Neil Alexander @neilalexander@mastodon.social

It's snowing. In April. What is this.

Read receipts, presence and typing notifications should be disabled by default https://neilalexander.dev/2021/04/09/read-receipts-typing-notifs.html

I would be extremely tempted to learn Interlingua if I actually stood a chance of coming across anyone else who speaks it.

Go 1.16 released — https://golang.org/doc/go1.16

All of that aside, one of these days I will learn Rust. I’ve been putting it off for long enough—I’ve just never felt particularly motivated to start.

On the topic of programming languages, it’s also interesting to see that the Go generics proposal was accepted this week.

As someone who works with Go everyday, both for work and for personal projects, it feels like a reasonable proposal. It gets the core elements of generics in without adding too much complexity to the language specification and without too many surprises. Most importantly, it’s backward-compatible and won’t break existing code!

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/43651#issuecomment-776944155

I realise that most of the world is focused on Rust but I am personally much more interested in seeing Swift become more widely supported on more platforms.

I believe there’s space in the world for Swift outside of the Apple ecosystem. It’s an elegant, expressive and safe language. I’d love to see it as widely accessible as C or C++ are today.

My #FOSDEM2021 talk, titled "Pinecones and Dendrites", is an overview of the sci-fi work we're doing on P2P Matrix and discussing some of the problems we need to solve in order to get there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7rHtQwpuus

I know it’s not a new thing but I feel like I’m seeing a lot of it recently. It must be so disheartening and off-putting for new and otherwise keen developers to see so much criticism and gatekeeping.

No one cares about emacs evangelism or tiled window manager tirades. Let people use and enjoy what they are comfortable with. Make an effort to meet users and other developers where they are.

The sheer amount of elitism and tool-shaming in open source communities is unreal. It’s everywhere — people being questioned or attacked in mailing lists, IRC channels and GitHub issues/PRs for their choices of text editors/IDEs, web browsers, operating systems...

Finally back home after a fun weekend at #fosdem2020!

Doing this seems like it will, over time, do the opposite of what it's supposed to do.

It removes the sense of something being marked as sensitive for a good reason and therefore removes its power.

Instead we all just get incredibly used to clicking through the shroud just to see content that's actually fine and doesn't need to be hidden, and greatly increases the chance that you're going to click through and see something inappropriate or explicit by accident without even thinking.

What exactly is with the absurd trend here of marking non-offensive/non-explicit pictures (e.g. of pets, memes, screenshots) as sensitive content?