Notices by PaulDavisTheFirst (pauldavisthefirst@fosstodon.org)

1994: I joined Jeff Bezos and another programmer to start Amazon. I stayed for 14 months until a corporate culture was visible that I wanted nothing to do with (other reasons too).

1996: after moving to Phila., I started shopping at Whole Foods. I've shopped there almost exclusively for the 28 years. I continued shopping there even after Amazon bought the company.

Whole Foods refusal to accept a union election and leveraging Trump's gutting of the NLRB is, I think, the final straw. Bye, WFM.

@weyoun6 @inthehands i think it is a mistake to believe that "the NYT allegiance to the aristocracy" is an explanation of the paper's behavior rather than a side-effect. NYT's fundamental commitment is to the status quo - that is, the idea that things are basically OK and just need a bit of fixing around the edges, which dutiful politicians will do after NYT reports on it. Turns out that this committment is functionaliy equivalent to the allegiance you identify, but semantically distinct.

@inthehands vaguely related observation. in the aughts we got a toyota sienna minivan, and fairly soon afterwards my wife backed one of the rear corners (can't recall which one) into a bollard or wall corner or something of similar height and hardness.

we soon started noticing that more than half the siennas we would see all had the precise same bump.

sometimes these things are the driver, but sometimes the evidence points to the design of the vehicle.

@Jackiemauro @mekkaokereke i think this highlights the problem: conflict between what social media actually is & what a lot of (most?) people actually want.

We need totally different models of for social media, rather than hoping that changes could lead to a better experience.

People who want semi-private spaces with implicit conventions (e.g the bar) are not going to get it from any current social media platforms, because they are not designed to be that. Behavior/moderation can't fix this.

@inthehands @JetlagJen that's not enough to justify slack :) Sure, if you want to write piano sonatas, you worked alone for the last few hundred years.

but if you were a piano player and needed drums, you used to have to find a drummer. now you just need a DAW and maybe a plugin or two.

which is both good and bad: you may live somewhere where there really is no drummer. but you may also be failing to connect with the drummer next door, so to speak.

@inthehands @JetlagJen sadly, creation is not community in the same sense that it once was. As the original author of a cross-platform digital audio workstation, I often feel regret about the extent to which contemporary computer-based msuic/audio tools allow people to work alone.

I believe it to be a real and genuine problem to which I contributed (not the worst problem I've contributed to, however).

1/

@freemo @maccruiskeen @DelRider and I think you're completely wrong about that.

So where does that leave us?

@freemo @maccruiskeen @DelRider my point is not about journalistic integrity, because I consider that orthogonal to notions of "objectivity" and "fairness".

I'm entirely happy to have reporters who are clearly heavily biased towards a POV on a story.

The "ethical expectations" for reporters from where I sit do not include "express no bias, have no opinion", but are much more ineffable than that. I want people who *dig*, I like it more if their opinions makes them dig deep and wide.

@freemo @maccruiskeen @DelRider they may exist, but they are followed as much as the WaPo's "no endorsements" rule has been followed since the 50s i.e. not at all.

Everybody knows that the Guardian is a left-of-center ("liberal" in US terms) paper; if you want the establishment right POV you read the Telegraph; if you want the establishment pretending not to be right wing, you read the Times; if you want the moss pit soccer hooligan version of the UK right, you used to read the Sun, etc. etc.

@freemo @maccruiskeen @DelRider nobody in UK journalism now or over the last 200 years believes any of these.

this idea that newspapers (and media in general) can be objective or fair or balanced is an almost entirely American fiction.

i want my news sources to be upfront about their biases., not hiding behind a make-believe facade of fairness and objectivity.

@inthehands Weissman at NYT explains it all to us:

@a_lex_ander @marcan

>> those rejecting modern tools like GitLab are gatekeepers,

Would like to mention one subtle nuance here. Over at ardour.org, we *refuse* to use non-self hosted systems like Github/Gitlab as our *canonical repository*. We believe that historical experience at sourceforge and direction at github confirm the wisdom of our preference for self-hosted options.

However, we are happy to use github as a public-facing locus for PRs.

(Can't boost an actual tweet so will recreate this one from Dr. Genevieve Guenther @DoctorVive)

Right-wing think tanks have written a 920 page plan, which begins day one of a Republican presidency, to dismantle most of the federal government’s work on climate.

Make no mistake: this is a battle plan. The war being waged is against our children's future.

Elections matter!

(screenshot taken from: https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/eenews/2023/07/26/battle-plan-how-the-far-right-would-dismantle-climate-programs-00107498)

#project2025 #renewablenergy #climatechange

whenever I see people write (or say) "on X, formerly known as Twitter", I want to yell that we, the users, control this technology.

Leaving Twitter has been popular with many, but an add-on like Control Panel for Twitter let users change what is displayed, logos, almost everything about the visual appearance .... BECAUSE THIS IS THE WEB.

One of the huge positives of web tech is just how much users can be in control, if they choose to be.

And we can, if we want, also choose what to call it.

If you are a DAW user that also uses a RTL language (e.g. Arabic), or you know someone who is ....

how do you feel about always being forced to draw lines from left to right (e.g. automation curves) ?

#daw #rtl #accessibility

stolen from a twoot by @CharlieJGardner

Things looking a bit questionable (at best) for Bandcamp and its workers, again. Sign the petition!

#bandcamp #bandcampfriday #bandcampunited

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/songtradr-recognize-bandcamp-united?source=direct_link&

@inthehands ok, so a couple of points. Recently my daughter (PhD candidate with a masters in speech pathology) was describing how she used python or R to hook up something roughly equivalent to an LLM to a data set she was working with. It was astonishing to me - the task was basically "plumbing" a set of insanely powerful pre-written components together to get a real task accomplished.

(almost) nothing I do as a native C++ developer with 35 years of experience works that way, but still... 1/

@inthehands ... it seemed to me that in some ways the late 80's dream of resuable software components has been substantively achieved, which is quite remarkable. 2/

@inthehands However ... this idea about abstractions being at the core ... while not wrong, it's really not my day to day experience as a native C++ developer writing realtime audio software with a GUI. Most of what I do all day involves grappling with the actual foibles of the language/libraries I am using, and the significance of abstraction-led design is relatively small on a day to day basis.

For example, understanding how to use instrusive lists instead of non-intrusive lists is quite 3/