Padraic Harley @pauricthelodger@mastodon.social

Google is a sponsor of CPAC, who worked hard to get us anti-Roe justices.

Google has deduced and stores information on your race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, and political views. They regularly collaborate with the police. They are on your phone, tracking everywhere you go. They are scanning your email trying to find out what minority groups you belong to. They are in your friends houses, listening to your private conversations.

They are not benign. They are not safe.

Did you see the news that all of the #JWST instruments are aligned now?

Check out this comparison of one of the newly released calibration images from the MIRI instrument compared to images taken of the same region of space by the WISE and Spitzer space telescopes! Look at that resolution! So many newly resolved stars and structures! 🤩

I can't wait for all the new discoveries we'll make with JWST! #Science data starts in only a couple months!

(Image from @/AndrasGasper on birdapp)

One of the largest inefficiencies in our current system of fediverse moderation is the lack of shared blocklists.

Individual instance administrators have to keep an eye on the fediblock hashtag and then individually add instance suspensions. This is vastly inefficient.

I propose a system akin to DNS RBLs in the email world where is a centrally distributed blocklist that an instance can subscribe to which then either notifies the admin about new additions or outright suspends.

cont.

https://blog.opensource.org/gnome-patent-troll-stripped-of-patent-rights/

One of the unexpected joys of the fediverse over other places is the addition of weird domains appended on to everyone's usernames.

It makes the web feel like more than just four websites again.

It's both a signal of a smaller more intimate internet and also a larger and far more diverse internet at the same time!

You can now read and engage with news and information about 🇪🇺 EU policies, in a privacy-focused environment and with no transfer of data outside the EU.

This initiative is part of an EU pilot for supporting and using social media platforms based on open-source software.

Follow us! 🙌

#EuropeanUnion #Mastodon #Fediverse

The EU just opened an official Mastodon server! https://social.network.europa.eu

#fedeverse news!

Hello, Mastodon!

A cool result from https://neverworkintheory.org - virtually all code review tools present devs with their list of files to review in alphabetical order, so most devs review those files in alphabetical order. Turns out, this is dramatically suboptimal.

In practice, code review is significantly more effective if devs deliberately review the tests first, and most complex files next - alphabetic ordering of files turns out to be an ill-considered default that performs very poorly.

Just a feeling: A lot of people lose interest in Mastodon because they were expecting a 1:1 Twitter replacement, when in reality it's more like a bunch of people from disparate special interest message boards meeting in the middle at Tumblr with a better reply interface.

anyway, my condolences to masto admins today and sending my best wishes through this hard time

As one of the main Mastodon developers, I can't promise you that Mastodon will be a complete and exact Twitter replacement for you, but it may fit your use-cases, at least it does for me.

Just keep in mind that it is not exactly the same thing, some core design decisions are different (there isn't an unique centrally-governed website, but many interconnected servers operated by different individuals and organizations) and thus the tradeoffs can be different as well.

While I personally don't think Mastodon should aim at being an exact replacement to Twitter, I do hope Mastodon can be useful to more people wanting an alternative to Twitter! And I know there are lots of room for improvement, on things we do know, and on things we don't.

Also keep in mind that Mastodon is developed by only two core developers payed through a non-profit funded through sponsorship, grants and donations, so please be patient!

Here are two #Tusky coding tasks that are very beginner friendly (imho). Never contributed to open source software but you would like to? This is the place to start. Message me or reply on GitHb if you have any questions. https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/2440 https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/2439

Hi! mastodon.social is being slow right now, as far as I can tell because there's twice as many people using it at the same time as ever have; I'm working on making it go fast again, but in the meantime, do remember to invite people to joinmastodon.org instead of directly to mastodon.social. People don't have to be on the same server to follow you! Thanks!

ready player one sucks but it also fascinates me as sort of this perfect, completely unintentional but not-even-a-little-bit-subtle icon of how under the last few dying gasps of capitalism, creation becomes impossible and the dominant form of escapism becomes endless nostalgia as everyone tries to ignore the rapidly decaying reality

Bluesky was announced in December 2019. It is now December 2021. The community Discord server is still arguing about what identity is.

In news shocking absolutely nobody, paying people to do work increases the amount of work that is done. FLOSS needs so much more of this. It pains me that funding work that has such an obvious benefit is such a struggle.
---
RT @llanga
Finishing up on the inaugural week as the #Python Developer in Residence, number-wise we're looking as follows:

I closed 👍🏻14 issues and 📦54 PRs, reviewed 👀 9 PRs, and authored 👨🏻‍💻 6 own PRs.

Details in my…
https://twitter.com/llanga/status/1416360607369072640

I predict that in 50 years or so, the way we use plastics today—from clothing to cosmetics to packaging—will be viewed the same way we now think of DDT or freon