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Boardgamers say they hate Monopoly and then buy from Asmodee

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I just found out about the Nexus Q which is literally just a sphere computer. My desire for it grows infinitely, but the ebay listings around all over $100 and that's enough to stop myself from being a dumbass.
Would you keep it as a music device or do something else with it?
@Morgan McMillian So there's a valid cyanogenmod for it (no, not lineageOS), so you can shove fdroid on it. So it'd likely spend most of its time as a small terminal PC and a music player, since it has good music interfaces on it and basically nothing else.


My son has decided he only wants @Alasdair Beckett-King 's books at bedtime. All other books can pound sand.
Much respect to your son.
@Alasdair Beckett-King your publisher's supply chain to Canada is horrendous, and so now I've got to figure out how to convince a UK publisher to send a book overseas again!
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"If an external MTA refuses to use plain text SMTP, but has not been updated for so long that it cannot use TLS 1.2, it probably has cooties and you shouldn’t talk to it anyway." #ryoms

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ah, this. daemonforums.org can't send me mail because it insists on long out-of-date TLS.


I am on my second cup of coffee today. I am dreaming already of my third.

I went off coffee for 3 months for reasons of "I try to force myself to not get too addicted", but fuck, I am so happy I am back on coffee

I’ve always hated coffee, but I quit caffeine by accident, and then felt like my heart was going to explode when trying it again after a few months.
@Lester Ward I am pretty light on the effect of caffeine, hence my ability to spring from nothing to 6 cups in a day. But I also go off coffee for three months every 5 years to make it nearly impossible for me to get badly addicted, hence the cause of all this.

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Appealing the removal didn’t yield any result. Google just repeated the same statement "the app was removed because it uploads the contact list" without even acknowledging any of the arguments I made in the appeal.

I understand that most of my audience here on Mastodon is more ideology aligned with F-Droid but the app sales on Google Play store have contributed significantly to me working (almost) full time on #Conversations_im.

Without the revenue from Google Play I can’t afford this.

Pretty sure almost all of these systems are just bots and ai models looking for something they think is suspicious and will have 0 people looking at your case unless you bring in big bucks for them :)

I use the playstore version because it has gcm/fcm enabled but I'd rather not of course.

#Google and #Apple - a plague on both their houses!

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Grab a couple of dice. Roll them.

If you get below 5, those are rookie numbers. Shout at the dice, let them know they're underperforming.

If you get above 9, that's what we want to see! They're good dice, and you should acknowledge that.

Repeat that and keep a record. You'll notice that negative feedback often results in better performance on the next roll. Positive feedback, conversely, can make them get lazy.

1/2

What is this even saying? That an individual's workplace performance is a stochastic process? That a skilled-enough manager can do the equivalent of "rolling" a person such that their performance is biased towards being better-than-average?

I mean, I get the surface message, but I don't think it holds up for precisely the reason that people aren't dice.

Yes, and that's why I'm asking. Reading 2/2 charitably, I was hoping you could help me "fully understand" what you meant by the dice analogy.

@ahoelken

(a) the dice are not responding to your feedback: they're dice

(b) nonetheless, the stats "show" that your negative feedback was more effective than your positive feedback (this is a genuine thing you can try if your Friday nights are as exciting as mine...)

People are a little stochastic, although that's not really the point: we have good days and bad days influenced by factors that we can't predict well. In fact, the first time I saw this effect referred to it was in the context of actual human beings, and it occurred to me that it would be amusing and maybe clearer to put it in the context of inanimate objects.

It's a really powerful cognitive illusion caused projecting an emotional response onto regression to the mean, and a similar effect can definitely cause people to believe it's in some way effective to mistreat others. To be clear, I don't think it is.

I guess it's not really an analogy, it's a thing you can actually do, and the dice don't even have to represent anything other than their cubical selves.

I'm going to link to this excellent explanation (with code!) in case any future travellers get here

https://hcommons.social/@juanrloaiza/112062067415121397


Inspired by @derwinmcgeary's post (https://octodon.social/@derwinmcgeary/111921298436478955) from a couple of days ago, I wrote a quick blog entry about teaching, feedback, and regression towards the mean. I hope I didn't get the explanation wrong and that I understood the point correctly!

http://blog.juanrloaiza.com/posts/2024/03/teaching-feedback-and-regression-toward-the-mean/



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It doesn't matter if Firefox's AI is good, it doesn't matter. Firefox is doing this to advertise, and the people thinking of switching wont switch to firefox if it's touting AI.
I believe that is active sabotage by google, the primary founder of Mozilla.

