Notices by Graham Downs (grahamdowns@c.im)

I'm getting lots and lots of friend requests on #Facebook from people already on my friends list. I'm ignoring them of course: it seems like profile cloning is on the rise again (note, NOT hacking. Stop saying you've been hacked just because your profile has been cloned 😛)

If you sent me one and it's because you're legitimately recreating your profile, or you've lost access to it or something, please send me a message to let me know. Otherwise, I'm just assuming the request comes from someone who's cloned your account.

(And please assume the same from me, by the way. My current account is still active. I haven't created a new one. 🙂)

The US wants #SouthAfrica to ban and stop using #Huawei equipment:

https://techcentral.co.za/south-africa-wont-bend-us-pressure-huawei/229405/?utm_source=mastodon

We said no, of course. I mean, Huawei is beyond ubiquitous here. My fibre router is a Huawei device. As are hundreds of thousands of others. And their smartphones are everywhere too. And their radios are in our towers. And and and.... America must be out of their minds if they think we're just going to abandon that, just because the technology happens to ALSO be used for #espionage against the US. :P

@thomasfuchs I remember as a teenager, I got Wing Commander: Privateer. It came on 16 x 1.44MiB stiffy disks. Which, at the time, was the biggest game I'd ever seen. I couldn't believe a game could be that big. 😆

@youronlyone I think you might be right, though: maybe it's only really an issue in English (or at least, in the West, because Afrikaans [the only other language I'm really familiar with, sorry] some also talk about "Drie-uur in the aand" [three o'clock at night], while others talk of "Drie uur in die oggend" [three o'clock in the morning]). :-)

Confusing the way people talk about times: in #Afrikaans, half-sewe (Half-seven) means half-past six, or "half an hour BEFORE seven".

When a #British person says "half-seven", they mean half PAST seven.

Lots of confusion there. It's almost as bad as midnight, which can either mean 23:59:59 or 00:00:00, and not even Wikipedia can tell you when it means what. And it makes a BIG difference, because when someone says something starts "tomorrow at midnight", do they mean Tuesday at 00:00:00, or Tuesday at 23:59:59? Arrgh, it's infurtiating.

Speaking of which, it really grates me when people talk about "last night at three AM". Because any time on or after 00:00:00 is clearly MORNING. It's "three o'clock this morning", NOT "last night at three o'clock." (yes, I would say, "this morning at midnight", too) :-P

#Time #Language #English

There's talk of possible sanctions against #SouthAfrica over our stance on the #UkraineRussiaWar. In particular, they're talking about us possibly being banned from SWIFT:

https://businesstech.co.za/news/business/692369/reserve-bank-sends-a-warning-about-sanctions-and-what-they-could-mean-for-south-africa/

If that happened, it'd be a disaster, because effectively, no South African would be able to do business with any foreign country.

And in this day and age, there are a significant number of ordinary South Africans who work for international companies (who have no physical presence in South Africa). If they ban us from SWIFT, those people can't get paid. :(

@atomicpoet That's fair enough. I shouldn't've actually replied on that thread and told you my preference without being asked and without really understanding the context.

Because I don't really know much (if anything) about calckey anyway.

I apologise.

In South African English, there's this saying when someone jumps into an ongoing conversation without really understand what it's about: we say they're "picking up stompies" (a stompie is a slang term for a cigarette butt).

Apologies for picking up stompies there. I really need to work on not doing that.

@atomicpoet Interesting question. I guess because I... might use it in the future?

Or because maybe someone who shares my preference discovers the fediverse through one of those apps (just like I did with Mastodon), gets dissillusioned because it doesn't have an option to remove all algorithms from the main timeline (before they've had time to learn that there's more to the fediverse than just that app), leaves and never comes back?

@atomicpoet I'm not. I'm just asking for a setting that allows me to keep my own preferences, and doesn't force anyone else's onto me. :)

@atomicpoet Fair enough. My comments stand for any #fediverse-compliant network/client, though. :-)

@atomicpoet I want no algorithm at all. Always show me the latest posts and boosts from my followees, and nothing else, in reverse chronological order.

For me, this place is all about what's happening now among the people I'm interested in. When I open Mastodon in the morning, and glance at it occasionally during the day, I want it to feel like walking into a party, sitting down and listening to the currently ongoing conversations, inferring what they're talking about, and jumping in.

I'm not interested in anything any of my followees said 10 hours ago, no matter how popular it is. Nor am I interested in anything they Favourited/Liked.

The single biggest thing that drew me to Mastodon from Twitter was exactly that: it's pre-algorithm Twitter, and the fact that Twitter got an algorithm is the worst thing that ever happened, and I've resented them ever since.

The last thing I want is for Mastodon to force an algorithm on me. :-(