Posts by miki@dragonscave.space
(DIR) Post #AbiJSt5kyFTYuuEe1I by miki@dragonscave.space
2023-11-12T00:18:51Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
I really dislike most of Doctorov's nonfiction writing, but he actually makes some decent points here, at least if you can get past the "money is evil because it is money" part https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety
(DIR) Post #AbsIyETkbTazUGtZdw by miki@dragonscave.space
2023-11-16T18:07:02Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
In its latest blog post, Signal just announced that it pays $6 million in fees for delivering verification codes via SMS.Signal has less than 50 million users. X, by some estimates, has 530 million users. That's about $60 million in SMS messages alone!*Suddenly, the decision to restrict SMS-based messages to paying users seems a lot more like basic math than "Musk evil"* this might be significantly less, according to some sources, X gets much better rates than anybody else because of Twitter's old SMS days.
(DIR) Post #AcKiFyeK8LkWsyHE1I by miki@dragonscave.space
2023-11-30T13:01:03Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
I love when an open source maintainer straight up closes an accessibility issue as "not planned"
(DIR) Post #Acfm9qMVPH9iBHfm1Q by miki@dragonscave.space
2023-12-10T13:53:45Z
2 likes, 0 repeats
@danluu IANAL and not from the US, but wouldn't this be a cut-and-dry discrimination case if true? This is in writing, for fuck's sake.
(DIR) Post #Aco201hFYy6oyCObxY by miki@dragonscave.space
2023-12-14T16:34:52Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@simon Personal experience re: the Facebook conspiracy. The only way I found to convince people this is untrue is to show them when the same exact thing happens on linear TV. We discuss something, and 15 minutes later, the ad for that thing comes on. Making them understand that if this was Facebook instead of TV, they'd blame it on their phones listening goes a long way.
(DIR) Post #Acoerz25TokAbUIYDY by miki@dragonscave.space
2023-12-14T23:54:51Z
0 likes, 3 repeats
We need some kind of summer camp for adults where left-leaning, strongly anti-capitalist radicals could go and experience how life was like in a communist country. I never actually lived in one myself, but I heard enough stories from the previous generation to appreciate capitalism for what it is.
(DIR) Post #AcywXoxa4izbohdqoS by miki@dragonscave.space
2023-12-19T23:01:16Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@AubreyDeLosDestinos setka.social, malpka.social?
(DIR) Post #AdARDPjv7Zb25vSuP2 by miki@dragonscave.space
2023-12-24T15:43:23Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
I wonder how long it would take a single human being to execute a simple "hello world" program in something like Apple II basic, by hand, with no electronic devices in sight.Imagine a notebook or whiteboard with all the memory contents, a piece of paper with the CPU register state and a person executing 6502 machine code by hand. It's certainly possible, people have been calculating bitcoin hashes for fun this way, but I wonder what the exact slowdown versus a real 6502 would be here.
(DIR) Post #AdARDRKpBqi72fjtZ2 by miki@dragonscave.space
2023-12-24T15:56:41Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@amszmidt Hearing stories like this, I realize how much privilege my generation has. Not only I never had to do this, my first serious attempts at programming were already in the age of high-level languages, Google search and ubiquitous internet access. Probably the golden age of learning to code (especially for a screen reader user like me), with online tutorials already freely available, but before constant SEO spam, fancy web-based IDEs and overly long videos and subtlu wrong LLM-generated articles.
(DIR) Post #AdARDSyD6toG77Araq by miki@dragonscave.space
2023-12-25T10:26:17Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@amszmidt I don't know if I agree. The people 30 years ago probably didn't know how a CPU actually worked either. People making the CPU didn't know much about the physics and chemistry of transistors. The people who did probably didn't understand the underlying quantum mechanics that explain why these chemical reactions work the way they do. It's all abstractions all the way down, the right abstraction used to be hole patterns on punch cards, now it's functions in a Javascript framework.I'm not saying knowing more about how computers work isn't useful, to the contrary, and I do think that modern software could do most of what it does with a fraction of a fraction of the resources, but at what cost? To the user, to the programmer, to security?
