Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

@blacklight It's an interesting idea. Telemetry is a much cleaner signal than self-reporting, although I think they could get equivalent information by
crawling GitHub, so probably way more trouble than it's worth.

@urusan They'd better be, or they'd stop orbiting!

@EwanCroft@mastodon.social Ah, I solved that problem by exiting twitter a half-decade ago, hence no Twitter friends to lose. ;)

@wjbeaver It's always worthwhile to remember that every organism alive on Earth today has (as far as we can tell) the same length of evolutionary tree. In terms of "goodness of fit" as criterion for what shapes form, every living organism has had the same amount of time to adapt.

... and any software engineer will tell you, many categories of additional complexity are not the hallmarks of a "superior" system.

(*DISCLAIMER* That was really, really stupid of me; do *not* test safety limits on live test subjects, even yourself. It ended badly for Dr. Jekyll and it'll end badly for you.)

#frc Screwed up my toe having the robotics team test a safety limiter we added on my body.

To the team's credit, the code did exactly what it was supposed to and the robot hit me exactly as anticipated.

... Except that instead of catching the bulk of my foot, it hit right on the nail of my big toe.

Broadly speaking, computer user experiences have bifurcated into two kinds:

* Those that do not assume the user knows anything about computers and must therefore spot-check every operation ("Do you wish to install X, the thing you just told me to install by clicking the 'Install X' button?")

* Those that assume the user knows a lot about computers, verifies that by having an obtuse interface documented elsewhere, but then backs off when the user tries to do things.

@SecurityWriter When a project lead says "We have a wiki so everyone can maintain the documentation," you should take that as a threat.

@SwiftOnSecurity IT'S GODZILLA!

@futurebird Vinyl chloride. If I understand correctly they added more fire to it because the safest way to deal with that chemical is to increase the energy to encourage the nasty compounds it reacts into to continue reacting into less toxic compounds.

... one of those deals where if you find yourself in the cloud, you *hope* to survive long enough to worry about the carcinogenic effects.

@wiverson it's the API for the FIRST robotics main library, wpilib. Overall quite good, but it's got a couple of loose ends that I'm going to look into tying off.

Mostly this complaint is around the fact that Java decided interfaces are something that the library owner owns instead of something that the client owns. I'm accustomed to typescript where you can define interfaces on the fly, and as long as an object has the relevant types and fields, it adheres to the interface. It's a joy because it lets you tie together otherwise unrelated components after the fact.

This API has like a dozen classes that implement a `double calculate(double)` method.

None of them implement an interface. Every time I want to switch between them, I"m either writing my own jank wrapper class or changing all their constructors and variable types.

Sometimes I hate this hell language. #java

@jeremymayer Just in time for Superb Owl Sunday!

I never write fiction.

But sometimes, an idea just won't get out of your head until you slam-dunk it into some prose.

@aspensmonster@octodon.social I don't have access to a second Android phone to confirm it, but I believe that's there because it logs your calculation history to your Cloud account so that if your phone is destroyed, your history is restored once you load your account onto another phone.

This arrangement is not a bad thing per se; it's probably actually good that web core techs move relatively slowly and things that are mostly developer sugar live in the toolchain.

... it just means that, yeah, the toolchain to write modern web sites *is* complicated. It's bridging about eight years of feature-gap between what developers want to write and what browsers are capable of reading.