Dave T-W @davoloid@qoto.org
- Location
- Mostly London
- Pronouns (plz)
- he/him
Just another worried little citizen of this modern-day Pompeii. Techie at UCL, working on Process Automation with MS Power Platform. Scatterbrain, interested in education, languages, Space and lots of disparate things. sorry.
Keeping my space toots at @astrodad as an experiment in self-moderation :)
*Background banner is a photo Yorkshire flag in blue and white, in front of a classic bell tent, in a field of similar tents at a festival.
Joined Oct 2022
@Free_Press Reminder: The Finnish border has been "flooded with refugees", the Russians have increased troops there, including AA missile systems. They've "warned" that Finland would be first if things escalated with NATO. Classic Russian bullying tactics.
Dave T-W
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In case you're not aware, one of the primary issues with what3words is addresses containing words that are indistinguishable from others when spoken: https://w3w.me.ss
Ffs. Some fella thinks that despite:
* all the crap going on with our cesspit of a government
* the developmental phase of Starship
* the general uselessness of a Starship launch pad sited somewhere in the UK
...this merits a petition.
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/653636
@rebeccawatson I stopped making resolutions to do better. It's the years that need to get better, not me.
Dave T-W
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Dave T-W
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@bloor Took me a minute. Chapeau.
Dave T-W
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Me: I need new shoelaces.
Wife: There’s a shoe store on 68th where a cranky-ass old man has hundreds of different shoelaces…
Me: Do I want to go to a shop run by a cranky-ass old man?
Wife: He might be a cranky-ass old man because online retailers have destroyed the local business he’s been running for 40 years…
Me: I’ll go there this week.
@oldrawgabbit Tough choice. It is important to make a stand, but it does feel risky as such situations are unpredictable. Hard to know how to make them consider the consequences.
Dave T-W
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On a regular basis, someone (usually a straight, cis, white man) says that we can solve the problem of people being nasty online by using real names. It doesn't work, and it hurts people who can't risk using their real name..
"Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0155923
Timothy Snyder: "The idea of constitutional self-defense is normal in major democracies, and for excellent historical reasons... In the histories of both Germany and the United States, there came a moment when a minority, willing to use violence, sought to break the constitutional order."
If Molesworth took Computing at St Custards - modern take on a classic British public school parody.
"wizz for coading!" by marnanel
https://archiveofourown.org/works/45787648?view_full_work=true
@chrisgerhard I am pretty sure I have seen a van from this company driving like a knob. They really need to stop doubling down on this. The guy was prosecuted by the police FFS.
Spontaneous #baroque concert this evening as my dad was in town. Vespers in a beautiful Christopher Wren church next to Monumen in #London
Arranged in the context of the Lutheran church's evening service with organ, string quartet and a choir. But you don't have to be religious to enjoy this gorgeous sacred #music by Bach and others.
https://www.stanneslutheranchurch.org.uk/about-us/bach-vespers/
Dave T-W
boosted
If our civilization collapses, extraterrestrial archeologists can look at this and be impressed. Three satellites following the Earth in an equilateral triangle, each 25 million kilometers from the other two. Each contains two gold cubes in free-fall. The satellites accelerate just enough so they don't get blown off course by the solar wind. The gold cubes feel nothing but gravity.
Lasers bounce between each cube and its partner in another satellite, measuring the distance between them to an accuracy of 20 picometers: less than the diameter of a helium atom! This lets the satellites detect gravitational waves - ripples in the curvature of spacetime - with very long wavelengths, and correspondingly low frequencies.
It should see so many binary white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes in the Milky Way that these will be nothing but foreground noise. More excitingly, it should be able to see mergers of supermassive black holes as far as... the dawn of time, or whenever such black holes were first formed. (The farther you look, the older things you see.)
It may even be able to see the "gravitational background radiation", the thrumming vibrations in the fabric of spacetime left over from the Big Bang. This radiation was created before the hot gas in the Universe cooled down enough to become transparent to light. So it's older than the microwave background radiation, which is the oldest thing we see now.
It's called LISA - the Laser Interferometric Satellite Antenna. And we're in luck: ESA has just decided to launch it in 2034.
Have recently found Star Trek: Lower Decks. Loving the way it manages to mix canon, parody and homage all at once. In S1E10 a movie within the show includes excessive lens flares, like the 2009 movie.
https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/jj-abrams-lower-decks.html
Dave T-W
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When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.
But that's not true anymore.
User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.
My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.
@CAPETOK The cat from Del Monte, he say "Miaow"!
Real story here is that a passenger got paranoid and caused himself and all his fellow passengers unnecessary delay. With knock on effects, no doubt.
Good work fella!
https://www.unilad.com/news/us-news/virgin-atlantic-flight-canceled-missing-bolts-wing-777642-20240123
@bot_wg Be interesting to know how much that's gone toward vineyards and other relatively luxurious foodstuffs. And for crops like almonds, how that compares with aquifers in cattle ranch areas.
- Location
- Mostly London
- Pronouns (plz)
- he/him
Just another worried little citizen of this modern-day Pompeii. Techie at UCL, working on Process Automation with MS Power Platform. Scatterbrain, interested in education, languages, Space and lots of disparate things. sorry.
Keeping my space toots at @astrodad as an experiment in self-moderation :)
*Background banner is a photo Yorkshire flag in blue and white, in front of a classic bell tent, in a field of similar tents at a festival.
Joined Oct 2022