(DIR) Post #AdGtxEpjxuKzFuaOn2 by miki@dragonscave.space
2023-12-28T14:51:15Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
There's seriously something off with HN's comment quality.To me, it looks like it rapidly decreased roughly when Musk took over X, and I wonder what the reasons for this might be.This might just be a coincidence, but I wonder whether the disappearance of HN bots had an impact, the X crowd was probably a lot more casual and less ideologically motivated than the die-hard HN and Fedi crowds.
(DIR) Post #AdQp3wkbZSkF8sOlvM by miki@dragonscave.space
2024-01-02T09:47:35Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@simon Whatever you end up doing, ensure you're properly crawled by archive.org in any case. Custom domains help with this, I've seen a platform throw a tantrum over their content being there when they went down and opt themselves out, losing years of valuable community history.
(DIR) Post #Ahz7boggllBQNXkVaC by miki@dragonscave.space
2024-05-17T10:08:14Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@benjojo hmm, this feels like very dangerous territory to step on. This might either open them up to inquiries like "how dare you show NSFW content to users you predict as being 13-17", or cause many misclassified adult users to be unable to see such content.
(DIR) Post #AmTcfxiLPuIzGcwU2y by miki@dragonscave.space
2024-09-28T22:52:23Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
THe Discord quick switcher makes absolutely no sense to me.I don't know how one could design an algorithm that always produces the wrong result, but Discord has clearly managed to do so.
(DIR) Post #AqKDdD4Q7MMKRRPKsK by miki@dragonscave.space
2025-01-22T01:38:53Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@futurebird I haven't thought of this before, but this will cause so much IT chaos.Many people in the US have non-US-issued documents that have a gender on them, and the US government needs to have accurate knowledge of what those documents say (regardless of whether it considers what they say to accurately reflect reality).Meanwhile, those same people may also have US-issued documents, and those documents will also have a "gender-looking thing" on them. The US government also needs accurate knowledge of what those documents say.For some people, the value on the US-issued documents will no longer be allowed to match the value on the non-US-issued documents, therefore the question of "but should I expect 'male' or 'female' when this person shows us their ID" will no longer be answerable by a single database field.Private organizations will also be affected by this, as many will need to separate "gender, as in what the person is expected to have when showing us ID" versus "what this person actually wants to get addressed by."European organizations already have this problem (this is compounded here by the lack of a 'title' concept and European burreaucracies that makes gender changes extremely difficult for many).
(DIR) Post #Ardgz4LCJC2y66pD7I by miki@dragonscave.space
2025-03-02T08:50:50Z
1 likes, 2 repeats
Maybe Google needs a team to take products they don't want to maintain any more, and make them worse before shutting them down.Look how positively users reacted to Microsoft shutting down Skype.
(DIR) Post #Ax7cz5xeXtNf4iTQMi by miki@dragonscave.space
2025-08-13T08:04:58Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@MichaelTBacon And of course, not even those are simple recommendations. What AI can do in two minutes will often take a human an hour. More humans in more offices means more air conditioning and more public transit (if not cars), and guess what, that consumes resources too.
(DIR) Post #Az364kG17ZpXctp08u by miki@dragonscave.space
2025-10-09T17:51:10Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@sundogplanets Genuine question, do (professional) astronomers in 2025 still rely on visible light to make their discoveries? It seems like such a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. If so, what makes this part of the spectrum more useful to science than any other?I'm asking as somebody who knows absolutely nothing about modern astronomy.
(DIR) Post #B0f7AC0B5reklkKmp6 by miki@dragonscave.space
2025-11-27T05:25:06Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@andrewrk PSA: Codeberg currently does not implement accessible account registration. It is impossible for screen reader users to make a Codeberg account due to the image-only captcha. There's a manual fallback path, but no idea how long that takes. I've been forced to use the Wikimedia one, and that was about 3 months. This has been pointed out to them many times, and it's seemingly not something they're prioritizing.
(DIR) Post #B1Eo9oQPqdRcCzGlMW by miki@dragonscave.space
2025-12-14T11:32:56Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
@Nonilex We don't really know what it is, but there's something *besides* guns that causes it.There has been an extremely significant uptick in mass schootings in the US in recent years, which isn't supported by a significant enough liberalisation of gun rights in that period. There has to be something else going on.