Notices by Thomas 🔭🕹️ (thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io)

Hope to see you over there in the future! Bye for now.

Astrophotographers Bluesky starter pack:
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/thomasfuchs.at/3lajg36fclw2w

Retrocomputing Bluesky starter pack:
https://bsky.app/starter-pack/thomasfuchs.at/3l6up64wfjg2o

Set my posts here to auto-removal. If you want to follow me, please head over to Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/thomasfuchs.at

Hope to see you there! There's a lively retrocomputing and astrophotography scene over there already, and I have starter packs to make it easy for you to follow them. (Will post as replies.)

If there's any chance you might be targeted in the next few years, I suggest to automatically delete your posts after a while (Mastodon has a setting for this) and manually approve new followers.

Just sayin’ in most western democracies when a party that previously won loses elections they will change party leadership instead of letting the same old people slowly rot on the thrones.

Many parties do elections among their party members on this.

I really don’t want to be negative or a doomerist—but a lot of people on here really need to realize how bad this will get.

Realistically speaking their plan (which they laid out in a 900-page document) is to dismantle anything in the federal government that are services, protections and safety nets for people.

They will also ensure Democrats can never again be in high offices, likely by making it impossible to collect donations at scale.

They’ve worked towards this for the last 40 years.

Americans: Please read, follow and share.

You should have a plan for your digital security, which will be under attack by the Trump regime very soon.

https://ssd.eff.org

Taken my account private, probably will delete because I don’t post here much anyway.

Also taking a MH break from social media in general.

On Wednesday, next Wednesday, a week on Wednesday, in two Wednesday’s time, three Wednesday’s on, or any other temporal variant, and including regional dialects are all totally alien concepts to it. And god forbid you discuss more than one timescale or event in one email.

What I do fear is that for those that do heavily invest, they’ll be required by the likes of Microsoft to begin to speak in ways that Copilot can parse and ‘understand’. Which in larger organisations will shape the way that they communicate with others, and it’ll spread. In the same way that American corporate speak, or Agile terminology has infected the rest of the world.

Our interactions, the things that make us most human, will be modified for the sake of corporate benefit over the coming years.

I’ve had a week of Microsoft Copilot integration testing across this organisation. Most features being assessed from user productivity to Azure admin.

And let me tell you, I’m coining it now, we’re going to be left with years of ‘Accuracy Debt’ when we see more organisations adopt it.

My very favourite example of just how fundamental these problems are were with user email synopsis and meeting time suggestions.

It's like, I'm not some kind of "it should just work" absolutist, but I think it must be tractable to users such that you can get the explanation of the relevant moving parts in the faq or whatever; and like I'm a dev with lots of track record in faffing around with things to get them to work, I feel like it's fair to say I represent the high end of the spectrum on that

Things that should go without saying: Boys are allowed to show emotion regardless of their disability status or neurotype, FFS

Have been handed a Windows 11 device for the first time after ~32 years using Apple devices.

May I just say: if this is how the majority of the world is treated by their computers, I don’t know why there haven’t been more Unabombers.

Launching stuff into orbit (especially humans) is really really hard. And it's getting harder and harder to do safely as the amount of space junk and satellites in orbit increase.

So many aspects of satellite pollution: space junk falls on us, space junk crashes into astronauts. The part that makes me angriest is all the light pollution from satellites and space junk.

And the part that worries me the most is all the atmospheric pollution. But there's a petition for this!

Sign here: https://pirg.org/edfund/take-action/tell-the-fcc-satellite-mega-constellations-need-environmental-review/

Full report on why you should sign is here: https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/wastex-environmental-harms-of-satellite-internet-mega-constellations/

[sorry if that was too snarky]

neat old film movie camera

This is written up in a Wired article too: "As Skies Fill With Space Junk, Nonprofit Urges US to Pause StarLink Launches" https://www.wired.com/story/pirg-starlink-environmental-review-space-garbage/

The next questions on the quiz would be:

2) How many eligible voters were erroneously (illegally) de-registered in these purges, so that they couldn't vote on election day?

3) Did they disproportionately target eligible Black voters for illegal de-registering?

4) Was the number of Black voters illegally de-registered between 2014 and 2016 larger than Trump's margin of victory?

5) Did Black voters ask for help with this in those 2 years prior to Trump winning the election?

But why bother? 🤷🏿♂️