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Ryan Singel (@ryansingel@writing.exchange) (Writing Exchange)
Thoughts and prayers tonight for all the tankies and their fellow travellers, including Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Medea Benjamin, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Max Blumenthal, Grey Zone, Code Pink, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr, David Sacks and more Watching their autocratic wet dreams and love of butchers fall apart thanks to the unwavering resolve of the freedom loving people of Ukraine is beautiful Almost sad I gave up on Twitter. Can't hear their tears, silence and pathetic bleeps Slava #ukraine
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So I posted earlier about how I was flabbergasted the oceangate guy didn’t just ask resident rich guy deep sea diving enthusiast James Cameron for sub advice or to borrow some of his tech or something. Cameron was just on the news with another prominent oceanographer saying “yeah i heard about the sub and warned some of the people involved in the construction that this was a really bad idea and this was completely preventable” hadffdhfdgsdf

—@photophoregirl

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oh, here’s some JUICY rumored details about meta’s plans for the fediverse

tl;dr “Meta will only federate with select larger instances from the beginning. There will be contracts which also provide for financial compensation for the instance owners.”

can’t entirely verify their validity but it’s still worth posting just in case

#FediPact #barcelona #project92 #p92 #meta #facebook #fediverse #fediblockmeta #FediAdmin #MastoAdmin #threads

—@vantablack

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While I wait for grocery delivery, I decided to do laundry. One of the items I washed was Hops, Phee’s kangaroo friend who is coming on vacation with us because both Sebastians are currently hospitalized and awaiting surgery. So I moved the clean laundry from washer to dryer and at some point, Callisto swooped in and stole Hops from the dryer. I know this because she proudly showed him to me once I’d started the dryer. Oy vey DOG! Needless to say Hops is in the dryer and it has been restarted.

—@Pawpower

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If you think we should care more about refugees than billionaires then, please, go ahead.

Care more about refugees.

Talk about them. Post articles. Boost other’s posts. Take action. Pressure the media and governments to pay more attention to the crisis. Keep the conversation going.

It’s just that I’ve seen so many hot takes about this, and it would be such a shame to see them all going to waste, as if they were a load of hot air.

#RefugeesWelcome
#RefugeeWeek

—@ProjectFearlessness

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When you learn about engineering failures in school you quickly understand that it’s not that people were unintelligent, it’s because they were careless. And good engineering practice builds layers to make sure that carelessness doesn’t propagate.

The rigor of engineering is not the technical complexity of the problem space, it’s everything else around it.

In other words, literally everything the silicon valley grindset devalues.

—@emilygorcenski

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This is your regularly scheduled reminder that ‘cis’ literally means ‘on this side’. It’s a term with Latin origins that has been used in scientific language for 135 years, and it’s not a ‘slur’.

The opposite of ‘cis’ is ‘trans’, which means ‘across’, and ‘transgender’ is just one of its many uses. You have probably eaten trans fats, for example, or perhaps you have been on a ‘transatlantic’ flight.

Ain’t science and language grand?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cis

—@sindarina

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Based on the analysis in this blog post, #visionOS relies on semantic HTML rather than author-defined CSS hover styles in order to render things properly. All of a sudden, things that those of us #accessibility people have been saying about properly using the semantic web becomes important.

🤷🏾 I guess.

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/thoughts-on-safari-spatial-computing/
#WWDC23 #a11y

—@ppatel

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@elight

Coding for a living fundamentally means writing code whose purpose is determined by someone else, in ways determined by someone else, on someone else’s schedule. You’re renting out your body to a stranger who has structural incentives to mistreat it & no structural incentives to make genuine value.

Generally speaking, you’re writing code intended to be used by domain experts in a domain you have limited knowledge of, and you will never meet the users and find out if the code you wrote made their lives easier — but typically the answer is no, because users & customers are disjoint sets with different motivations. Basically, if you’re writing a tool for some field X, you’re implementing a marketing guy’s idea of what a different marketing guy at a firm that does X will want to buy, and the people who actually know how X is done have no power or voice. So you may well work on an extremely profitable but totally useless project.

If you’re very lucky, you’ll be surrounded by sensible people. But inevitably, you will be asked to do something that shouldn’t be done, and your choices are to either do it or find another job that may very well be worse. Most software engineers are employed exclusively to implement code that should not ever be written, in ways that are transparently perverse, to perform tasks that should never be performed in industries that should be abolished.

In this sense, we’re like workers in other industries.

We’re privileged because of the unjustified mystique (produced largely by unnecessarily poor tooling) surrounding programming: non-technical managers acknowledge that we know something they don’t, to a greater degree than other comparable domains, and so it’s possible for at least senior devs to manipulate the planned project away from really obviously bad ideas. But there are pretty strict limits to that. We’re trapped the same way as all other workers.

—@enkiv2