Someone once explained to me that the reason companies like Google turn to shit is beyond a certain scale they can only grow by hiring the people their competitors are most willing to let go, and I think about that a lot.

<Mastodon post> Hey, my friend needs to know, in your experience, which specific iPad mastodon clients work with VoiceOver? Please don’t guess or answer questions I didn’t ask.

<Mastodon braintrust> Are you familiar with the general concept of an iPad? I saw one, once. It was midsummer, and the cherry trees had finally shed the last of their spring blossoms. A car drove past (2021/2022 model year Toyota sedan, pale blue), and from a distance, I saw a small child enjoying SpongeBob on the screen they held aloft. Anyway, Mastodon (or as I like to call it, GNU/Mastodon) is a social network characterised by a technically adept community of users and a lack of centralised control. I estimate there are at least two Mastodon clients for the proprietary iPad device and I will list them shortly. Are you sure your friend is really disabled? Perhaps they would find solace in a solution that contains neither Mastodon nor an iPad? I saw such a solution, once. It was midsummer, and the cherry …

Me: If I reduce this pasta sauce outside on the barbecue, the resulting steam won’t turn my whole house into a swamp. I am a genius.

Literally every fly in the country: be right there bro

There’s many hilariously awful things about Google wasting half a page of search results on their asinine LLM thing, but perhaps the best one is that it takes every page of the SCP Foundation wiki completely seriously and reports it as stone cold fact.

I just signed an executive order permanently declaring Gavin Newsom “Gavin Newsom” in California.

You’re welcome, America.

The main reason I encourage people not to buy Nvidia GPUs (apart from the company being neck-deep in fraud) is that every single edge case or interesting thing you might want to do with a computer outside of “give Valve money” is always full of endless weird hassle, so much so that doing anything other than giving Valve money with your wildly overpowered computer starts to seem really difficult and unpleasant. I didn’t believe this myself for the longest time.

Controversial take, maybe, but after someone says Romani people are like wolves and you should shoot or deport them, you don’t have to waste any more time on their opinions about anything.

Just clarifying the Gillian Anderson news: “pan” doesn’t mean you specifically, whatever your gender presentation.

“You’re not signed into Canva and can no longer use the online AI features” oh no

Fully 50% of the work of the modern CIO/CTO role is navigating your organisation away from products and services run by terrible people you know are going to hurt you later.

The slop tide rises ever higher. I hope this is the future you want, friends.

Atlassian is genuinely one of the most embarrassing SaaS platforms I’ve ever used, and dealing with their absolute trainwreck billing system is a strong indication that you should not trust any of their products.

Harbingers of Apple’s doom, #92: Autocorrect insistently inserting an apostrophe in “harbinger’s” when you’re already three sentences away.

You can remove a huge amount of trash from your mastodong experience by skimming the replies to this post and blocking anyone visibly struggling with such esoteric concepts as irony, consent, room-reading, civility, or relevance. https://mastodon.social/@jwz/117106720849031751

Interested in digital typography? Down with Unicode? Confident you understand why modern systems do a bad job of languages like Arabic? Meet Mayan hieroglyphs, a writing system even Arabic scholars are scared of:

https://www.mayaarchaeologist.co.uk/public-resources/maya-world/maya-writing-system/

OK, I loved the premise and the aesthetic of Blue Prince despite the pun name, but the way it intentionally penalises you for saving is the most user-hostile game design I’ve seen in a fair while and I’m not interested in supporting that. I’d refund it if I could.

Good news, everyone. Only three more days until the next insultingly stupid press release from a “frontier” “AI” “lab” makes another nonsensical claim and gets uncritically reprinted by every newspaper on Earth.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@pallenberg/117043093887400189

the wrong robots are dying

Stating for the record that I have met Aral Balkan ( @aral) in person, and have engaged with him personally and professionally for roughly 13 years. Adopting a lazy and brainless “devil’s advocate” position that maybe his current humanitarian work _could_ be some sort of financial scam is incorrect, unhelpful, and contributes nothing but noise to a serious and unpleasant topic. Please stop it.