Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

the world government i have in mind, would not look like a unified structure at all, much less anything characterized by borders. but we don’t have words for that. the more words i use, the less you’re inclined to consider it a government at all, and even i only call it that because it is the superstructure through which the work of governance is done. how can i tell you what it looks like when, not only do i lack language, but such designs are not mine to dictate?

[RSS] Instead of putting a hash in the Portable Executable timestamp field, why not create a separate field for the hash?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20240815-00/?p=110131

how does one learn about decompiling? any good books on the subject?

Schöne Grüße vom #reloadfestival

Please stop using "blindness" as a lazy synonym for "ignorance" in your writing. If there’s one thing about Blind folks: we survive and thrive by being perceptive, observing patterns and responding to cues. Not only is this use of "blindness" rude — it's uninformed. Mistaken. Obtuse. Naive. Counterfactual. There you go — five better ways to say "ignorant" than "Blind"

Writing alt text descriptions is good practice for writers.

Think about it. You reader can’t see what you’re describing. So you need to capture what conveys the meaning you want to get across. It’s the exact same skill, and will help you understand aspects of the descriptive process like choosing what to focus on.

If you’re a writer who wants practice, describe your own pictures, or follow the #Alt4Me and #Alt4You tags and write descriptions for those who can’t or won’t.

#AmWriting #WriteTip #WritersCoffeeClub

@aeva one of my coworkers got a winrar license as a white elephant gift

he reported the email to security when he got it before the gift reveal event

ticket closed with reason "i have it in good confidence that this was a white elephant gift, not a phishing email"

#poll Have you ever paid for software when it was optional to do so?

EDIT: If you only occasionally pay for software when it is optional, please reply with what sorts of software you typically do and don't pay for.

The part where many people tend to expect the software to already be relatively mature and high impact to give support leaves an open question of how new development is meant to be funded, since it takes a lot of work to get there. I suppose that's where stuff like grants come in. It's a shame society is set up so the general population is coerced into being a cheap labor source for the whims of the wealthy, or we'd probably have a lot more high impact R&D happening outside of corporations.

Not a lot of mention of funding libraries, middleware, and critical infrastructure though. I guess most folks just assume that's someone else's problem

It seems like applications that people interact with directly have the best shot at being funded through a pay-what-you-want or donation based model. Within that, games have a bit of an advantage over regular applications by more commonly having an end date to their development without being considered "abandoned".

Lots of people also unsurprisingly strongly prefer one-off donations or payments instead of recurring ones to support long term development, but are also often vocal about how they are entitled to updates and improvements long term. That seems to imply that "growth" is the unsaid expectation of how a project should be funded long term.

I think it is probably safe to call it here. The overwhelming majority of you support the development of software you use to varying degrees of "sometimes", which is pretty cool.

From the replies to this thread, I gather it's relatively common for people to only support projects that are already relatively mature and popular, which is an interesting chicken and egg problem. Also you don't get anything if you don't ask, but it works better if the asking doesn't feel extractive. Not surprising

Jesus christ, we really need an actual proper community-run browser project.

"Mozilla this week said it has acquired ad metrics firm Anonym [...] Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base, many ardent ad-blockers among them, will oppose Anonym, a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone, though there's still room for improvement."

Source: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_betting_privacy/

#security #gender

"It's good that I don't know what's going on, because that way I can't bias the results" - quote from a lab member that both reassures and scares me

Can I just say that the option to mute people on here for 24 hours to 7 days, rather than either muting them forever or blocking them is a wonderful feature that I wish more social media had? It was designed for muting people if they are doing something like livecasting some show you don't care about... but it works well for suspected trolls too. It allows you to become non-responsive with little effort without alerting the target that you got mad and blocked them.

Kitten, free to a good home