@cheetah_spottycat 100%! Definitely!

Google has been actively sabotaging the web from all fronts for decades!

But Mozilla* really needs to figure out getting Mozilla** in check, but that seems unlikely

* The not for profit
** the for profit



What ever happened to that weird mess of uzbl, xombrero, surf and so on. I've heard so little about weird minimal browsers. Might be that I'm out of university - but I thought the Fediverse was filling that hole.

I never got into uzbl or surf - I was a Xombrero user due to the OpenBSD package being easy - I wonder how stable those are? Kinda the inverse of LibreWolf.

@silverwizard: i used to be partial to luakit if "as minimal a browser as humanly possible" is a goal. Maybe still good?

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#CDCSays Covid has a right to defend itself.

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Fuckin' Drata rolled out a support AI and now their support doesn't appear to look at tickets. Who the fuck.

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$0.0000001196969/req web server
$0.0000019666666/req auth server
$0.0000040533333/req database
$0.0008833333333/req large language model

someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my SaaS product is dying.

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i don't know shit about fuck, but i think one of those things is worse than the others



So I redid my phone homescreens to avoid having application links, and replaced everything with widgets.

For years I've felt like desktop widgets are mostly a gimmick and pointless, and basically after a day this way I've completely reversed my decision on them. I basically got annoyed at the way that the shortcut model leads to just a soup of icons and I usually just go to the display of all and then use the link from there, and I completely reversed my decision. Feels very weird.

@silverwizard This sounds absolutely dystopian to me, but I've been blessed with a kid who mostly follows rules, so I'm in no position to judge.
@Hypolite Petovan I mean, it's easier than finding a stool at 2am and unscrewing his lightbulbs again

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Hi everyone, I’m looking for work! I have ~7.5 years experience working on iOS apps, both Objective-C and modern Swift.

I’m based in the Netherlands and would be looking for a fully-remote position.

Boosts appreciated!

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there's been almost twenty years of work on optimizing javascript engines with JIT and complex heuristic-based GC and a wealth of feature-rich profiling and analysis tools and validation and testing frameworks for deployment and integration and syntax improvements and functional and higher-order primitives and serverside transpiled code. and it's all enabled some amazing new stuff, for example github now takes 10 seconds to display a plain text file, and you cant search properly anymore

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also we've got hardware running at billions of cycles per second, and to compensate for this incredible feat we make software with features such as taking five seconds to start up, hogging 1 GB of memory to display some messages and using half your available graphics compute for a spinny arrow icon

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also no one talks about how much resource these modern sites consume for displaying the simplest looking page. I've seen vastly static landing pages having 100mb heap size. We must thank React (and similar technologies) for assuming that all of us use latest gen 32gb macbook pro 🤗🤗


So I gave up coffee until Lent back in November, and I've been chasing the dragon of something that tastes half as strong as coffee
A cup with a ginger teabag floating in it
The same cup with the tea bag, but also slices of raw ginger
A little end of ginger and a stick of cinnamon makes a mean cup of ... tisane

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According to Apple’s lawyers, "no reasonable user would expect that their actions in Apple’s apps would be private from Apple."

I repeat to make it clear: According to Apple itself, no reasonable Apple user should expect privacy when using the device.

So let’s make it even more clear: if you expect basic privacy using your Apple device, you are "unreasonable" (= a fool).

(originally posted by @mysk )

Excerpt from the court document:


"Given Apple’s extensive privacy disclosures, no reasonable user would expect that their actions in Apple’s apps would be private from Apple."

Civil Case No.: 5:22-CV-07069-EJD
Case 5:22-cv-07069-EJD Document 122 Filed 12/08/23 Page 30 of 41

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Happy #blackhistorymonth Canada, we’re doing great:

Three Black speakers were barred from a meeting with clerks of the Supreme Court of #Canada for their social media posts related to #Palestine.

https://rabble.ca/human-rights/supreme-court-staff-polices-black-voices-and-shows-anti-palestinian-bias/

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EDIT: WE FOUND THEM AND THEY ARE OK

hey! has anyone seen Lore AKA @taq ? nobody has heard from it since last friday. last seen in edinburgh uk

pale person with brown hair and black glasses
@taq
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That must be such a relief, I'm so glad to hear this!
very glad to hear it


So I spent all of the weekend with sick kids and then yesterday with a sick family. So, during this, I bought Mario+Rabbids - and holy crap - how did Nintendo let such shitty people control their brand?! So much misogyny and unkindness
It's almost completely avoidable. But you'll be going along, and then suddenly it'll make a joke about Rabbid Peach being super vain because she takes selfies.It's like 3 hours of good gameplay and then one little 4 second joke that reminds you Ubisoft sucks

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You don't hate project management.
You hate a mediocre tech bro's interpretation of project management

You don't hate product management.
You hate a mediocre tech bro's interpretation of product management.

