cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
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- 5 yr. ago
- Posts
- 124
- Comments
- 254
- Joined
- 5 yr. ago
thanks i hate it
Do tech journalists at the New York Times have any idea what they're talking about? (spoiler)
The author of this latest advertorial, Kevin Roose, has a podcast called "Hard Fork".
Here he and his co-host attempt to answer the question "What’s a Hard Fork?":
kevin roose: Casey, we should probably explain why our podcast is called “Hard Fork.”
casey newton: Oh, yeah. So our other names didn’t get approved by “The New York Times” lawyers.
kevin roose: True.
casey newton: And B, it’s actually a good name for what we’re going to be talking about. A “hard fork” is a programming term for when you’re building something, but it gets really screwed up. So you take the entire thing, break it, and start over.
kevin roose: Right.
casey newton: And that’s a little bit what it feels like right now in the tech industry. These companies that you and I have been writing about for the past decade, like Facebook, and Google, and Amazon, they’re all kind of struggling to stay relevant.
kevin roose: Yeah. We’ve noticed a lot of the energy and money in Silicon Valley is shifting to totally new ideas — crypto, the metaverse, AI. It feels like a real turning point when the old things are going away and interesting new ones are coming in to replace them.
casey newton: And all this is happening so fast, and some of it’s so strange. I just feel like I’m texting you constantly, “What is happening? What is this story? Explain this to me. Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane.”
kevin roose: And so we’re going to try to help each other feel a little bit less insane. We’re going to talk about these stories. We’re going to bring in other journalists, newsmakers, whoever else is involved in building this future, to explain to us what’s changing and why it all matters.
casey newton: So listen to Hard Fork. It comes out every Friday starting October 7.
kevin roose: Wherever you get your podcasts.
This is simply not accurate.
Today the term "hard fork" is probably most often used to refer to blockchain forks, which I assume is where these guys (almost) learned it, but the blockchain people borrowed the term from forks in software development.
In both cases it means to diverge in such a way that re-converging is not expected. In neither case does it mean anything is screwed up, nor does it mean anything about starting over.
These people who's job it is to cover technology at one of the most respected newspapers in the United States are actually so clueless that they have an entirely wrong definition for the phrase which they chose to be the title of their podcast.
"Talk with me about this, because I feel like I’m going insane."
But, who cares, right? "Hard fork" sounds cool and the times is ON IT.
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what surprises me more is that Netanyahu seems to be fine with it?
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herzl's_Mauschel_and_Zionist_antisemitism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_antisemitism
as a mod/admin, i would appreciate being able to edit post titles. there have been a fair number of times where i asked a poster to do so, and then waited a while for them to before deleting the post if they don't.
and/or, it would be nice to have a way for us to temporarily semi-delete a post while waiting for OP to make requested changes to it; that is, to hide it from the community view but leave it visible to people with the URL, or people who find it via the user profiles of the poster or commenters in it.
editing titles would be a awkward without an edit history or, at the least, a way to see that some 2nd party had edited it, and editing post bodies would be even more so. but it would make sense and be useful with an edit history, i think.
i would also appreciate having content addressability, portable identity, composable moderation, and... perhaps a pony 😂
cross-post of my comment elsewhere:
I immediately knew this was going to be from Microsoft users, and yeah... of course, it is.
Binaries distributed under this EULA do not meet the free software definition or open source definition.
However, unlike most attempts to dilute the concept of open source, since the EULA is explicitly scoped to binaries and says it is meant to be applied to projects with source code that is released under an OSI-approved license, I think the source code of projects using this do still meet the open source definition (as long as the code is actually under such a license). Anyone/everyone should still be free to fork any project using this, and to distribute free binaries which are not under this EULA.
This EULA obviously cannot be applied to projects using a copyleft license, unless all contributors to it have dual-licensed their contributions to allow (at least) the entity that is distributing non-free binaries under this EULA to do so.
I think it is extremely short-sighted to tell non-paying "consumers" of an open source project that their bug reports are not welcome. People who pay for support obviously get to heavily influence which bugs get priority, but to tell non-paying users that they shouldn't even report bugs is implicitly communicating that 2nd and 3rd party collaboration on fixing bugs is not expected or desired.
A lot of Microsoft-oriented developers still don't understand the free software movement, and have been trying to twist it into something they can comprehend since it started four decades ago. This is the latest iteration of that; at least this time they aren't suggesting that people license their source code under non-free licenses.
- https://web.archive.org/web/19991009154641/http://www.sgi.com/fun/freeware/3d_navigator.html SGI webpage archive from 1999
- https://github.com/DX94-Quas/3d-file-system-navigator - SGI fsn binaries here, for IRIX versions 5.3 and below
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer - 1999 free software rewrite in C
- https://github.com/mcuelenaere/fsv - fork of 1999 version, updated 2018
- https://github.com/jtsiomb/fsnav - 2009 C++ free software rewrite, updated 2021
if you've never used
ed(1)technically it's illegal for you to say "it's a UNIX system, i know this"They had a Republican governor from 2003 to 2011.
