In general if people are genuinely hurt by the use of some words, I’m not sadistic so I’ll avoid using them

That’s a sane position. Only issue is that this have nothing to do with the question, and the people that were the most vocal about this issue had no business talking about it in the first place.

Ultimately, git is flexible; beyond some potential local and shared automation, anyone can call their local branches however they want, regardless of other and servers. Personally, changing years of habits and tooling (that probably should not have hardcoded some names in the first place) is not worth following a change proposed by misled people.

The name have nothing to do with being in charge of others, skill level, or anything, but, sure.

So-called “social” networks can have three main issues: technical (they have to work), leadership (they have to not be dickhead), and users (they also have to not be dickheads).

The first point can be handled with competent people, consensus, open source contributors, etc. (assuming no dictatorial management).

The second point can probably be handled by having a handful of decent people, transparency, accountability.

The third point, which is basically the thing that makes the content on the service… is still people. If people were obnoxious on twitter, they’ll be obnoxious on bluesky, mastodon, and whatever else shows up. It’s almost inevitable.

It’s also why decent moderations tools are needed, which brings the question of how to do decent moderations tools that are not too extremet but still remains useful. This is not an easy task (and to my knowledge, there’s no general solution to that).

Bots showing up is just the icing on the top. Without a pretty aggressive vetting system for accounts, there’s not much that can be done from the service itself.

Given the general ambiance, I guess smaller community and services tailored for them might come back, the way we had tons of different forums back in the days. It might be a good solution; some form of SSO across many services to make people reachable, but no general, shared stream of messages as we have now.

tl;dr: it’s not a technical problem, it’s a people problem. So it won’t be solved by technical solutions.

I’m worried about anything that can be controlled through a third-party online service. The amazon doorbell thing is a prime example of what can go wrong, but it can be more subtle, too. And I’m not even talking about obsolescence. Frankly, I’d still be worried if it was a self-hosted, properly configured system where I’m the only one with a legit access.

I understand the convenience of all this. I also have to deal with the risk balance of security vs convenience, which causes me to not tolerate that “too tired to go across the room” justifies “a third party have full control over my doors, lights, heating, ovens, etc.” (not shooting fire at you, see this as a generic example).

The bare minimum would be a fully self-hosted solution, which is possible, although difficult because hardware manufacturers don’t always play nice. And even then, proper, secure setup and maintenance is not for everyone. In the meantime, yeah, I’ll have to move myself when I want to turn on my dishwasher.

Though I’ll admit, I have some lights that are controlled wirelessly… my old phone have an IR port, and they have IR remotes… Technically, an attacker could probably turn them on/off/change colors from behind a window :D

I’m warry of electronic, wireless, and sometimes third-party cloud dependent services, having a say in how I lock my doors or control heating.

I’m a bit old fashioned, but also have to work with solutions where considering the consequences of a compromised entry point is vital. I’d be ok with a way to check that the door is locked, but something that can lock (and, so, unlock) my door remotely? Not a chance. At least, not for a place a value.

Probably a security update to try and keep it from being part of a botnet maybe?

Then we’re back to the same question. At what point a grill have anything that could be part of a botnet :D

Grill, Dehumidifier, Air con, Fridge, Dishwasher, Washing Machine, Lightbulbs, Ovens, Doorknob…

None of that should be smarter than “press button, get action”.

And where do you dump the paper towel then? The idea behind a jar is that there are facility that takes that grease and (supposedly) won’t dump it in a trash field, which is pretty much bad too.

A crash? I’d say we’re in a plane from which the pilot decided to press the “eject wings” button.

People don’t care. as long as they can get their infinite scroll with funny picture, they’re happy.

But you can. Hopefully, you know how your language is called in your language, right?

I’m pretty sure nobody’s doing that based on geoip. Client-side, the browser exposes the user’s languages choices. And server side, the HTTP header can help. But geoip is totally unreliable, even a broken salesman would not sell that as a feature.

Well ok they would sell it but get a very heavy glance from the dev team.

The label for the language picker is an issue, but the choices themselves? In the target language. You want French? You pick “Français”. You want Japanese? You pick “日本語”. You want english? You pick “English”.

Supposedly, if you’d rather have a website in a given language, you must have some level of understanding of that language, and picking its name should not be a challenge in any case. If you somehow change a site/app to a language you don’t know, as long as you can identify the language picker, you’ll be able to change to something you understand.

It does leave out the case of a user wanting to change to a language they do not understand, but I do not care for those.

I find it reassuring that some people are not proud of grabbing random people off the street to send them to their death with a smile.

That’s an idea, but it requires the incentive to be more than people… let’s call it laziness. I see people drop their trash in front of an empty trashcan on the regular.

Regarding plastic bottle deposit, a quick search (https://www.statista.com/chart/22963/global-status-of-plastic-bottle-recycling-systems/) around 30 countries had such a system in place, with varying degrees of success, with only 10 US states. That’s not a lot. In France, we also had this for glass bottle. It was discontinued long ago but we’re looking to bring it back. Let’s hope this do motivate people, although I don’t have my hopes up.

It reduces littering by bottles to around half, just because we count the pieces differently now.

Beyond the statistics, collecting bottles seems easier than collecting bottle caps. Since people can’t stop tossing their trash in the street, at least it makes it easier for people that clean up to get them.

I very rarely come across a labia minora either at work or at home, but maybe I’m not working in the right place or something.

The search still go on ✨

I’m going to use base π from time to time.

Indeed. None of the crazy things that happened in the last few months stopped. Unfortunately.