Notices by Sandrockcstm the Prodigious (sandrockcstm@elekk.xyz)

An interesting article looking at social media sites like Yik Yak and ConnectU and how they died. https://gizmodo.com/why-these-social-networks-failed-so-badly-1836996164

I think there's a lot to be learned here for the Fediverse. I don't have the spoons to distill all the lessons myself, but a few:

1) Big money often precedes death.

2) Neglect leads to toxic user bases.

3) Losing sight of your initial goals alienates your early users, who do more work than you think to make the place run.

ICE only managed to abduct 35 out of 2000 people they targeted in the latest raid, due to a combination of rights education (i.e. not opening the door without a warrant), direct action (forming human chains to stop arrests), and deterrence efforts (hiding them at someone else's house). Of those 35, 17 are not the people they were trying to kidnap.

Keep fighting.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/23/politics/ice-raids-35-arrests/index.html

Strength: How much coding vocabulary you have.

Dexterity: How often you have to backspace or rewrite something.

Constitution: How long you can sit in a chair and code. Also determines how much coffee and red bull you can handle.

Intelligence: How good you are at coding tricks; knowing polymorphism, being able to express long statements in shorter ways, etc.

Wisdom: How well you can write comments and readable code.

Charisma: How well you can persuade someone to accept your pull request.

@FirstProgenitor

Key red flags of a tech bro:

- Use of the word "Disruption."

- An inordinate amount of time talking about "free speech."

- A disdain or ambivalence towards the idea of ethics in technology and engineering.

- A refusal to look at consequences beyond how something works.

- Strong capitalist tendencies.

- A belief in "neutrality" or "apolitical-ness" in software development.

- Anti-democratic stances, such as "benevolent" dictatorships.

- Fedoras.

It's time to stop using Fedilab folks. The dev of that app just announced that he will not be blocking Gab. This is despite overwhelming support for the block from users and devs in a poll that hasn't even completed yet.

I attempted to have a conversation with him yesterday because he gave the appearance of good faith, but he's made it clear that he's fine with Nazis and White Supremacists as long as it doesn't affect him. Receipts will be attached over several toots.

In case anyone ever tells you "strikes don't work": Uber is now the worst performing IPO debut in U.S. history. They lost $617 million today because their stock declined almost 8% (due to the double whammy of the strike and tariff increases), and their IPO valuation was $76.5 billion, far lower than $90 billion or $120 billion some "analaysts" (read: fortune tellers) were speculating they'd value at.

Power to the workers.

This is HUGE. They've more or less found a way to eliminate AIDS by stopping HIV from spreading.

Researchers deserve so much credit for the work they've done in the past 40 years to eliminate this pandemic.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/may/02/end-to-aids-in-sight-as-huge-study-finds-drugs-stop-hiv-transmission?CMP=share_btn_tw

If you live in the capitalistic hellscape that is America and need insulin or know someone who needs it, here's a lifesaving link to a manufacturer's coupon that can bring the price of insulin to $0. :boost_ok:

https://www.lantus.com/sign-up/savings-and-support

@chr My wife and I are both disabled. Getting ready to apply at an employment network to hopefully find something on tech that will give me accommodations, but no idea how long this will take.

Our scum landlord told us we'd get our security deposit back and then a week later changed their mind and charged us $1000 for new carpet. We have a payment plan but it's cutting into our fixed income. Anything helps.

https://paypal.me/pools/c/89SI6o1A0p