Notices by Nolan (nolan@toot.cafe)

In my experience, the biggest source of unnecessary energy waste in websites is JavaScript doing some kind of polling while the page is idle. Think about it: you spend ~95% of your time on a web page not doing much: maybe scrolling, maybe typing, maybe literally doing nothing. So if there's something running during "idle" time, consuming CPU, then that will be your biggest battery drain. Especially if you're unfortunate enough to leave the tab open for a long time.

"Why companies struggle with recalcitrant IT" https://www.economist.com/business/2020/07/18/why-companies-struggle-with-recalcitrant-it

"Airlines are […] now advised to turn the plane off and on again every 51 days, to stop its computers displaying false data in mid-flight."

Love our glorious computerized future

I see this same kind of stuff in the LineageOS/Android ROM community, and it bums me out. It's like we're given a choice between 1) trust Google/Comcast/$BIGCORP with all your private date, or 2) trust some Macedonian teenager who compiled a binary somewhere. And of course, this choice is not even available to the non-technically-inclined (who frankly are better off going with Apple).

"Challenges in the Decentralised Web: The Mastodon Case" (PDF) https://emilianodc.com/PAPERS/mastodonIMC19.pdf

Interesting academic paper analyzing the fediverse and how different instances and users are connected to one another. It's cool that the Mastodon API is open enough that researchers can do this kind of work.

If I were King of America, I would make it so every library provided a free course on password managers, and handed out YubiKeys like candy

At some point I have to wonder if I'm just too hard-headed and doctrinaire. Everybody else decided to make their peace with Twitter, and yet here I still am, shouting into a void and wondering if anybody's listening.

Probably the thing that bothers me most about Twitter is how it's like a fly trap for smart people. It legitimizes the platform that so many thought leaders use it, even if those same people might privately (or publicly!) despite Twitter.

You can use Twitter as a write-only medium for your own mental health, but then you're still pushing the drug out to a large mass of readers.

New blog post: "Get off of Twitter" https://nolanlawson.com/2019/05/29/get-off-of-twitter/

The main issue with LineageOS is that my phone feels like it's held together with duct tape. Stuff randomly breaks, it's awkward, and every few months when there's a firmware upgrade I have to factory reset and start all over again, which takes hours, and I'm always afraid I'm going to break something when I muck around in recovery mode.

Using Ubuntu on a laptop is really not that hard; I don't feel like I'm missing much compared to either macOS or Windows. Why are open-source phones so hard??

Mastodon got a shout-out in The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/what-it-takes-to-put-your-phone-away

"Odell believes that there is another way. She cites, for example, the indie platform Mastodon, which is crowdfunded and decentralized. (It is made up of independently operated nodes, called 'instances,' on which users can post short messages, or 'toots.')"

A social network either fails, or it becomes successful enough that people think it's worthwhile to spam it

I have yet to really come to terms with my extreme disappointment with the tech industry. Not just with the "techlash," but with many more personal things:

- burning out on being an open-source maintainer
- realizing that the browser industry is brutal and uncompetitive
- noticing how many tech influencers are just seeking out social media validation through Twitter or GitHub
- realizing that the frontend JS community is largely fad-driven rather than evidence-driven

I could go on