@heracles@mastodon.social
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

heracles

@heracles@mastodon.social

Heracles Papatheodorou • design technologist, digital maker and architect engineer • musings, shares & ephemera herein • toots in English & scarcely in Greek

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

matthiasott, to random
@matthiasott@mastodon.social avatar

By the way, do you have a personal website and does it have a home page? (I’m pretty sure it does… 😁)

I would love to know: what’s on your “home” and why?

Feel free to share a link, of course. 🤗 As always, I’m also asking on behalf of my newsletter subscribers.

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@matthiasott A short first person bio, so that people looking for me online can get an idea of what I do and used to do, where to contact me, then my texts (things I write), and objects (things I make).

molly0xfff, (edited ) to random
@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar

all i want for christmas is CSS support for underlines to extend below SVG pseudoelements 😔 (as in the first image)

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@molly0xfff It's possible by setting a unicode character (fallback) in the CSS content, then style it with a custom webfont (e.g. convert the SVG with IcoMoon).

That's how I manage such link indicators in my personal website, although I move them to the right gutter instead of inline. Example: https://heracl.es/geary/

The difference between versus an SVG is negligible. Of course, opinions may vary between what's good practice between icon fonts and SVGs.

simon, to random
@simon@simonwillison.net avatar

Do you have anything special setup as your default new browser window URL? What is it?

I've been getting a huge amount of value out of having my daily private GitHub issues thread (effectively a scratchpad notebook and daily todo list) as my default for new Firefox windows

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@simon What's the benefit of Github issues over working in plain text locally? Curious if there are any computational paths this enables.

heracles, to random
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

“… the digital revolution has failed. The initial promise was a deception to lay the foundation for another corporate value-creation scheme, but the benefits that emerged from it have been so deeply eroded by commercial imperatives that the drawbacks far outweigh the remaining redeeming qualities — and that only gets worse with every day generative AI tools are allowed to keep flooding the web with synthetic material.”

https://disconnect.blog/the-digital-revolution-has-failed/ by @parismarx

heracles, to random
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

Painfuly familiar… "I am a creative. Every deadline I make is an adventure that makes Indiana Jones look like a pensioner snoring in a deck chair. … I am still 10 times faster than people who are not creativeonly … It’s just that, before I work 10 times as fast as they do, I spend twice as long as they do putting the work off."

A testament about identifying as a creative by @zeldman https://alistapart.com/article/i-am-a-creative/

jeffjarvis, to random
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social avatar

This starts by acknowledging that teens are not "mindless screen zombies" and moderate their own phone use but then turns right around into about screen addiction. Yeesh.
How to get your kids (and yourself) to put down the phone https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/26/how-to-reduce-screen-time-kids/

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@jeffjarvis But they should be doing their homework, undistracted by life, and then when they become adults they should just flip a switch and know how to use their work email 24/7.

heracles, to random
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

"[...] the residue from crypto is a lot of bad digital [...] AI is a bubble, and it’s full of fraud, but that doesn’t automatically mean there’ll be nothing of value left behind when the bubble bursts. [...] Do the potential paying customers for these large models add up to enough money to keep the servers on? That’s the 13 trillion dollar question, and the answer is the difference between WorldCom and Enron, or dotcoms and cryptocurrency."

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/ by @pluralistic

Meyerweb, (edited ) to random
@Meyerweb@mastodon.social avatar

IT’S POLL TIME! Suppose you’re going to listen to a podcast with four (or more) participants. Would you prefer…

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@Meyerweb I listen to podcasts with a single earpiece 8 out of 10 times so R/L separation or bad balance would rule me out. I'd guess I am not alone at it.

heracles, to random
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

Where in @anildash raises the banners for a weirder web with wonderful references of practice from digital artists and activists @abundance @darius @netabomani and more.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/internet-future-about-to-get-weird-1234938403/

In that spirit, if you're reading this, click on a person's page, shift through as you would a new book, the check for external links and repeat. If you're not in a deep-reading mood, send the links over to a device with a bigger screen. If they accumulate into a pile of tabs, that's okay.

liampomfret, to random
@liampomfret@mastodon.social avatar

After months of procrastination, it seems like I might manage to complete my 2023 resolution of “Switch to Linux” in the dying days of the year. After wiping my drive and trying from scratch with a fresh install of an LTS, all the little annoying problems that were preventing me switching have been dealt with. Now it’s just a matter of some tedious setup for certain pieces of software.

