This is an image of the decision tree that Slack used 5 years ago to determine whether to notify someone.

Every time you add a customization option like "don't notify me during these times in my time zone" or "mute notifications in this thread" etc, you add another branch or set of branches to a decision tree.

This is NOT a bad thing, but it is a reason that I am resistant to customization. Each knob you add expands software complexity and room for bugs.

Source: https://slack.engineering/reducing-slacks-memory-footprint/

Woah, this brought back memories.

As I recall, Microsoft was always the most friendly toward treating web apps as if there were native apps, listing them as first-class citizens in their stores and such, but I’m not sure how much of a thing that is anymore since they aren’t much of a player in the phones and tablets world anymore (although I do think the Surface Duo is cool). But surely a truly native Windows app is .NET and C# and whatnot.

When I was an SDET in Windows Mobile, I worked on both 6on6 (IE6 on WM6) and W3C Widgets. Probably to no one’s surprise, these weren’t done out of a belief in web apps, but because iOS was by that point already holding a commanding lead in the app ecosystem.

RE: https://toot.cafe/users/slightlyoff/statuses/109632248664696707

Speaking of Adobe chicanery, here's the very detailed graphic chart made by @xdanielArt of alternatives to #Adobe products. Many are #free and #OpenSource.

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2023/01/01/the-allspaw-collins-effect/

Huh, this reminds me of doing Puzzle Hunts. I wonder if Puzzle Hunts could be organized in a similar manner as incident response? 🤔

On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work. He might think about a math problem, or prepare to lecture a classroom of students, or schedule doctor’s appointments for his two sons. “Then I’m exhausted,” he said. “Doing something that’s valuable, meaningful, creative” — or a task that he doesn’t particularly want to do, like scheduling those appointments — “takes away a lot of your energy.”

To hear him tell it, he doesn’t usually have much control over what he decides to focus on in those three hours. For a few months in the spring of 2019, all he did was read. He felt an urge to revisit books he’d first encountered when he was younger — including Meditations by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and several novels by the German author Hermann Hesse — so that’s what he did. “Which means I didn’t do any work,” Huh said. “So that’s kind of a problem.” (He’s since made peace with this constraint, though. “I used to try to resist … but I finally learned to give up to those temptations.” As a consequence, “I became better and better at ignoring deadlines.”)

He finds that forcing himself to do something or defining a specific goal — even for something he enjoys — never works. It’s particularly difficult for him to move his attention from one thing to another. “I think intention and willpower … are highly overrated,” he said. “You rarely achieve anything with those things.”

https://www.quantamagazine.org/june-huh-high-school-dropout-wins-the-fields-medal-20220705/

It occurred to me that I don’t think I’ve seen one technique for teaching programming talked about online much (if ever). In my HS CS class, Mr. Stueben gave regular (dead-tree) quizzes where we had to predict what a piece of code would do, but where the code was purposefully formatted in misleading ways.

I don’t know if it’s actually good pedagogy, but I do think it was very effective for me and made me understand very early on that what the code looks like is not actually related to what it actually does.

Python 2 removed from Debian
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1027108

End of an era. Python is dead, long live Python.

Somewhat unintuitively, the more experience you get as a developer the more you have to lean into documentation and search

Earlier in your career you're more likely to specialize in just a small number of projects built with a tight collection of tools and languages - making it relatively easy to keep everything in your head

As you gain competence the scope of projects you can take on expands way beyond what's possible if you're not constantly looking things up!

Saw a post about how fedi bigots are feeling so isolated by defederation that they're making secret "normie" accounts so they can have human connection and like... this is where it all went wrong isn't it?

Instead of shaming and ejecting bigots and bullies from civil society we let them in and comment on our tweets and facebook posts and YT videos. And then liberals for whom this is all a game cause they remain largely unaffected were like "no! let's debate them in the marketplace of ideas!"

No. You make them afraid of the cost of going mask off. You make it not worth it. So that they hide and attempt to interact like normal human beings instead of demons wearing human skin. And even if they stay shitty, if they keep it a secret they can't spread it easily to others

If you haven’t noticed, I’m big on common courtesy.

The little things like introducing yourself to people you don’t know before assailing them with questions, asking about and respecting people’s boundaries, respecting pronouns, apologizing when you’re wrong, etc.

We often forget we really don’t know each in this space, so we take courtesy for granted. But those small things build trust that eventually blooms into a community.

We’re all people looking for some kind of connection, and finding those connections is so much easier when we have a baseline respect for our shared humanity.

Don’t take the small things for granted. They are the bricks that build bridges between our wildly different experiences and backgrounds.

Oh yeah, I’m definitely in the latter camp. All OSes are awful but macOS is the least awful.

RE: https://weirder.earth/users/noracodes/statuses/109621755810545052

Devon Henry was ready when the time came upon him. 👏🏾

"For a Black man to step in carried enormous risk. Henry concealed the name of his company for a time and long shunned media interviews. He has endured death threats, seen employees walk away and been told by others in the industry that his future is ruined. He started wearing a bulletproof vest on job sites and got a permit to carry a concealed firearm for protection."

#BlackMastodon
Gift link: https://wapo.st/3YXoixg

Phil Ting's #FreedomToWalk Act is now law in California. You can cross the street anywhere as long as you're not creating a hazard.

#Jaywalking, the fake "crime" created by automobile industry lobbying to blame victims of #TrafficViolence, no longer exists in California.

Enjoy your freedom to walk! https://ktla.com/news/california/new-law-allows-californians-to-legally-jaywalk/

The #Rust compiler codebase looks like this, so that the output you see can look like that

So much yes. https://cohost.org/cathoderaydude/post/572330-i-do-no-t-care-about

What happened to the then-growing #atheist movement from the 2000s? The leadership happened.

Atheists are on average less likely to be racist than Christians. This doesn't mean all Christians are racist, nor does it mean no atheists are.

While Sam Harris is arguably the worst, a lot of prominent atheist leaders fell down the anti-SJW rabbit hole. There weren't enough anti-racist atheists to push back against them when they did.

1/4

https://youtu.be/JvemuO2mL14

Find someone who flirts with you the way Judith Butler flirts at a linguistics conference

I was not ready for the suggested alternative to the Windows sleep command in this ss64 page https://ss64.com/nt/sleep.html

Cough, Kubernetes, cough. https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-5652-the-nps-effect

I spent many hours in bookstores during high school and college. Reading about this turnaround of Barnes and Noble makes me want to check it out again, even though I rarely buy dead-tree books anymore.

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and