tomw

tomw, 1 year ago to random

There is a strange joy in wearing jeans and a T-shirt to an event where it is clearly implied (though not actually stated) that you are supposed to wear a suit, or at least a shirt.

tomw, 9 months ago to random

I'm... sort of OK at #Swedish but just had to resort to "förlåt, kan du prata engelska, jag förstår inte".

On the plus side, I delivered it confidently and with maybe half decent pronunciation.

On the minus side, that just makes it more confusing to hear probably?

tomw, 9 months ago to random

The software industry is full of sensible-sounding people saying that every tool is a great choice, use the "right tool for each job", use whatever works for you, etc etc.

The problem with this is that some of the tools suck terribly. Some are filled with footguns. Some are insecure by default. Some are ruinously expensive if used for any real project.

All this "every tool is wonderful" stuff may sound nice and avoid conflict, but ultimately does people no favours.

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Real-life actions and situations that have, to the best of my knowledge, never appeared in a video game.

Replies are very welcomed if you have an example of one of these things happening in a game.

Sometimes there will be an example of an action being vaguely suggested as part of a bigger process (like "repair" or "clean") but it only counts if the specific action is performed step by step.

(I'll add to this over time maybe.)

tomw, 10 months ago to random

I say:

Cactuses
Octopuses
Geniuses
Viruses

Referendums
Aquariums

The -i and -a versions of the plurals are hypercorrections and sound awful.

tomw, 4 months ago to random

What's the oldest thing that it makes sense to describe as having a "fandom"?

I don't think you can really say Shakespeare has a fandom, for example, without sounding anachronistic. But it seems reasonable to talk about, say, "the Sherlock Holmes fandom" – in fact there is a Wikipedia article with that title. So where is the line?

tomw, 7 months ago to random

Saw a thread with loads of boosts and positive comments recommending GNU Mailman as an open source substitute for Mailchimp and... what? What??

Anyone recommending this has no clue where the difficult part is today in sending emails at any list size over ~100. (Clue: it's the bit where people actually receive any of the emails.)

tomw, 1 year ago to random

It is annoying that every time Mastodon is made a little bit easier to use, you get these viral posts from high-follower accounts about "threat to the fediverse!!!"

Yes, choosing a server isn't the biggest barrier in the world. But from where I'm sitting, the problem is that many people hesitate for a long time at that step and so never sign up.

You're not helping the health of the fediverse overall by fighting pitched battles against every small UX feature.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Swedish people will insist in all sincerity that their language contains no "accents", "umlauts" or anything similar, just the alphabet, which has 29 letters from A to Ö.

tomw, 10 months ago to random

Once you know the telltale signs of a "this person does not exist" photo, you spot them all over the place, but especially in Twitter profile pics.

tomw, 10 months ago to random

On Mastodon you need to follow quite a lot of people or you won't see much. Here's what I do:

1. See an interesting post.
2. Check their timeline. In their most recent few posts, is there something else I find interesting?
3. If yes, follow.

tomw, 9 months ago to random

Everyone talks about JSX but no one talks about the hilarious alternative, putting your JS between <script> tags with the occasional <?php some_function(); ?> in the middle of it

tomw, 8 months ago to webdev

Did you know that <input step="10"> in #html not only makes the up/down arrows on your number input go up and down in steps of 10, it also outright rejects as invalid any keyed-in number that isn't a multiple of 10, and does so with a user-facing error that is too cryptic for any user to understand the issue?

I now know this. Guess how I found it out.

tomw, 1 year ago to random

Imagine: you're a cute little mouse. You have finally escaped from the maze and tasted freedom.

But at that moment you smell some cheese and clamber back into the maze.

That's Bluesky.

tomw, 11 months ago to random

It's funny to me that a lot of people seem to think you can solve problems of protocol fragmentation with a bridge. Don't worry, there'll be a bridge! When has that ever worked? I can't think of one example in internet history... maybe someone else can. (Genuine question.)

tomw, 1 year ago to random

Almost 20 years since Gmail and "making people beg for invites" still works tragically well as a launch publicity tactic

tomw, 8 months ago to random

Deciding between "is" and "are" for collective nouns has become an unwinnable situation.

The natural-sounding answer is usually "are" but you get a lot of upset pedants.

tomw, 8 months ago to random

My theory: the entire existence of web apps was caused by stupid corporate "you can't install anything on your computer" policies

tomw, 8 months ago to random

NFTs didn't become worthless today. They always were.

tomw, 7 months ago to random

Oat formats

tomw, 9 months ago to random

Mostly pointless skills I have, part two:

Updated my crontab and got the syntax right the first time

tomw, 11 months ago to random

What the web is going through right now is "platform collapse": the giants of the web 2.0 era gradually failing as they scramble to cut costs and raise revenues.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this comes at the same time as interest rates are rising. For 15 years, most of the life of these platforms, they built themselves into giants by burning easy cash – but now the taps have been turned off.

tomw, 11 months ago to random

No one ever believed me about this ("just a concidence" etc) until I found this Wikipedia article one day.

Statistically though, one in five of you probably do it too.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Spare me from people who think the answer to "Google sucks now" is a paywalled search engine that gets most of its results from Google anyway

tomw, 1 month ago to random

Why has no one made "Slack but free and simple"? Have I missed it? Every proprietary alternative seems to be a featuritis nightmare (eg. Discord) while the open source ones are too busy fretting about perfect encryption and decentralisation to be simple/friendly.