@sean@scoat.es
@sean@scoat.es avatar

sean

@sean@scoat.es

Tricking software into working since the 1980s.

I do all kinds of tech things. Here you'll find: rants, ops/devops, web, iOS, microcontrollers, electronics, food, beer, opinions, and whatever else is on my mind + in the conversation.

Doing brain stuff as VP of Technology at Matter: https://matter.xyz/

I've opted in to making my posts searchable.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

Learned that (allegedly) Ukraine is using a repurposed Stuxnet (or at least a Stuxnet-like system) against Russia. It’s called Fuxnet.

I’m not sure attacking [potentially civilian] infrastructure is the right move (lots of pro and cons there), but who can argue with a name like Fuxnet?

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

I keep hearing about Google paying Apple $20B/year to make it the default search engine in Safari. “They must make at least that much on search from Apple devices in order to justify the cost.”

This is wrong.

They must make at least that much from search OR from preventing others from eroding their monopsony. The REAL value is to prevent someone else from being the default.

It’s similar to regulatory capture, and we should tax the shit out of it.

(harnessing my inner @pluralistic)

sean, (edited ) to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

Oh, I see you were in the middle of a 7-step process investigating a bug that’s probably on our side and WOULD YOU LIKE TO SCHEDULE A CALL WITH OUR CTO ABOUT AN EXCITING NEW PRODUCT LINE WE’VE LAUNCHED? IT PROBABLY HAS AI.

—web apps in 2024

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

YOU DID NOT CLICK ON SCHEDULE A CALL LAST TIME WE INTERRUPTED YOU SO WE ARE NOW INTERRUPTING YOU AGAIN. IT HAS BEEN 9 MINUTES. CLICK THAT X AGAIN AND WE’LL SEE YOU IN 9 MORE MINUTES.

(I’m tempted to schedule a call to tell them how disruptive this abusive behaviour is to me actually using their product and that it makes alternatives much more viable.)

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

@andreiz Yeah, and they’ll probably also harrass and interrupt me, but I can hope…

(this complaint is not about AI directly; that’s just what they’re (probably) peddling this time)

CmdrTaco, to random
@CmdrTaco@federated.press avatar

Today I tried something called a dragon chilli taki. If this is my last transmission, the takis have won: avenge me.

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

@CmdrTaco Too soon for spicy twicey?

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

Have to admit I’m a little bummed this didn’t trigger something fun.

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

Feeling a weird paradox of…

…the optimism of how everything is better because we’re moving away from the decades-old mess of poor memory management with protections that C/C++ can’t enforce, and even improving on models like Garbage Collection (with Automatic Reference Counting and Borrow Checking), strong typing, powerful and accessible high-level languages…

…and the pessimism that actually using software feels so much worse nearly every day—especially on the web.

wez, to random
@wez@fosstodon.org avatar

As an OSS maintainer, a pet peeve of mine is when someone asks why something is a particular way, when what they really mean is "I don't want to configure it to my preferences and I want you to change the way this works".

The "why" question sets things up for the maintainer to be on the defensive, which implies that the answer needs to be well researched and reasoned, which takes extra effort.

Ultimately the person asking doesn't care about any of this, making the whole thing a waste.

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

@wez I can certainly understand that position, but I sometimes ask that kind of “why” question to truly understand if/why that way is better than my preference, or to even find out if it wasn’t really thought about and it was just a choice without good backing (and maybe it could change). I see developers make “we’ve always done it this way but I don’t really know why” decisions all the time.

Good prompt to be more careful about that, though.

dotjay, to random
@dotjay@mstdn.social avatar

Friends with ADD/ADHD/VAST: Do any of you have any good resources or tools for directed attention fatigue?

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

@dotjay Not sure this is what you’re looking for, but the pomodoro technique works pretty well (vs not using it at least) with Kid 2.

saramg, to random
@saramg@fosstodon.org avatar

Enshittification As A Service.

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

@saramg Private Equity.

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

I have Mailchimp set up to use MFA via TOTP and I have 2FA via SMS turned off.

