Notices by 𒀭𒂗𒆠 ENKI ][e (enkiv2@eldritch.cafe)

@ernie

It seems like a pretty reasonable decision to me. It opens the door for a follow-up article about screen savers that came out after 1995.

@murph @tedium @jwz

EviCore, the Company Helping U.S. Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Treatments " ProPublica https://www.propublica.org/article/evicore-health-insurance-denials-cigna-unitedhealthcare-aetna-prior-authorizations

Random link from the archives: "Simone de Beauvoir’s authentic love is a project of equals | Aeon Essays" https://web.archive.org/web/20200131113721/https://aeon.co/essays/simone-de-beauvoirs-authentic-love-is-a-project-of-equals originally retrieved Fri Jan 31 11:37:21 EST 2020

@foone

The worst is when like a third of them have screws under them, most of the rest don't, one isn't removable, & there's a hidden screw somewhere else that'll break the board if you force it

what dvds actually use the alternate angle feature in interesting or useful ways? i don't think i've ever seen it used

periodic reminder that i make video games. (i do not have a team & make them independently.) Manna for our Malices is a visual novel where a time loop allows you to explore the conspiracies hidden in plain sight in a small japanese town. it hasn't found its audience yet. https://enkiv2.itch.io/manna-for-our-malices

@brewsterkahle

(If I wanted to be paranoid, I'd say that encouraging slow client-side technologies means that you can justify centralizing more and more power server-side on user experience grounds, but realistically I don't think the people making these decisions are capable of foreseeing their results)

@brewsterkahle

When I first started programming in the late 90s, everybody cared (at least a little bit) about performance & resource use.

Today, I have to explain to junior devs that they should use an O(<n) algorithm instead of an O(n^3) one -- on a web app (so, a system that uses a text-based protocol & 3 different languages to remote-edit a rich text document to simulate the OS's built-in widgets), & why we don't need to spin up a whole VM for their 10 line python script.

Weirdly, this change seemed to happen at exactly the time that new machines stopped getting twice as beefy every 18 months & people started moving more and more of their computing to dinky resource-strapped pocket devices.

Hey since this is blowing up let me remind all of you that I literally wrote a book on this & related subjects.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1718167423

This is a very hot take and also not a new one but here we go: the goal of a properly functioning software engineer is to obviate themselves, not by solving the customer's specific problems but by blurring the line between using a computer and programming one to the point where users can solve their own problems.

Wow, bluesky really *is* like circa 2017 fedi

yo anybody wanna buy the infowars domain name? https://360assetadvisors.com/events/fssmh/

@ratkins @jk

Correction: the web is an *OK* hypertext browsing system.

it is inherently very hard to explain how to do something in a GUI, and very hard to implement a GUI for almost any task that does not need to be explained. it is, on the other hand, very straightforward to explain (and make explainable) CLI tools -- but people don't bother.

@technomancy @mwl

Yeah, I get the impression that when Carpenter made Escape from New York he *thought* he was making Escape from LA but he was accidentally too subtle. Certainly a mistake!

@technomancy @mwl

I always thought it was an over the top parody of conservative fears. (Like, Escape from LA clearly was -- I figured that twenty years earlier, EFNY came off as much sillier)

A lot of 80s movies have the problem that they were aimed at adults and starred over the top satires of toxic masculine behavior, but then became popular with (and targeted at) kids who didn't get the joke, whose interpretation dominated the cultural memory. (Like: Star Wars was supposed to be an allegory for the Vietnam war from the perspective of the Viet Cong -- did intelligent adult viewers at the time pick up on this? A lot of the time, the adults don't catch on to particular interpretations either, or don't "get the point" for 20 years -- we all basically accept that The Matrix is partly about the trans experience, but imagine trying to convince someone of that in 2005.)

the goal of being poly is to maximize the number of metamours you have. so, the winning strategy is to get a new partner close to poly saturation from several distinct polycules, like an ancient trading empire

Band name of the day: putrefiction

@noracodes @r14c @futurebird

To be honest, I'd like to see more totally-independent AP microblogging codebases, but I'm not sure if implementing one is genuinely an unavoidable hassle or what, because even the small ones are too big for one person to maintain?

Like, a tiny reference implementation with barely any features is the best thing for any protocol to have, because once you have that there's a pressure to keep the protocol simple enough that the reference implementation stays small, while at the same time, the small reference implementation can be easily forked or ported by anybody who doesn't like the behavior of a major implementation.

Mastodon is the opposite of a good candidate for this (and actually, this problem also affects SSB): it contains both frontend and backend code (whereas what you really want is just the server portion and let somebody else build a client -- frontends are always full of fiddly bullshit that needs to be tuned, and users should have control over their frontends anyhow), and it's full of features somebody requested that maybe somebody else doesn't want.

Often the cost of forking is just downstream of protocol design; there are a billion gopher clients because anybody can build a gopher client in an afternoon, and there are exactly two full-featured web browsers (firefox and various chrome skins) because a small group could not write a modern web browser in a lifetime.

the first grand twitter -> masto migration was not last year; it was in 2017. this migration brought in a lot of gay & trans people who were boycotting twitter over moderation policies on organized harassment by gamergaters, TERFs, and the alt right, and it's a major reason why fedi is *so* trans so it feels really weird for people to act like it never happened just because they're noobs.

the first grand twitter -> fedi migration was in the identica days, back when twitter was competing with google+ and ello... so 2009ish maybe? this was related to excitement over distributed, noncommercial social media, and brought in a lot of anticapitalist & FOSS people. this was during a period when twitter still had the fail whale, to give you a sense for the time.

there has been at least one major migration-wave to the fediverse per year since 2017, more or less evenly split between people moving because they don't want to give a rich guy more money and people moving because centralized moderation sucks. the one that happened after musk bought twitter was unusually large but not different in kind from any of the others.