Notices by Charlie Owen (whalecoiner@indieweb.social)

@goatsarah I didn’t see anyone “chomping a the bit for weekend sailors to die”. It’s some internet memists using attacks on a rich persons hobby (hey, you can be rich being a dog groomer, just as you can be rich being unemployed) by wildlife as a metaphor for class warfare and nature fighting back.

If you want to get angry about that then you’re gonna get angry over ACAB and eat the rich. 🤷♀️

@goatsarah uh huh, but that’s not what your posts came across as saying. More like “we’re not rich just because we own and operate a yacht!”. Which given that you’re one of the trans women known for living off the money from tech shares *might* just rub folk up the wrong way. 🤷♀️

@goatsarah You’re probably not mega rich if you have the time and money to operate a yacht.

Just normal rich.

Pure crying joy at this video. A young trans dude singing about the transphobic “archaeologists will dig up your bones and you’ll still be female” trope. 😭😭❤️❤️ #Trans

I am fascinated by the difference between the @Mastodon and @homeassistant approaches to community, both being very similar scale projects.

One of them is about very small regular incremental updates, lots of community contact and consultation, a helpful communication style, excellent documentation, and a deep empathic understanding of human needs, and the other is @Mastodon.

#Mastodon #HomeAssistant

@Mastodon @homeassistant this is snarky, yes. But I’ve yet again just seen some oh so helpful Blåhaj-cuddling tech nerds scolding users simply because they pointed out some issues with Mastodon.

@Mastodon @homeassistant I know that Mastodon is a German project but you’ve gotta ditch that whole German approach to community and usability. It’s holding things back. 😩

@Mastodon @homeassistant this snarkiness perhaps also brought to you by me discovering my vape died this morning and I now have no nicotine in my system.

Bluesky absolutely nailed it by targeting the FOMO that runs right through the tech industry.

You could put “invite required” on a cheese sandwich and developers would be selling their grandmothers for access to it. 🙄

Still, Bluesky is undoubtedly better than Twitter. Which is a low bar. But still a bar.

Can anyone help with finding a decades old children’s programming book? Probably from the mid-1980s.

It was set on a spaceship or shuttle that had crashed onto a barren grey moon. Two young people were forced to learn BASIC programming (oh yes) in order to survive (calculating oxygen levels and suchlike). I remember it being fully illustrated, in a thin hardback format.

#RetroComputing #Programming #80s

BTW this is NOT an endorsement of every male tech nerd who delights in knowing more than others and being a special little boy.

This is about people taking responsibility for the tech that they use and OWNING it, rather than being a passive consumer.

Perhaps I’m getting #SolarPunk in my old age, but we need to start building our own shit and maintaining what we’ve got. Product Thinking is anathema to that.

I say this as someone who has long worked in frontend and who cared about UX for the things that I built.

Product Thinking robs people of responsibility for their choices. It assumes that money can smooth away the rough edges, and that Delight is a key metric.

Cars are a Product. You get in and press a button and off you go. You take it into a magic cave once a year and it gets Made Better. You drive into a magic house once a week and it gets fed by elves.

A bicycle is the opposite of a Product. You need to know how it works. You need to be able to fix it when the chain comes off. You repair it, and inflate tyres, and adjust it to you.

Cars are killing the planet and no one wants to ride bicycles because they get wet.

The narrative of “normal users shouldn’t have to learn basic technology” is valid. But to make that happen you need to make everything a Product. Smooth, and shiny, and without responsibility. Which is exactly what we’ve been doing for decades and look at where that has got us.

Massive kudos to @Gargron and the Mastodon platform job advert for including *an explicit salary range*.

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/mastodon/290fd40f-125e-41fc-942d-f4ce59e6bda2

@redstarfish @ivory Glad you took the time to swipe at a small Indie and claim that they’re lying about their data collection.

@ivory vs Twitter app.