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tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Stop releasing "new web browsers" that are just Chromium.

Stop releasing "new search engines" that are just Bing.

What a colossal waste of time.

Tesseks,
@Tesseks@mastodon.social avatar

@tomw Stop releasing open source operating systems that are just unix based.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

It's strange to see people on here defending Tiktok, the most obvious Trojan Horse since 1000BC.

The main defence seems to be that Facebook also sent us a horse full of soldiers. Which is true. So we... just have to accept horses full of soldiers now? Out of a sense of fairness? I don't see how that follows.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

At this point I don't think there's any reason to learn what passkeys are. Just wait for them to slowly get removed from everything again because of low takeup.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Marketing website: "Wow, Bonkadonk makes collecting payments so easy, even my cat can do it! Now he runs his own fancy collars business. Thanks Bonkadonk."

Emails to customers: "We have just deprecated the C-7 GX Rootytooty trust chain as part of our move to GlobalSecure root chain v4. What does this mean for me? You will need to update..."

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

More websites should say "Wow, this made a difficult task somewhat less difficult, though also still requiring regular maintenance and basic competence."

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

You know how people do something slightly embarrassing in the coffee shop (or wherever) and then they say "now I can never go back there"?

I have worked in plenty of customer service jobs and let me reassure you that I never remembered anyone for any reason.

"My usual"? I have no idea who you are, sorry.

"I was just here an hour ago"? Nice for you, I did not retain that information.

"I've been waiting for my food for ages"? Hmm, it is possible that I was bad at this.

DodoTheDev,
@DodoTheDev@front-end.social avatar

@tomw
I work for a trust that employs 18000+ people. I probably serve about a third of them. We get people coming into the office every day. The amount of times someone walks in and smiles at us, gets no response, so adds "I'm here to pick up my stuff"

Like we're meant to know who the hell you are?! When we ask for a ticket number, they seem rather lost. "why would you need a ticket number?"

"Because I've got 16 computers, 5 headsets, 2 mice and bloody partridge in a pear tree!" I want to say

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@DodoTheDev Everyone is the star of their own life...

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Does a word processor exist (regular app or web app I suppose) that displays a section outline with 'live' word counts next to each section? Like:

Introduction (434 words)
Chapter 1 (942 words)
etc

This seems so simple but searching turns up a) other people asking the same question and b) bodgy scripts/plugins.

siblingpastry,
@siblingpastry@mastodon.world avatar

@tomw If you don't mind spending a bit, then Scrivener has these kinda features and lot more besides -- https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@siblingpastry Hmm, this does look like pretty much what I'm looking for! And the pricing isn't too bad. Thanks, I'll probably give it a try

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Used to be that you'd ask "what are the kids into?" and the answer would be like, idk, pogs.

Now the answer is "liminal spaces".

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

I will not be taking questions on this.

Really though, they love those liminal spaces.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

sings
Mobile phones killed the widget sidebar

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Just saw someone saying they use AI to write Tailwind.

At that point why not just stab yourself in the feet with a spoon instead.

18+ gundersen,
@gundersen@mastodon.social avatar

@tomw we used to say that perl was written by banging your forehead on a keyboard. Tailwind is written by banging your forehead on an LLM.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Journalism training proved to be not very useful to my life... except one thing.

They trained me to write quickly and short. No redrafting. No overthinking it.

Drill fashion: These are the key facts. Bang, bang. You have ten minutes.

You can't wait for the muse to come because the news has come. Now go!

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Pop quiz: can you spot the problem in this PHP snippet? I just got tripped up by it and it was very Not Fun. (This is rewritten to be a minimal example.)

if ( $coolness > 10 ) {
define('COOL_MODE', true);
}

if ( COOL_MODE == true) {
echo 'You are cool.';
}

Geoff,
@Geoff@mastodon.cloud avatar

@tomw @datarama @abucci yes. Php was successful because it was a horrible mess that worked if idiots used it. They are now trying to make it a proper language, but all the code that the idiots wrote is still running on live servers everywhere.

It's our own fault: we should have pushed back when they forcibly removed register_globals. Once they got away with that absolute catastrophuck, we were doomed.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@Geoff @datarama @abucci I think it's more that they want to focus on an audience that's building "apps" instead of pages.

When you're just adding some widget to a page, you want it to just error out and the rest of the page to still continue. You don't want execution to 'correctly' stop on error.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

How likely are you to recommend this toot to a friend or colleague?

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

When this launched, I said it will fail like all previous attempts at microtransactions for news articles.

Guess what...

Stop trying this idea! It doesn't work! It will never work!

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/19/24135011/twitter-alternative-post-news-shutdown

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

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.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@spartibartfast I've vaguely heard the name but not looked into it. It looks like it might be what I'm after, thanks!

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@simon Hard to tell from their website but this seems to be more IM-style than a Slack-like?

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

I miss the days when the RIAA was public enemy number one and someone was inventing a new peer-to-peer protocol every week

mahryekuh,
@mahryekuh@fosstodon.org avatar

@tomw I never heard of eMule, but your mention of Kazaa brings back lovely memories of one of the first viruses I downloaded when I was too young and stupid for the internet.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@mahryekuh Yeah definitely! Some of these things were borderline viruses in themselves, full of bonzi buddies and comet cursors. I installed way too many...

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