Notices by vera grey :verifiedplural: (quietmisdreavus@squad.town)

@clarity god, this is the thing i hate the most about TTRPGs and the reason i don’t really play. i really love the minutiae of the combat mechanics in D&D (for example, i don’t have much experience in other systems) but absolutely suck at conversational improv and character acting, so i eventually bounced off

the promo art for the steam spring sale is cute

excited to see the Steam Delivery Catgirl make a return for the next seasonal sale

@vyr

“upstream" is now "canon"
"merge" is now "canonize” (@akjcv beat me to it lol)
"fork" and "branch” are now "headcanon”
"rebase" is now "retcon”
"BDFLs exercising control to do dumb shit" are now "George Lucas releasing another special edition”

@clarity god yeah

is it alright if i boost this

i will never stop stressing the importance of a “culture of documentation”, where you make it as seamless as possible to write and consume documentation, provide top-tier examples of excellent documentation, and build the incentives for people to write and show off their own documentation in a virtuous cycle where everybody benefits

rust has this with `cargo doc` and docs.rs. swift *almost* has this with Swift-DocC and the Swift Package Index, but generating documentation at-desk still requires modifying your package spec to enable the CLI tooling.

plus, while “official” libraries like the standard library and the Apple SDKs have professional documentation, we still need to extend this quality to foundational libraries like Swift NIO and other server-side packages. (i haven’t used NIO personally, but we just talked about it in the Documentation Workgroup meeting.)

if everyone has trivial access to high-quality documentation and an easy means to host their own, everybody benefits.

so, it’s been documented that random engineers at Twitter would open the Great Big Dashboard and flip through private messages of people they know, right?

i’m confident the same is true of Facebook and Instagram, even if it’s not documented (or that i haven’t heard of it

even outside of those services, it’s also been documented that random NSA agents will open their version of the Great Big Dashboard and flip through private messages of people they know, aggregated across the services they have taps for

similarly, the reason that every healthcare professional in the US won’t discuss private details over email is that email is a fundamentally insecure medium. there is no protection for messages in transit or at rest, where “at rest” includes your phone if you’re using the default Mail app on iOS

so over here, when people trot out the old canard that “fedi admins can read the DMs to/from people on their server”, i kinda get annoyed because /that’s not new/. at least here there’s no Great Big Dashboard to pull them out - you need to manually trawl through the database tables to pull posts out

the only secure medium to exchange electronic messages is encrypted email, or end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms like Signal, WhatsApp, or iMessage. full stop.

so now i just need the confidence to address a work meeting as "chat", preferably while setting up screen-share so i can continue my tradition of having un-serious presentations given to the entire department

years of watching twitch streams has taught me that "chat" and "gamers" are both gender-neutral forms of collective address

god, i just want to scream every sentence in this article from the rooftops #ActuallyAutistic https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-human-connection-and-the-double-empathy-problem/

over-reliance on search as the means to finding content has led to worse user experiences in software

it is phenomenally easy to wind up in situations where you don't know what you don't know, and because the attempt at a category system is so half-baked you're thrust into a situation where you can never figure it out

"old woman yells at cloud" moment: compare a library with broad categorization (easy to learn the available categories, possible to go to a shelf related to a category and "browse the shelves" to learn about a new thing) to a search-first system (topics are loosely categorized based on potentially-inconsistent terminology, you need to know the key phrases to look up something which may not be available without already knowing them, algorithmic content feeds entrenching you in information you already know)

i'm willing to accept this is a generational thing, but i will continue to dislike it

i was a major contributor to Rust's documentation tooling in 2017-2019. i'm now a major contributor to Swift's documentation tooling since 2020. if you appreciate those documentation experiences, it's likely i've had a hand in it.

i'm also trans. the growing tide of rhetoric and legislation targeting trans children and adults in the United States is terrifying to me. i have had serious discussions with my partner about whether we should leave the country for our own safety.

i've already had to evacuate my home state, Texas, having never lived anywhere else since early childhood, because of the specific political climate there. i can never move back. i could maybe go back to visit my parents or my sisters who still live there, but if it follows Florida's lead, even that might be difficult.

if you think that "politics should stay out of tech", you are putting your colleagues' lives at risk. you might be able to stay here and keep working on your projects, but the rest of us are looking at immigration law and losing sleep wondering how long it will be before even the "safe" cities and states are too dangerous to stay in.

please. stand up for us. if we have to do this alone, we may not be around to do it much longer.

@Mara brb, getting a frilly dress to wear for my next talk