@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
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Hey, diagnosed-neurodivergent friends: it’s not offensive for those of us who don’t have an official condition or other diagnosis to talk about being low on spoons, similarly to how y’all do, right?

It’s just such a clear feeling/situation for people who understand it that it would be a shame to have to talk about it with other words, but I don’t want to implicitly tiptoe around being ableist or insulting if it is.

sean, to random
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Relevant again today upon the news of the clown show over at Xitter. (No offence to actual clowns.)

"Be vain and break things” I guess. https://scoat.es/@sean/112083156595012755

sean, to random
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Ever notice how some web sites put you into a sign up flow every time you try to log in?

I infer a company’s focus by how this works.

If they prioritize logging in, they’re focused on customers.
If they prioritize signing up, they’re focused on growth.

This also informs who won the internal arguments: people who care about users or people who care about sales.

I’ll take a company/service that’s focused on the existing relationship I already pay them to maintain, any day.

sean,
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@anthony If I had to guess: A/B test showed small bump in signups and no one measured rage.

sean, to random
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But the Developer eXperience! The DX is glorious! /s https://recurse.social/@dylnuge/112224705351727757

ocramius, to random
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I used to book my trips via booking.com, but now I can't get through because:

  • they have aggressive JS tracking/tracing that I block from my client
  • they can't seem to process 3DS payments

I wonder how much biz revenue they lose, because of them no longer caring about their core business (literally just "collecting the money").

sean,
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@ocramius I have a theory that people don’t measure this stuff because it makes them look bad. They want to measure the positives so they can pretend they’re doing great.

Even Amplitude, the platform we use for analytics, wants users to self-report with a snail-shaped button labeled “Report slowness”. It’s mind-boggling.

sean, to random
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(Blatantly stolen from a meme about tipping.)

sean, to random
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Adding mine to the traffic

Halo after totality
Totality through rhetoric DSLR (I only took a short break from viewing with my own eyes)
A snap through the eyepiece of the filtered telescope, of the partial eclipse

sean,
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A plane flew through between ’s 3rd and 4th contact (meaning: after totality) and its vapour trail had an eerie shadow.

Jet with vapour trail and a shadow that reached in front of the jet’s trajectory.

kboyd, to random
@kboyd@phpc.social avatar

Enjoy Totality.

https://youtu.be/ltBuzrGJc5A

sean,
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@kboyd https://youtu.be/4FXzXKRWwvQ

sean, to random
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I like that Jon Stewart/TDS had FTC Chair Lina Khan on the show, but I was seriously let down by her portrayal of “Web 2.0” as when the Web turned to the big social networks like Facebook.

Web 2.0 was a period of time BEFORE the giants got giant, and before capital-S-Social took over.

It was a time of open data, public APIs, mashups, and actual humans contributing to their own little plot of the Internet.

A break between when most-EVERYTHING was driven by big money and digital carpet bagging.

sean, to random
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Trying to buy tickets to a music show, and the only way to purchase them (which is a Ticketmaster rebrand) requires me to enter the personal details of each ticket holder (not just the cardholder).

** This madness must stop. **

(Obviously, I lied. They’d better not be checking IDs at the door.)

sean,
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@evan You surely know that I’m no fan of the hype and shadiness of that entire segment, but yes, I do agree that “event ticket” is the ideal decentralized transferrable non-fungible.

If anyone needs “disruption”, Ticketmaster could easily be in the top 5.

sean,
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@nick Oh, yeah. I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. It would be nice to be able to transfer tickets in a traceable decentralized way, though.

sean, to random
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Gotta say, watching Monday episodes of The Daily Show has been a really nice nostalgia bath. A throwback to 20 years ago when everything was also going awfully, but it was a different presidential race, and a different war that Jon Stewart was ranting about.

Something something Orwell was right about Eurasia something.

sean,
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@kboyd It’s actually kind of comforting in a way.

sean, to random
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Web in 2024 (vs 10 or even 5 years ago):

✅ servers: disks and CPU so much faster; RAM so much cheaper
✅ browsers running on so much more powerful hardware
✅ technologies like CDNs moving delivery so much closer to users
✅ connection speeds—on average—so much faster

❌ page load times and performance hilariously, stupidly, so much worse in almost all cases

sean,
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PS, pulling that old Shopify admin trick of making 99 “fast” requests for every 1 “slow” request, in order to populate content on a page, might bring the actual average down, but you’re still abusing your users with holistically slow loads. “Technically correct!” is measuring wrong.

(Note: Shopify stopped publishing their misleading individual endpoint load times not-too-long after I called them out, but I hold no illusion that I drove that change.)

https://archive.scoat.es/1202659860481003521/

sean,
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@preinheimer For many, many years I held the position that we shouldn’t run ad blockers because “free” content on the web needs to be paid for somehow.

But then they went full scumbag and now I think it’s the only way to get an experience that’s anywhere near acceptable, these days. And obviously it doesn’t solve it all, but it does satisfy the ethical dilemma.

Somehow it’s even worse when people do this to themselves (first-party non-ads × 500 == still junk).

sean,
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@shiflett @nick Yep, exactly. That’s what got me. Honestly, these days a “2 second” goal is mostly reasonable—at least relatively—but thinking that is the apex is… rough. A cold load of matter.xyz for me is 1.33s, and cache-populated it’s 391ms. And I know we could do better.

sean,
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@nick @shiflett I’ve been thinking a lot about how we collectively aren’t very good at exercising restraint.

sean, to random
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I didn’t know this was possible (and it’s here: https://myaccount.google.com/connections/settings ), but… I already had it turned off and that cursed poison still follows me around the web. https://mastodon.social/@andrewe/112202963896571059

preinheimer, to random
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Every time there's a "mandatory recall" on a car, the manufacturer should need to include a check for $100.

My Reasoning:

  1. They messed up. I did my part, I paid them $X0,000 for a car, they sold me one that was unsafe/illegal/whatever.
  2. The repair I'll need to get is only free if you value your time at zero. I don't.
  3. Getting the repair will subject me to a moderate-pressure sales person. Oil changes, alignment, $14 to top off my windshield washer fluid. They push it all. Hard.

fin.

sean,
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@preinheimer Yes. We’ve allowed failure to become a profit centre, and that’s objectively wrong.

sean, to random
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Every year I forget, but the LockPickingLawyer on April Fool’s Day might be the filthiest thing in the Internet.

sean, (edited ) to random
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Over the past 10 years, I’ve had so many partners and vendors share passwords and keys with me via email that I’ve given up on making them invalidate and re-send using a secure method, if it’s not a credential to anything I/we care about directly (e.g. our own systems vs. theirs).

I can’t be alone in still believing that email is unsuitable for sharing secrets (for lots of reasons), right?

sean,
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@grmpyprogrammer Yeah, I agree that it’s tOo HaRd. Just feels like we had a better handle on this before the aforementioned 10 years ago, somehow.

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