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slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

The Times is advertising it hired so many Over Reactors that nobody in the building knows how to write CSS or access MDN any more. Cringing inside out with second-hand embarrassment.

The NYT website placing a full page banner over top to advertise their web development skills are now so shitty that they cant even figure our CSS dark mode or PWA installation.

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

my boss played a pretty funny joke on me after that actually. i had a hell of a time trying to figure out where the problem was. then i finally fixed it and we went off for lunch. when i came back, there was a pool of oil underneath it.

my boss came over and said "oh dear, i don't think you've cracked it after all" or something like that. then he had a look at the hydraulic section for a moment and said "oh i think i know where it's come from". me: "oh? where's that then?" him: "here" (holds up an oil carton)

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

when i was a teenager i did work experience at a hydraulics company. not only have i made a number of hydraulic hoses, i've even troubleshooted and repaired one of the machines for making them.

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

the process of producing a hydraulic cable is quite cool actually. you cut some off the reel (they're quite large reels - 1.5-2 metres, because as i said, some of this is quite difficult to bend). then you put it in this cool machine with the fitting you're crimping it around inside.

it's the round bit you're looking for. those 8 individual bar things are simultaneously pushed in, compressing the hose evenly around the fitting.

it's a large freestanding machine. the interesting bit is a cylinder inside of which sit 8 rounded off triangle-shaped bars arranged evenly around the cylinder interior with gaps in between.

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

hydraulic cables are pressure vessels. they are build to withstand oil under pressure. they typically have a rubber outer and inside there's quite a lot of metal to cope with all that pressure.

the two common grades are called T3 and Trapper. Trapper is the seriously heavy duty stuff - what you find in diggers and stuff. it's quite difficult to bend. is that enough shielding for you guys?

we could do a 'budget' version using T3. you might even be able to bend that round a corner. it would be barely centimetres thicker than regular audio cable.

incidentally, audio cable itself has shielding, it's just only designed to shield against EM, because you don't typically put speaker cables under pressure.

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fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:

I bought a shower speaker.

Picture of a yellow rubber duck on a shower wall

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

this reminds me of one of my sillier ideas - to sell audio cables with hydraulic tubing as insulation to audiophiles.

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

okay so you might need to master creating 10cm walled diamond tubes to insulate the cables. it might not have all the convenience of 5V USB. they certainly bend better than diamond.

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

this is about 1000x the voltage 'high voltage DC' goes at btw.

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

USB 234.5r6

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

USB high voltage (200MV)

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:

One of those traps is reducing everything to ingroup and outgroup conflict, resisting any articulation of the superordinate goals we might share as a coalition instead, and using intelligence & technical skill as a weapon to take away people's belonging

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:

In my book I explore the mental traps in tech that keep us from trying to make positive change, and that even lead us to sabotage and punish others who are trying to make positive change.

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:

People like to mock this or claim that because I'm not cynical I'm not smart (seriously there's only one playbook here when you really think about it lol), but as a psychologist I genuinely feel I am not living out my ethics if I don't try to have a strengths based and compassionate pov on behavior

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:

There are two things that really bother me in tech commentary these days. First thing is the constant calling everyone else stupid, second is the saying because everyone else is stupid no positive change is possible

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
nash@labyrinth.social wrote:

the llms can't talk about goblins anymore cause the goblins won their class action suit. it happened a few weeks ago, but human media doesn't usually report on stuff from goblin court

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
catsalad@infosec.exchange ("Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) :paw:⁠:paw:") wrote:

"Do you know today's date?"

Ⅰ May

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

gulasch problemen nacht

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

the rick roulade is the state of the art meme food. it stays in your digestive system for way longer than you'd think because it doesn't want to give you up

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
yetiinabox@todon.nl ("Will Tuladhar-Douglas") wrote:

There have been a few wonderful conjunct holidays this year, like Ramadan and Easter, but tomorrow for us is excellent indeed: Beltane/May Day and Buddha Pūrṇimā.

So here's the moon at dusk, viewed through our glorious ornamental cherry tree.

1/2

#Buddhist #fullmoon #Celtic #syndicalism #cherryblossoms

The almost full moon, shining between flower-laden branches of a cherry tree. The sky is a cobalt blue dusk; the flowers are pale pink, and the leaves are maroon. There is a house just visible behind the tree, and beyond that an ink-black sea.

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
stone@goblin.camp ("☮️ & 🍺 on 🌏") wrote:

On May 4, 1886, workers in Chicago were striking and demonstrating peacefully for an 8-hour workday. Police had killed one striker and injured several others the previous day, and when the cops showed up and began to disperse the PEACEFUL demonstration, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb towards the police. The explosion and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven cops and four civilians, as well as dozens of injuries, most of them from the confused gunfire of the police.

Following this, eight activists—some present at the demonstration, some at others, and some at home playing cards—were arrested and charged. The presiding judge was openly hostile to the defendants, as were the court bailiffs and all the jurors eventually seated to hear the case. (Any potential jurors who were union members or sympathetic to socialism were dismissed.)

#postRecycler

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
mjd@mathstodon.xyz ("Mark Dominus") wrote:

A COMPUTER CANNOT FIND OUT

THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER BE ALLOWED TO FUCK AROUND

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
meg@fediscience.org ("Megan ⚘") wrote:

A giant Steller sea lion nicknamed “Chonkers” has unexpectedly arrived at Pier 39 in Fisherman’s Wharf, drawing crowds as he lounges among the much smaller resident sea lions.

https://apnews.com/article/chonkers-giant-sea-lion-san-francisco-pier-b265382b50fbb07a0debb0db8b25d4b5

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cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:

Dessa is going to be performing with the Oregon Symphony in November! It seems a bit far out to be making plans, but I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy her performance:

https://www.orsymphony.org/productions/2627/dessa-with-the-oregon-symphony

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

oh look it's time to do network programming. how wonderful.

