the funniest thing about Apple is the last version of MacOS features "video reactions" where if your camera sees you do a thumbs up or heart symbol with your hands, stuff happens behind you like fireworks in ANY video app you are using BY DEFAULT.
A friend was in an online therapy session, describing his trauma so the therapist asked if he was alright and he did a thumbs up and then HUGE FIREWORKS BEHIND HIS HEAD.
It's so bad that online therapy sessions now start with a warning dialog!
I'd like the #favorite button on #Mastodon to have a name like "I'm seeing you" or something more neutral. Maybe something like "noted."
I pause when someone posts something disastrous, and then I end up favoring their post. I favor it because I have nothing else to say, and I'm trying to not boost everything.
It feels like this:
"My house burned down! 😭"
"👍"
Hmm... I guess ultimately, #reactions like on #Discord would be better. (Yes, I know Firefish has them.)
Much of what I post here is not based on existing laws or statutes. My posts are my #gut#reactions to the inequities & blatant #discrimination being tolerated today in our country
Try as some will, they cannot argue away my feelings. They are my own & they are based on the experiences of my family & me
My #criticism of #Biden is not an effort to divide voters or an attempt to sway votes from one candidate to another
Sometimes situations require a heavy fist v a soft glove.
I was made aware of the fact that my article about personal websites which has received >1300 webmentions by now (🤯💚✊) was loading a bit slow. The reason? A gigantic amount of avatar images in the webmentions section at the bottom. Some of them were 1.8 MB large GIFs… I hot-fixed it with a loading="lazy" (thanks, @MoritzGiessmann 🤗) and by improving the compression of all images in the avatars folder.
The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little surprising that the bank didn't support them.
The bank refused to spell their customer's name correctly, so the customer raised a GDPR complaint under Article 16.
The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her.
Cue much legal back and forth. The bank argued that they simply couldn't support diacritics due to their technology stack. Here's their argument (in Dutch - my translation follows)
Bank X also explained that the current customer data management application was launched in 1995 and is still running on a US manufactured mainframe system.
This system only supported EBCDIC ("extended binary-coded decimal interchange code"). This is an 8-bit standard for storing letters and punctuation marks, developed in 1963-1964 by IBM for their mainframes and AS/400 computers. The code comes from of the use of punch cards and only contains the following characters…
(Emphasis added.)
EBCDIC is an ancient (and much hated) "standard" which should have been fired into the sun a long time ago. It baffles me that it was still being used in 1995 - let alone today.
Look, I'm not a lawyer (sorry mum!) so I've no idea whether this sort of ruling has any impact outside of this specific case. But, a decade after the seminal Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names essay - we shouldn't tolerate these sorts of flaws.
Unicode - encoded as UTF-8 - just works. Yes, I'm sure there are some edge-cases. But if you can't properly store human names in their native language, you're opening yourself up to a lawsuit.
Hâte de mettre en justice tous les sites et autres compagnies qui ont décidé que le fait que j'ai un accent dans mon nom de famille soit source de bug (avec évidemment un message d'erreur qui n'a rien à voir. Histoire de bien pas comprendre pourquoi ça marche pas) https://t.co/ReIodsI1dh
La France va sortir de l'UE juste pour que leur état-civil et autres administrations puissent continuer à ruiner la vie de quelqu'un parce qu'il a un tilde dans son nom https://t.co/i8FisgEEjD
Does this mean that Z̷̡̧̢̰͓̪͖̭͙̰̣̱̬̹̙̜̪̣̏̿̏̋͑́̒͑́̒̿̇̈̍̇̌͝͝a̵̡̧͍̘̮̤̙̹͙̦̙͙͖͓̥̟̦͔͒̇̊̊̔̓́͒́̌̈́̑͋̏̏̏̚͘͝͠͝l̶͉̯̱͇̭̭̉̉̈́̿͐̽̒̎̽͌̚͜ģ̸̧̛͙̩̹̰̤̱̖̘̻̪̻̮̫̟̙̲͍̰̻͕̗̫̿̆̃́͗̽̊̽̌̔̂͂̈͊̐̈́̈̈́̈̓̆͌̑́̕͜ǫ̶̢̹̥̮̟͍̔̑̔̽ can finally open a bank account? https://t.co/06cTjHxdgx