Fascinated by the chutzpah of the folks behind Reflect Orbital.

I would definitely buy a T-shirt, if they had a merch store.

(They should do that. It’d generate more money than their space mirrors)

@staringatclouds @sundogplanets Dave of EEVBlog did a nice analysis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkjyeI0ykGM - tl;dr - its useless

Hi journalists! Before I start targeted emails to journalists I've talked to before, I'm just going to put this out here and see if it works:

Now that Reflect Orbital https://www.reflectorbital.com/ has officially filed to launch their first satellite, does anyone want to write an article about what a stupid, useless, potentially destructive and harmful idea this is? I would be happy to be interviewed about all the ways this is a very very bad idea and why I'm absolutely livid that they're launching.

One unexpected discovery is that Foundation.Data values are decoded using the Unkeyed container, one byte at a time, rather than the SingleValue container that I was expecting.

Weird. I guess that’s because Data adopts Collection, but it does feel inefficient.

#iOSDev

Spent most of the weekend writing a Swift Encoder/Decoder for DynamoDB AtrributeValue dictionaries.

The Swift Codable stuff has always been a mystery to me, and it’s good to spend some time to properly understand it.

Entirely unnecessary, of course, because decoding those values manually is an easy job. But it was fun.

#iOSDev

#AWS friends: do any of you have a thorough explanation of why the #DynamoDB NULL type exists, and how it should be used?

Why would I choose that over simply omitting the attribute completely?

Neighbour is going on holiday next week, and is having their garden landscaped while away.

So obviously I suggested that we swap the numbers on the front of our houses, to get some free work done.

But they’re having a brilliant tree removed and everything paved over, which has definitely ruined my plans. Fuck that.

When people loftily declare that they can ‘separate the art from the artist’, the unspoken addendum is always: ‘in this case.’

"I can separate the art from artist *in this particular case*."

Which should prompt the question: why this one?

https://www.girlonthenet.com/blog/separating-art-from-artist/

NEW BLOG: 4.5k words on transphobe JK Rowling + Harry Potter.

Me: would you mind please reviewing my pull request?

(Several days pass)

Me: hey, about that PR….

(More days pass)

Them: I’ve reviewed it, but you have merge conflicts

hope that everyone is using photos of keir starmer for online age verification

One of my main pleasures in making @NearlyDeparted is that I can add small details that would never be considered in my day job.

These are often good learning opportunities that only I’ll ever notice in the app.

Today: synchronising some state across multiple devices via silent push notifications. It’s taken a lot of head-scratching, and I’ve loved every minute.

#iOSDev

Excited for the football this afternoon, but wifey won’t finish work until 7pm… so I’m gonna do a “likely lads” and watch it later.

Can I avoid all the drama for a few hours?

absolutely nails it, by analogy to one of my favorite books even. use these things if you must—and really, must you?—but at least have the decency to own up to that and maybe run the result through your own brain before burdening others’ with it. https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/

Mastodon Moderators: If you've had this verification scam/spam happening from accounts on your server, would you mind sharing with me privately the IP address and other details of the account?

I'm trying to compile information on this attack (we don't have any of this data from Hachyderm, because we've approval based registrations due to LLM spam)

I've been able to pull together information on the different domains and text of the spam messages being used, but not much in the way of account details.

(Yes, this data is PII, and I promise to handle it responsibly)

#moderation #trustandsafety

A marketing company sent me spam emails.

Unfortunately for them, their webpage has a link to their Trustpilot, so I left a review.

(And I won’t remove it when you email again to explain the difference between “outreach” and “spam”)

iOS 26 beta 4 is a real step backwards for legibility.
Do not recommend.

The curtains in my hotel room made a crude camera obscura.

Also replaced the sealant around the shower this morning. It’s a rubbish job that I’ve been avoiding for weeks.

Made two small loaves of chilli/cheese bread today.

Spent time sharpening a knife so I could score the dough before baking it, then forgot to score the dough.

Question for any #Irish #Blind folks on here who use #VoiceOver on #iOS. How do you type the diacritic mark that appears in so many Irish words and names? I know if you press and hold a letter you can select from various alternative characters, but I can't find that one. Visiting Ireland next month and don't want to spell everything wrong, including the name of my cousin's baby. Thanks for any help you can offer.