Notices by Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social), page 2

Protip:

When starting a new computing project, plan to throw your first version away.

Plan to bury it deep in a landfill in the New Mexico desert.

Plan to change your name and move far, far away.

Plan to hire an Atari Priest and stock up on holy antistatic spray for the inevitable night when it knocks, wires dangling, landfill dust dribbling from its empty LED sockets, on your door.

Oh for... we specifically said to point the radio telescope at the MILKY WAY galaxy not the MICHAEL BAY GALAXY

http://www.ska.ac.za/media-releases/meerkat-radio-telescope-inaugurated-in-south-africa-reveals-clearest-view-yet-of-center-of-the-milky-way/

This seems like it was obvious, and yet, it took someone to make it

http://www.howies.co.uk/really-care.html

Protip:

When designing a user interface, imagine some old woman using it, say Margaret Hamilton, and she's clicking your app's buttons and saying to you, as old people do,

"Young whippersnapper, when I was your age, I sent 24 people to the ACTUAL MOON with my software in 4K of RAM and here I am clicking your button and it takes ten seconds to load a 50 megabyte video ad and then it crashes

I'm not even ANGRY with you, I'm just disappointed."

Not so sure about this new Amazon Alexa update

via https://twitter.com/PulpLibrarian/status/989556918397095937

big if true

Hewlett-Packard Product Naming Team, December 2017:

Well done everyone, you absolutely nailed it. A perfect name. Captures sleekness, power, slightly edgy

Hewlett-Packard Product Naming Team, January 2018:

Ffffffffuuuuu

https://mastodon.social/media/gLqBZqxj7XAGnq3rGlA

@beadsland If you try to have 'individualism without egalitarianism', you end up with heirarchy! 'Some are more equal than others'!

And in practice, that's the problem with libertarianism: it's not 'one person, vote' but 'one dollar, one vote'. So it rapidly reconstructs a strong power gradient... a social hierarchy.

@strypey @pnathan

Ie, I agree with the critique that the economic Right has long made against the Left (styled as the USSR) - that ground-up democratic decentralisation is generally better than top-down centralisation.

Where I differ with the Right is that I believe the market, left to itself, tends to over-centralise in a few winners. So a democratic state can act as a counterbalance to the otherwise unchecked centralising power of commerce.

@pnathan @strypey I also think the architectural ideas of Christopher 'A Pattern Language' Alexander are sensible. And the economic ideas of Michael Albert.

I think the best social organisation - and one we see in biological systems - is not massive hub-and-spokes centralisation, but recursive federations which themselves federate.

Centralise the things which *make sense* to centralise. Which should only be *what smaller units can't handle themselves*.

This seems a universal pattern to me.

http://sashat.me/2017/06/03/roman-roads/

It’s finally done. A subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD

(via http://www.openculture.com/2017/06/ancient-romes-system-of-roads-visualized-in-the-style-of-modern-subway-maps.html )

https://mastodon.social/media/C67E7fRRAQ8Sqgtb9KA

If you're considering changing web browsers after the W3C endorsing in-browser DRM (and Mozilla apparently caving to it), PaleMoon might be worth a look

https://github.com/MoonchildProductions/Pale-Moon/issues/1354

http://www.palemoon.org/roadmap.shtml

@miwilc @pmosetc @wrenpile @pnathan I live in NZ, a country total population 3-4 million, making us essentially just a medium size city. Our small towns are *really* small and are dying too, mostly because the jobs aren't there. So people flow to our bigger cities (eg Auckland, ~1.5 million) and this is *massively* spiking the cost of housing - AKL is now *less affordable than London* vs NZ median wage.

I find this pretty scary.