Notices by ShadSterling (shadsterling@mastodon.social), page 3

@inthehands @mekkaokereke I still think we ought to reallocate senate districts to not necessarily follow state lines. Keep the same number of senators, but reallocate the districts so each district represents about the same number of people - more like the house, but senate districts are national, while the house still represents the states

@mcc call it “Prime Time”

@verge that should be required by the standard, along with software on every device capable of any UI that exposes the capabilities and status of every connected device, and some amount of logging from devices that manage connections

When your computer loses the connection to every external drive because the power draw on your hub/dock triggered a reset, it should be required that the user be able to see what happened and why, and to see the potential for it if they look in advance

@inthehands it might be more complicated for international operations, but since the Deepwater Horizon I’ve thought we should have a required chemical spill insurance agency that works roughly like the FDIC - if your facility is involved in a spill, that facility and employees who work there and other assets involved in its maintenance are transferred permanently to the insurer, who can also temporarily commandeer any other assets as needed for cleanup.

@inthehands ah, that’s new then; last I’d heard it still said “without consent”, where consent seems to mean “agreeing to the TOS”, which only means they won’t do it unless you use their service

@inthehands did they actually remove that from their TOS?

@irenes @mos_8502 @tedchoward @beka_valentine is there an app standard that an Indy developer can target that every user can then install on whatever distro they happen to have? I can’t imagine any Indy developer having the ability to negotiate with hundreds of distros about it

@c0dec0dec0de @siderea @dalias @warthog9 everything about how spam filters work is bad for users. Mail should either be delivered or not, senders should know which happened and why, and recipients should be in control of what is and isn’t delivered to them. None of it should be subject to the whims of a chaotic score based on a secret formula.

@inthehands figuring out what to do has never been the problem, it’s deciding to do it. 1) stop extracting fossil fuels, 2) start refossilizing greenhouse gasses. There’s enough buffering in the system that we wouldn’t need much more mitigation than to ban renewal of any fossil fuel extraction permits or international trade contracts (along with canceling all of the subsidies and unused permits). The engineers have been prepared for a decade, they’re waiting on the politicians

@inthehands “concrete” may not be the best word, but I mean operations that act on bits, roughly machine instructions, or the lowest level where you can talk about data rather than physics. Sure, it’s an abstraction, but it’s the boundary between CS and CE

Not sure what you mean by “projects”; when I got my BS in CS we did plenty of projects, but since we only used the standard library we never had to think about dependencies

@inthehands interesting. One thing I’ve been thinking is that CS programs fail to teach how computers work - how data is composed of bits and how abstract operations are composed of concrete operations. I think I agree that treating abstractions as the “trunk” would be good, with the caveat that they also have to cover what it is that’s being abstracted

(And they need to do a much better job of teaching practical skills like dependency management)

@mekkaokereke I hadn’t heard of the cough method before, but at some point I switched to these “alternative swabbing instructions”, based on reading about what was getting fewer false negatives as the new variations were gaining prevalence:

cough 3-5 times, then swab on the inside of both cheeks, above and below the tongue, on the gums and hard palate, for a minimum swabbing duration of 30 seconds

@smallcircles @Blort @hrefna if lots of companies join the fediverse to compete or connect with Facebook, won’t that make it harder for Facebook to extinguish other providers?

@feld @mcc every time I see this sort of thing I wonder, what if we could spend more of that time and attention on feeding the hungry, healing the sick, housing the homeless…. Not that other pursuits aren’t worthy, just that if we can solve such tiny obscure technical things, why can’t we also solve the big obvious social things?

@ariadne so next time their ISP changes their IP address they’ll lose access to their bluesky account? And another customer could take it over?

@Gargron I don’t care about the difference between toot, post, share, or publish, but the misuse of the term “boost” bothers me. It doesn’t increase(boost) the weight of that post in decisions about what to show, it adds that post to the timeline of your own posts - it should be called retoot, repost, reblog, or similar