Notices by Hisham (hisham_hm@mastodon.social), page 2

@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!

@gobolinux In all fairness, I had already stepped down from the lead a long time ago! @lucasvr had already been leading the project for the past several years! At the time of 017.00, back in mid-2020, I called Lucas "Head of Engineering" (he built the whole thing!) with myself being "Head of Design" (the look and feel, which is mostly from 016-era). https://gobolinux.org/gobolinux017.html

is there an easy way to clean them? #coins

These are the S-tier cities.

Sorry, I don't make the rules. Casio does.

Wow, over 3500 people voted and it ended up 51%/49%. That's impressive.

It's been a long long time since I've last touched any codebase that used tabs. I thought this debate was pretty much settled by now, but it only comes to show once again how we perceive the world in bubbles.

https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114218144555074935

current status: venting about the woes of being a FOSS maintainer and then deleting the toot 5 seconds later

@usuario se fosse no mundo em geral, seria uma linda final entre o Senna e o Lula, mas sendo o fediverso, só posso prever que teremos grandes surpresas!

Every now and then I think about how communities produce manners of speech, and how for us, non-native speakers, our use of language is primarily shaped by our online interactions.

I think this has an overall negative effect to the use of language, because people pick up patterns from things like forums (e.g. constant hyperbole clichés, everything is either "blazingly fast" or "painfully slow"), and they never had the experience of using other registers, e.g. speaking English to their mother.

"ils voyageaient"

People love to talk about consonant clusters in slavic languages... but that's one chunky vowel cluster!!!

#monanneeenfrancais

Left #fosdem feeling energized. Realized I barely posted here since the event started (my Xennial heart's GenX side is good at staying away from the phone when real life is happening live).

Then I opened Tusky to toot here about it and couldn't help but scroll a bit the timeline. So many bleak news, one after another.

Still, I type this and force myself back to the #fosdem mindset. Because this is how we fight back. With joy. Supporting each other. We keep doing what we do.

@benoit I am no longer maintaining htop! This feature is not from my time in the project. I'm sure the @htop team can explain :)