FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Spotted in SE Portland last week #nightinthewoods

The progress bar GUI widget was created so that a program could show its progress to users in a nice, linear, and moderately predictable way.

But now the progress bar is used primarily to show a complete lack of progress, moving back and forth in the progress tray like the light on a Cylon's face, as reassurance to the user that, no, the program hasn't frozen, only that the company behind it couldn't care less about its users.

i love that my server literally runs out of disk space on a regular basis because the fediverse instance software it's running can't regulate the size of its media cache. i love disappearing from the internet for hours at a time. i

I should probably write a blog post about Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth: where it came from, how it compares (unfavourably) to basically any hardware synth, why it sounds bad, how it could sound better if you use it right…

Perhaps the best remote I have ever seen.

Bumblebees learn by observing other bees. Bumblebees, like ants, may even teach each other. In a University of London experiment a bee watched a "fake bee" (a fuzzy yellow & black orb on a stick) pushing a yellow ball into a circle for a sugar water reward. The bee copied this action.

When a nest mate was introduced, they learned by watching the bee trained in the previous experiment. I find the idea of a "fake bee" adorable.
https://www.popsci.com/brainy-bumblebees-can-push-balls-into-goal/

The research was fundamentally flawed and should not be used as evidence that one group is better than the other. It does, however, highlight the problem of biased research that stigmatises everything about us.

There has been a lot of research about autistics over the years, but this one really took the cake! 🍰

Find out what happened when researchers attempted to compare the moral compass of autistic and non-autistic people... (1/2)

#actuallyautistic #autism #neurodivergence #comic #art #MastoArt

A cishet guy in my FB timeline lost a bet and has to spend all day wearing the jersey of a sportsball team he hates.

At first I didn't understand why it was such a big deal. It's just sportsball. It's just clothes... oh.

This must be like the cishet guy version of dysphoria.

I'm coining this as 'Sportsball Dysphoria'.

my talk "Why can't you multiply vectors?" is now live on youtube!! 🎉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htYh-Tq7ZBI

Tired: A WORD is 16 bits
Wired: A chomp is 16 bits

Apparently mathematicians think I should use the term "large positive integers" and not "big naturals"

Transitioning manually is too hard. I need a stray bolt of magical energy to transform me into a girl.

*talking to a straight couple*
So like... which one of you is the handler, and which one of you is the mech pilot?

remember kids: the point of the html "class" attribute is to list out the explicit formatting of every element on your webpage.

CSS was supposed to split formatting from HTML! and it did.

now instead of horrible HTML like <font size="7" color="red">, we have CSS!
So our HTML can instead look like:
<div class="size-7 color-red">

note: you'll need to include a few hundred KB of CSS libraries to make this work properly, but that's the price we have to pay for elegance