kinda wild that margaret hamilton had to coin the term "software engineering" to get her team's work a budget line at nasa. 100 people landed humans on the moon with 64kb and hand-woven core rope memory.
Tech · Takes · page 2
Further down today’s ranking of Tech posts that are opinions and questions: page 2 of 4.
Software Engineering is honestly rotten to the core. The lack of rigour and attention to correctness has made me hate our industry. I spent two decades working extra hard, I create robust systems which fail safely. Only I find myself alone atop the mountain in a world which doesn't give a fuck.
DATA CENTER BROS: whyyyy does everyone hate us??????? ALSO DATA CENTER BROS: we've decided that out of all of an entire continent, the best place for us to build is on top of the last remaining trees of an important & almost extinct species which conservationists have been trying to save for decades
My bluesky is becoming a fact checking account, istg. First: Discord IDs are not secret at all. Second: This is a third party service (think MEE6) who got hacked, not Discord Third: Email addresses were of their users. Discord API does not allow email fetch except via OAuth
And the "censoring" that existed wasn't for cynical nonsense. 1337 speak was invented to bypass censors that were genuinely concerned with hacking and adult material. We had to say hax0rz instead of hackers. pr0n instead of porn. Now people say "unalive" just because of advertisers. So sad.
I do like the MPEG LA completely ruining what they had going (well, they're now like fifteen different patent pools if you want to guess how they ruined what they had), with everyone using MPEG almost exclusively for decades and AVC+AAC in particular seeing almost literally 100% adoption, and now HEVC/VVC have pathetic adoption while everyone loves VP9 and AV1
With so many hacks happen to Discord, can you seriously trust them with age verification. I surely don’t. https://www.theverge.com/tech/1006670/discord-users-data-was-exposed-in-a-breach-at-server-bot-double-counter
people have to stop comparing atproto to google and http, they are not comparable. atproto fundementally changes a deeply established design pattern for what accounts are and how they work. i want it to succeed, but its not as simple as people want it to be. we are going to need to do a lot more.
I just tried getting an account on VKontakte but found out I need a Russian phone number. The site also blocks a lot of eSIMs. I thought it might be a way to try to find some signals of what is really happening in Buryatia. There's no way I'm plugging in a physical Russian SIM.
California, who I thought was evangelizing digital privacy rights in #USA, just passed a law banning social media for children under the age of 16. The #CCPA is a refreshing piece of legislation that models the pillars of GDPR for Americans. As the birthplace of Silicon Valley, it made sense that Californians understood the criticality of protecting our consumers, and would set a progressive precedent for protecting digital rights. Instead, #California decided to ban young minds from freely expressing themselves or engaging in supportive communities. Now #BigTech has the legal authority to collect even *more* data on them so they can evade infractions. eff.org/press/releases/we-all-…
This headline is extremely misleading. Neither Discord, nor any entity affiliated with or trusted by Discord, was hacked. The hack was against an unofficial 3rd party moderation service that some server operators use. Discord gave them zero sensitive information. It all came from willing users.
It's very telling that there's no way for customers to opt out of this profile feature. Whether it's worker surveillance, Ring, or cloud-computing contracts with ICE, Amazon has proven that it doesn't respect people's privacy. www.fastcompany.com/91619118/ama...
My controversial opinion: JavaScript was a mistake It was created to make a button play a noise on your website, not dynamically render a massive single page application A lot of libraries for it exist to try to sweep the technical debt of JavaScript’s slapdash design under the rug
TCP/IP is impenetrable and yet somehow millions of people get online every single day. It doesn’t matter how impenetrable the protocol is when the products abstract it away, which is the only thing anyone has been saying, lol
Mastodon is a great idea, but it has a fatal flaw: authoritarianism. Mods and admins are free to censor posts and users on a whim, and far too many of them seem eager to do so. I want to see a social media service–it could even be a Mastodon instance–which is run democratically, so that deletions and bans are put up to the vote of all participants. Dictatorships suck, and that includes ONLINE dictatorships! #Mastodon #SocialMedia
It's nice to see that PEM Encodings of Cryptographic Objects is now targeted for Java 28.
Many years ago I used to work on a Cobol-based application that ran over an 80x25 green screen terminal. People running 30 or 40 users on a 486 PC running SCO Unix hooked up to a multi-port serial card. We'd never have tolerated the amount of waiting between actions or screens that is now considered absolutely normal on web-based cloud-hosted applications. Weird how things change.
