Notices by Your friendly 'net denizen (cstanhope@social.coop)

@clacke Reminds me how I didn't hear glottal stops until a friend of mine from Venezuela pointed out she couldn't pronounce Cotton like I do (the name of a coworker). And I was confused, "I'm pretty sure I've heard you say Cotton's name..." She says, "No I say it with a 't' and you say it with..." and then she gestured to her throat. And my mind was blown a tiny bit when I realized what she meant. 😆

@cwebber Too real... 😭

@KasTasMykolas @hisham_hm Oh cool! I didn't know about that. TIL.

@hisham_hm If you use from:hisham_hm on mastodon.social's search box does that help? Or is the search so limited it's still not doing what you need?

(I've had to resort to downloading an archive of my toots and then grepping the .json file. 😆)

Code like other people matter.

@valhalla This is going to be one of those associations that's going to get stuck in my head on first exposure and will pop to mind whenever I see a trackpoint device. 😆

Phrases like "average user"... "normal people"... kind of set me on edge. We should just say "imagine a perfectly spherical person".

Logging off like...

@yrabbit You're right about the boards. I haven't tried to price their parts in any sort of volume, but if there is a similar price difference, then yikes!

@yrabbit I dug up an old invoice. Back in 2015 I was able to get that icestick board for $21.86. Hmm...

Aw, bummer. It looks like makers and hobbyists are not buying enough Lattice FPGAs. Lattice is announcing layoffs:

https://www.hillsboronewstimes.com/business/hillsboro-semiconductor-industry-takes-another-hit-as-lattice-announces-14-workforce-reduction/article_5bc138c6-a089-11ef-b6ed-c36ab7740877.html

#FPGA

Some DIY inspiration and aspiration:

"It's a digital book called Make it Yourself: 1000 Useful Things to Make...

Think of it like those old mail order catalogs that contained everything the average person might use in every day life. The difference here is that instead of products to buy, every item listed represents a DIY project that you can make yourself."

https://n-o-d-e.net/makeityourself.html

https://makeityourself.org/

@theruran Sometimes we write in ancient dialects because we're supporting hardware with ancient compilers. Not that you should see much of that sort of code in the open, but I don't know anything about the cultish types.

I like how Apple's "Gatekeeper" name says exactly what it is. It's cool how we sleep walk into a computing world where you are only allowed to trust somebody as long as Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. also trust them.

https://hackaday.com/2024/11/01/apple-forces-the-signing-of-applications-in-macos-sequoia-15-1/

(Note I had dalliance with Apple products a long time ago. I don't currently use Android. And I only use Windows at work because its a requirement there. But dealing with one or more of these corps are largely unavoidable to most of us.)

Step by step they're enclosing computing. Pick your preferred monopolist gatekeeper.

Between individuals like myself and whole communities of people helping each other out there in various ways, I suspect that's a large part of what allows the modern complex tech stack to actually continue to exist. If corps actually had to bear the entire burden of technical support for their products, could they continue to exist in their current form?

I used to think of it as technical support for family and friends, and now I realize it's really more like I'm volunteer technical support team for big corp. I wonder how many anonymous technical support dopes like me there are. 🤔

@derek I lucked out and avoid cueing as a child, and my kids avoided it too. But I have to admit, English is a terrible language for phonics. So many words that are exceptions to the rules that kids encounter right away as they try to learn to read. But even so, phonics is still useful.

Movin' slow and fixin' things.

Reading about the situation with PFAS and how 3M knew it was being found in people's bodies as early as 1970s and knew it was toxic but buried the information.

How many more examples do we need of corporations doing things that are antithetical to life itself? It seems clear that no set of laws, regulatory pressure, or good people on the inside will ever stop it. The problem is in the very structure of these companies. They can't do the right thing. They're not designed to.