Notices by Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)

Here is wisdom. I learned this too late in life, and am still not sure I’ve learned it well:

❝Don’t feel like you need to fix everything. A common response to bearing witness to another’s trauma is to try and fix it. We don’t want others to suffer. That said, you may not be offering what the other person or group is clearly stating they need. If they need you to listen, and you choose to act but not listen, then you have both not supported them in their trauma and violated a boundary.❞

https://community.hachyderm.io/blog/2024/08/12/hachyderms-introduction-to-mastodon-moderation-part-1/

Good article with lots of quotable quotes. Here’s one:

“Lines of code, number of [pull requests], these are liabilities. These are not measures of engineering excellence.”

That’s a big “well duh” for anyone who’s been in the thick of the software engineering process for more than 15 seconds — but a whole lot of folks are about to learn this the hard way, as the article lays out.

https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/17/ai_businesses_faking_it_reckoning_coming_codestrap/

@carpetbomberz @aubilenon

I mean, insurance refusing to cover reckless / dangerous use of tech seems like a “maybe we’re •less• fucked” sort of thing inasmuch as that is one for of risk contagion prevented.

Is there some general theory — just in the hand-wavy “these underlying principles could apply” form of macroeconomics and not necessarily even any kind of falsifiable model — of the idea that increased coupling of risks induces higher investor payouts? or something along those lines?

I feel like “coupling increases the magnitude of failure” and ”coupling increases risk” are more or less self-evident assertions (though of course deserving of study). By some kind of symmetry, it •feels• like coupling could increase payouts too — the billionaires certainly act as though it does! — but that seems less self-evident to me.

Just as we are entering the riskiest part of the sort of period when such capital requirements might prove salutary…

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/19/federal-reserve-bank-capital-requirements

@quephird
A shade closer to “oat” in MN, but yeah

RE: https://techhub.social/@shantini/116253971172403637

The need is still great. Please chip in if you can.

My dad could use a helpful resource on establish a baseline community code of conduct for an online discussion group. Any recommendations for good guides and/or templates?

(This is a •completely• nontechnical group, FYI.)

@marick @mhoye

Yes, that’s the bit! And much better stated than I managed.

@jwz
This!!!

@hakona @mhoye
You’ve half got the argument, half missed it.

Yes, as the experiment is set up, experts don’t have much room to overestimate — and beginners don’t have much room to underestimate. Thus even if there is uniform inaccuracy (“noise”) across the whole ability spectrum, beginners will tend to overestimate and experts will tend to underestimate. This is exactly the “it’s just noise” argument, and the whole point of the article linked in the OP.

What you’re missing is that experts do not in fact “get true self-assessment for free,” because they •could• also underestimate themselves — and they do, but (it seems, maybe) by less than beginners overestimate themselves. That conclusion, if it holds under scrutiny, is still an interesting one and not a statistical given.

@Unlikelylass

The NeXT UI holds up incredibly well even with 4 decades of hindsight. I could quibble with many details, but damn did they do a good job.

The other one I truly love is GitUp (https://gitup.co). Its visualization handles certain specific tasks better than anything else — tasks where I’m more concerned about the shape of the commit graph than the contents of individual commits.

Because of the way it does live updates of repo state and offers a whole-commit-graph-level undo, I’ll sometimes keep it open in the background while doing some fiddly thing in another tool (Fork, CLI, whatever) just so I can see what the ^*@# is happening.

Alas, its lack of support for commit signing means I use it less and less.

@johannab @Niall @ai6yr
Yeah. In multiple spheres, I’m increasingly resigning myself to “people are going to have to learn it for themselves” mode — shifting focus from global prevention to local mitigation, away from trying to control others and toward protecting what’s already in my sphere of personal control.

In my software consulting days, I often found myself trying to get companies not to hit themselves in the head with a hammer, but often it turned out to be best to just go ahead and let them do that and then ask “How’d that work out for you?” It’s painful to see in advance the needless damage, the waste, but sometimes it’s the only thing that works.

My Git client of choice. https://mastodon.social/@fork_dev/116250734509884225

If somebody at Apple ever sneaks back in even a hidden setting to pin the Dock at one end instead of centering it, I will buy you the pastry of your choice.

@mhoye
My •extremely• limited understanding of the “it’s just noise” argument is that there •may• be room in the data for a gentler conclusion from the data:

Everyone’s self-assessment is inaccurate in •both• directions (over- and under-estimating), but experts may be slightly less inaccurate. We don’t have evidence that ignorance comes with •bias•, but it might come with greater •noise•.

Groaning at probably having to finally “up”grade to Liquid Glass because of the latest round of iOS security breaches, hanging out with my parents and wincing at the cartoonish look of the latest macOS on their screens, and…

…I’m just once again hit with my periodic nostalgia for the days when it was possible to pin the Dock to the upper corner instead of having it always centered (and thus having my pinned apps always appear in a predictable location).

These little things are so big when one lives with them every day.

@johannab @ai6yr

I’ve listened to almost every episode by now, and I can recommend the experience.

@johannab @ai6yr

Classic among classics.

Also, there’s a 99pi about exactly this: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/