Michael Newton

@GeePawHill@mastodon.social Some of it is so much more banal than the creepiness and directly sexual as well. The very first professional tech conference I went to, I chatted to a female speaker and found out that (in context of the conference having paid to fly her across the atlantic to give a technical talk because she was a world class expert on the subject) she had just been told that she needed to choose between taking a pay cut to move to "developer relations" or get sacked because "a really good engineering candidate came on the market, and you're so good with people skills". No points for guessing the gender of the new team member.

@natpryce@mastodon.social @romeu@mastodon.social "I spent more money, give me a raise!"

@lritter@mastodon.gamedev.place @aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORWAY

@shelldozer@oldbytes.space Thank you, although I have to honest and say that I think I've heard it used before. Unfortunately I can't remember where, so I'll take a bit of Schrödinger pride in the case that maybe I did coin it on the fly... @briankrebs@infosec.exchange @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

@cstross@wandering.shop I think these 'stupidity dependent' misunderstandings are tempting partly because they are easy, but also because they are easy to justify as 'realistic' because we have all seen people being stupid in relationships. But they fundamentally aren't satisfying because we can see how easily the conflict could be resolved from the outside, sort of a deus ex machina in reverse.

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange I love watching that happen! My mum once went through the whole process of ordering a meal in a kebab shop in the UK speaking Turkish (which is what the staff were using talking to each other). He not only replied in English, but then asked his co-worker why they'd complimented an English speaker on their Turkish...

@grimalkina@mastodon.social I love having a name for this concept, which I first met when some Chinese friends were horrified to learn that the immediate family normally handled funeral proceedings in the UK. "But... they're the ones most impacted! That's when everyone else is needed most." Also: you (and by the sounds of things your wife) are standing strong even if this is a crappy timeline at the moment and that is awesome. There's a lot of us rooting for you, and hoping it gets less crappy soon, including adding some recognition for the people who are actually doing the hard work.

@grimalkina@mastodon.social @mwl@io.mwl.io I've just also realised that this is exactly what the best bosses do, which I've always previously described as 'being the shit shield' but that's a, erm, less useful name in a professional context than 'applies ring theory in their management of the team'

@ben@werd.social Ooof. You'd really hope that by the time you've collected enough money for that type of publicity you'd have read at least one article on the topic of your core claims. It's not like government identities making networks less safe is a new idea at this point.

@susankayequinn@wandering.shop @JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange @epilonious@toot.lgbt The backlash when there's progress part is undoubtably real; I saw at least a couple of people who were nominally egalitarian just flat out refuse to believe that #metoo was real, for example. And when someone points out to the meeting chair that they have asked the only non-male person to take the minutes again they basically have the choice of deciding they want to change or just deciding that maybe "the women" were really always the problem after all. Doesn't stop the pushback grossing me out though!

@epilonious@toot.lgbt @JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange @susankayequinn@wandering.shop I think there is some of that, but honestly I think the reality is a lot more complex than a single chart (or my initial exasperated comment). People feeling 'allowed to say what they really think' is a thing, but so is people changing opinion, even quite fast, and not having the self awareness to notice. We all tend to assume we've always been like we are now, and a lot of people don't challenge the assumption.

@epilonious@toot.lgbt @JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange @susankayequinn@wandering.shop about the age range thing: I hope that's true. I'm also in a smallish town in Italy, so gender related social dynamics have a bunch of other factors playing in.

@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange @susankayequinn@wandering.shop As a man, can I just say... W. T. A. F? My 18 year old son complains regularly about the attitudes of his cohort but I was hoping that was more along the lines of "I know it's bad, but at least it's better than it used to be" rather than straight up "you're right, and it's getting worse"

@grimalkina@mastodon.social I have used precisely this analogy in trying to explain how engineering teams function! As a data point, my dad had a classics degree...

@cstross@wandering.shop @spazahedron@indieweb.social I once had a website pop up a warning dialog that said warned me that I was receiving a "degraded" experience because "no ads are loading". \

@cstross@wandering.shop "... they never stopped to ask if they should!" It's a very impressive piece of work though! I love it.