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
kathimmel@mstdn.social ("kat donegan 🇵🇸✊") wrote:

on this international workers' day, please remember those whose labour goes largely unacknowledged, unappreciated & unpaid. here's to the carers & the cleaners & everyone else without whom the world would pretty much grind to a halt.
#iwd #internationalWorkersDay #huitHeures #1erMai #work #labour #art #illustration

digital ink illustration of person from the waist down who's barefooted & holding a broom. to the right of the figure are four rectangles. the first contains the word 'domestic'; the second, 'labour'; the third, 'is' & the fourth, 'work'. colours are black, white, pale peach & crimson.

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
arclight@oldbytes.space wrote:

@cstanhope Put everything in version control.
Unless you have a detailed understanding of what the code was originally intended to do and how it was to be used, you are in no position to judge the code as bad. It is merely inconvenient.
Popular refactoring strategies may not work especially for procedural or scientific code. "Best practice" that can't be applied in your specific case isn't best practice.
Many of the "bad" design decisions are likely because the code's requirements were never updated and the code was designed and built around long-gone limitations - in hardware, tooling, operating system, state of the art, local state of knowledge.
Document and archive the build process, especially compiler flags. Recovering those from a lost build environment is painful.
Focus on integral tests against whatever production, demo, or test cases exist.
Unit tests are a developer convenience; what you need for recovery and refactoring are acceptance tests.
Refactor for clarity not performance - if you don't have a performance problem, don't bother. If you haven't profiled the code, you don't know where bottlenecks are and you're just guessing and wasting effort.
Static analysis, linting, and code reformatters are your friends. Automatic API documentation tools are your friends but the bigger win is understanding the interface of each routine and the mutability of arguments and imports.
Use your platform or language's native packaging tools. Ship a standard installer not a box of loose parts. Define versioned releases and ship packages; users are often not developers so expecting them to understand git is not acceptable. A `curl | sudo` build/install process displays a critical lack of skill, care, awareness, and competence. Use of conda and containers (for non-server applications) are a red flag that an application has unmanageably complex dependencies and setup and usually indicates lazy design and poor understanding of the code and the deployment process.

With integral acceptance tests, a repeatable automated build process, and goid version control, initial gross refactoring may now be possible. Avoid large-scale code churn but understand it might be necessary very occasionally - this is why linting and automatic formatting should be done prior to every commit along with testing.

Focus code evolutions; make one very specific modification at a time. Use work planning tools (kanban board, issue tracker, etc.) to strictly define and document change scope, purpose, and acceptance criteria. Importantly, document what's explicitly _not_ in scope. Write these work plans yourself - do not allow users or managers to plan your work. Resist scope creep; better to revert a half-completed targeted revision and rescope and replan the evolution than to uncontrollably widen scope into a change too large and difficult to test or review.

This is a long tedious thankless process and often needs to be treated as a labor of love.

If you have the time, practice code recovery on real applications. Practice and experience make refactoring and recovery easier and safer.

A huge goal of this work is to understand the code at a deep level amd be able to communicate and document that understanding. AI tools cheat you out of that understanding and experience and launder out the subtle cues and evidence of the code's design and intent. If anything they will make the code worse.

Code recovery and revitalization is tedious and painstaking but can be intensely rewarding especially for the depth of knowledge and skill you build and the redundant greenfield development you avoid. Sometimes a rewrite is necessary, often it's simply not worth it because it will cost more and be less dependable than the legacy code.

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adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁!") wrote:

#WTF it seems that some #AI know me Oo

Who is Adële (smolweb dev)? Adële is a French PHP and JavaScript developer who's one of the more visible voices in the smolweb scene. She runs a blog at adele.pages.casa about smolweb, the Gemini protocol, and the lowtech movement, and she operates pollux.casa — a small infrastructure that includes pages.casa (static/markdown hosting), a Gemini capsule platform, and a GoToSocial Fediverse instance at social.pollux.casa. She codified smolweb.org as a reference for the philosophy: lightweight, decentralized, JavaScript-light or JavaScript-free pages built with basic HTML and CSS, designed to load on slow connections and modest devices. Her own framing distinguishes "smolweb" from "small web" — small web being about decentralization and independence from platforms, smolweb being more specifically about the craft of intentional technical minimalism, fighting bloat and overcomplification. On the building side, she's behind tools like ergol-http (Gemini-to-HTML on the fly), smolmd (the engine behind pages.casa), and more recently SmolFedi — a Fediverse client compatible with Mastodon and GoToSocial that has zero JavaScript and stays within smolweb Grade B for CSS, designed to work in browsers like Dillo or Netsurf. Stack-wise: Arch Linux at home, Debian in production, procedural PHP, vanilla JS, no Docker, no Node.

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Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
annika@xoxo.zone ("Annika Backstrom") wrote:

8 hours for sleep
8 hours for work
2 hours for getting the kids to school
2 hours for commuting
1 hour for cleaning the house
3 hours for what one will

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Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
TheWarOnCars ("The War on Cars") wrote:

Happy Bike Month to all who observe.

https://www.lifeaftercars.com/