I need to give email access to less-than-tech-savvy colleague. She’s a Windows user. Suggestions on a lightweight, bare-bones email client that I can walk her through the install and configure? It’s not her main email client, so I need nothing fancy.
I've flip flopped on "should we explain atproto/PDSs to new users" and landed on "nah." No one knew how much of our digital lives would end up on a single platform when we first signed up for Facebook. At least with atproto they can figure it out later and migrate or branch out.
YouTube hasn't paid out music streaming earnings to Distrokid for almost two months with no communication, so my income has been cut in half just for fun. It's a startling reminder that the entire streaming ecosystem could just go away overnight because a tech company lets it. Buy albums if you can.
@irene - I took a look at your note "Slow Software". I felt that the general notion was quite rational - separating high impact code (and thus give it more care) from lesser impact code. I do testing - I break code. And I've noticed an increasing tendency of builders to presume ever-faster underlying processing, memory, and network resources. I work with the latter - network services going bad.
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I am seeing more and more code begin to break on low performance platforms - such as cheap Chromebooks - because the code being run presumes vast network resources rather than things like slow connections, intermittent connections, and support for only a few TCP connections at a time. This is exaberated by the new generation of "proof of work" challenges being presented to incoming clients in order to cull bots from humans. An exaple is Apple's Music App - it goes bad, often for quite a while, when the underlying network changes, such as when getting into a car and thus switching from wi-fi to 5G.
I don't know why I have not done this before. But you can totally just build code using MSVC on Linux via Wine. You get an .exe that you can launch through Wine and it has similar perf characteristics for anything compute-bound. And you can profile it with Linux tools although symbols need to be fixed up manually. This means that I basically don't need to reboot to Windows every few weeks to profile something, which is amazing for my sanity.
Visual Studio Code on Linux is allergic to having its IntelliSense play well when I point it towards an MSVC binary
This is what government software can be again if we get the yahoo cowboy dudebros out
Well, Monarch sort of works with Ios now. I find reliably focusing the cursor is hard, but you can pan through text and it does show graphics of icons if one cares about such things. But I still would recommend having another navigation tool. I like how one can connect two Braille displays to the phone because this makes it so I can navigate through the Brailliant to apps and then read with the Monarch. I find navigating through lists of things or the list of apps to not yet be beautiful.
"I never thought the copyright infringement machine would infringe MY copyright." - company that embraced the copyright infringement machine (Obviously not an endorsement of this software but c'mon, it's pretty funny)
The stark staring falsity of the technology sector has, I will openly confess, been gnawing at me for decades. In the 1990s, rebounding from the Caltech disaster, I resolved to turn my former computer-programming hobby (I've been programming since I was in middle school, even earlier depending on what you count as programming) into a lifeline out of college towards some sort of future, and thus it was during that time I first got to be really disgusted by the whole scene.
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The fun and enjoyment started to trickle out of #programming as I got to see what was happening in the tech scene: the hypercommercialism, the saturation with advertising, the shabbiness and shallowness of "computer science" as a discipline compared with the physical sciences, the seething elitism within the field and a corresponding hatred and contempt for the ordinary person, the "luser" too smooth-brained to understand the subtle genius of programmers and their software. I am mortally tired of technology evangelists. That's the foul tradition which has produced fools like Dash and Doctorow: even when they strive to present themselves as critical, that's a thin veneer over a core of unthinking rah-rah "techno-optimism," the same irrational mentality that's led presumably reasonable human beings to vaunt crooks like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk as great inventors and pioneers. This is how the entire technology sector has been selling itself for decades, as if THEY were the vanguard of all human achievement, fearlessly saving the world and solving all problems with their computers...the computers they don't even understand, the computers they treat as magical black boxes. It's vile, it's fake and fraudulent, it's led humanity and "Western Civilization" to the brink of ruin. I do not mind being thought of as a "hater" or a "doomer" on this score. The tech sector doesn't need to exist the way it does. There may be heroes in technology but you can bet they're not in the news and they're not the people who are spoken of as if they were the only people in the world capable of having thoughts. ~Chara of Pnictogen
Putting “Wall St. banks hacked by jailbroken chatbot swarms” on my 2027 bingo card
I don’t think most folks are buying smartphones expecting high-end camera quality. They’re expecting a device with reasonable cameras for casual or professional purposes on a device that also meets other needs. Comparing the two comes across as silly at best, or as ragebait in some cases.
