Notices by Victorian Sparkgap Kitsune (enkiv2@niu.moe), page 6

tired: speculative execution
wired: counterfactual execution

@clacke @ajroach42 @jk
I mean, kind of...

What software engineering doesn't have (and the industry has resisted) that a lot of other technical & maintenance related industries do have is a licensing system based on a test of competence & a period of apprenticeship. (Doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, and hairdressers all have this.)

Also, no unions or meaningful professional societies.

@ajroach42 @jk (5) As a result, anybody who can knock together a web page thinks they can support a million users, and the people who need to support a million users believe them, and the idea of "supporting a million users" decays to the point where they de-facto succeed (because nobody else does any better). It's bad for everybody, not least beginners who don't know how to improve.

When people talk about "the sixties" they're basically talking about 1968, or responses to events of 1968 that happened in 1969.

@ajroach42 @duck57
I would say:
Most FOSS is DIY, but the mindshare when people think of FOSS is not DIY projects.

90%+ of open source software is something one person wrote in an afternoon and slapped a license on, and fewer than ten other people run it and they've all made their own modifications.

The remaining 10% is massive sprawling incomprehensible messes like GIMP or anything owned by Apache. But since everybody uses those, we think of them first.

Sustainable community education through WTFM http://web.archive.org/web/20170416184606/http://www.roaming-initiative.com/blog/posts/wtfm

You can identify an alpha male by the way he glitches out, crashes, and spontaneously deletes your files.

Beta does less of that, but can be distinguished by sloppy or unprofessional presentation.

Honestly better to wait for a stable release.

ON THIS #FOLLOWFRIDAY I RECOMMEND FOLLOWING

Anybody who uses the phrases "time binding" or "secondary orality"

@h
There's a thriving but mostly-isolated fandom for alternate computer universes. (We should Find The Others)

@natecull

This is probably relevant to a lot of people's interests:

"What great ideas from CS have been forgotten?"

https://twitter.com/joeerl/status/951357931559284736

@natecull @h

@catoutofbed @amphetamine
they go particularly well with

the strange attractors that surround her

qotd: "hypermedia is the revenge of text upon television"

bad idea of the day:
A game where the protagonist inherits a memex from a distant relative & must navigate the complex structure of interlinked footnotes, shopping lists, and marginal scrawl in order to discover who & why

There are two classes of bug. One is where the program doesn't match your mental model of the program. The other is when the problem doesn't match your mental model of the problem. Most bugs are both.

This Is the Most Important Fallacy You’ve Never Heard Of http://nautil.us/issue/55/trust/the-resulting-fallacy-is-ruining-your-decisions

@saper
Nothing's natural about having a web browser. Web browsers are common simply because there was so much pressure for people to download one in the early 90s that OS vendors started shipping them on-disk.

We did it in the 90s and we can do it again with something that sucks less, if we put in the same amount of effort.

Continuing my rant from earlier today:

We're living in an environment where having the primary way you interact with a system or application be via a browser is considered acceptable and natural.

I would like to begin transitioning to an environment where social pressure gets people to feel slightly ashamed of doing things the hard way unless doing them the hard way is the point. Step one is that writing a web app is embarassing unless it's done ironically.