Padraic Harley @pauricthelodger@mastodon.social

A few weeks ago I posted here that the #decentralized blogging platform @PlumeDev had some of its right-to-left (RTL) rendering issues fixed by @ahangarha. I myself had also fixed many little CSS issues related to #RTL for @Mastodon in the past.

Well, expect such kinds of things to happen less often in the future, since #GitHub has mass-blocked many accounts of Iranians* at various levels; This applies not only to Iranian residents, but also sometimes to Iranians living abroad.

* And not only for #Iran, but also for #Cuba, #Syria, #NorthKorea, and #Crimea.

#Mastodon #Mastodev #Plume
#SanctionsAgainstIran #Microsoft

https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/locked-tech-company-comply-iran-sanctions-190731081829014.html

There's a new #RideSharing #Coop in Montreal that's taking on Uber and Lyft:

https://eachforall.coop/co-operative-ride-sharing-with-eva-co-op/

Friends, I'm about to try to convince my coworkers that we all need to take #translation of our software seriously and that this will require that we all approach the problem conscientiously.

What's good reading material I can recommend? I remember reading about it on Masto.

Boeing 737 Max ordered by Ryanair undergoes name change - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/15/boeing-737-max-ordered-by-ryanair-undergoes-name-change "737 Max replaced by 737-8200 on the nose." spread the word: if it says 737-8200 on a Ryanair plane, it's the same model as the ones that crashed.

the defaults in building software in this space should focus on user safety.

when people say that having a design stance in favour of user safety compromises "free speech" -- tell them to shut the hell up, because free speech is about open publishing, which is not compromised by this design at all.

you don't get a free audience for your bullshit, and software which forces people to endure crap they don't want to endure just to give people a free audience is user-hostile.

It is wholly disingenuous to conflate the push to de-platform groups that mean to perpetuate hate and violence to a generalist push to control the flow of information. That point is complete and utter bullshit.

People such as myself that advocate de-platforming bigot do not give a single solitary fuck about controlling information. I want to *reduce harm*. That's it.

Anyone that gets on a high horse about how that idea is SLIPPERY SLOPE is purposefully trying to derail the point of it.

Someone didn’t like that the Mast app for iOS blocks Gab. The dev’s response is 🔥🔥🔥.

Dear News Reporters,

The reason Mastodon doesn't have any Nazis on it is that people actually do the work to keep it that way.

There's no magic solution to Nazis. You're going to need to put in some work.

Gab isn't a new thing in the Fediverse. It's just getting more attention because you're giving it more.

The dev of Toot! for iOS isn’t very patient with Gab enthusiasts, either. ❤️❤️❤️

@sweetmercury "On the one hand, this website spawned several mass shooters and it's leadership not-so-tacitly approves of the website being used as place for neonazis to gather and plan to kill people. on the other, someone told me it isn't like that so who is to say if it's bad really"

For all the responses this got:
No matter your sleeping habits or ""productivity"" levels: YOU ARE VALID

HEY. @Tusky is excellent. As of me writing this post, their Open Collective balance stands at $1592.59.

If people can get $200 more dollars in the till (that's $1792.59) by the end of the day tomorrow (36 hours for me, give or take a few), I'll match it with $200 dollars of my own.

I also challenge other folks in tech with a little money to throw around to match my match, even partially.

https://opencollective.com/tusky

video of my brain

#Japan resumes commercial #whaling for first time in 30 years - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/01/japan-resumes-commercial-whaling-for-first-time-in-30-years young people in Japan know that whale meat has high concentrations of mercury; eating it is condemning themselves to terrible mental health problems. they won't do it.

So we started shipping WebRender in Firefox a few weeks ago. Completely new rendering engine written in rust, big departure from how we approached rendering before. We are gradually enabling it for different hardware/OS configurations and a couple of million users have it now.

What's kind of blowing my mind, having worked on 3 large-ish rewrites, is that since WebRender shipped, telemetry has reported less crashes per user with WebRender than without.

This is *not* how big rewrites usually go.

"On 10 April, astrophysicists announced that they had captured the 1st ever image of a #blackhole.

No headlines mentioned that the image would have been impossible without open-source software: #Matplotlib, a #Python library for graphing data.

Just 5 days later, the NSF rejected a grant to support that ecosystem, saying that the software lacked sufficient impact.

#opensource is widely acknowledged as crucially important in science, yet it is funded non-sustainably."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02046-0

@bstacey godd did you hear about the situation in germany? because it's incredible

basically, the German Conference of University Deans ("HRK"), in a moment of unlikely clarity, decided that they were Tired Of This Shit and told all the publishers that from now on all german universities would make one large agreement with them, on the universities terms, for access

elsevier and springer made offers so laughable that the HRK actually literally wrote a press release about how they should "come back to the table when they're ready to make a serious offer" and since then many universities have just kind of let access contracts expire

they recently came to an agreement with wiley, rest is still ? ? ? ? ?

it's fantastic because every day this goes on is a day more scientists learn about the greatest development in science access of this century, which, lets be quite honest, is scihub