Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

Also, stretching during that time and generally making myself comfortable is an important part of making that work

So here's an interesting thing I've found: I sometimes wake up super relaxed (especially on hot days), but most days I wake up in a subtle 'instant anxiety' state, immediately worrying about all the stuff I have to do.

Turns out that if I just *stay in bed* for an hour or so, pondering over random thoughts and stuff I might want to do that day until I feel genuine motivation appearing, my brain works *significantly* better for the rest of the day! Both in terms of motivation/focus and in terms of (lack of) anxiety.

It kinda feels like frontloading the "winding down after a busy day" thing, but somehow that works super well!

Don't mind me, am just completely refactoring a critical library 30 minutes before bed

Ah and there's the 03:00 second wind...

What the hell, an extremely panicked neighbourhood cat somehow sneaked into my house through the roof window, how did it even get up there

(This toot prompted by me investigating whether anyone else has figured out yet how to do modular mutations in a graph API, and predictably discovering that nobody cares because that's not seen as useful in a corporate setting - guess I'll be solving the problem myself again...)

So here's a good example of how conventional 'best practices' in software development implicitly optimize for corporate usage rather than community projects: https://www.apollographql.com/blog/graphql/basics/designing-graphql-mutations/

"Don’t be afraid of super specific mutations that correspond exactly to an update that your UI can make. Specific mutations that correspond to semantic user actions are more powerful than general mutations. This is because specific mutations are easier for a UI developer to write, they can be optimized by a backend developer, and only providing a specific subset of mutations makes it much harder for an attacker to exploit your API."

This makes sense - *if* you're developing corporate software, where you control the entire stack! But if you're building a community project, then this design approach actively makes it harder for third parties to adapt and experiment with your thing, and ultimately centralizes control over how the software works, which is the opposite of what you want.

By itself, this is of course a relatively small thing - but implicit "corporate optimizations" like this are *everywhere* in software development, both in how tools are designed and in what people believe to be 'best practices', and they add up - and that puts grassroots projects at a serious disadvantage.

CW'ed repost of https://mastodon.lol/@alexispurslane/108986248558881508:

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"A team of scientists in Texas used CRISPR to edit out genes associated with autism traits in mice and observed clear results: The animals stopped digging obsessively, their erratic jumping around the cages slowed to a halt and they became more calm."

This sounds like a fucking lobotmy. They're just editing out all the behaviors except placid "normal" ones.

The article also refers to autism as a "developmental disorder" that autistic people "suffer from."

https://www.newsweek.com/scientists-edit-autism-genes-traits-texas-crispr-research-mice-997948

#autism