Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

@dgoldsmith Regarding search: there has definitely been pushback from node owners (complete with threats to defederate) over crawling to build an index. Some people definitely *don't* want fifteen year old toots to be easily accessed.

If I vanish, weep not for me; I have merely screwed up my computer upgrading from #Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04 LTS.

@lauren The funniest part of the Twitter foot-gun to me is that they seem to have reversed the decision, but I don't care.

The "Oh, that's a Twitter link; I'm not going to bother to click it 'cuz I'll just be directed to a login page" effect is so strong that I just skip them now like I'd skip links to expertsexchange or the New York Times.

@krisnelson @luis_in_brief This response makes me really nervous because it smells an awful lot like “I’ll know noncompliance when I see it, says the auditor.”

• I don’t know if providing posts from my users to the users on another node (who are in the EU) counts as “the offering of goods or services, irrespective of whether a payment of the data subject is required, to such data subjects in the Union”

• I don’t know if receiving toots made by an EU data subject counts as “the monitoring of their behaviour.” My turn-your-head-and-squint analysis suggests it does; you can infer a lot from a person (likely timezone, for instance) based on post patterns, without even getting into the question of “Stuff people post explicitly about themselves on social media.”

Broadly speaking, I get squicky about GDPR because it feels a lot like the protection for small operators against getting smacked by the full force of the law is “Don’t worry; the law is crafted to control the FAANGs, not you,” which… I mean, we can look at the US’s War on Drugs for an example of what happens when a law that criminalizes tons of regular activity is left up to enforcement discretion.

Someone should write a small GUi wrapper around a command line utility and distribute it initially via reflected lunar radio signal to HAM receivers worldwide.

I can assure you this is an entirely practical means of creating and distributing software, and not an elaborate and expensive process to allow the HAMs using the software to claim that wizard came from the moon.

@georgetakei Comparing this letter to the things he was tweeting three years ago is a hell of a "How it started vs. how it's going."

@shawnomancy honestly I've been very happy in the Fediverse via qoto.org. It has that old Twitter feel and I've only had to block like two people and one node the whole time I've been here.

Just a chill little robot looking for corndogs #PhotonVision #romi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2MqCNQNC3I

@matdevdug This is how I feel about c++. I suspect Rust is a great choice if you're writing in a domain where you have to break the memory abstraction, but if you're not, using languages that'll handle it for you is much faster.

Rust is great compared to c++ (and in that problem domain, great relative to languages where auto garbage collection can't be switched off and you can't trust a gc cycle won't run your day or the footprint of having a gc won't make it impossible to run your program on a given hardware target).

@josh longer time goes, the more confused. I am at SpaceX's success. He must have been hands-off with the project, right? Just threw money at the right people and took a big step back?

@happyday @caseynewton Absolutely. Mastodon is a way better model for municipal broadcast messaging.

@sysop408 FUN FACT: Running every request through an auth check is way more expensive than letting data be served to anonymous access.

Of course, they wouldn't just activate auth on every request without load-testing that, right?! ;)

Just a chill day building a corndog finder. #PhotonVision

@neroden It’s not up to him. Congress, however, can definitely impeach them. Well within their purview.

@stavvers Okay, but in fairness they invented sails of massive scope that could catch winds above the sea-level wind and would be tethered via sturdy cable.

… so, you know, way more dangerous sails. ;)