@tomw@mastodon.social
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

tomw

@tomw@mastodon.social

Web developer. Sometimes designer. I like code, words and mass movements. Jag lär mig #svenska.

Interested in/may post about #html #css #wordpress #openweb #decentralisation #socialism #protest

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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.';
}

JonnElledge, to random
@JonnElledge@mastodon.london avatar

Hmm I'm still posting here, but

a) I've gone increasingly broadcast only, which is bad form, I know, but that's because

b) my follower count is sinking and there's hardly anyone here. Feels like BlueSky kind of won?

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@JonnElledge Maybe depends what you mean by "anyone". Journalists, political types? Most of tech (broadly defined) seems to have some presence here.

tomw, to random
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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

@konrad I think it's a push to describe IRC as simple or friendly

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

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

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

tomw,
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I used to speak Napster protocol well enough to fix bugs in other people's clients with a hex editor

(It was interesting but crude, basically some kid's hacked up IRC with search bolted on)

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

The end of that period (Gnutella, Kazaa and all the also-rans - shout out to the eMule and DC++ users) was the release of Bittorrent, which is an incredibly elegant and basically unsurpassed p2p design, so everyone else pretty much stopped trying.

(I wish we'd ended up somewhere that doesn't rely on websites as indexes but ho hum)

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Come on Mastodon, I expected someone to reply by now with "actually I still use eMule"

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...

interfluidity, to random
@interfluidity@zirk.us avatar

the practice many browsers have adopted of truncating URLs in the address bar to the hostname is emblematic of the decline and commercially driven infantilization of the web.

understanding URLs — their roles and the ways and whys of how they are constructed — was an elementary skill of the original view-source web.

hiding complete URLs encourages people to become ignorant consumers of mysterious information services, rather than informed participants in a public forum.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@interfluidity Meh, seems like an unpopular opinion here but it's good to stop people getting fooled by stuff like login.mybank.com.example.com

Being able to parse a URL is good, but should not be required for safe web use.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

I wonder if the AI pin will burst the AI bubble

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

I have literally implemented SRP at both the client and server side but I am still unable to figure out, if I were to purchase or set up a "Passkey", what exactly I would have, or how it would work, or which computers, web browsers or web sites I should expect it to work with

tomw,
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@mcc Yeah, I have swerved passkeys so far because I do not understand the failure modes or how to recover at all. And they're asking 'normal' people to use this!

tomw, to random
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Substack has not solved the problem of "paying for journalism", it has just paywalled things that otherwise would have mostly been blogs

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

All my emails go something like:

"Yes that's all good. Happy with Wednesday or Thursday.

Tom"

People either appreciate this brevity or find it weird, there's not really an in-between

tomw,
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@onnob Yeah, I'd maybe add something about time of day, though people I'm emailing tend to either expect office hours as obvious or evening as obvious, depending on who they are!

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Please read my paywalled article about why paywalls are bad for democracy

tomw, to random
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In :

A clock = klocka
A watch = klocka
A bell = klocka

One upside of this is that you never have to worry about whether Big Ben is the name of the clock or the name of the bell.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Windows people, please understand this. Sometimes people need to run Linux.

They’re allowed to complain about printers not working, or sound issues, or any other hardware compatibility problems, without you saying “use Windows” every time.

tomw,
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I like the idea of this group of annoying Windows evangelists going around replying to every post about operating systems. They tell you to please call it by its correct name, "Microsoft Windows"

tomw,
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I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Windows, is in fact, Microsoft Windows, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Microsoft plus Windows. Windows is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning Microsoft system made useful by Microsoft Office, Microsoft Edge and vital system components comprising a full OS. Many computer users run a modified version of the Microsoft system every day, without realizing it. Through a p

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Do you need a database, or could you make do with 3,000 ~1KB json files filled with regexes?

(The database probably would have been easier but this is definitely cheaper to host.)

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Wait, maybe I can call my directory full of json files a "microservice"

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