Any text platform should have some way to add context tags and tooltips to words and phrases. I would love to put a subtle dotted underline on a word to establish which of the 13 meanings and 45 different interpretations of it I actually refer to without having to write a whole essay about it in parentheses that's so long that by the time you finish reading it you already forgot how the sentence even started.
I feel like we're running out of places to find out what's really happening. The days where you could simply connect with people without a heavy hand on the algorithm are numbered. Media is being entirely gobbled up by capital. We're going to have to make our own information networks
How am I supposed to add alt text to uploaded audio files straight away? The new desktop design now shrinks them to an unclickable thumbnail in the editor. Neither the '...' menu nor the alt text button is visible. Posting them as they are and then adding the alt text later doesn't work either (apart from using another app, client or web interface). Or am I missing something entirely? Mastodon v4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06 #Mastodon #AltText #Accessibility
iPhone Duo is almost here, but I'm not super optimistic about the mainstream apps doing a great job of adapting to its form factor... scottberrevoets.com/2026/10/05…
FCC keeps giving Musk & Bezos basically everything they want and I don't guess that's likely to change but... there is a pending vote on auctioning spectrum soon: www.cnbc.com/2026/10/07/f...
i really am quite distraught at how many people are just being willfully ignorant about Grim’s reasoning for the lack of Dashlaunch plugin support and source availability- both of these things were previously discussed
The important thing in any argument is understanding what you're saying and arguing in good faith IN THIS INSTANCE, DISCORD WAS NOT TO BLAME A completely separate, third party service was hacked, not discord. This particular case is not connected to discord and age verification.
Just praising Vivaldi for creating a genuine rare mix of customisation + privacy. I cannot state it enough how refreshing it is that I can completely change the way the browser looks when I get bored. You guys created something amazing, and I hope you can continue what you doing. You gained a costumer for life.
Please test your pages with the browser forcing a dark theme... ... because some of us are vampires and sure to enable it when we find it... and then come across plenty that look atrocious this way. (yes, just handling dark mode suffices in a lot of cases... but not always)
Gaming platforms going full SAS are next. They will soon regret leaving physical behind.
It is getting increasingly hard to decide whether a certain post or utterance is meant in earnest, or is part of a performance art project. Surely "the solution to identity theft is … a printed 2D barcode, that can be revoked" is of the latter kind? Particularly when you demonstrate that by accompanying it with a high-res photo of the to-be-revoked code. John Smith now has no valid ID document anymore. The entire "Verifiable Credentials" landscape is very slapstick, but this takes the crown.
I cannot believe that Facebook on the Web has regressed with the links that tell you when something was posted. The links once again read as gibberish. I normally try not to fall into the "they don't care" mentality because the situation involving accessibility efforts is a bit more nuanced than we sometimes realize. Some people at a company might care very passionately about accessibility and they may be doing their best to advocate for it. Others may not fully know or understand. I speak from experience. In this case, though, a small part of me wonders if more people over at Meta don't care or aren't getting it compared with those who do.
I would not use android but I love a couple of phones .. Freedom and nothing which could make a case for using Graphene as love their ethos .. yes Apple fan boy but can not be silly about benefits of others
I don't understand how speech to text on my phone seems to actively be getting worse all the time
Pet peeve of mine: when tech people who should know better name a thing an "operating system" when it is, in fact, not an operating system. "This is our new operating system for [insert thing here]." -> turns out to actually be an electron app running on iOS or whatever.
I'm kind of mourning the good-times tech twitter, there were a lot of interesting web dev people active, and many of them just kind of have disappeared or moved on, and I miss that time and some of those people a lil bit
not to slightly doom but will we ever have people in charge of online spaces that aren't super sensitive crybabies who use their power to lord over their site's users. or is that just what silicon valley/the tech field does to you
The thing is, I think iPlayer already works really well. I can find stuff, I get recommendations of things I might like, it’s all good. It’d be helpful to have one button access from my remote - but otherwise I think it’s the cleanest most logical streaming service atm.
IMO, there is about to be a big tipping point in gaming monitors with Gsync Pulsar and RGB Stripe OLED. Everything that came before is inferior in a serious way. People that buy expensive gaming monitors are going to ditch their 360hz IPS gaming monitor and get one of these new fangled GSync Pulsar and/or OLED 360hz+ monitors. 240hz and lower monitors of yesteryear will be relegated to the bargain bin.
In the future, everything will be done in blue books.
Open sourced it because why not? Point your agent at it to fork and build your own version, or trust my agent's APKs github.com/ericflo/winnow
