Notices by Piers Cawley (pdcawley@mendeddrum.org)

@tommorris One of those signs of a codebase maintained by a developers who care is the amount of boilerplate that's hidden behind domain specific abstraction.

Don't generate the fucking boilerplate for me; generate the domain specific stuff I need to eliminate it, or get the fuck out of my way you tedious Clippy++ attempt.

@DJDarren @cstross TV adaptations have more chance of working even if the original author wasn't writing with that in mind though, because TV has more time and don't have to pare everything down to the bone to fit in ninety minutes.

Jackson's LotR films are astonishing, really. Because there's no way JRRT was writing with any consideration for film adaptation.

@cstross I suspect that, should it ever happen, The Rivers of London books will adapt remarkably well for similar reasons.

@cstross @christineburns @ChrisMayLA6 I was chatting with a doctor acquaintance and he grumbled a bit about all the paperwork these days. I said "Isn't that better than another Shipman though?" and he went a bit quiet and conceded the point.

@cstross @christineburns @ChrisMayLA6 Can't recommend this highly enough, by the way. David Spiegelhalter describing the statistical evidence against Shipman is particularly chilling. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001qw98

@cstross I didn't use a microdrive 'til dad got a QL. Now there was an unholy hack of a storage medium.

@lzg @doubleunion I thought those were only ever threaded by pulling new threads through from the tail end of the previously threaded ones

@cstross Could've sworn I recognised at least one specific ex-CiX reprobate in the Rule 34 novels.

@tito_swineflu @mekkaokereke @rasmus91 probably easier to 'just' play it rather than trying to punch it into a drum machine, there's so much variation. Phenomenal stuff.

@mekkaokereke you're not wrong. Billie Jean is magnificent. Tight. There's nothing unnecessary on that track. Thriller is baggy by comparison (but only by comparison). Nobody, except maybe Prince was even close.

@inthehands the example that springs to mind is Twitter. Twitter got to stupidly large whilst being written in Ruby, back when Ruby's only implementation was a painfully slow tree walking interpreter. They got much bigger, but Ruby and MySQL got them to the point where they mattered.

@futurebird @mekkaokereke @ddritter I confess, I'm at a loss to think of non-abusive uses of followers only replies.

Followers only posts, sure, but replies? Nothing but an abuse vector.

@futurebird @mekkaokereke @ddritter I'm not sure I understand what a followers only reply achieves over and above you adding a cw.

Doesn't a public reply plus a self-boost achieve the same result?

@futurebird @mekkaokereke @ddritter

I recognise that I'm probably just another privileged asshole at this point, but is that a bad thing? Especially when eliminating 'followers only' replies (or its current behaviour) genuinely seems to eliminate a very nasty form of abusive posting?

Me, I'd make followers only replies work similarly to the way mentions only toots do – make them visible to the followers of everyone mentioned in the toot, but only push them to the replier's followers.

@futurebird @mekkaokereke @ddritter having non DM type replies invisible to a victim's followers, and un-boostable or QT-able to boot is just too fucked up for words.

But… here we are, in the land of unverifiable screenshots.

@NicolaElle @revoluciana Dunno if it's strictly #radicaloptimism, but a friend of mine, Lou, transitioned in her seventies. I phoned her when I found out to congratulate her and find out how she was doing.

"Well," she said, "I'm finding out who my friends are, and so far it's all of them"

She didn't have long as herself, but my god, she enjoyed those years.

RIP Lou Killen.

@goatsarah @emmatonkin @ajlanes @justinto @atomicpoet the Arc was reputed to have the best version of Elite until Elite:Dangerous launched.

My takeaway from the xz thing is this: never write software that anybody but you might want to use for anything.

@goatsarah Um… I disagree with your paraphrasing of the answer you gave though. To my eyes at least, you went: "This is the history. This is why it makes sense."

And their response was along the lines of: "Thanks for the history. I meant it when I asked people not to explain why they think it makes sense today though."

Given the sheer volume of responses the OP gets from Reply Guys when they ask questions like that, I can understand why they might reply to you that way. Maybe you overreacted?

@lookitmychicken I've been pleased by my Keychron K3, or if you want something more radical, @jesse makes some fabulous boards at https://keyboard.io