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Related gripe: it continues to baffle me how controversial "ask people what they need and do that" is in a lot of places that really should know better

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There is something I will never understand from people working in global companies - not taking other people's time zones into account:

- not prioritizing asking and answering people who's day starts before yours by end of your day so they can work on it or be unblocked at the start of their day

- not prioritizing asking and answering people whose day finishes before yours earlier in your day so they can be unblocked or you can discuss it while they are still there

- not planning meetings during times when all parties are awake and working

I will never understand how this is not just automatic. 🕐🙄

possibly hot take, low-code development tools 

As a professional programmer, I think that low-code development tools are actually a good thing - the problem is just that they are usually designed/adopted with the mindset of "saving money and time", rather than the much more healthy mindset of "giving people agency over the tools they rely on", and the result is that they end up being bad at both

#annaWilGraagWeten Wat is het ergste? Een vreemde die naast je op een bankje ploft en

spacebar heating 

The thing with 'spacebar heating' (xkcd.com/1172/) is that sure, it wasn't designed to work that way, and it's kind of weird to rely on it to do that, but...

... apparently your users have a need that is not being met by your current software design, and maybe instead of complaining about how horrifying spacebar heating is, your time is better spent trying to understand how to make your software better for them?

Terminology question: I'm looking for a concise term to describe "the vast majority of computer users, who do not particularly care about or are interested in computers, beyond how they can serve as a tool for their needs."

"Non-technical users" isn't quite right, because it's not necessarily a competence issue, and there's more tech than computers anyway. "Average users" also isn't quite right, since I'm specifically looking to include those who have above-average difficulty in dealing with computers. "Normal users" also doesn't quite work, because it implies abnormality on the other side.

Are there any better terms to use?

Weet iemand waar de #Paralympics te volgen zijn? In vorige jaren volgde ik het live op het officiële YouTube kanaal van de Paralympics, maar daar krijg ik nu helaas te zien dat het "in mijn land niet beschikbaar is"... HBO Max had veel van de Olympics, dus toen ging ik daar checken... Maar ook daar geen Paralympics.

Does anybody know where to follow the Paralympics? In previous years, I followed it live on the Paralympics' official YouTube channel, but when I go to the live feeds there now, it says it's not available in my country... HBO Max had a lot of the Olympics, so I checked there next... But there too, no Paralympics.

I wish e-mail had an "authenticated receipt" feature, where you'd have to authorize a sender in your e-mail client (with eg. OAuth-style flow) to let them send you e-mail, and they can only do so with the negotiated key, and e-mails received from authenticated senders would be specially marked with the key-associated name of the sender.

I feel like that would address a lot of phishing issues, because all "account updates" and other messages from regular contacts could be visually and unfalsifiably authenticated. While still allowing for sending unauthenticated messages, they just don't get the marker.

Seems a lot more reliable for the average user than "check whether the URL starts with..."

Huh. Apparently there's now a sporting program here specifically for autistic teenage girls (with physical contact accommodations, and presumably other things), funded by the municipality. Just spotted a poster for it at the local (boxing) gym.

“we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded”

#Linguistics #AI

nature.com/articles/s41586-024

How to fix homelessness: free housing.

How to beat bus fare evasion: free buses.

Both methods cost less than punishing the poor by criminalizing and jailing them.

If you don't like the idea of being taxed to implement those solutions: I don't care - it would make our society objectively better so your annoyance is a small price to pay.

It's easier to just not listen to the person with ADHD or believe they're lazy rather than having to confront that the system is unfair and that many people cannot succeed in it no matter how much effort they put in. That scares people, so they put up a wall to protect their existing belief, which means dismissing people's lived experiences

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Though neurotypicals are sometimes hesitant to believe that anyone can truly live like this, because it tends to interfere with core beliefs about free will and "everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps"

Getting non-disabled people to understand that some people literally cannot do a thing sometimes no matter how hard they try is a key challenge of disability activism. Because if they accept that, they'd have to challenge core beliefs about society and capitalism working

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I've learned over time that neurotypicals generally don't understand the impact of executive dysfunction from #ADHD. I've found that being a little more blunt can help. I tell them that having ADHD is like having inconsistent and unreliable free will.

Because that is literally what it is like for me.

sysadmin things that annoy me: something breaks, I keep looking for it to break again and it doesn't

NL heeft N.B. van alle Europese landen de nog maar het kortst houdbare vaccins. Maar Agema blijft er zo lang mogelijk bovenop zitten:
* asociaal (eigen volk eerst, zelfs als dat veel later of nooit is)
* racistisch (uiteraard, bij een bevriend Westeuropees land lag het vast anders)
* oliedom (een pandemie in de kiem smoren in het land waar die ontstaat is vele malen kansrijker dan als het overal in Europa rondgaat, dan gaat ze ons groepsimmuniteit aansmeren wil ik wedden)
rtl.nl/nieuws/politiek/artikel

@joepie91 now I think of it, JCDecaux is basically Google for public transit.

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