Notices by Peter O'Shaughnessy (peter@toot.cafe)

In today's WTF news... Opera - yes, the browser company - "has made a dramatic pivot into predatory short-term loans in Africa and India" https://hindenburgresearch.com/opera-phantom-of-the-turnaround/

Woah, Firefox 70 includes colour vision deficiency simulators 😮👏 https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/10/auditing-for-accessibility-problems-with-firefox-developer-tools/

This is why we can't have nice things 😞

"The study found that over 50% of sites using WebAssembly apply it for malicious deeds, such as cryptocurrency mining and malware code obfuscation"

https://www.infoq.com/news/2019/10/WebAssembly-wasm-malicious-usage/

I stopped using & deactivated my Facebook profile about 16 months ago. Facebook choosing Breitbart as a "trusted news source" was a great reminder for me to finally get around to that last step and delete my account today! #DeleteFacebook

United Nations' IPCC offers the "gold standard" climate change assessment. Their most recent report gave an avg estimate of 3.2 degrees of warming by 2100.

Last time the world was 3° hotter than pre-industrial levels, sea levels were 25m higher.

This is what 3° looks like for cities across the world: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2017/nov/03/three-degree-world-cities-drowned-global-warming

And (to "bring it home" for those who live near me) this is what 25m sea level rise looks like in S.E. England (from http://www.floodmap.net):

Dr Hannah Fry has joined calls for a Hippocratic oath for tech & maths specialists.

"The issue has become urgent now that researchers are building systems that gather and sell personal data, exploit human frailties, and take on life-or-death decisions."

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/aug/16/mathematicians-need-doctor-style-hippocratic-oath-says-academic-hannah-fry

Seems like missing out the 'No' button is the hot new UX trend now

When websites say "use our app, it's much better", they mean better for them, not you.

Is it just me or has there become an unpleasant amount of condescending replies to toots from random people who are keen to tell you you're wrong/naive/stupid... (even more than on Birdsite)? Perhaps it's mostly to do with the topic and the fact I dared to share some suggestions, but as well as muting and some blocking, it's making me wonder if I should start making my toots Unlisted or Follower Only by default... Maybe I'll see how it goes for a bit longer though... 🤔

Firefox is now more important, isolated and vulnerable. Some suggested ways we can support it:
• Set it as your default browser. And if you're back home with family over Christmas, suggest/set as their default too.
• When you hear web devs say "can't everyone just use Chrome", please challenge it.
• Contribute to Mozilla-led projects, e.g. MDN Docs: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/05/contributing-mdn-webdocs/
• Donate to Mozilla if you can: https://donate.mozilla.org

I just published: "Why Mastodon is defying the 'critical mass'" https://medium.com/@poshaughnessy/why-mastodon-is-defying-the-critical-mass-de3454109099

"Network was the critical performance bottleneck 10 years, but today it’s CPU, especially given the amount of mobile traffic on lesser-powered devices... As pages get slower, JS is the CPU task that grows the most." - Steve Souders https://discuss.httparchive.org/t/cpu-time-breakdown/1510

"What is ActivityPub and how will it change the Internet?". Nice post by @jdormit!

https://jeremydormitzer.com/blog/what-is-activitypub-and-how-will-it-change-the-internet/

(The only thing I'd challenge is the bit about needing lots more users to compete with Facebook and Twitter - I think most active users here would say that the fediverse is doing well already & it doesn't have to become a wholesale Facebook/Twitter-slayer for it to be good and useful! I think in general we - I'm guilty of it too - spend too much time focusing on & comparing with them!)

"The plunge in Facebook’s share price puts the social network on track to rack up the biggest ever one-day drop in a company’s market value.... the Silicon Valley company revealed that 3 million users in Europe have abandoned the social network since the Observer revealed the Cambridge Analytica breach"

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/26/facebook-market-cap-falls-109bn-dollars-after-growth-shock

"It is now possible to capture images from the ground at visible wavelengths that are sharper than those from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope... To compensate for the blurring effect of the Earth’s atmosphere, four brilliant lasers project columns of intense orange light into the sky, creating artificial 'Laser Guide Stars'. Adaptive optics systems use the light from these “stars” to determine the turbulence and calculate corrections 1000 times per second." 🔭 https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1824/

(Posting without comment... 🤔)

About how we're contributing to MDN Web Docs - and how others can start to (if they wish) too! https://medium.com/samsung-internet-dev/were-helping-out-on-mdn-web-docs-and-you-can-too-68e001866ad3

"Most mobile connections are still 2G or 3G. The Web overall is getting slower. JavaScript is the most expensive asset. We are drowning in JavaScript. What we make matters." - @slightlyoff telling it how it is. Remember to set performance budgets, folks! 🙏 #SamsungCreate

Last night I had yet another conversation with web devs about why it's not a good thing for "everyone to just use Chrome". This morning I wake up & see yet another Chrome-only site. I really think we have a problem. Pls let's try to fix this together, for the sake of the web ❤️

Reminder: please keep an eye out for Mastodon newbies - e.g. on the introduction/introductions hashtags - and give them a fave/boost/friendly reply to welcome them. Thanks! 👍 #FriendlyFediverse