Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.

Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.

Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.

Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?

What? Did I turn it off and on again? I’m a very smart technology person, of course my big brain already thought of that. I develop software for a living. It couldn’t be that simple or I wouldn’t be calling you.

. . .

Turning it off and on again worked. My shame is immense and I have wasted everybody’s time.

(And that is how I learned to embrace my own idiocy and do the recommended, simple troubleshooting tasks without questioning them.)

So I’m curious . . . what reference am I missing that helps me understand what menu settings cause exactly which pieces of personal data to be shared with which Apple services? I want to RTFM, and while I appreciate people wanting to be helpful, comment replies are not themselves documentation.

(I switched from Android to ios in 2020 and haven’t really figured out details beyond turning icloud sync off for specific apps. I’d like to add more devices and learn to trust that sync method but I don’t understand where crypto is used and how the keys are handled.)

I still miss Naomi Wu’s tech videos.

Plagiarism should be part of the conversation here. Credit and context both matter.

How much stock ownership remains with the nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation? And will that be enough to hold off shareholder complaints that they aren’t being evil enough?

Start early in the commit history, see if you can understand the general shapes and concepts the project was using at the start.

Then sort of binary-search your way forward in different sized jumps and see how quickly you can get to present day without sacrificing your sanity. Completely at least.

God that sounds awful in headline form.

Pride month is absolutely not an excuse to say “current homophobes will never get better, so they all need to blah blah”. Their current behavior is intolerable, but through continued exposure and humanizing influences, the people can be reached. It’ll go from hatred to extreme discomfort to mild discomfort to … something more normal.

Unfortunately I’m a crappy communicator and I can’t figure out a way to reduce that to a headline without making it some kind of division-promoting reductionist garbage. Sigh.

They probably got the sound file from the Visual C++ 4.2 CD’s samples folder. That’s where ICQ got it from.

I think crucially it has the potential to show moderate voters that President Biden is not one to abuse the legal system for his own personal gain. If the outcome is supported by evidence and precedent, obviously some won’t be convinced by even that. But some will be.

Agreed. Use your experience to shape the direction your teammates are moving in. Be an architect, and let them handle your light work.

What’s the penalty for claiming to be impartial but not actually being impartial?

Ugh, this makes me want to “slash slash slash.”

Oh, that makes sense. I’m diabetic and she’s not and there’s definitely a difference in familiarity with injectable medications between us. Maybe I’m seeing dark patterns where they don’t actually exist.

I’m not sure I follow. Why would a needle be reused? That’s never ok to do.

The pictured injector is single use. The weird workaround would never be ok’d by any doctor, and even if it was, a clean needle would be used to withdraw and administer medicine from the hypothetical medicine ampule for each dose. I’m not qualified to measure loose liquid medicine, and she’s on the second highest dose anyway.

A better design would be more like the pen used by the original senaglutide medication this is related to, ozempic. Screw on a disposable pen needle, dial your dosage on the twisty knob on the other end, inject, dispose of needle. But instead they deliberately designed this thing, with a latching device that starts squirting medicine with no way to stop it. If the user is not familiar with needles and jerks away, the needle comes back out but medicine is still squirting.

It’s a good medicine, except supply issues are making it difficult. My wife’s refill at the hospital pharmacy has been pending since end of February. It’s a weekly injection but her last dose was 15 days ago as of this morning.

My wife is on Wegovy. That injector pictured above is a special kind of perverse design. There’s a plastic donut-shaped trigger the needle has to pass through. Once the trigger starts the flow of medicine, it cannot be stopped. No way to, for example, pay for a higher dosage and use a little at a time, if you were prescribed the 0.25 mg starter dose but only 1 and 1.7 are in stock anywhere. (Without, say, milking the pen like a poisonous snake and using a needle and syringe.)

Could be a MUSIC/SP reference. (No I don’t remember how to use it either. I had a letter-letter-number-number %nemomus@academic.nemostate.edu email in college though.)

I use Due on iOS for repeating timers/reminders where I need it to be persistent and annoying because the task is important. Like paying rent, or physical therapy “homework” I kept forgetting. The persistence might be good if you’re worried you’ll just dismiss a normal alarm or forget to start the next timer.

Yeah a bit. IBM QRadar is alright. I’m confident there’s something real (and real expensive) underneath the buzzword salad in that article.

And those jobs are critical to the process of making new developers.

An important part of my education - the part that grad school can’t teach you, you have to learn it on the job - was being new and terrible, grinding on a simple problem and feeling like a waste of money. Any of the experienced guys sitting behind me could have done this thing in a few hours but I’ve been working on it for a week. “What’s the point? Any minute now they’re going to tap me on the shoulder and tell me I’m done, it’s time to go find another job.”

But that never happened.

Those early problems weren’t fun. At home I would have never chosen to work on them. I’d leave them for someone else. “But now that I’m collecting a paycheck for it, this isn’t up to me. I have to work on it. I can’t give up. I can ask for help, but I need to show my peers that I belong. I can solve difficult problems. I can persevere.”

As a mediocre professional developer, I had to struggle to learn that. I wasn’t getting far on my own, without mentorship and motivation. Homework, pursuing degrees, wasn’t getting me there. (And even now, I seem to have about two weeks of attention span, for projects at home.)