@cstross@wandering.shop Having been twice made responsible for institutional change in the workplace and then having the person who appointed me lose the authority to push the changes, I have a painfully direct experience of how tough it can be to break out of the Abilene Paradox with a group that has someone well spoken and charismatic in authority who doesn't understand what's happening in the rest of the group. Lots of well meaning people doing things that seem sane, rational, and empathic individually, leading to a Not Good™ and emotionally distructive overall situation. Hmm. I think I'm leaking my trauma. But it definitely makes for a stronger plot than 'I need to delay the PoV character five minutes or the entire story ends because they can have a conversation.'

@miniBill@mastodon.uno @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe What could possibly go wrong?

@cstross@wandering.shop @HighlandLawyer@mastodon.social @graydon@canada.masto.host @passenger@kolektiva.social Thing is, I can't help suspecting that each time these people are so pleased with themselves for having come up with their very own, very unique, cunning plan.

@robertpi@functional.cafe @cameo007@rheinneckar.social @forgejo@floss.social @Codeberg@social.anoxinon.de I'm running forgejo on a pi that's also running several other services (including the postgres instance forgejo is using). Only time it's used noticeable resources is when meta's ai bot tried to scrape every commit of every file on the git history of my blog with 20-30 concurrent connections at a time, I think in a loop as it didn't ever seem to finish. Which was annoying, but I don't blame forgejo for it...

@briankrebs@infosec.exchange @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social Yeah, in a true fediverse moment I think I managed to upgrade to a broken pre-release of Bonfire while the acceptance was queued. Hopefully it will finish working its way back through the backlog and accept the quote reasonably soon 🙈

@hp@mastodon.tmm.cx @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz Within you are two wolves, a chicken, a head of grain, and a pauldron...

@hp@mastodon.tmm.cx @andrewt@mathstodon.xyz raises eyebrow inscrutably giving the impression of vast knowledge and encouraging continued investigation; a technique that fortunately works for the teacher regardless of any actual knowledge on their part

@ParadeGrotesque@mastodon.sdf.org @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social Because, of course, the addiction should come before the security and compliance. Priorities, people. Priorities.

@edwinb@types.pl ah, well. It's all over now anyway. There's a line of LLM enthusiasts just waiting to explain to you how natural language is the ideal tool for capturing and defining complex processes.

@joethephish@mastodon.gamedev.place a shame, but I suspected that would be the case. Supporting that kind of ui slickness across the two different stacks would be a huge pile of work. It looks gorgeous, by the way.

@tastapod@mas.to If only there were some real world examples of people trying to scale output by hiring more staff that we could look to. How unfortunate that nobody has ever tried that before, so we have no way of judging the impact of just adding more "workers".

@briankrebs@infosec.exchange @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social You would have thought that the large, er, "thought leading" consulting firms would have been violently anti-AI; verbose sycophancy as a service is basically the whole business model. That and pre-arranged supplier approval with large orgs so that nobody manages to hire any consultants who are actual experts.

In this time of the world being a pretty heavy place I wanted to take a moment out to suggest following feeds with a regular pulse of things that are just beautiful, like @MichaelWhelan@mastodon.art (fine art/cover art) or @Jgbird@mas.to (stunning pictures of birds in nature).

Sometimes it is really what you need in the middle of your feed to keep the mental health, er, healthy. The apple a day of the brain.

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place Of course, we were never going to do it properly. The very first paid dev work I did was integration software between a UK fire and rescue service and a brand new reporting service set up by the national government for collecting stats. During the launch, the project lead on the government side pulled me aside to thank me for writing the only implementation out of over fifty that sent xml that validated. Several of the other implementations were written by large consulting firms at orders of magnitude greater cost.

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange I wonder if you could get a good rendition of Azimov era scifi describing the modern world by deliberately translating back and forth from unrelated languages focussing on literal translations. "The lightning carriage accelerated down the complimentary path with torque unmatched by the older confined burn machines..."

@ppscrv@mathstodon.xyz Makes sense, I'm from down south with a some years in the Midlands, so I obviously speak proper like and don't know how you northerners would mangle the language :). I think I tend to use post for the postie and as a verb, and mail as the noun ("The postie delivers the mail" "I'm going to post the letter") but I'm pretty sure I'm not consistent in using either.

