@sangster@macaw.social
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

sangster

@sangster@macaw.social

He/him. Web/backend dev. Currently: Etsy. Previously: Classy, Twitter. 🐈🐕‍🦺📷🏄🕹️✈️🎧📺🖥️🍞

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

stshank, to ai
@stshank@mstdn.social avatar

A snapshot of AI rules for a photography group I'm joining. OK to use it on the margins, but nothing completely AI-generated.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@stshank it makes sense — there are a lot of selection / filter tools in Adobe products that save a ton of time on editing but aren’t meaningfully different from what you could achieve by hand with a lot of time.

Things get fuzzier when you start talking about Topaz or other AI sharpening tools or cloning / removal tools, though.

quixoticgeek, to random
@quixoticgeek@v.st avatar

Well fuck.

Just did a Google image search as part of some research into something in the medieval era. Well over half of the results are from some kind of ai image generation site. Argh. Totally useless for research purposes.

Search engines need an "exclude AI content" option.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@quixoticgeek @cory that would take real work, innovation, and a determination to deliver high quality search results.

Not real Google Search’s MO anymore.

annika, to random
@annika@xoxo.zone avatar

:thisisfine:

(Yes I can still use a password, for now)

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@annika I know there’s no good reason for me to resist passkeys and yet

Lord Of The Rings GIF

DenisCOVIDinfoguy, to Oakland
@DenisCOVIDinfoguy@aus.social avatar

🇺🇸 US: Oakland schools allow COVID-positive students to attend class.

"COVID-positive students no longer have to stay home, as long as they do not have any symptoms, according to district officials. Asymptomatic, COVID-positive students should wear a mask at school while indoors" 🤦‍♂️

@auscovid19

Source: https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/oakland-schools-allow-covid-positive-students-to-attend-class/

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy @auscovid19 can’t keep parents away from work anymore

cassidoo, to random
@cassidoo@notacult.social avatar

I'm a lil annoyed at React these days

https://blog.cassidoo.co/post/annoyed-at-react/

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@cassidoo It doesn’t solve the problem, but: Etsy migrated to Preact years ago and it’s been pretty great. Same basic API, though there’s less of a story around SSR (but we use SSR with Preact, too).

I do generally agree, though — RSC and everything happening with it feel like an evolutionary dead end for React. The promise of a thin UI layer you could add to any backend is dying, and now your whole stack has to be built around their ever-changing decisions. It’s not sustainable.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@developit @cassidoo I sing praises for Preact and the wonderful folks who work on it at every opportunity.

seldo, (edited ) to random
@seldo@alpaca.gold avatar

Do you have a device that can receive radio broadcasts in your house (not your car)?

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@seldo I’ve gotten several COVID vaccines, does that count?

gabek, to random

Once in a while I’ll end up on a Facebook page because I have to view a venue’s hours or something. I’ve noticed lately every time I do this the back button automatically gets disabled. Does anybody else see this? If so, how is this even possible? I only see it on Facebook.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@gabek I think they’re probably messing with the browser “history” — popping all of the entries off or clearing it. It’s like the mobile webpages where when you swipe or tap the back navigation, there’s suddenly a page of ads because they’ve manipulated the history to inject it. I wouldn’t have thought they could clear history that wasn’t added by their site, though.

williampietri, to random
@williampietri@sfba.social avatar

There's this cult of billionaire competence that extends even to their critics. I regularly see people saying that Musk's destruction of Twitter must have been intentional, that he and his rich backers were trying to ruin it. Nope! Musk's just an out-of-control narcissist who's not half as bright as he thinks.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@williampietri it’s been pretty wild to see someone take over Twitter who will make Jack look like a wise and competent leader. Because he gets that same assumption of competence and was the most gigantic freakin weenie. Couldn’t commit to anything except for trying to look like he knew what he was doing, so he did nothing and tried to garner praise for it.

cory, to random
@cory@social.lol avatar

☕ New year, same routine

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@cory SSDD, as Stephen King was fond of saying

sandofsky, to random
@sandofsky@mastodon.social avatar

On Threads, my algorithmic timeline is full of right wing garbage, thirst traps, and Facebook employees complaining about Apple.

If I point this out, my replies fill with Facebook employees telling me it’s my fault for not following enough people, or that I should just switch to the “Following” tab every time the app launches.

I suspect the real problem is Threads has cooled off. With fewer posts coming in, it doesn’t take much engagement for trash to float to the top.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@sandofsky we had a constant problem at Twitter where all the employees were constantly interacting with each other and had really deep networks of mutuals.

It led to a lot of PMs planning out features based on an experience of Twitter that didn’t really exist for regular users, or trying to help users get into that state. Was pretty wild to see how many massively out of touch features launched and died because of it.

cory, to random
@cory@social.lol avatar

My goal for 2024 is to stop falling onto the ADHD productivity trap of switching tools unnecessarily.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@cory My kryptonite is not knowing whether a tool is helping, or if the stress of learning / endorphins from figuring it out are kickstarting my executive function.

cory, to 11ty
@cory@social.lol avatar

Ok bye Tailwind https://github.com/cdransf/coryd.dev/commit/9b2d0883e590546aeb34cbaf3cdc6a5232fe9015

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@cory @sarajw ugh, and it does look like a bunch of work… but I recently had to run around giving more memory to the tailwind dev build process for my 11ty site because it kept crashing when 60+ HTML pages changed at once.

