Notices by Mark T. Tomczak (mark@mastodon.fixermark.com)

"You truly are a member of America's Greatest Generation."

"Thanks, it's the trauma!"

(... this post inspired by Bea Arthur's military service. Semper Fi, Staff Sergeant Arthur.)

@evan Oh, absolutely. Americans do not know how it feels to be occupied; haven't had it happen since 1812.

I can't guarantee we wouldn't bite back like a rabid dog, but I can guarantee it would fuck with our identity fiercely to have a foreign sovereignty holding our soil.

@dalias @lauren I'd have to ask the guy who did Pepe the Frog because IIUC that's exactly what happened with it when GamerGate adopted it.

@dalias @lauren When I was a kid, we did that all the time. That's how memes worked / still work. Perhaps you mean "nobody professional" or "nobody in academia?"

The web was a playground until it wasn't.

@lauren It's been interesting to me to watch website vampirism (which used to be, if anything, welcomed---"Please, please, please scrape and share my data, I put it up for people to find and use!") become a bad thing.

Second time in my life I've witnessed a behavior that was near-universally accepted as fine transitioning to unacceptable in multiple spaces. Smoking was the previous one.

@lauren It makes me wonder how this impacts Google search results in the large, because way down in the stack for Google's ranking algorithm has always been CTR and click-bounce.

I have no idea if they're controlling for AI (and their own OneBox surfacing's) impact on those signals. Be interesting if that were one of the explanations for the perceived enshittification of search results.

On this, the eve of Flow taking home an Oscar, I want to note that Blender exists in its current form because after Ton Roosendaal spearheaded writing it, released it as freeware, had his company dissolve, tried developing it as shareware, had the company developing it go bankrupt, and built a non-profit foundation to crowd-source funding for it... Enough people stepped up to fund it that it still lives.

It's a hell of a testament to a software author---and a community's---insistence that in spite of market evidence to the contrary, the software is good and worthy of continued existence.

#Blender3d

@RikerGoogling OMG I want to start saying this. "LLMs lie because they're not trained on Big Data, they're trained on Big Lore."

@dalias @AnnaAnthro Ah yes, I forgot the classics. How foolish of me.

@dalias @AnnaAnthro Yep. Turns out the only actual problem with games journalism that "gamergate" pointed to is just a problem with "journalism."

@owl @schratze @CatsWhoCode @loren "THAT FOOL RICHARDS THINKS HE CAN INVENT NEW TYPES OF SCROLLING? HE WILL FAIL. SCROLLING BELONGS TO DOOM ALONE!!!"

@mcc One second, let me find a link.

https://eventsforchange.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/the-starfish-story-one-step-towards-changing-the-world/

tl;dr a fiction about someone throwing individual starfish back into the ocean when they wash up on a beach.

@mcc I spent a lot of time star-fishing on Twitter and Facebook, trying to get people to change their behavior.

I'm not sure it's useful. It may be the case that you're not here to change their behavior so blocking without explanation is fine and if they want your wisdom they can do the bare minimum work of, like, reading your profile or something.

(I mean, unless you are here to change their behavior; not telling you what to do. "I'm a shitposter, not a cop." 😉 )

@WarnerCrocker I feel this way about both my Ayn Rand phase and my Paul Graham phase.

My conclusion is "I guess I didn't actually have that much to compare those ideas to."

@jk Yep. Because the UI abstraction stack never actually got good.

To its credit, it did get less bad than it was when JQuery was king.

@futurebird Oh God, it's following me now.

Visited the Cleveland Museum of Natural History for the first time this weekend and they have fossils of that fish in five different places. It's IIUC the state fish fossil.

I swear, every time we turned around, it was staring at us. I'm going to remember "The Dunkleosteous had a self-sharpening beak" like I remember the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

@blogdiva Yes, all of this.

I've told people in the past that the power-move Apple made was to jump up and give the RIAA everything it wanted: format control, a very generous resource split, and encryption on the local files. They kept iTunes dancing to their flute until the alternatives had died.

... and then one day they turned around and took all that away, removed the encryption and changed the revenue share. And they said "What are you gonna do? Go to our competitor? Michael McWentBankrupt? You gonna build your own? With what talent? The talent we hired?"

It was a coup. A huge coup.

@rauschma Small-brain energy: "They should have stuck with the original Scheme-inspired design; that'd have been much better."

Big-brain energy: "They were smart to go with a language design that mirrored what people were familiar with. Yes, it had design flaws that we probably shouldn't have tolerated in what would become the assembly-language of the web, but there was no guarantee at the time it would hit the way it did and it's better we have something than nothing."

Galaxy-brain energy: "So that's why I'm announcing SchemeScript, my Scheme-inspired compiles-to-Javascript language with compile-time or run-time options for..." 😉

Americans: "Oh no, we couldn't possibly replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20; what kind of precedent would it set if we just started changing the picture on our money?"

Australians:

@mayadev @ton @ariaflame @cstross I agree it has consequences. My point is it should not. Source of authority on one's gender should be the person, not some document they didn't have agency over.

This unfortunate circumstance is giving the lie to the entire British government policy of caring deeply what one's birth certificate says about one's gender. It's an absurdity that proves the farcical nature of the whole system's approach.