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I am floored and fascinated by the near-literary quality of many of the descriptions of images that people carefully craft when appending pictures to their posts on Mastodon. Some of them will reveal a detail that had escaped my attention. Others will help me understand a subtle joke I had missed. Others still are true poems. ALT are their own microblogging world that reveals itself as you hover on a picture. And I hover, and hover.

#AltText #inclusivity
#Mastodon #netiquette #tootiquette

—@fheinderyckx

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I had to explain to a 12yo that not long before she was born, you made a computer display by sucking all the air out of an enormous glass box and then painting one side of it with special paint that sometimes glowed and then applying 2000V to a little bit of hot wire so you ripped electrons out of it and using electromagnets to steer the electrons to hit the special paint so that it glowed, and she seemed increasingly suspicious that I was pulling her leg and at the end she just said “that seems.. ..very inefficient?” and now I feel like a walking exhibit at a mediaeval blacksmithing museum

—@doop

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At the dawn of computers, newsrooms thought their “content” is what made them valued, so they each needed special “systems” to “manage” it. They commodified content until it lost value; so did their CMSes. Here is word that Vox, which made a big deal of creating its own CMS–licensing it to other news organizations–is dropping it for WordPress. Newsrooms are not each so special after all.

https://www.axios.com/2023/07/18/vox-media-chorus

—@jeffjarvis

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Sometimes Elon stans call me out on Twitter when people post the “cars and rockets” post, demanding to know what stupid things Elon says about software.

Here’s a primo example.

In this exchange, Elon thinks Adam Mosseri is adding rate limits to Threads just like he added them to Twitter, and that he “copied” Elon.

Anyone who understands software knows Adam is talking about WRITE rate limits to curb spam posts. Elon implemented READ rate limits in an application that relies on ad impressions.

—@rodhilton

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Dear people who don’t understand chronic illness/invisible disabilities –
* believe me when I say I’m too exhausted to absorb what you are saying or discuss something complex
* believe me when I say I’m too tired to put away groceries or walk to something a block away
* understand that things that take you trivial amounts of energy can be exhausting for me
* BELIEVE ME

#disability #fibromyalgia

—@meredithw