Vincent Tunru @vinnl@mastodon.social

If I could make one software metaphor go away, it's the idea of code as Lego.

Abstraction is a balancing act between power and utility, and the idea that you should be able to combine everything with everything tips the scales all the way to power at the cost of even the slightest bit of usefulness.

A more apt metaphor would be Tetris: we have some idea of the general shape of the blocks that are yet to come, but we'll occasionally be wrong, yet we'll still have to try to fit them together.

I saw an actual, Dutch-language, physical billboard ad for DuckDuckGo. I'm not too big of a fan of billboard ads, but it's pretty cool that privacy is enough of a selling point that this is a sensible investment.

(Though of course, it's not unlikely that outdoor advertising is relatively cheap today.)

Apparently OpenStreetMaps also allows you to record pandemic-related altered opening hours. Pretty cool.

Every year on May 5th, the Netherlands celebrates freedom. One major part of these celebrations are the freedom festivals all over the country. However, freedom day is only an official day off in most industries once every five years.

Of course, that just happens to be the year every one is stuck at home and public events are prohibited. #firstworldproblems

I understand the desire to automatically generate a changelog from your commit history but... When I'm evaluating the impact of an update, I'm really not that interested in how the unit test infrastructure was changed 🤷

They can recoup some of those costs by outsourcing the processing of this data to an advertising company, but if they wouldn't need to store that data in the first place, they could focus on their core competency. There's an opportunity for ethical alternatives there.

We've become so used to the narrative that our data is a valuable product, that we tend to forget that much of that data is being generated by organisations other than the large advertising companies like Facebook and Google, for whom that data is not their primary business model, and for whom modern legislation is increasingly turning that data into a liability.

To everyone who worked on improving @gnome's performance in the past two years: thank you. It's really a world of difference.

Likewise, how much time and sanity has been sacrificed to setting up tools to point to private registries, poking through proxies, etc.?

How many organisations will have surreptitiously taken the (public, but not open source) GitLab Enterprise Edition source code and set it up for themselves, and how many of those represent actual lost income for GitLab?

I feel like most companies vastly overestimate the cost and risk of keeping their code public (even if not open source), and likewise vastly underestimate the cost of keeping it private.

A third-party review of code quality that ends with the suggestion to consider adding a blockchain to your project.

The Dell Customer support systems are really struggling with a + in an email address. I just received an email that just cut off everything up to and including the +, which luckily still arrived.

I'd like all issue trackers to add one feature: automatically convert comments that are *just* "+1" into votes, and thereby not notifying subscribers of that comment.

No need for fancy language processing or heuristics; by just capturing comments that are literally nothing other than "+1" you'll get rid of 80% of the noise.

The Dutch government is hastily setting up a system to keep track of free hospital beds across the country: green represents free beds, red means an occupied hospital.

I hope it won't be operated by one of the 5% of people who are red-green colour-blind.

https://nos.nl/artikel/2328856-waar-is-nog-een-ziekenhuisbed-vrij-nieuw-systeem-moet-direct-antwoord-geven.html

There have been some concerns recently over Webkit making Progressive Web Apps impractical by clearing their data after seven days.

They've updated the post; turns out it doesn't hold for PWA's. Phew! Lower your pitchforks:

> We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted.

> If your web application does experience website data deletion, please let us know since we would consider it a serious bug.

https://webkit.org/blog/10218/full-third-party-cookie-blocking-and-more/

There must be some serious meme potential here.