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@liampomfret Kudos for taking the leap. What's your software setup like? I've always found it difficult to switch because of some rarely used but essential tools, like SketchUp, Dropbox, but I'm mostly going to miss IrfanView out of them all.

heracles, to random
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

A bright keynote by @anildash on the open web, seeking power for many vs the power of the few, how great things happen when people are allowed to own what they create online https://youtu.be/x9wbRUW57sc

Meyerweb, to random
@Meyerweb@mastodon.social avatar

I tried to read out the class names on Medium and may have accidentally summoned a lesser Lord of Hell, please send help

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@Meyerweb Some CSS frameworks exude the same vibe with "My roflcopter goes swosh swosh swosh" from a million years ago. https://youtu.be/gj71ym1_mz8

Em0nM4stodon, to random

The end of humanity is
two corporate generative AI talking nonsense to each others in a very confident tone while everything else around is burning to ashes.

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@Em0nM4stodon Surely with the voices of Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek, but we've gone past this point already: https://infiniteconversation.com/

pixelfed, to random
@pixelfed@mastodon.social avatar

⚠️ Account deletion is permanent

We receive multiple requests every week to restore accounts accounts that were previously deleted.

How can we improve this?

heracles, (edited )
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@pixelfed Having non-native speakers in mind, rephrasing with "easier" words could help, e.g.: "I understand that my Pixelfed account, its photos and messages will be deleted forever, and that nobody can bring them back."

clive, to random
@clive@saturation.social avatar

On the deep pleasures of posting practical advice online

My essay: https://clivethompson.medium.com/why-you-should-post-your-practical-advice-online-105afcae9e0

A "friend" link in case you're not a Medium subscriber: https://clivethompson.medium.com/why-you-should-post-your-practical-advice-online-105afcae9e0?sk=1f244090d20df8dcf0d93300b25d1dab

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@clive Hear hear! All the more useful in an era of (yet) superfluous video tutorials and bull-smearing LLMs. Some words with a similar attitude on the "web's vernacular learning" I wrote a few years ago: https://heracl.es/tutorials/ sharing here to show the "drops of water in the desert" are condensing.

heracles, to random
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

"The idea that the future is created by flawed geniuses who happen to accumulate great wealth is outmoded and simplistic, and it encourages a flattened view of how technology is developed and whom it impacts. [...] The bottom line: This is the story Musk himself wants told."

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2023-09-11/lets-put-a-stake-in-the-great-man-biography-starting-with-isaacsons-elon-musk by @brianmerchant

arselectronica, to random
@arselectronica@social.ars.electronica.art avatar

Only two more days until the Ars Electronica Festival 2023! Are you attending this year? And if so, what are you looking forward to the most?

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@arselectronica Looking forward to the main symposium, meeting good friends, and the great art for a last time in the depths of Postcity!

chriscoyier, to random
@chriscoyier@front-end.social avatar

A lot of stuff is just fine. https://chriscoyier.net/2023/08/31/a-lot-of-stuff-is-just-fine/

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@chriscoyier Maybe because any half-decent book is crafted by a designer that likes designing books, for a client that likes books. A web-designer's client likely cares for the purpose rather than the measly mean of a website, while the designer would still rather design a book.

liaizon, to random
@liaizon@wake.st avatar

the rabbit holes always keep expanding. reading about UPI IDs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Payments_Interface

I was just surprised to see there is this weird name system for banks that is user facing with millions of users I had never heard of.

usernames are in the form of username@bank but its not an email address

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@liaizon prncares ought to be in that list!

thedextriarchy, to random

Congrats to Elon Musk on achieving the platonic ideal of the glass cliff https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/11/23517090/elon-musk-twitter-ceo-replacement

heracles,
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

@thedextriarchy I am pretty disappointed there has been no effort to contact Twitter's press office for further comments for this piece.

heracles, to random
@heracles@mastodon.social avatar

“There's an enormous value in just playing with things and I think that if we valued fooling around with a new tool, and just seeing what it might do, rather than, … I think that if we did away with that, and just enabled people to play as they learn, and I think this applies to everything from K-12 to universities, to learning how to operate a computer, we would advance our learning a lot better.”

Really enjoyed this @hrheingold episode https://www.notion.so/blog/howard-rheingold

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