Notices by Hisham (hisham_hm@mastodon.social)

@deech Alternatively: petition to get Pedro Pascal to legally change his first name to Turbo.

@mcc the conclusion I arrived to in one of my talks on minimalism at FOSDEM is that programming tasks have an inherent complexity to them, and it can either be represented in the program source or not, in which case it is living in your head. In dynamically typed languages, you're still running a type checker in your head. In C, you're doing lifetime tracking in your head. We're always running the most complicated dependently-typed checker in our heads, if the problem itself needs it.

@liaamancio

We should have raised a red flag the moment people started using the word "disruption" as a positive thing. This is just too, to use an overused term, orwellian. "Disruption is Progess" could easily be a slogan in 1984, because the dictionary literally defines disruption as "to interrupt or impede the progress of". As in "there is a disruption in Line B of the metro".

Nobody wants disruption in their lives.

When you come from the developing world and visit places like the US and Europe, you can't help but be surprised at the number of little things in daily life that work based on the honor system. People basically agree collectively to not exploit and break the system, and basic things like public transit without turnstiles, etc, work.

We're seeing now that this honor system actually extended all the way up. There were never real checks and balances, everything was always ripe for "disruption".

@glyph Clearly the techbros don't see a difference between these two things. And to be honest, I'm not sure there is a difference. If you look at the transportation industries disrupted by Uber (in those cities where the local government wasn't strong enough to fight back), or the hospitality industry disrupted by AirBnB, the victims of disruption had their functioning disrupted in a very traditional sense.

@glyph Look at what AirBnB has done not only with hotels, but with the rental market of many major cities, pricing locals out. It's very exploitative, and it is done by working around regulatory systems which were put there democratically—literally, as in "put into law by an elected legislative body"—for a reason. All the piracy feeding every AI system. The examples go on and on.

Tech bros always operated by breaking the law. What is happening in Washington is no different.

@glyph This "greater efficiency" of these disruptive businesses is mainly at the expense of workers. Look at cities where Uber either left the market entirely or plays by very different rules as to become effectively just a taxi frontend. The difference there is that drivers in those cities actually have a welfare support system. That's it, that's the big difference.

@lanodan meh, modern Irish barely has it, and only followed by the number two, which takes away much of its fun/usefulness! Also the article says that dual is considered archaic in Lithuanian, they don't even put it in the summary list below.

You folks have no idea how natural, fun and useful it is to have singular, plural and DUAL in a language until you actually try it.

According to Wikipedia, it looks like the only Indo-European language that's an official national language to have it is Slovene. Everyone else is missing out!

@hub Nothing has more of an "it wasn't meant to be an instruction manual" to me than all those dystopian sci-fi books and their libertarian undercurrents. When you see techbros literally quoting from them as inspiration for all this stuff they're building, you can really see how influential they were into priming them for a proto-fascist mindset that leads them to putting in power the people who are turning the Handmaid's Tale into reality.

@mcc a general problem that I observe in the design of this kind of end-user app is that often they're not designed for maximum efficiency (as in "spend the least time as possible to reach your goal"), but rather to "maximize engagement" (make you spend more time in the app, "upsell" other features, etc.).

The irony is that even FOSS applications then copy the design of the "popular, intuitive" ones and end up replicating their bad patterns.

(example: looping videos in social media)

@kvuzet That was something we considered true before the Snowden revelations. Given PRISM and similar NSA programs, we now know that private surveillance _is_ state surveillance. We have proof that American big tech companies collaborate with NSA backdoors.

If they had kept going with the 386, 486, "586" nomenclature... at what number would we be at now?

@thomasmey @ParadeGrotesque omg, Intel releasing a processor literally called "x86" would be delightfully confusing.

We'd need a copy of Windows 9.5 to run on that!

Why I no longer say "conservative" when I mean "cautious".

https://hisham.hm/2025/04/06/why-i-no-longer-say-conservative-when-i-mean-cautious/

@dosnostalgic I was just about to say "oh, that just..." then "WAIT, BACKWARDS???"

@usuario @Vitu devia estar no mundo da lua

@usuario @Vitu Torcendo pra que o Lucas Silva e Silva do Mundo da Lua tenha se classificado pras eliminatórias

looking shinier after a day in vinegar!