Now I feel guilty every time I run the dev build, knowing I could just extract it all to CSS files and variables.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@cory @sarajw Maybe what I need is a tool that will parse Nunjucks files for Tailwind classes and convert that into real CSS classes.

mttaggart, to random

Do you think gas stoves are "better" for cooking?

Are you sure you know why you think that? www.npr.org/2023/10/17/1183551603/gas-stove-utility-tobacco

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@mttaggart @mekkaokereke After 2.5y living in Europe with a modern electric stove, we still find it less predictable and harder to manage than a good gas range. We’ve encountered some induction stoves in Airbnbs that were fantastic, though.

We definitely still miss the gas stove, but all of the reports have us thinking that even if we move back, we’d want an electric or induction range.

grammargirl, to random
@grammargirl@zirk.us avatar

Despite drinking coffee for decades, I have no idea what I like, and my grocery store had a coffee sale, so I did my own taste test this morning:

So far Dunkin' Original Blend > Starbucks Breakfast Blend > Starbucks Veranda.

Veranda was so bitter! I'm hoping I can rescue it by using it to make cold brew.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@grammargirl a few grains of salt (really not much) on the beans before brewing can help rescue particularly bitter coffee.

trainingmontage, to random
@trainingmontage@hachyderm.io avatar

Risk A:
Do not learn React -> Do not get paid to write React

Risk B (possibly more dangerous):
Learn React -> Get paid to write React

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@sarajw @cory @trainingmontage @jake4480 I’m one of the React “architects” at my job — I write, upgrade, maintain, etc all of the core architecture for our seller tools and do my best to advocate for best practices. I’d never touched it before I got here.

My secret is that despite making it work better and for longer, I know it was never the right tech stack. Keeping it going was just… way better than trying to rewrite everything.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@sarajw @cory @trainingmontage @jake4480 Now all of the things I’ve done in the last five years to keep our SPA running fast have mostly reached their limits, in part because… keeping React apps fast requires everyone to be experts. A single non-expert can break a lot of things. It’s not their fault, even.

Will be interesting to see what we have to do to keep things going another few years without major architecture changes.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@sarajw @cory @trainingmontage @jake4480 Yeah — there’s a hard divide between the most responsible choice for the business (avoid massive rewrites, keep the existing architecture stable, ship product) and rewriting everything.

It doesn’t help that we have a PHP backend, so there are pretty difficult limitations to work around in terms of parallelizing things.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@cory @sarajw @trainingmontage @jake4480 I saw a recent comment about React that everyone writes it so differently that even at the best of times, most of the advice out there doesn’t help. That’s certainly the case about a lot of what my company does, because we’ve got best practices tuned (as best possible) to our architecture.

Our company refuses to hire frontend specialists, though, only “full stack” roles. Makes a lot of things complicated.

sarajw, to random
@sarajw@front-end.social avatar
sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@sarajw Hope no one over-Reacts to that shirt

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

Hoo boy I've just written a huge somewhat personal blog post and now I'm worried it's too much

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@sarajw I've been thinking about this post all day since reading it with my coffee this morning. It reminds me of "death of the third place" style posts, but it's so much more hopeful to say, "I lost one community but found another".

I've moved around a lot as an adult, and the move to Ireland a few years ago really left me adrift and isolated. It took years before I found a new place - a camera club. As we leave Ireland this coming summer, I'm hoping to find a new camera club in our new home.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@sarajw We're about to have our first kid in February (which is part of what triggered the upcoming move), so it's definitely good to read about other folks figuring out how to integrate their personal/social lives with expanded family.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@sarajw we’ve done some of that, but haven’t yet many folks we’re connecting with. A lot of the classes are online, since we don’t have a car and it’s a lot harder to get around to places here without one.

Once we move, I hope that some of that will get easier (having more ready access to cars, at least, though that has its own problems).

ifixcoinops, (edited ) to random
@ifixcoinops@retro.social avatar

Watching a mutual ask for printer recs and receive a chorus of tired tech folk going "Just get a Brother, they're fine" and man

MAN

Like this is actually kinda fascinating honestly, Brother is now the best printer brand, the one that every Computer Person recommends, and is it because their printers are good? Their printers are fine, they print, whatever, no, it's because everybody else's printers have gotten Innovated out the wazoo, every innovation making them way worse, until it's gotten to the point where I wouldn't have one in the house even if it were free, and meanwhile Brother's have remained consistently Fine I Guess, which now makes them the best printer manufacturer simply by virtue of them opting out of the Who Can Get Crappiest Fastest race

Brother have gotten to where they are now, by NOT innovating

EDIT 2023-11-27 2130 UTC: I muted this thread a while back because wew lad this got too big. I won't see your reply but the lurkers (and commentors) of Hacker News might.

sangster,
@sangster@macaw.social avatar

@ifixcoinops

  1. Build a decent enough product to not die off
  2. Refuse enshittification
  3. Wait a while
  4. Become best available option
  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • megavids
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • GTA5RPClips
  • osvaldo12
  • love
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • khanakhh
  • everett
  • kavyap
  • mdbf
  • DreamBathrooms
  • ngwrru68w68
  • provamag3
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • normalnudes
  • tacticalgear
  • cubers
  • ethstaker
  • modclub
  • cisconetworking
  • Durango
  • anitta
  • Leos
  • tester
  • JUstTest
  • All magazines
    •