Friend of mine used to volunteer for the local chapter of a well-known national non-profit. He tried to explain all the technical benefits of setting up a website, yada yada. The board didn’t care and were bored.

He finally set up a small demo on his own. Just a few screens. Ran a small test. Presented static screenshots, along with charts and stats on viewership and engagements. Had mockups of donation pages, volunteer signup screens, newsletters, etc. That was when people saw the value and got interested.

Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They’ll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.

Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks. May want to have some answers and slides ready.

Firefly

So… Hyundai Automotive signed a deal with Hyundai Electric to supply them with electricity.

🤔

Ask about ‘Independent Study’ from your faculty adviser. If you don’t have one, go to your Department head. If you don’t have that, ask the Registrar.

Independent Study means you get to propose your own coursework and, if approved, get to do it and get credit for it. You still have to deal with faculty supervision but the subject is specific to you. Think about what you would love to learn and propose a way to get there.

Sheesh. How often do you need to reach for the power button? It’s got solid state storage. Just flip it on its damn side and stop whinging.

Cool stuff. But not enough delta to be worth an upgrade from a year-old M3.

• RPN: OR Trick Treat

• Async multithreading: Treat Trick (loop closed) OR (stack trace)

This is pretty sad.

I have a number of elderly relatives. The one thing I keep telling them is if they ever get approached, to contact their kids, or check with another family member before responding. So far, there haven’t been any problems.

But I heard an in-law’s parents in a different state lost a big chunk of money to one of these scams and may now lose their home.

Totally agree.

Builders care about the nuts and bolts of a building. Most people just care about whether they can get a decent hot shower, how cold it gets inside at night, or whether the smoke alarm goes off every time they fry onions.

The killer feature of decentralization, I suspect, does not lie in a singular interaction with a user, but (as Mike notes) in harnessing the power of the distributed group to do something amazing.

Just wait. It’ll all work out fine.

Not a WP dev. Just a (techie) user.

This whole thing seems so unnecessary. FOSS devs would love to get a fraction of the goodwill being squandered here.

• Any work or study done during an all-nighter is a waste.

• If you meet someone and all they do is talk about themselves, they won’t be a good friend.

• Nobody really cares how you look or what you wear. And anyone who does has bigger issues they would rather not deal with.

“Did I already shampoo? Can’t remember.”

(Apply a small dab of shampoo. Foams up instantly).

“Dammit, yes.”

All the deserved ribbing aside, if you had to design a removable, R/W, high-capacity, environmentally tolerant, secure, fault-tolerant, mission critical storage system that could last 25 years, starting NOW…

What would you pick?

That’s a tough one, even if you design future hardware upgrades into the system.

• Do unto others, etc…
• Don’t punch down. Ever.
• Hydration is key.

Apple and Google can fix the problem. Apps are required to ask for permission to access location information. Most of the time, it’s for tracking and analytics, not anything related to the app’s functionality. That’s the data that is leaking to these data brokers.

In those cases, if asked, user can say no, but apps keep haranguing you until you capitulate.

Instead, the OS could add a button that says: “Yes, but randomize.” After that, location data is returned as normal, but from totally random locations nearby. They could even spoof the data clustering algorithms and just pick some rando location and keep showing returns to them, or just trade the data from one random phone for another every N days.

You do this enough and the data will become polluted enough to become useless.

Yup. Techie, but with other interests. There are dozens of us.

Edit: gave up on Twitter and Reddit after being early adopter of both. Moved over to Fediverse and not regretting it one bit. All good.

It was the window seal.

Read the book. Great story. Was curious why they decided to roll up the program at the end and blow their own cover. Book mentioned it was getting too popular, but that didn’t sound right.

Hopefully, the talk will explain it a little better. Bookmarked to watch.

Makey Makey has been around forever: https://makeymakey.com/

Background: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-18303012