@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone
@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone avatar

KevinMarks

@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone

Reading your thoughts, if you write them down first.

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KevinMarks,
@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone avatar

@HelixDab2 @mondoman712 you're wrong. An actual ebike, with assist rather than a throttle really does get you to exercise because you are pedalling, but you're not adversely affected when going uphill. It's cycling, it burns calories, but it doesn't have the tiring bits.

KevinMarks, to random
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And Middlesbrough wonders why the Linthorpe Road bike lane isn't used much.

Bike lane is full of cones, roadsigns and a traffic light for the adjacent car lane

KevinMarks, to random
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“Suddenly every PC becomes a target for Discovery during legal proceedings. Lawyers can subpoena your Recall database and search it, no longer being limited to email but being able to search for terms that came up in Teams or Slack or Signal messages, and potentially verbally via Zoom or Skype if speech-to-text is included in Recall data.” https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/06/is-microsoft-trying-to-commit-.html

KevinMarks, to random
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If you're a UK person overseas, you still have time to get voting sorted: https://www.gov.uk/voting-when-abroad - if you have more than one possible residence to register where someone can proxy for you, try this to choose https://tacticalvote.co.uk/where-to-vote/

KevinMarks, to random
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https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld5804/ldselect/ldsctech/68/6803.htm I do like that the title of this is Long-duration energy storage: get on with it

KevinMarks, to random
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https://shareopenly.org/ is a very neat idea by @benwerd

KevinMarks, to random
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The irony of this is that "pushing water uphill" is far more viable than CCS - that's a good description of Pumped Hydropower, which is one fo the best energy storage options avilable at grid scale
https://mastodon.social/@CelloMomOnCars/112011573363426941

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

A thing I hate hate hate (but always happens) is when a company distributes "Sample Code" for their API, and you open it up, and what they did was make a series of "Helpful" wrapper classes for the API then write code using the wrapper classes. Now suddenly it isn't sample code for the API, it's sample code for the helper classes. You can't just paste the sample code into your own project, unless you copy the helper classes into every project, in which case why aren't the helper classes the API?

KevinMarks,
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@mcc I was on QuickTime - the CoreAudio team were big C++ fans so likely wrote sample code that way too.

KevinMarks,
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@mcc good post about this https://glazkov.com/2023/07/30/live-as-our-customer/

KevinMarks,
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@mcc that's so annoying. Especially when the helper stuff is like "my first OO project"
I remember stopping this kind of thing at Apple ~ 25 years ago.

mick, to random
@mick@cosocial.ca avatar

For the first time the Mastodon server has started to struggle just a little bit to keep up with the flow of the Fediverse.

We’ve usually been “push” heavy but we’ve started to see some spikes in “pull” queue latency. The worst of these spikes was today, where we fell behind by at least a couple minutes for most of the afternoon.

1/?

A pair of graphs showing sidekiq queue latency and enqueued jobs. The queue latency peaked at around 6 minutes at roughly 6pm this afternoon, but was between 1-2 minutes most of the afternoon. The maximum number of messages in queue at any one time was 12000. The majority of the traffic is pull queue.

KevinMarks,
@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone avatar

@polotek @mick @thisismissem what happened to the attempt to wire Mastodon up with OpenTelemetry? This kind of thing is what honeycomb.io is really good at exploring

mcc, to random
@mcc@mastodon.social avatar

The problem with udm14* is that Google Calculator is legitimately one of my favorite pieces of software (the natural language unit conversion is so good), and I expect udm14 is going to kill Google Calculator because that's the point

Maybe I should just make my own js calculator with builtin unit conversion.

  • See https://mastodon.online/ ; it's great, although since similar "give me the old version" flags on YouTube have sometimes stopped working without warning, I wonder how long it will last
KevinMarks,
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@mcc sadly the unit calculator is now LLM poisoned too

KevinMarks, to random
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The international consensus against Sunak's ridiculous traffic policies designed to kill people https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240517-vision-zero-how-europe-cut-the-number-of-people-dying-on-its-roads

dangillmor, to random
@dangillmor@mastodon.social avatar

Social media disappointments:

  1. Journalists are still actively participating at exTwitter, thereby actively supporting Musk, who is helping extremists bring down democracy and, by extension, a free press.

  2. Reddit got away with stomping its volunteer moderators and users, and its execs are cashing in on an IPO that in a more just world would have flopped.

