The main reason a lot of people still stick around Twitter is because the journalists are there. If Mastodon goes down this path and adds more features to help news organizations and individual reporters, the more likely people will move over.

Was just listening to the latest episode of Dot Social podcast where there was a discussion with CEO of Ghost (alternative to Substack). They’re integrating ActivityPub into the platform, but where they’re going with it is that you can use your Fediverse ID instead of email to sign up.

Once they have that worked out, any likes or comments automatically migrate back to the fediverse. Replies back to replies also show up in your timeline and your followers can see them. This makes discovery pretty effortless. They can also use the stats to keep track of engagement across all fediverse services.

It also means turning one-way streams like RSS (podcasting), email services, and commenting services into common two-way communities.

You’re now going beyond just catching up to existing services and doing things just not possible in closed silos. Real “Aha!” moment.

https://www.wonderdraft.net/

It lets you import base maps and create stylized overlays, with artifacts like terrain symbols, map legends, and icon sets (extra cost for some of those). You can even draw line routes on top.

The import process is a bit wonky. Not sure you can bring in multiple backgrounds, copy/paste is a bit random, and it’s a bit fiddly about file formats. It also sometimes would crash so important to save often, but the output is really nice. Also has a Mac version.

Good to see proliferation of presence detectors. Good for turning things off when nobody is around.

In my last job I got to play a bit with the SeeedStudio mmWave presence box. What was interesting (and a little confusing) was that it took multiple add-on boards for things like on-device fall detection (for elderly). For the time I had with it, it worked fine with HA: https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/mmwave_radar_Intro/

I actually tried letting ChatGPT-4o write some tests the other day.

Easily 50% of the tests were wrong. They ignored DB uniqueness constrains or even datatypes. In a few cases, they just hallucinated field names that didn’t exist.

I ended up spending just as much time cleaning up the cruft as writing them. I could easily see someone just starting out letting the code go through.

They’re propping each other up.

Remembering ActiveX Controls, the Web’s Biggest Mistake: https://www.howtogeek.com/717016/remembering-activex-controls-the-webs-biggest-mistake/

That was amazing! Watched the video with my Trackmania-crazy kid. I’ve played it a few times but I’m total crap at it. We couldn’t peel our eyes off the action. The first external shot of the track shows how insanely difficult it was going to be.

On Mac/iOS, Ivory is pretty dope: https://tapbots.com/ivory/

If using pyenv to support multiple python versions, when creating venvs, make sure to pass --copies to it.

% python3 -m venv venv --copies

Ordinarily, venv uses symbolic links back to the current version of the python binary. A lot of tools and IDEs don’t traverse symbolic links. That flag actually copies the real binaries over to the venv.

This avoids a metric ton of hard-to-diagnose misery later on.

That is actually kind of brilliant. Having to go through MFi and getting the Apple DRM chip into the manufacturing pipeline can be a real pain (and expensive).

With this scheme, they could also run all the wired on/off and volume control actions through Bluetooth AVRCP. Even have a Mic on the wire, so if a call comes in, switch to HFP to talk/manage the call.

Damn, that’s clever. Hats off to whoever came up with it.

Incidentally, there’s very little Apple can do to make this stop, unless they decide to break Bluetooth and third-party accessories.

Enterprises IT policy may have a say in that.

There are browser userscripts out there now that do this automatically.

Not to worry. Someone will build a utility that flashes a spreadsheet image for a millisecond every time the system tries to take a snapshot.

If you liked Apollo, you’ll really like Voyager for Lemmy: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/voyager-for-lemmy/id6451429762

So on their opinion of Kevin Roose… putting Decider down as “on the fence.”

In retrospect, an early grand-slam would have been less painful.

Let’s not forget… the reason this type of licensing exists is because large cloud providers were taking a large code base and selling them as services . Often, the main path for the creators to make any money from their code is to offer a paid, managed tier, along with professional services. They would end up competing, and losing, against those cloud providers.

Not saying this kind of license is good or bad, but the reason is often not to stop self-hosting or screw contributors, but to maintain couple of the only pathways FOSS can bring in revenue.

Ignore them. Send a pull request with the full source of Arch Linux.