Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

New web devs: "The web dev tech stack is so ridiculously complicated. Why do I have to install like three layers of tools just to make a simple webpage with CSS?"

Meanwhile, webkit adds to CSS a preview feature of something that sass had in 2006.

https://webkit.org/blog/13813/try-css-nesting-today-in-safari-technology-preview/

@lauren Do you think he wonders if the explictly anti-racist chat neural networks were the real racists this whole time? ;)

@NoraReed @BabblingGeek How far back on the todo list? Is it priority A or priority......... ;)

@mekkaokereke People from DeAnza wrote chunks of the Linux kernel?

(... yes I'm assuming the answer is yes it's the Linux kernel ;) )

@dansinker Mmm, did it though?

It went from failwhale to media attention trap to dealing with a major nation electing a troll President by modifying its TOS to allow trolls if they were important enough to kicking him back off when he used it to stage an attempted coup to selling out its users to a billionaire.

I'm not sure where the high, noble part of the story comes in.

@jasonp @feditips (Correction: It *is* in the response to ctrl-V. So *that's* what the "Edit" button does!)

I don't think it's biologically possible for me to get enough of Dr. Dinosaur. #AtomicrRobo

@jasonp @feditips Nice.

They should move that clarification dialogue to the response to control-V pasting an image in for discoverability. Apart from that minor criticism I'm impressed by the feature set.

@b0rk This is one of those few places where I look at the problem domain and go "Okay, *this* is easier in Haskell." Because the real answer to the question of "How do you deal with the precision gap in floating point" is "Don't reduce precision until you have to," and lazy evaluation is *great* for that.

... that having been said, you don't need Haskell to implement lazy evaluation.

@lauren "Probably would have been caught if they hadn't fired everybody on the marketing team."

(*) variants of this barb will be tossed Google's way for the next two years, at least. ;)

@jasonp Query: how do you caption an image in Mastodon?

@bezoar @tivasyk @lauren And a key part of this situation is that reporters specialize in reporting. That's a talent of summarization, focusing on key facts, crafting disjoint information into narrative, and getting all of that in front of people.

There's nothing in the minimum qualifications for the job that require them to know anything about the fields they're talking about and, in general, they are not held accountable for passing along information that is later found to be false (empirically speaking; few people cancel a newspaper subscription because any given story is full of bullshit, though they may cancel for an *unpopular* story).

It's their job to report on a field, not to be masters of it.

@lauren @lucybeahere @tivasyk This cannot be emphasized hard enough. They will tend to focus on whomever will talk to them the most.

Their job is to fill airtime or column inches. Like most professionals, they will do that to the best of their ability and will take shortcuts when necessary, and the easiest shortcut is "run what you have and don't burn time on investigation." The press and investigative journalism aren't synonymous.

I'm reminded of a piece I read on Nintendo ages ago where the author was decrying the imminent doom of the company because they had nothing in the pipe: no new games announced, no new systems, and Microsoft and Sony were going to eat their lunch in the console market as an aging Gamecube failed to keep up with new innovations. With mobile phones taking the place of dedicated portable consoles and no plan to compete with high-end consoles, opined the author, Nintendo was doomed.

I had a fascinating flash of "Wait... But this is *Nintendo.* Famously tight-lipped Nintendo. I'm... I'm reading one newshound's opinion based on the fact that he asked Nintendo and they told *him* nothing.

Like a week later, Nintendo announced the Wii.

(When it's entertainment and game consoles, this game is fine, but when it leaks into public policy, science, and other fields that impact people's fates, it's way less okay).

@vaurorapub I sincerely doubt most any business owners are thinking anywhere near that macroeconomically. It's a lot more about not being able to trust that employees aren't taking revenue for zero value delivered.