Notices by Angus McIntyre (angusm@mastodon.social)

@arstechnica “judge shopping” is cool, but have you tried “judge subscribe-and-save”?

@arstechnica Someone way out there REALLY hates dinosaurs.

@arstechnica There’s something very Philip K. Dick about the idea of a future where everyone worries that their toothbrush might be spying on them.

@arstechnica Grift recognizes grift.

@arstechnica There's a marketing opportunity here for any search company like Kagi or DuckDuckGo who want to offer "AI-free" results.

@arstechnica “The dog incinerated my homework.”

@nixCraft If they hadn't nailed it to its perch, it'd be pushing up the daisies.

A striking image of the rare 'furry land turtle’. This specimen is named Cocoa.

#caturday #cats #CatsOfMastodon

@newsthump It's hard to know whether that's his dinner or his date in the picture. Or both.

@nixCraft "Someone bet us a quarter that we wouldn't shit in the swimming pool, so we did. We shat in the pool so much that the pool had to be drained and no one could swim in it for a week.

We look forward to getting more quarters by shitting in more swimming pools in future.

P.S. Follow us for tips on how to shit in swimming pools.”

Hi, Big Corporation

Just wanted to let you know about a minor issue in your software. I think the option screen that offers me the choices:

[Set Up Now] [Remind Me Again in 3 Days]

is missing the third choice:

[Fuck Off Forever]

No biggie. There’s lots of space on the dialog to accommodate that third option, and it should be an easy fix. Thanks!

All those people who dismissed #Twitter as a “Nazi bar" have it wrong.

It's not JUST a Nazi bar, it's a Nazi bar with paid guest performers.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/07/13/twitter-creators-payments-right-wing/

Trees after a snowstorm.

#PhotoMonday #photos #photography

Once upon a time, logging into a website required:

- fill in 2 fields, click a button

#2FA has turned this into:

- fill in 2 fields, click a button, look at your phone, copy and paste a code, click a button.

Bad #ux design has turned this into:

- click a link to show a menu, click another link, wait, fill in a field, click a button, wait, fill in another field, click another button, do the 2FA dance if needed ...

By 2025 you're going to need to submit a 6-page essay just to log in.

@laura @aral Apologies -- I should have credited you both.

I haven't yet had a chance to play around with SiteJS but it looks like a very interesting project, and I think it fills a need.

10/ I think any "solution" is going to be a point on a continuum. There may not be one perfect one-size-fits-all answer that delivers maximum flexibility with minimum cost of adoption.

I'm interested in, say, @laura 's site.js (https://sitejs.org/) as an example of a project that aims to lower the barriers to site ownership.

I see that as a point on the continuum: Site.js lowers the bar THIS much, and in exchange you get THIS much flexibility, power, etc.

9/ So maybe that's not the best possible solution to the question of how to democratize access.

And so one of the things that I think about is, how could we do it better? What solutions could we come up with to the challenge of giving everyone who wants it a place to do their own thing on the Interwebs, lowering the barriers to entry without requiring people to trade away something intangible but valuable as the price for their fifteen minutes of attention?

8/ You're probably familiar with the phrase "If you aren't paying for the product, you ARE the product."

It might be more accurate to say "You're paying for it, but perhaps not in the most obvious way."

You pay for your social media with your privacy, your attention, and anything else you have that the corporations think they can turn into money.

And we ALL pay for it in other ways too, through the casual damage to society inflicted in the name of profit.

7/ Of course Big Tech social media turns out to be a devil's bargain. The microphone is free, but they can turn the volume all the way down or even cut the cord altogether, whenever they want to, for any reason or none.

And then there are all the other things they get up to to ensure that your use of their free microphone is HIGHLY profitable to them.

6/ It's worth acknowledging that FaceTwit and InstaBook and their ilk do represent a possible solution to this question. Big Tech handed everyone a microphone (so to speak) with no up-front downpayment required.