  3. Writers I respect decided to stick with Substack despite arrogant, extremist-friendly investors and leadership.

KevinMarks,
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@dangillmor the question is how we provide them with a place to gossip about their stories that can be influenced usefully by non-journalists too

jessamyn, to random
@jessamyn@glammr.us avatar

I serve an aging population who use technology but want it to do a few specific things:

  • Big slow email - make it simple to do basic tasks (read, compose, attach, file) without clicking any tiny targets. Don't hide features.
  • Simple home page. A great site called Internet Buttons used to help you do this.
    http://web.archive.org/web/20171212223232/http://www.internetbuttons.org/page/gallery/
  • Streaming (only) networks. Many people I work with ditch cable but want to watch network TV/news. It's harder than it should be! They'd pay more for fewer options.
KevinMarks,
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@waldoj @jessamyn similary, I had to fix the contrast on my father-in-law's microwave buttons

KevinMarks, to random
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Now if I were choosing a voice for an AI program I would have based it on Orac, not Her https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCg43omcgZs

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

If you got upset at me for pointing out that more people died of Covid under Biden than Trump, in large part because Biden rolled back common sense restrictions that were in place under Trump...

Then you'll hate me pointing out that Trump introduced a 25% tariff on Chinese EVs, and Biden is upping that to 100% tariff.

https://insideevs.com/news/719283/chinese-ev-tariffs-biden-quadruple/

We can't allow the US to get off of fossil fuels... unless US billionaires win! 🤡

Fear the BYD Dolphin! (an EV car for $12K)
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/T3nfyO_UHjk

KevinMarks,
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@mekkaokereke the real disruptive innovation in vehicles is cargo ebikes. They fit Christensen's criteria perfectly

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

@stevenlevy has written his “This Changes Everything” for AI (referencing his Dec 1995 article about the Internet). Certainly the power of AI now is gob-smacking…and frightening. I have found AI very useful in various ways, from helping me debug stuff in my 11ty website to assisting me with research tasks. But over the past 6 months or so, I’ve also come to realize that the human parts of the web — and it’s inherent openness — are worth fighting for, and saving. https://www.wired.com/story/its-time-to-believe-the-ai-hype/

KevinMarks,
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@ricmac @stevenlevy “the demos aren't lying” is flagrantly false. The demos are lying at scale. I'm reminded of the opening of Accidental Empires hailing Gates's skill at demoing while avoiding bugs.

KevinMarks, to random
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“As tech gets more complex, things seem to get more intuitive locally, but overall the arbitrariness keeps going up. The number of YouTube videos explaining arbitrary shit keeps going up.” https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2024/05/14/arbitrariness-costs/

revk, (edited ) to random
@revk@toot.me.uk avatar

Latest bit of fun, but small, bit of C code...

iMessage (from which the screen shot comes) copes remarkably well with them.

When a specification casually says to remove accents to compare letters just A to Z, FFS. Ended up scanning the whole Unicode XML file to find A-Z type letters.

KevinMarks,
@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone avatar

@revk there's trickiness with the multiletter ones though, as @Edent has pointed out https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/11/domain-hacks-with-unusual-unicode-characters/ ℡ and № being examples

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“The wrong way to do Web Components | Go Make Things” https://gomakethings.com/the-wrong-way-to-do-web-components/

KevinMarks,
@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone avatar

@baldur The sad part is that Shoelace 1.0 was a great classless CSS library that you could add classes to adjust layout. It gave very good default looks and I still use it for some projects. If Shoelace 3 could adopt the html component model where the components wrap HTML elements and augment them it would be a real winner. cc @cferdinandi

KevinMarks, to random
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I recreated the classic 'And None Of Them Knew They Were Robots' compilation album by @Cameo on YouTube Music https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLpSh8dWOWl82ifSboAVCRHaOd__QtsKC&si=pyWEu4HdRRB4uIKy - @davidgerard this was what I was trying to point to the other day.

KevinMarks, to random
@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone avatar

Can everyone in Middlesbrough turn the lights and street lights off so I can see the aurora please?

KevinMarks, to random
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The aurora moved south enough that I could see it looking away from Middlesbrough

green/orange/magenta aurora with a star in the middle and tree branches in the foreground
green//magenta aurora with a stars sprinkled through it
diagonal magenta aurora with trees in the foreground, some city light and a small crescent moon near the horizon

skinnylatte, to VideoGames
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

it's weird how much of LA I feel I know just coz I played a lot of GTA V..

KevinMarks,
@KevinMarks@xoxo.zone avatar

@skinnylatte my sons had that, but with Florence and Assassins Creed

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