Notices by Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social), page 62

If you need to solve 100% of a problem to get any benefit and the last 5% is impossible, *any* work on that problem is a waste of time. Figure that up front. Go work on something which actually can protect your users and systems and colleagues.

@alcinnz @RL_Dane Also borders around software buttons, who needs those?

Cleaning out my screenshot folder. This one aged like wine.

@javan I think *my* browserdev blog shouldn't need to explain this...

It's not the teachers' fault, obviously, it's neoliberalism's for turning education into an industry that can be measured and tested with targets and league tables, an attitude that's directly responsible for most of the failures of our public services.

But it's partly why people are finding the "AI" chatbots so convincing - they produce the same kind of unnatural but vaguely proper-sounding garbage that we've been trained to mistake for good all our lives.

these chatbots don't write well, but they do a good statistical analysis to figure out how to get to "this is the kind of sentence that meets the established metric". Teachers are right to be worried, because this is exactly how they've been training children to write for decades instead of actually teaching them.

Since everyone is obsessed with the "ai" chatbots, here is my thought about how depressingly likely they are to bleed into many, many things they shouldn't.

@plaguepoems Ask a Nelsonian about this... We've had numerous once-in-a-mellenia floods in the past few years...

Apparently this technique is so foreign now that someone had to write this in a blog about a web browser. 😔

https://webkit.org/blog/13851/declarative-shadow-dom/

The Starlink Gen2 sats are apparently each 7m x 3m and 1250 kg, the size and almost the same weight as a Ford F-150, in case you were wondering.

But of course, this isn't actually public information that you can find officially anywhere, because private companies are awful, so I'm just gathering this from press releases.

@didek @jikodesu XMPP here!

Have you tried running Snikket? That was easy to get up & running!

@tzimmer_history These moral panics annoy me because when I recommend alternatives to Hollywood entertainment that summons them. Then they inevitably find something inconsequential to disapprove of in my recommendations!

@sam I'm keen to see someone at least prototype some TV UI for me! Got someone else's thoughts into Haphaestus!

What sort of menus should I render webforms to? "Bureaucromancy"
What should my start page look like? "Hearth"
What would a document-centric (as opposed to app-centric) smart TV OS look like? "TVle"

Any of these sound interesting?

HTML/CSS is an ideal medium for me to work with, since I'm writing the code to render them.

@jikodesu I also have a self-hosted XMPP server!

I'm at the point of my career that I'm embracing MS Excel and it's myriad of non-apparent powers.

eeesh....

You know it can parse XML (HT @infobex!)?

oh eris what have I become....

@owa Push notifications from webapps? Yuck! I prefer RSS. Can we please bring that back as a dominant part of browser UI?

Oh, right. This is iOS, where web & native devs alike are participating in the attention economy. So I guess this is good thing, leading to more sites which should be sites to embrace the web.

And yes, I know I don't have to opt in. I'm just wary of how often we'll all be asked to.

@tinker @alcinnz

Wide words and deep words.

@alcinnz - Fully agree. Jargon is absolutely needed for those niche audiences that understand that jargon. Generalized language or "plain english" is absolutely needed for those general audiences whose experience or expertise falls outside of those niche groups that use the jargon.

For mixed audiences, I use jargon, followed by a quick generalized definition, where appropriate.

Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Having a Fire Sale on Data About You - Jon Keegan @ The Markup: https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/02/16/forget-milk-and-eggs-supermarkets-are-having-a-fire-sale-on-data-about-you