Notices by Matthew Lyon (mattly@hachyderm.io)

@technomancy "why is this code using fake money to secure some data?"

the intersection of being old enough to have difficulty seeing things on your smartphone and being curmudgeonly enough to resent having to use a smartphone to begin with

@MonaApp are you aware of any new development in fedi-land that might cause beachballing in the mac client when looking at a post's replies? This started happening to me about last week and I'm seeing it multiple times a day now

My weekly link roundup is up: https://lyonheart.us/links/2025-01-17/

Playing God; Tarpits; Beyond Colonialism; Artists, Art-Making, and Image Formats; Ethics & Technology; Web Development is Collapsing

@puppygirlhornypost2 thanks, I hadn’t heard of this before, definitely keeping it in my back pocket

TIL the word “anemoia”: Nostalgia for something you’ve never known

Also a great analysis, even if provided via screenshots https://mastodon.social/@tofugolem/113842198259982674

@janl I try to get into threat modeling a bit, including framing their desired use (circumvent geolocation blocks) as a threat

I don’t have recommendations for VPN products; personally I’d have a hard time trusting them & have in the past warned people off of “free” VPNs with “you’re sending them all your network traffic, even if it’s all encrypted they still know roughly where it’s going. how do you think they’re making money?”

I’ve had three people who are not normally privacy-conscious ask me about VPNs in the past few days

bringing that #masculineenergy

@cemerick yeah, this was inspired by an in-flight migration of my site off of Astro+MDX to a custom engine; I'm working on porting over things which used solidjs or preact for some client-side interactivity, and am tempted to either leave them behind or rewrite them in something that doesn't require compiler transforms, just because of how much a PITA getting things to work with esbuild is

after over a decade, I've come to resent JSX

not because it "muddles view and logic code", which is the sort of thing people who don't work on truly interactive things say,

but rather because it's given the whole JS ecosystem carte blanche to go hogwild with compiler extensions, custom file formats, and all manner of things that necessitate build tools like webpack, rollup, or vite

Who needs to _link_ an image or stylesheet when you're supposed to import them to your code instead?

I clicked a link, a story in 3 parts

@janl “Why settle for licking boots when you can eat them? Here at BootStew we offer a superior boot taste for the self-respecting billionaire”

@janl Maybe billionaires just like the taste of boots? Maybe my next startup will sell boot stew to billionaires

@janl Yeah I was eyeing them as a path off Fastmail (who are union busters) but, noooooope

Can someone explain to me how it makes any sense for Pixelfed to be a thing that has its own accounts, rather than being an ActivityPub client whose GUI just happens to be image-focused?

@RobHadley @ngons I reread that one recently; not sure I’d read it to my 8y/o, but I have read them both “The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents” and the first three of the Tiffany Aching subseries (Wee Free Men, Hat Full of Sky, and Wintersmith) and would recommend those (last two TA books “I Shall Wear Midnight” and “Shepherd’s Crown” get more into YA themes)

no

@ngons I'll also recommend both of WoF author Tui Sutherland's other series, _The Menagerie_ which is sort of present-day fantasy, and _Pet Trouble_, which is more of a "kids going about their everyday lives" kinda thing, but I was blown away by the quality & themes of all her work

@ngons Wings of Fire. I cannot recommend this series enough - all 18 books. The first two books are good, but it starts getting *great* at the third book.

My kid also really likes the "Fart Quest" humorous D&D style series