Clinton got 46.4% there in 2016, only a 1.5% lead over Trump.
Their House of Representatives is currently split 50/50 (with Republican leadership due to this), and the DFL has a one-seat majority in the Senate.
I wouldn't call it "incredibly blue", and certainly not "one of the bluest".
Like one of the bluest.
In fact, if you sort the table here you can see that of the states Harris/Walz won there was only one (New Hampshire) where they got a lower percentage of the vote than in Minnesota.
However with the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party having a majority (by a single seat) in the Senate, this bill will obviously not pass, and if it did, obviously the governor (Tim Walz) would not sign it.
This is just trolling by some deeply unserious politicians.
shoutout to the person who reported this post. reason? "dangerous misinformation can lead to heat stroke and death"
there is some interesting discussion of the problem and possible solutions (including links to github issues) in this blog post: https://popcar.bearblog.dev/lemmy-needs-to-fix-its-community-separation-problem/
https://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/SillySounds/english.ogg (from back when many english speakers were still insistent that the i in Linux should be pronounced "eye")
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I'm confused as to why this 404media story neglected to link to the post in question.
to get from this article to the post that it is about, i had to type in the bsky username from the screenshot and scroll through the timeline. to save others the effort:
https://bsky.app/profile/marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3liwlwvvq6k2s is the post which was removed.
https://bsky.app/profile/marisakabas.bsky.social/post/3lj3yrzc6is2p is the thread about it being removed and later restored.
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this meme has some truth in it, in that these six vegetables are all brassica oleracea. but, the factoid in the center of the meme is misleading: brassica oleracea can be many things but (despite brassicaceae being "the mustard and cabbage family") brassica oleracea is not typically called "wild mustard plant".
edit: toned down my refutation; i guess maybe it is sometimes 👀 but i think not really
i don't usually cross-post my comments but I think this one from a cross-post of this meme in programmerhumor is worth sharing here:
The statement in this meme is false. There are many programming languages which can be written by humans but which are intended primarily to be generated by other programs (such as compilers for higher-level languages).
The distinction can sometimes be missed even by people who are successfully writing code in these languages; this comment from Jeffrey Friedl (author of the book Mastering Regular Expressions) stuck with me:
I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications :-)) —Jeffrey
(there is a lot of fascinating history in that thread on his blog...)
Am I still missing something? This is posted on the instance of .world, wtf are we talking about .ml and politics for? If your instance filters your comments on other instances than that’s concerning and something I didn’t know.
Yes, something you're missing is that it was your (our) instance which removed the word from your comment. I believe the slur filters are effectively a combination of the configured filters on the writer's instance, the reader's instance, and the community's instance.
If you view this thread from other other users' instances (via the
link on their comments in the web view), you will see that the word which was removed from your comment is not removed from comments by users on some other instances (despite that it is also removed from their comments when viewed from our instance). HTH.(imo false positives from the slur filter are annoying, but so are the people casually using slurs who are prevented from doing so by it; it's a tradeoff i don't feel strongly about. although i do think it would be much better if the writer-side version of it could notify users of the impending bowdlerization prior to posting.)
Organic Maps is great, but see also OsmAnd.
The former is faster and easier to use but the latter has a lot more features.

You say that but, everything I ever posted on identica (and also on Evan's later OStatus site
Status.Net, which i was a paying customer of) went 404 just a few years later. 😢When StatusNet shut down I was offered a MySQL dump, which is better than nothing for personal archival but not actually useful for setting up a new instance due to OStatus having DNS-based identity and lacking any concept for migrating to a new domain.
https://identi.ca/evan/note/6EZ4Jzp5RQaUsx5QzJtL4A notes that Evan's own first post is "still visible on Identi.ca today, although the URL format changed a few years ago, and the redirect plugin stopped working a few years after that." ... but for whatever reason he decided that most accounts (those inactive over a year, iiuc, which I was because I had moved to using StatusNet instead of identica) weren't worthy of migrating to his new pump.io architecture at all.
Here is some reporting about it from 2013: https://lwn.net/Articles/544347/
As an added bonus, to the extent that I can find some of my posts on archive.org, links in them were all automatically replaced (it was the style at the time) with redirects via Evan's URL shortening service
ur1.cawhich is also now long-dead.imo the deletion of most of the content in the proto-fediverse (PubSubHubbubiverse? 😂) was an enormous loss; I and many other people had years of great discussions on these sites which I wish we could revisit today.
🪦
The fact that ActivityPub now is still a thing where people must (be a sysadmin or) pick someone else's domain to marry their online identity to is even more sad. ActivityPub desperately needs to become content addressable and decouple identity from other responsibilities. This experiment (which i learned of via this post) from six years ago seemed like a huge step in the right direction, but I don't know if anyone is really working on solving these problems currently. 😢