I admin the.coolest.zone, the coolest site on the net for online social engagement.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I always thought this was my ADHD talking, but from some googling… It could be this as well, or instead of. I’m definitely very monotropic and I also recognize the symptoms of Pathological Demand Avoidance in myself.

    Unfortunately, at work I manage three different tracks which each have their own roadmaps and deadlines, so constantly shifting attention is required. It’s taken a decade of practice to get where I am – forcing my body and my brain past perceived obstacles and discomfort. It’s possible to train your brain out of certain desire paths with enough effort, but it’s not easy, and I wouldn’t say I’m cured to any measure. I’m just better at managing my symptoms and getting things done than I used to be.

    I hate to say “it’s a bootstrap thing” but frankly there’s no magic cure, only increasingly difficult iterative steps that you achieve through a ton of practice. I do hope my neurodivergent compatriots here have been able to find jobs that work with their unique skills and brain structures, rather than against as I have found myself.



  • So this is actually an interesting term. Looking it up from Wikipedia…

    The term “sideload” was coined in the late 1990s by online storage service i-drive as an alternative means of transferring and storing computer files virtually instead of physically. In 2000, i-drive applied for a trademark on the term. Rather than initiating a traditional file “download” from a website or FTP site to their computer, a user could perform a “sideload” and have the file transferred directly into their personal storage area on the service.

    The advent of portable MP3 players in the late 1990s brought sideloading to the masses, even if the term was not widely adopted. Users would download content to their PCs and sideload it to their players.

    So as applied to phones it originally meant a particular type of download and install - rather than installing directly to your phone from an app store, you have somehow obtained the file on your PC, transferred the file to your phone, and then installed it. In that context, downloading an APK directly to your phone and installing it would not be sideloading.

    However, semantics have shifted somewhat and now it’s used generally to refer to any install that isn’t directly from an app store of some kind, and requires downloading an actual package file and then installing it.


  • I think this is mostly what you want, but as far as I can find online (and I’ll test it again later today) it no longer shows traffic warnings and your current speed like the destination maps does. I think it used to, though, which is what’s annoying about this whole situation.

    I actually lost this feature for a while - it used to be under the hamburger ≡ menu as “Just Drive” and then the hamburger menu disappeared, and I’ve just recently found it again as a widget.

    So, yeah, Google kills all good things and I’m sure it won’t last for much longer, but it’s nice in the meantime.




  • Reddit does work differently and they would have to implement the ActivityPub protocol in order to federate, which would be a lot of effort for them.

    The bigger thing is, ActivityPub is an API protocol. So for example, by knowing your username and instance I could call a particular API endpoint on your instance and get, just as one example, all your “outbox” messages - everything you have posted, the tags, actors you have sent it to (people or communities), etc. The reason for the large recent Reddit exodus is that they shut down their API because they do not want people to be able to easily pull all their data. So they would absolutely never implement ActivityPub, in my opinion. They want to remain walled off.




  • A fascinating take on it. I’m still wary about Threads interoperating with the rest of the Fediverse, and how that may change the culture as well as the system over time (Meta would have the power and money to throw around regarding changes to ActivityPub implementation), but I also see it similar to email. And I’ve spoken about this before to the point I sound like a broken record …

    But people understand the basics of email. They understand they can sign up for a Gmail account and send an email to anyone else. Maybe Threads will be our Gmail here, and introduce people into the idea of a wider open social media concept in a more familiar way to them, and they can branch out as needed or just choose to stay on Threads.

    In any case, any given instance can choose to block Threads if they so choose.


  • Re: this section:

    As a technical writer, you should stay close to the teams whose work you are documenting. Listen out for any code, SDK, or product changes that may require action. When you hear that a tool may be deprecated, start communicating.

    It just assumes that nobody will ever proactively reach out to the technical writer about deprecations, which is entirely true in practice, but just feels so sad to acknowledge. Please keep your content and document management team(s) in the loop!


  • I feel like the Fediverse hasn’t yet reached the Eternal September moment, and I’m happy for that. A smaller footprint means we get to have our own culture.

    On the other hand, even though it means losing this culture, I would like to see greater general adoption of the fediverse and decentralized social media in general. Sure, there will likely be some big-name domains serving fediverse instances, the same way email is primarily served by Gmail et al, but anyone should be able to spin up their own instance and interact as well. I don’t believe Internet communication should be locked behind various walled gardens, and people should re-acclimatize themselves to a version of the Internet where anyone can host and contribute.


  • people working at the San Francisco-based startup “look down on what they consider legacy companies” and “see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world.”

    With the rumors that the ethics board was worried about OpenAI and Altman moving too fast to truly consider ethics… This checks out. Startups are truly a different beast to larger “legacy companies”, who move slower because they have checks and balances and a reputation to maintain.

    I do think Microsoft would have given them a lot of leeway though, given the gold mine they were about to be sitting on. Staying at the front of the copilot race is critically important right now, and as Microsoft continues to move all its Office 365 services to the web and cross-connect them, it’s even more important for them to have a copilot for Enterprise clients that spans and can pull data from all those services.


  • Details:

    On January 1, 2020, Lowtax changed a setting so that unregistered users could not see the forum index. Anyone not logged in would be given the banpage because of ‘=’ in place of ‘==’ in a section of the code. This led to discovery of an ancient bit of radium code that changed ‘unregistered user’ to a homophobic slur. Jeffrey fixed the bug, but this load bearing slur will live on forever.

    While details are scarce at this point, my best assumption as to what happened hinges on the idea that non-logged-in users with a presumed username string value of unregistered user were meant to be forwarded to the login page, but because a separate section of the code changed the string value of unregistered user to [homophobic slur here], hence nobody actually got the correct forwarding and they were all sent by default to the ban page. If I recall, this led to the unintended side effect of non-logged-in users being unable to log in.

    @favrion@lemmy.world @KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz @Klear@lemmy.world



  • Ok, so I use Gboard and it doesn’t seem to do that for me, it leaves existing spaces alone. Here are my settings:

    Under Text Correction I have enabled:

    • Show suggestion strip
    • Auto correction
    • Auto capitalization
    • Double space period
    • Proofread

    Everything else is disabled, so maybe try toggling things off and on and seeing whether the behavior changes?

    I also have two keyboards I switch between: English (US) and हिन्दी . I’m unsure whether having multiple language keyboards changes how the base functionality works.