Notices by Stevens R Miller (stevensrmiller@mastodon.sdf.org)

@aral

Oh, they could have forged ahead. The actual impact of what they planned on 98% of the outraged community would have been utterly nothing. People forget quickly.

But, you are quite right: the public insisted on a reversal, and got it.

I can tell you it was a panicky few days on my campus. I had students coming to me to ask if their careers had already been ruined before they started. Today, it's as though the whole thing was just a bad dream.

@aral

Oh, my goodness. If I dropped a product whenever its maker blundered that badly, I'd be down to nothing but Tinker Toys.

Fact is, the reports of their errors were far beyond the actual mistakes they made. Nonetheless, they rewound the entire thing in response to public backlash. They even stated, for all to read, that they had erred.

All corporations make mistakes. Not all undo them. Even fewer admit they made them.

With prudent caution, I forgive them.

@aral

Which news? The aborted royalty scheme?

@aral

Or create a Unity app that tries to access the Webcam.

Or just try to install Unity.

Honestly, what kind of personal computer still tells the user to contact someone called an "administrator" in 2024?

@SDF

Love it! One of the few DEC product lines I never used myself.

Gosh, I miss DEC...

@aral

Schrödinger's switches.

@aral

Tough call. Some folks do deserve the award, while others deserve it with oak-leaf clusters.

In this man's instance, I'll stick with lower case. He just seems like a lower-case kind of asshole, to me.

Note: His net worth is listed as $700,000,000. How does that happen?

@aral

Heard about this. Hard to believe, but there it is.

What an asshole.

@aral

I'm done arguing with people's reasons for still being on Musk's Nazi server. I no longer ask them why they haven't left. What I ask them now is, "What's your plan for leaving?"

@aral

Sorry, buddy. After the war is over, maybe we can at least meet up in Kyiv for some tea.

@aral @cadence022

Agreed. But how much is too much? I bought a toy I don't need. I could have spent that money on food for a hungry person. Should I have?

@aral

That phase of making a meal is called "mise en place," French for "putting in place." I find it very meditative. You can be focused, take your time, and not worry about much because there's no flame or special skill involved.

Once done, you just follow the rest of the recipe's instructions. Everything is where you need it to be. Inexperienced cooks tend to run around their kitchens, looking for ingredients just as they need them to go into the pot.

Not us.

We got this.

Mise en place.

@aral

I'd choose an actual poo over Musk. They don't talk and they tend to smell bad, but I could live with the risk of being in a picture with one.

A literal talking poo, on the other hand...

I mean, an honest-to-God, no-foolin', actual talking poo would be quite sensational. I'd pay to have a conversation with a talking poo.

@aral @developit

Okay, I don't know what any of that means, but you do have to tell me how you did superscripts in a Mastodon toot.

@aral

You know, I feel the same way. I don't miss it (or Facebook, which I have also abandoned) at all. Made some good new friends here. Have just as much sense of community as before. And I don't have to grind my teeth over the fact that I'm making a billionaire richer by using his product.

@aral @EU_Commission

Maybe consider sharing this with your own government officials? They might think it's worth acting on.

@mackaj @aral

Communities would have be maintained as shared lists, but that's not much of a challenge. Onboarding would require an installation that was no harder than the learning curve of the existing UI, web or mobile. The more I think about it, the more I'm expecting this to be the wave of the future.

And, as @aral points out, you don't have to choose. The only piece we actually don't have today is the virtual community, though hash-tags partly get there.

@aral

Pushed to the limit, do you think there will come a time when it makes sense for each of us to run our own server, with a local community of one user?

@aral

I think this one is just amazing. I use it in my intro classes.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3333

@aral @PINE64

Ah, visible now!