@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place I'm going to say it: if as an industry we'd done SOAP properly and built the tooling to support it in more languages, it would have been awesome. XSD is so much better than json schema for specifying a domain.

@joethephish@mastodon.gamedev.place @dstan@mastodon.social Do you have any plans for an android version?

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange I recently discovered that here in Italy you can sell nude properties, which amused me no end. Literal translations are such an unending source of fun. (It refers to buying a property but granting the current resident leave to continue living in it, and is used in situations where a pensioner is running out of money but doesn't want to leave their house)

@cstross@wandering.shop @pikesley@mastodon.me.uk I... wow. That is quite the advert.

Now, now, @edwinb@types.pl . You're almost making it sound like different programming languages are better at or make it easier to communicate different things to both their users and maybe even the computer. This is obviously nonsense, as shown by the many developers who will immediately tell you the best programming language.

I have one, simple, straight forward job that I was planning to do today. And my brain has decided it doesn't want to do it.

Ideally... I'll do the thing at some point. But the much bigger challenge is not trying to force it, which I know from #ADHD experience will just block me from doing everything else.

@mhoye@cosocial.ca Did... did he write that entire article without taking any responsibility at all for what happened? Not even a "I thought I'd put something in place but I was wrong"? I... would probably sleep much better at night with that level of self awareness. And hurt the people around me a lot more.

Decided for the first time ever that it was worth breaking out some manual memory management for some code I want to run on (relatively) low resource systems. Weirdly, it's never something I've had reason to do before in these last ~20 years writing software.

So I get to take ziglang.org/ out for a trial run and try out all the funky design features I've been admiring from afar. I'm really enjoying it - trial run was streaming from RSS xml to activitypub Article json, and it has basically all just worked. Admittedly I'm rewriting a work flow I've already written in another language I know much better, but I'm pleasantly surprised with progress and how fast the resulting executable starts doing stuff (my biggest gripe with the languages I normally use). #ZigLang #zig #activitypub

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange @xaetacore@neondystopia.world English English would use mail or post interchangeably for 'is this thing physically being sent to me'. Here in Italy though, 'mail' is often used to refer to email in Italian so if you use mail speaking in English to an Italian they will often assume you mean email (and will often use mail to refer to email even in English)

@RonJeffries@mastodon.social @katemorley@hachyderm.io Doing this to random people on the internet seems rude and lacking self awareness. Doing this to your employer seems to take a... special something, and maybe limit future life opportunities

@tastapod@mas.to @codepo8@toot.cafe This reminds me of a friend of my brother who loved expensive cars. Office wear was generally t-shirt and jeans, but on the days they had to meet investors he would put on a really nice suit and then take a long lunch break to go test drive a car. Because it turns out that the test drives were in fact wage-restricted, they just didn't have a great way of measuring "wage".

@janl@narrativ.es @ellyxir@humanwords.cc Now... does this make MS incompetent or dishonestly trying to shed responsibility by proclaiming incompetence? I'm not sure I know or care, really. But it feels hard on the other projects/3rd parties who got the random seagull experience.

@andrewt@mathstodon.xyz @hp@mastodon.tmm.cx To be fair, if your cauldron has a pauldron has something very wrong with it. Or it is a curséd knight who needs kissing. (final option only available to heirs to the throne with correct sexual orientation unless local equality laws apply)

@glyph@mastodon.social @SnoopJ@hachyderm.io

The South Carolina pastor who prayed over a 22-foot-high golden statue of President Donald Trump last week says it is not an idolatrous golden calf as described in the book of Exodus.

Mark Burns is a self-appointed pastor who previously lied about his educational background and previous military service. He unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, 2022 and 2024. He was an early and ardent supporter of Trump’s presidential campaigns.

Brutal from opening from [checks notes] Baptist News Global. Even the url is sharp and pointy: baptistnews.com/article/its-...

@passenger@kolektiva.social @cstross@wandering.shop Which is where this type of conflict is so rich for stories! Nobody in the situation was "wrong", but several players were set up with conflicting information, backgrounds, and incentives and suddenly no person is wrong but every thing is wrong.

@andrewt@mathstodon.xyz @hp@mastodon.tmm.cx ah, no you hadn't. That clarifies everything - I had been assuming the traditional four faces which rotated as their split personalities transitioned.