Stephan Sokolow @ssokolow@qoto.org

@LittleWytch Sadly, I was never socially connected enough to get that kind of neat stuff during that period. I just had a handful of floppies that my father brought home, including a couple full of games like Spacestation Pheta and Risk.

I did, however, discover that Apple didn't anticipate users thinking in non-technical directions as well as they thought. I think it might have been MacOS wouldn't find files if you categorized your System folder into nice, tidy subfolders.

@alexbuzzbee @wizzwizz4 Were you aware of https://pyoxidizer.readthedocs.io/ before you decided to start building this?

(It's a bundler similar in concept to tools like py2exe, but with different architectural goals, and it does support embedding data.)

I ask because, even if you're not trying to put *everything* in a single file, it could have something useful to learn from.

(And, being a bundler, it sort of goes in the opposite direction of well-known Python plugin frameworks like YAPSY.)

@wizzwizz4 @skunksarebetter

...or is it just a mass of computer data? Intuitively, we don't think of that as a dataset and, in that use, "data" has become an uncountable noun like water or bread.

(eg. "Where is my data? Did someone reformat this floppy disk?")

(And sorry I'm making so much use of "delete and re-draft" today. I'm not feeling alert.)

@abionic I don't do stuff I can't archive and, since I got "Permission denied" when I tried to wget the enclosure URL in the RSS feed on anchor.fm, I think it's not worth my time to work around.

I'll just make a note to read it myself out of the Frost anthology on my bookshelf.

Another two thoughts I'll have to remember to send upstream:

1. With local timelines making it possible to actively follow everything local, it'd be really nice to have something milder than "Mute" so I can remove arXiv Quantitative Biology from my local timeline but still see exceptional entries that get mentioned by people.

2. Posts should have an "I'd like to be notified of people's answers to this too" button.

@Absinthe Another article in the vein of that first link:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-world-built-for-men-car-crashes

EDIT: Aha! It mentioned the book (Invisible Women) that was used as the basis for the title of one of the articles in that original list of citations I couldn't re-locate:

https://www.wired.com/story/caroline-criado-perez-invisible-women/

@LittleWytch Does Apple tech become interesting if it's early 90s MacOS being played with for retro-nostalgia and I'm interested in programming something new for it?

...because they certainly were *trying* to make it candy-cane tech as they saw it at the time and, if I can ever justify the space and cost to get an old 680x0 mac, System 7 holds a special place in my heart from the Mac SE that my father brought home from work sometimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7

Here are a couple of examples of what I mean:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Diagnostic_Port.txt

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=PC_Board_Esthetics.txt

@Absinthe From a "for the good of the world" perspective, it's because we still see things like https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mgb3yn/technology-isnt-designed-to-fit-women which wouldn't have happened if more women were involved in the creation of various technology products.

As for from a "because society still has immoral biases built into it" perspective, I seem to have forgotten to copy the post with all the citations into my reference-back bin, but here's the gist of how I understand it:

1. While it's true that we see a skew toward women *wanting* non-STEM jobs that exercise other skills (eg. language) in nordic countries where factors such as pay are reduced or eliminated as biases, studies show that even the nordic countries still have fewer women in STEM fields than they should when controlled for that. (ie. In a properly fair world, studies show there should be fewer than 50% women in STEM fields, but more than we have.)

2. Our school system is partly to blame because, while girls and boys develop differently and arrive at the same point eventually, the current development curves tend to result in math being taught in a way that better harmonizes with the boys' development curve and English (and, I'd assume, other native languages) being taught in a way that better harmonizes with the girls' development curve.

3. Biasing factors can be *very* subtle, such as parents allowing male babies to cry longer without realizing it, or being more concerned about little girls getting dirty or hurt during play that might help to develop their curiosity about the natural world... again, without realizing it. (eg. Balancing on a rock in the middle of a stream)

I've been using COVID as an opportunity to deep-clean the couple of used Unicomp buckling-spring keyboards I snagged at a good price as spares (since they don't make standard US104 layout anymore) and I noticed that one of them not only had the separate keycaps and keystems, but that it had a whole bunch of different colors of keystems, so I decided to have some fun putting them back in.

(Yeah, the keys that are always one-piece designs are yellowed. I'll order some replacements eventually.)

@freemo Fair enough. To be honest, I just thought of it and asked impulsively.

I'll add it to the pile of "today or tomorrow" things.

@freemo That's fine. As long as it's on record somewhere and I'm not the only one theoretically responsible for trying to get it done eventually.

@freemo I'd prefer not to. I have zero experience with Ruby, let alone Ruby on Rails, so it'd take me *far* more time than someone already familiar with a Mastodon codebase.

(Especially given that I'm already fighting to catch up on maintainership on my own projects, which I allowed to lapse for the last while.)

@freemo To clarify, I do understand that it's served up by the site that hosts the post I'm trying to fave/reply to/etc.

I'm asking whether an option could be added to opt out of it when both the user and the post are on qoto.org and, thus, the code serving up /interact can see my session cookie.

@freemo Given how much I use middle-click as part of a "triage first, read and fave later" workflow, do you think we could get an option in qoto.org's Preferences to skip the "/interact" page (the page with the "Proceed to ..." button), rather than just pre-filling the username?

For anyone who might be following this for updates to existing entries on my blog, I've added "YouTube's Copyright System Isn't Broken. The World's Is" and '"Games as a service" is fraud.' as related mentions in my "The Most Eye-Opening Things I’ve Ever Read" post:

http://blog.ssokolow.com/archives/2014/04/04/the-most-eye-opening-things-ive-ever-read/

@reykjalin @sir @newt OK, watched it and anything I could say to praise it would feel like an understatement.

The combination of length, quality, and topic remind me of Ross Scott's `"Games as a service" is fraud.`

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

@kev Since I was just reminded of a specific example I need to report, here's what I mean when I say that Gutenberg/Block Editor for WordPress is maddening.

If you are trying to add a block of text to an existing bulleted list in Word or LibreOffice or TinyMCE, the easiest way is to turn the first item into a bullet, then backspace and then hit Enter on each successive element.

In Gutenberg, backspacing a block boundary moves your pointer from the beginning of the paragraph to the end.

It reminds me of Lord i/o's https://lord.io/blog/2019/text-editing-hates-you-too/ and the sheer number of those frustrating little bugs I manage to trip over, combined with how WP itself will mangle an article if I forget to close a </dd> or </dt> tag when manually inserting a <dl>, is why I'd rather write Markdown or ReST in Vim to blog.

As Ryan T. Harter said, Don't make me code in your text box!

https://blog.harterrt.com/coding_in_textboxes.html

@ticoombs @tomosaigon I don't post from touchscreens, period.

I just take minimal notes through whatever means I find most convenient at the time, and then wait until I get back to the buckling spring keyboard on my desktop PC.