Notices by pzmyers 🦑 (pzmyers@octodon.social), page 76

@marnanel The Wobblies are here? My day is complete. #IWW

@homardelac @glyphicality "PC" is a rhetorical tool used by entitled people to shame criticism.

I'm not interested in discussing it with the kind of person who uses it. Bye.

@homardelac @glyphicality That you even use the term "political correctness" is a warning sign. PC is a shibboleth of the Right.

@hemphalump It's a rectangular array of semiconductors. All those chips were light sensitive, it was why they were covered with black plastic slabs (among other reasons). The genius was realizing it was a functioning camera sensor, if you just used it wrong.

@MarcusP It was a mixed bag. You had nerdy engineers like Ciarcia writing up cool experiments, and then you had pompous windbags like Pournelle writing meandering blithering essays about how he called up his friend the engineer to install some obscure gadget on his mess of computers for him. You didn't miss much.

@porsupah I was working in a biology lab that was doing a lot of imaging at the time (tube cameras, SIT-cams, data recorded on VHS tape) and was doing a lot of tinkering with this up-and-coming digital video revolution.

Clumsiest kludge: attaching a photosensor to a dot-matrix print head to build a custom photo scanner.

@gshevlin Yeah, and I think that's the big difference here: distributed management that is willing to enforce standards of behavior on their instances.

@gshevlin I was on usenet in 1992. It was useful if a bit dry if you stuck to the technical forums, but remember…the alt.* groups were formed in 1987.

You're too young to remember that!

@CoronaCoreanici Or "Man Stood."

Why is Mastodon so sexist?

@kiplet I hear that. I'm 95% cynic, though, and it's mainly the hopeful 5% that gets booted to the back room to listen to sad songs and cry.

@MorningSong That's why I persist. Even if I'm not charismatic & popular, I've got to try.

@Roboron I sometimes do that. I just think it's also important to show a human face, even if it's not pretty, and engage person-to-person. Like teaching.

At least I've got Mastodon, where I log in in the morning and find scores of follow announcements. And no one is sniping at anyone else!

It's weird. How can a social medium that doesn't revolve around adversarial hostility persist? The "I hate you & this is why" model of interaction has been around since Usenet.

@gargron YouTube comment sections are not the place to find positive affirmations, so I don't worry about it much.

Also, who remembers the issue of Byte where Steve Ciarcia showed that you could peel the plastic off a RAM chip, expose it to the light, and read off a grainy image? That was the state of computer imaging back in my day.

OK, today I continue my project of invading YouTube. It's getting harder. When you're old, fat, and homely, and your commenters all tell you so, it's tough to use a medium that's all about cameras.

It's not fair. When I was younger, slender, & my beard wasn't white, YouTube hadn't been invented.

You ever read an essay by a Christian & think, "I could steal that, change a few nouns, and use it as an atheist essay"? It's a little disconcerting.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/08/18/i-may-have-found-a-mirror-universe/

Bill Donohue makes excuses for Catholic rapists. He thinks he's helping.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/08/17/donohue-those-catholic-priests-didnt-rape-anyone-and-besides-its-the-gays-fault/