if you don't know what "the ozone layer hole" was, or you're thinking "but the year-2000 problem was a lot of hubbub about nothing"...

yes, exactly, that's because the problem was actually addressed before it broke the world

we should be approaching more problems in the way we did for the ozone layer hole and the year-2000 problem, and less problems in the way we did for cigarettes and cars

sudden 'aha' moment: in (some?) Dutch culture, unsolicited feedback is often considered normal, and (unless someone is an asshole) given from a perspective of respecting someone and wanting to support them in their endeavour

but in some unclear subset of other cultural backgrounds (including but not limited to the US?), it seems to be interpreted as "claiming you know better" by default

... is this just the competitive vs. collaborative society thing again? where in a competitive society you signal superiority through unsolicited feedback, whereas in a collaborative society it's about contributing to an emergent shared project by adding a perspective? (without implying superiority of that perspective, just that multiple perspectives combined tend to produce better outcomes on the whole)

what a lovely design this kettle has internally!

thermal probe is inserted using a silicone gasket, *not* using a sealant glue, so you can trivially remove it and replace it; and it also just has a connector, it's not soldered to the control board

likewise the user panel on the side is connected through a connector, so it's also independently replaceable

the whole thing is just... really easily maintainable, I'm impressed, I wasn't expecting to find this in a kettle

wow, so I have a cheap temperature-controlled kettle, and I put it on while making food as I always do, but then suddenly it started continuously beeping at me in a smoke detector cadence, very clearly trying to tell me that something was wrong

I looked at the live temperature display (which yes, is real), the temperature had been rising more or less as it does normally, except... the water wasn't really approaching boiling, it was barely heating up, definitely nowhere near the temperature the sensor was measuring

and it somehow... detected this?? it somehow knew that the temperature it was measuring with the sensor didn't match the 'true' water temperature??? even though the temperature curve it saw was normal????

how on earth did it know that

one of my less obvious frustrations with capitalism as an ideology is that it forces people into *creating* negative externalities, not just suffering them

example: if the work you want to do looks like "collecting and compiling data", then there's really only two options for making a living off that under capitalism: either you collect and compile *private* data, which infringes on people's agency, or you collect public/informational data and you sell (semi-)exclusive access to it, creating information inequality tied to wealth in the process

there is no reliable way to make a living off doing this work for the public benefit; if this kind of work is your passion, your *only* real options for actually doing it are ways that harm society, despite there being plenty of legitimate purposes for data compilation on paper

what an absolutely fucking spectacular bus station Heerlen has, damn

you come down an escalator from the station, where your view is mostly obscured by the semi-building that the escalator is in, and then suddenly your view opens to... this

if you are constantly coughing your lungs out because you're sick, have you considered: not traveling on a fucking long-distance train and staying home instead

it's sad that it's no longer a bagpipe though :(

I remember travelling on a VIRM as a kid, back when railrunner was still a whole thing, and it's kinda cool that they're still running and are still fun and nice to ride on

I am not entirely convinced by NS' choice of making the platform announcement chime the notification sound of the "there's a problem with your journey" notification in the planner app

most of the work in programming isn't in making it do the thing. a lot of people will agree with that.

but it *also* isn't in the edge cases, and it also isn't in the error handling or the reliability, or in the UI.

no, most of the work is in designing it such that *every level of the stack*, every abstraction and every design choice, every part of the system works together such that it's even *possible* to create a good, logical, easy-to-understand interface for humans to interact with it, without ever going "oh yeah it's a bit awkward but that's just how the system works under the hood" at any point

which is precisely why almost no programmer even does this work, in FOSS or otherwise

I was browsing on that crappy GTK theme site the other day and everything is just going "material design" and "flat design" and like

NO

there's already a million of those and there's only so much you can do with 'flat' everything and material design isn't even good UX-wise!

make something else! live a little! do some actual creative expression instead of trying to make corposlop! make your themes look like the ones that constantly pass by on @macthemes

wanted: #GTK theme that is
- dark
- high-contrast
- but not such that it sears my eyes at night
- *not* flat design
- preferably, actually colourful

the way to deal with this kind of bullshit safely, by the way, is to open an entirely new tab, type in the domain of the website by yourself (so you *know* that it's the real site) and log into it there, then close that tab and click the link in the e-mail again

if it's a legitimate link, it'll now just lead you to the logged-in part of the site because you already have a session. if it still gives you a login page, it's probably a phishing page

(this method is more reliable than "looking at the domain" because eg. lookalike characters can't fool you this way)

github: "supply chain attacks!!1!!!1!"

also github: "hey by the way your PAT will expire soon and your applications will stop working, click the big button in this completely unauthenticated e-mail with no identifying details other than your username that directly dumps you onto a login screen, to renew it"

:thaenkin: huh why do people keep getting their accounts phished

happy weewoo day!

back when I was a kid in primary school, one day there was a well-known children's books author who came by to talk about their books and their writing process, where everyone could ask questions

one of the things that always stuck with me, because I was already getting curious around that time about what brains could do when pushed, was when they explained that they sleep with a little notebook on their nightstand, and when they woke up they'd write down their dreams before they could forget and that's where they got a lot of their story ideas
 
and since then I've been paying a lot more attention to my dreams, and what comes up in them, and how much of it is nonsense vs. actually plausible things - and over the years, my dreams have become more and more like small feature films with mostly coherent plots

so it's really satisfying to be able to tick off another box and know that my dreams do, in fact, produce real music, and don't just simulate a fleeting belief in it existing

my dreams somewhat regularly feature music, specifically music that I've never heard and my brain just seems to have made up, but last night was the first time that the music persisted into my awake state

and I can confirm, it was actual plausible music, there was a rhythm to it, a melody, you could absolutely make it into a song even if it was a little basic

wow, apparently flixbus limits the free wifi to 250MB? fucking cheapskates

how did they double the prices compared to megabus back in the day and then *worsen* the service