Go find the people those tech bros were talking over last year. Hire them. Listen to them.

When something underrepresented people have been arguing for becomes trendy, it gets diluted by mediocre overrepresented people in tech.

Break the cycle. Stop building mediocre teams.

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When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.

But that's not true anymore.

User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.

My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.

#HCI #UX #UI #okdoomer

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Well said. Here's my own take, from almost exactly 3 years ago.

Why I'm losing faith in UX:
https://creativegood.com/blog/21/losing-faith-in-ux.html

@markhurst Nice article, excellent graphic!
(by Erika Hall https://nitter.net/mulegirl/status/1332389999656927232 , via @markhurst )
a humpback anglerfish, hideous and predatory and mouth agape with fangs -- its maw is labeled "Business Model" and its attractive dangly luminescent lure, meant to draw in prey, is labeled "UX"

(Nitter addon enabled: Twitter links via https://nitter.net)

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how about we go back to instantaneous load times

because that is something we can do

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Honestly, with my startup job starting to fall apart, and my CISSP exam, and my kids sick, and me not really sure what the purpose of the economy is - I just

I feel like things are in chaos, and I need to figure out stability for the next little bit, somewhere to ride this out



some people's parents bring them computer problems

my parents message me with DeltaChat to tell me SSL is broken and I realize someone *else* deleted the nonprofit's DNS entry for their domain



https://tann.itch.io/slice-dice

an indie game that works perfectly in my brain is awesome. I want the devs to do more so pay them for me!


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I know I shouldn't be surprised but

look at the shithead trying to appropriate Jennell Jaquays' career accomplishments

https://diyanddragons.blogspot.com/2024/01/xandering-is-slandering.html

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@jhx Luckily I have a job. I just had the meeting that was "Oh, oh no, this meeting's topic is that I need to job hunt"

So yeah - thanks

@jhx

Ah, gotcha.

Yeah... the day did not start quite so good.. meeting was rather annoying

Oh well, life can be fun sometimes 😂

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What if we defined "security" as being able to put food on the table?
As safe and abundant housing for all?
As access to healthcare?

What would investing in “national security” look like then?

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Sort of feel like the combination of “you must work productively if you want to be allowed live” and “technology will allow production without the expense of human labor” should be a bit of a giveaway as to capitalism’s murderous intentions.

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The amount that Absinthe tastes like a burny delicious liquorice all sort is probably bad for me
@Patch Arcana That makes a lot of sense, my previous weakness was sambuca

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Viewing "climate collapse" as a "social movement" is definitionally climate denial. It is just that simple.

Whether society acts or not, the material quality of life for the West is going to decline over the next few decades, at least, due to the cost of collapse-induced disasters.

Thinking, disconnected from facts, isn't thinking as much as it is hoping.

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Your yearly reminder that ‘layoff season’ is an American invention that infected the rest of the world.

Layoffs cost a company 35% more than retaining a core staff over 3 years.

The only purpose is for inflating investor reports.

Layoffs in tech immediately degrade the product, reduce security, create safeguarding issues, and inevitably destabilise the future of a given product.

@guigsy I'll quote my father on that subject, from when he was mill foreman at a copper mine:

"I don't want the industrious guy who's always sweeping or shoveling or mopping up the mess. I want the lazy guy who'll find out what's causing the mess and fix that so he doesn't have to clean up the mess anymore."

my former employer laid off my entire team to bring them back as contractors a month ago and those that decided to stay are still dealing with the hassle of trying to get access again to necessary systems all while customers are suffering in the meantime from what I hear.


My Burning Wheel party failed a navigation roll and stumbled into the wrong magical ritual of demon summoning
@silverwizard Maybe the real treasure is the daemons we summoned along the way?



I love this keyboard so fucking much
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That's a awesome keyboard

whats the switches and keycaps or is it custom from ground up?

@m8ic621 it's just this https://www.maxkeyboard.com/max-nighthawk-z-104-key-custom-backlit-mechanical-keyboard-top-print.html a very boring build, but I wrote some magic circle generating code and got glowing magic circles and I love it