber to either, please re-install the app and click the button to decline your refund.

It's difficult, perhaps, to understand what a huge impact this would make on these folks, but your effort and small monetary sacrifice will help them more than you know.

More details in Daring Fireball's post: https://daringfireball.net/2023/03/tweetbot_and_twitterrific_face_the_cliff

@StewartLynch I have gone back to my blog posts multiple times because I forgot the details on how to implement things.

A thought: what if we built social media to enable true human-to-human connectivity?

Because, right now, that's not happening.

Right now, it's relevancy algorithms and bots and A.I. that's acting as a social media middleman that's inserting itself between you and your friends.

People aren't talking to people.

They are talking to algorithms in the hopes that algorithms will connect them with their friends -- though that's no guarantee.

Only roughly a third of Americans have a travel ready passport. It’s a privilege but if you can see how other countries work it’s a game changer for your own empathy. We have a lot of work to do. Many countries actually work quite well. SHOCKER. Also, more trains, please.

If you were a former paying customer of Tweetbot or Twitterrific who was happy with what they got out of the app before Twitter unceremoniously killed third-party clients, then consider launching the latest update and opting out of the refund. The money comes out of the developer's pockets, and the fact that the apps don't work anymore isn't really their fault—you can ease the load on them a bit. https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/03/tweetbot-and-twitterrific-updated-with-option-to-opt-out-of-subscription-refund/

Tweetbot and Twitterrific Face the Cliff:

https://daringfireball.net/2023/03/tweetbot_and_twitterrific_face_the_cliff

Saturn's moon Mimas in IR+UV expanded spectrum. Processed using images taken by Cassini on November 19 2006.

The dataset for the second image has frustratingly eluded processing for years. Data just didn't line up at all. Finally took the time to build out a cylindrical map from the observation then reproject it back to a camera perspective like I do with JunoCam images.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill

#Saturn #Mimas #Cassini #Space #Science