@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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mastodonmigration, to random
@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online avatar

Again? Really?

Twitter: By submitting, posting or displaying Content.. you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute...

Bluesky: If you post any content.. you hereby grant Bluesky and its licensees a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive right and license to use, reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, modify, sublicense, and distribute..

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@mastodonmigration So much for the "open protocol" talk

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

All UK addresses can be expressed as:

Name
[Flat No.]
House No.
Postcode

Street and Town/City are not required but are recommended - they help resolve typos and such. But people insist on writing addresses out like this:

Name
[Flat No.] [Building Name]
123 Street Name [or House Name then Street!]
Small District
Larger District
Town/City
County
Postcode

If you don't give them enough fields to do this then they will take a terrible revenge on your data.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Postcodes are a great invention. I guess the problem here is that people do not realise how much information a postcode encodes. Each one is (usually...) either a street or a section of a street.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

The 'correct' database thing to do here, I think, assuming you are only handling UK addresses, would be to try to standardise on:
Name
Flat/House No./Name
Street
Town
Postcode

But in practice every system I see sadly ends up with something like:
Name
Address1
Address2
Address3
Address4 or sometimes Town
Address5 (rarer)
Postcode

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@nickbwalking Yeah, they can (usually) match from either end now, so typing a postcode works but so does just typing the address.

I still think take postcode then choose from a list is faster but only if (big if!) it's implemented well.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Spare me the people looking at Bluesky and going "well it has these interesting features", as if you can evaluate such a thing technically and not socially.

You can't trust this platform, even with that little sheen of "it's actually a protocol". It's far too easy for them to add something terrible at any time.

It probably won't be crypto since that has died down, so my money would be on some awful AI thing.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

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

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@mikesheldon Haha! Yeah I have no emails saved from before 2004 and every email since... probably the same for a lot of people.

I even finally learned the keyboard shortcuts recently.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@mikesheldon I did that for a few years until Thunderbird got super slow... maybe there are better options now though

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@mikesheldon Hey, good to have! I bet there's something interesting in there. (I don't think I've ever put anything into a tarball, only taken stuff out.)

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

A theory:

AI moderation of human writing and speech will cause it to gradually evolve into a form designed to be as difficult for machines to decode as possible.

Think: little sound effects, hand gestures, complex social codes to indicate that you mean the opposite of something said.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

In the future, people will use the suffix -verse to make things sound 2020s retro

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

I think the Bluesky plan is:

  • Sell Twitter for bazillions to a dummy
  • Use (a fraction of) the cash to make a new Twitter - Bluesky's main vibe is "the ground-up rewrite of the whole project that programmers always wish they could do"
  • (Optional) Buy back ruins of Twitter later and switch it to Bluesky's system

I can see this working. I also don't see why any of us would want to help them. The best outcome would be persuading/shaming them into federating with ActivityPub.

grammargirl, to random
@grammargirl@zirk.us avatar

Sunday morning language meltdown:

I'm writing an example sentence about buying flowers, and suddenly, "nursery" seems like a weird word to me.

Do we really buy flowers at a "nursery"? It's also where we keep babies.

Sure, we nurture both flowers and babies, but will people outside the U.S. know that a nursery is where we buy flowers???

Maybe I should say "hardware store" instead.

OMG, why do we buy flowers at a HARDWARE STORE...

<runs away screaming>

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@mattgemmell @grammargirl I (British) would use "hardware store" but only to refer to a small local shop that sells screws, tools, etc, not to refer to a big-box DIY shop.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

It's funny to me how many SaaS admin panels I use that have been basically the same for years, but insist on changing their logo and font yearly

timbray, to random
@timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

The one Mastodon feature I would like to see, more than the next 3 or 4 put together, would be: Don’t show me stuff I’ve already seen!

Or at least do it less. If something is getting boosted a lot, maybe a maximum of once a day tell me that it got 38 more boosts, including 11 of my follows. Even better, show it just once only.

Thank you.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@timbray There's an open issue for this here https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18693

mattratt, to random

“Flat in London for £550 pcm or jail cell being exposed for human rights violations” hard mode.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@mattratt So what do you get for the £550? Half a bunkbed?

caseynewton, to random
@caseynewton@mastodon.social avatar

Twitter is dying :)

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@caseynewton Netcraft confirms it

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Any new technology starts with a built-in advantage over its critics.

NFTs were obviously, comically useless and they still pulled lots of people along because hey, it's new, it's technology, you can't just dismiss it. It took a lot of focus on the harm, especially energy use, to overcome this.

AI on the other hand produces at least superficially useful results, and the problems are real but a bit harder to pin down: cases of bias, spam polluting the web, semi-plagarism. It's an uphill battle.

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

My hobbies? Well I like to make to-do lists with about 30 things on. Then I do 2 of them.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

Actually I went back to the list and had done another few of the things. But not by working through the list in order, or remembering what was on it.

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@HollieK72 Yes true!

tomw, to random
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

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,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

The obvious problem of loudly screaming about how Mastodon sign-up should work is that we are only hearing the people who already signed up, and not the people who gave up because it was too complicated.

aeva, to random
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

what if I shaved two yaks 🤔

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@aeva Mastodon is interesting in that if a post gets to low double-digit boosts, it often ends up in the 'explore' tab (in the web interface at least) and from there can build up hundreds rapidly. But it feels weird – starts slow and gathers pace at a point when you're probably not paying attention

jeff, to random

We are thrilled to announce that we're starting to roll out the red carpet at Celebrity.Social ⭐ , an exclusive Mastodon social server designed for celebrities and notable people,

Premiering Soon 🎬

tomw,
@tomw@mastodon.social avatar

@jeff You're about 24 days late for April fools

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