sil

sil, 8 hours ago

@film_girl the late, ungreat Thomas Midgely Jr, unluckiest man in science! And, obviously, creator of absolutely terrible things for which being unwitting probably isn’t a defence. Fortunately all of this stuff got fixed to be ok over time…

sil, 9 hours ago

@phlash @CatherineFlick ooh, cool; is this for BCS members only or is it available online somewhere? That’ll be worth reading

sil, 2 days ago

@Edent ah, I wanted it as a Doctor Who reference but figured that a normal red phone box would be sufficient, but there isn’t one. Mostly because the Venn diagram of emoji plus people who remember red phone boxes is just about O O :-)

sil, 2 days ago

@Edent so… what would be the best emoji to imply #DoctorWho, I wonder? You only get one: this isn’t one of those rebus emoji quizzes. How close can you get to the Doctor (or the Whoniverse more generally) with one emoji?

A few years ago I might have said a fez but there’s no fez, or a finger snap. 👩‍⚕️ is boring. ✆ is sort of correct but a phone box doesn’t exist. A running man is probably thematically correct, but Schwarzenegger (and King) would say: hey!

I think my closest is 🌌 ? Not good.

sil, 2 days ago

@tomw @robstyles ah, a slightly different link might be useful, perhaps. Most people whose JavaScript fails aren’t that way because it’s turned off or they’re in Lynx on a green screen terminal in 1992. It’s a temporary failure; their train went into a tunnel, or they’re on hotel WiFi, or something. And sure, you can say “hit refresh”. But if the page does something useful in that situation, then it works for them and they don’t notice. The next load fixes it.

https://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/why-availability/ has more.

sil, 2 days ago

@tomw @robstyles agreed. And I build stuff the same way you do, half the time. My objection is to the idea that doing anything without js is old fashioned and outdated. The specific demos on that page don’t work without JS, I absolutely agree. But the page itself explains its vibe correctly; it does not display only a warning.

Obviously, you build what and how you need to; that’s up to you. But doing something useful when your scripting isn’t there is more robust, and that helps real people.

sil, 4 days ago

@film_girl it’s weird, isn’t it, how everyone else keeps aging at the rate of one year per year and literally just you and I are immune to this. It must be really hard for other people to stare into an uncaring universe and know that they age, and yet envy those only two glorious people with eternally smooth skin, and no grey hairs, none, not any, and a perfect balance between pining for yesterday and yearning for tomorrow. They have my sympathy, the poor unfortunate souls.

sil, 4 days ago

@film_girl people talk about unifying natural ability and technological accomplishment. They think they’re talking about sport. No. They’re talking about this. Go out there and knock ‘em dead.
(Also, being like one’s grandmother is always cool. Mine was travelling around the place and laughing her socks off into her nineties, while having friends literally half her age. And dyeing her hair the whole time. I miss her. Be all you can be.)

sil, 6 days ago

Ah now there’s a special speech bubble button top left.

sil, 6 days ago

@popey @bagder I was all, like, wtf it does SMTP? SFTP? MQTT? Crikey. I always thought of it as “very detailed configurable http fetcher” and clearly what I ought to be thinking is “talks to the network in every possible way”

sil, 6 days ago

@bagder @popey I need to adjust my thinking. It’s normally “do I need to make an HTTP request? Then curl. (Or GET -UuSse if I want to see the headers, for historical reasons.)” What doing the survey has told me is that I should maybe be thinking “do I need to talk to a server? Then curl.” I had no idea it does all the stuff it does.

sil, 6 days ago

@pavled @bagder yeah. I feel a little bit embarrassed, because I have been granted this amazing thingy and I’ve used about 0.4% of its potential

sil, 6 days ago

@bagder @pavled exactly. I once heard a person on the MS Word team say exactly the same thing — everybody uses about 10%, but it’s a different 10% — and curl is… probably more popular than Word, so the same vibe applies :)

sil, 4 days ago

I am alerted by @jessie to a new job title to add to my cool list: Threat Intelligence Librarian
https://mastodon.social/@sil/110468307372693166

sil, 9 hours ago

Another new job title for the cool list.

The shadow paymaster general.

This perhaps really ought to be on the “oh my god that’s so sinister” list, mind.

sil, 9 hours ago

@ppk yes! What would such a person do in the campaign? Probably not the big boss, but a constant foil behind the scenes, I bet

sil, 9 hours ago

@ppk but what if they’re a paymaster of shadows? A general commanding the shadow army? Not metaphorical shadows as spies: an actual force of shadows?

sil, 8 hours ago

@ppk also, maybe the paymaster general is themselves a shadow. Maybe a shadow dragon. That might be fun.

sil, 8 hours ago

@ppk huh. Now I like this idea myself. The cohort have all given over their shadows to the leader, who has created them as detached shadow creatures, thus doubling the size of their small force, at the advice of the paymaster general. Who is actually a shadow dragon, although they don’t know that. I might steal this idea for one of my own campaigns…!

sil, 8 hours ago

@ppk oh no, not paid. They’re an elite group of freedom fighters; small but dedicated to the cause. Aware that they can truly make a difference: alter the world through a combination of influence, sneaking, and the occasional murder. But there just aren’t enough of them. And then their paymaster, who’s been quiet up to now, suggests a way, a ritual, that can double their efficiency overnight. Turn their shadows loose. And everybody eagerly agrees. The army, and the shadow army.

sil, 8 hours ago

@ppk not so far! But I like this idea of a little force that I’ve just invented. I should write it down: something like an insurgent group, or a thieves guild, that I can incorporate into an ongoing story