Notices by Paddy Duke (paddyduke@mastodon.social)

@Epic_Null Once again, these people being banned or hidden ARE verified, and using a well-known donation platform.

They’ve had video calls with team members of @gazaverified and link to that verification from their bios.

If you’re suspicious about an account, check with the Gaza Verified team via https://gaza-verified.org/team/

Beyond that, you’re asking for an unreasonable level of verification from people in a war zone, often living in tents, with limited internet access.

@aral @Epic_Null @bifouba But Aral, someone who’s given it less than a minute of thought has decided “no-one has the tools to verify” Gazans are who they say they are.

That’s surely the matter settled. No?

You going out of your way to actually verify these people are who they say they are, specifically to help with this exact problem, doesn’t soothe my conscience when I ignore them.

Won’t somebody think of the real victim here? Me, in my intact home, terrified of getting scammed out of £25.

@aral It’s always easier to pretend that terrible people and companies have only suddenly become that way, rather than admit you weren’t paying enough attention to the people warning you earlier, or you didn’t care until now.

@aral It’s fucking exhausting to watch though.

“BigBadCo has lost its way (now that I can no longer ignore all the evil shit they do that I always thought I was immune to because of my race/class/gender/job)!”

@thomasfuchs The year is 2036. Apple now makes a phone so thin it slices your fingers off unless you hold it using their special glove accessory (sold separately).

The phone still has a gigantic 6.5 inch screen, making it feel like one of those big novelty cheques they use when rich shitheads give a tiny percentage of their hourly income to a charity for a photo opportunity.

@aral I was trying to put a small third party widget from a massive company on our website recently. They make you choose up front whether the widget is in dark mode or light mode. So they even went to the trouble of creating styles for a dark mode, but then didn’t think to provide a version that just reacts to the browser environment and uses the correct colour mode. It’s so shit.

@aral Now only smashing European puppies!

@MastodonEngineering Is there a closing date for applications?

@obrhoff Image alt text:

Developers, please be careful when installing Homebrew.
Google is serving sponsored links to a Homebrew site clone that has a cURL command to malware. The URL for this site is one letter different than the official site.

A Google results screenshot shows the top two results for Homebrew. The first, a malicious clone, has the URL ‘brewe.sh’. The second is the real website, with the URL ‘brew.sh’.

There are a bunch of modern web dev tools that all seem like they're geared towards really streamlining the developer experience of building something exactly once and leaving it. Maintenance be damned.

I don't think by itself that's necessarily a bad thing – sometimes you just want to publish a thing and be done – but most things on the web are not finished or perfect. It feels increasingly like the tools we build the web with fight against the nature of the platform rather than embrace it.

You'll hear "Tailwind is so good. It really streamlines my development process.", and when you look at their code, this is what a single, plain button looks like:

@quinn No disagreement on the last point. I just don’t see the long-term need to hold on to any capitalist structures for those goals. We could have the commerce without the capitalism and local governance without centralised power.

@quinn Sorry, I guess I missed your meaning.

I thought you were saying that certain forms of capitalism could somehow act as a bulwark against the excesses of a large centralised government. I don’t see a lot of evidence for that, especially given capitalists’ frequent tendency to subsume and dominate governments for their own ends.

@quinn @futurebird I’m sceptical of this.

If you need a second problematic system of exploitation and oppression to somewhat counteract your first one (and as a non-American I don’t really recognise the counterbalancing effect you’re referring to), it seems to me that you should probably try to get rid of both systems.

The “old woman who swallowed a fly” approach of increasingly compromised kludges feels like it’s been pretty conclusively debunked by now.

“Carbon capture” feels less like a technology and more like a description of the current state of environmental and energy policy making.

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Tried out https://kitten.small-web.org today for a little tiny character sheet "app" I've been working on.

It's really nice. It was super easy to set up and get started and the self-contained nature of everything was perfect for my needs.

Excellent work, @aral!