I just logged in for the first time in a while. It made me verify by SMS and didn’t ask me for my TOTP number. In the settings, I have this configured correctly, but there’s a “We’ll use this to confirm your identity if we spot any unusual activity on your account.” phone number.

This seriously lowers my confidence that they’re doing this right at all. Everything seems to have gotten worse over the past few years.

preinheimer, to random
@preinheimer@phpc.social avatar

I didn't realize it until I came upon it in a podcast.

I view people calling twitter "X" without mentioning its former name a negative signal for how much I want to interact with that person.

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

@preinheimer How about people who say “Xitter”? Those people are usually a little better. (-;

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

This support dance of “pretend to talk to the bad AI thing that definitely can’t answer my question for 5 minutes before being allowed to talk to a human” is getting very old very quickly.

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

@derickr Yes. That sort of works sometimes. I also emote discontentment at the “did you know…” interludes, in hopes that someone hears them at a review. But I still believe that people don’t measure bad things because it makes them look bad.

heiglandreas, to random
@heiglandreas@phpc.social avatar

I hate VPN!

It never worked out of the box for me. There are soooooo many moving parts.

Debugging is difficult.

And it's always the clients fault...

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

@heiglandreas If you haven’t tried Tailscale, it’s probably worth a look. By far the best VPN experience I’ve ever had.

If you have tried Tailscale: yeah, indirection is hard. (-;

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

Apple Event: I like this totally realistic public transit set where a man who soiled himself is not sideeyeing the $2000 iPad while harassing your neighbour for heroin money.

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

Just saw a guy with a t-shirt that said “UNIX 1970”. Tried to catch his attention to say “Epoch shirt man!” but he left before I could make a pun fool of myself.

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

Web developer: my dynamically typed language is now faster than that other dynamically typed language. Sometimes. By a small amount.

Also web developer: SELECT query in loop.

sean, to php
@sean@scoat.es avatar

Remember when software publishers made an effort to make their documentation available for use offline? That was cool.

(About to get on a flight and wanted to download the docs for an open source library that’s pretty new to me. I don’t see a way of doing that short of crawling a few dozen (hundred?) HTML pages, or maybe building the docs from the source, myself. Situations like this always remind me how proud I was—and should be—about the work we did on the #PHP manual, way back.)

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

@Schrank That’s the “crawling” part that I mentioned and should’t have to do. Plus it rarely fully works anymore because of client-side loading.

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

Generally, I think delegating your login to another provider (e.g. “Log in with Facebook”) is dangerously awful short-term thinking, but for phone-specific applications like buying an eSIM, the combination of logging in with Apple and then using Apple Pay, is delightful to me as an end user.

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

Airlines: you can have this idea.

Offer half price seat selection that’s a single checkbox: put me in any seat that only has one neighbour. I don’t need an exact seat; I do need to not be in the middle.

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

@aran …good luck. (-;

Schneems, to random
@Schneems@ruby.social avatar

The voyager stuff is cool, but where are the hard debugging details. How did they isolate the problem to that specific chip?

They're moving the logic somewhere else, cool. Is it replacing/diminishing other functionality? Was voyager created/born with the ability to hotfix software or was that hacked on.

Don't leave me hanging! Turn this into a Netflix drama

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

@Schneems @self I heard that the relocation area isn’t long enough to relocate it in one contiguous block so they had to get clever about linking and had to reach out into even the otherwise-fine code to change jump addresses.

These are the juicy bits I want to learn about.

sean, to random
@sean@scoat.es avatar

This technically ticks the box, I suppose, but what a shameful display of doing the least possible work to call yourself “accessible”. Because of the useless repetition, I think it might even be better to NOT include these trash alt tags. Can’t even imagine how infuriating it must be to have a screen reader say “Display images to show real-time content”, over and over, if that’s your only way of navigating.

This is absolute garbage behaviour, Old Navy (Canada). Your customers deserve better.

sean,
@sean@scoat.es avatar

Good job Brussels Air⸮ That’s a super useful alt tag⸮ 🙄

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