Tootfinder

Ein kleiner Lichtblick in den #Koalitionsverhandlungen, auf den #NFDI4Culture @… zum Glück letzte Woche aufmerksam wurde:

It's the fact that you can tell from a mile away that it's even less defensible than a photoshop, it was a hackjob done in a fucking word processor, it's all so blatant and lazy that I can't not conclude that anyone who still champions this guy have a rotting bowl of porridge for a brain.

Wow, what a weird rabbit-hole I just ended up down.
So, the “Spread Mastodon" page (tutorial?) recommends a cool-sounding browser extension as an alternative to all those constantly-dead 'fedifinder' / Twitter-person-looker-upper-tools: the ‘Whosum Social Assistant' browser extension.
Sounds cool! Sounds like the correct solution to this problem!

#harvard Very nice comments at the #nytimes who mend wrath with high literacy:
"Trump and the ignorant like him have always wanted (...) As they rest in the shallow, dirty bathwater of their reactionary, time-worn bigotries, misconceptions, and lies they tell to explain their bitterness a…

Why Harvard Decided to Fight Trump
The Trump administration will freeze over $2 billion in federal funds because Harvard refused to comply with a list of demands. Harvard leaders believed saying no was worth the risk.

"If anything, this author firmly believes that programming skills are second to those related to communication; most engineers coming out of colleges these days are unable to express themselves in public, to teach their peers, to write an essay or a blog post, to communicate their ideas to stakeholders, or to put together a simple documentation bundle without suffering a seizure in the process."
https://deprogrammaticaipsum.com/banning-adopting-reckoning/

Rant about PHP
You know a technology is declining when the most basic questions about its most bizarre quirks are left completely unanswered for years.
#PHP is like that. Every day I have many of these questions. I look for them. No one asked them before, no one wrote about them before.
I'm baffled by the lack of curiosity and proactivity of its community.
I know it sounds like me piling up on people I don't know anything about, but I used to invest a lot of time programming in PHP. I went to conferences, I made some open source libraries for it, like a PHP kernel for Jupyter Notebooks, I even made a library to work with dataframes, tensors and matrices in PHP (although I lost this one because my laptop was stolen before I released... and I didn't had it in me to rewrite it again).
Then, the ones who I admired the most in that space, like Nikita Popov, started leaving it to work in more intellectually vibrant communities... and it shows.
I'm sure Nikita Popov would be much more gracious than me when talking about it. I can only speculate about his motivations, but at least I can tell you about mine: It was precisely about that same lack of curiosity and creativity that I mentioned before, it felt unbearably grey and sad.

techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.

Sorry, didn't know "Neurodiversity" was a racist word to you.
#Facepalm

Und ich dachte immer, *ich* wär der schlimmste Aufschieber Deutschlands.
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/warum-das-afd-gutachten-immer-noch-nicht-vorliegt-der-verfassungsschutz-ist-nicht-allein-…

Oh, it was a multistep process...step 2, put full username in a field at https://tootfinder.ch/join.php
Ok, just did it!
"Magic word searchable found. From now on, you are indexed."
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