Eamonn O'Brien-Strain @eob@mastodon.technology

Reminder to people hiring software engineers. The best can come from surprising places.

If you make your funnel wider you will get more diversity AND better candidates.

It turns out Berkeley and Stanford are NOT in the top ten.

https://codesignal.com/university-ranking-report/2022/

Ukraine is known as the "breadbasket of Europe", but actually it's only the 2nd largest wheat producer in Europe and the 8th largest globally.

This gives some hope that the war-caused wheat price rises that are so concerning for the Global South might eventually settle back.

People think health data privacy is protected in the US, but Thomas Germain points out activities NOT protected by HIPAA:

Browsing Web for Health Info

Wearing Smartwatch

Using Period Tracker

Bringing Phone to Medical Clinic

Doctor Getting Subpoenas

https://www.consumerreports.org/health-privacy/guess-what-hipaa-isnt-a-medical-privacy-law-a2469399940/

I see that both https://www.tbd.website/ and https://www.disco.xyz/ are leveraging W3C standards such as Decentralized Identifiers and Verifiable Credentials.

Maybe they will get us back to the early idealistic promise of a decentralized internet that was hijacked by the trash fire that is blockchain.

It is so tragic that the stochastic parrot has exploited the genuine goodness and openness of a person I admire and respect, and led them so badly astray.

I hope that the situation is treated with compassion.

Are spinners dishonest?

They seem to rotate in response to an activity’s progress.

But they generally are unconditional animations that operate independently.

So spinners sometimes rotate forever after an activity fails.

Perhaps an honest spinner should constantly poll?

Is http://privacycomputing.net a legit site?

They claim to be hosting IEEE-affiliated conferences about privacy computing, but ironically they have a very outdated, insecure website with expired certificates and Flash plugins.

The provisions of the EU's proposed Digital Services Act was supposedly already agreed.

But the EU presidency (i.e. member country governments) tried to slip in preamble text that might require content monitoring.

The EU parliament rejected it.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/european-parliament-rejects-consolidated-text-of-the-digital-services-act/

Just finished "We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland" by Fintan 0'Toole

It's a brutally honest depiction of Ireland's last 60 years.

As someone who was there for 22 of the bad years, it was cathartic to read.

And sometimes shocking.

https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=5EUfEAAAQBAJ

Another overlooked Irish woman:

Violet Albina attempted to assassination the ur-Fascist Mussolini in 1926, and was arrested.

It was politically expedient for both English and Italians to deem her insane, so she spent the rest of her life in an asylum.

https://www.dib.ie/biography/gibson-violet-albina-a10139

I'm bookmarking this site as probably the most reliable tracker of Covid prevalence in Northern California.

Until these graphs starts trending down I'm going to keep on wearing a mask in badly-ventilated or crowded indoor spaces.

https://soe-wbe-pilot.wl.r.appspot.com/charts

Cissie Calahan, a sadly overlooked hero of Ireland's revolutionary period.

Overlooked:

because she was a woman

because she was working class

because she was a trade unionist

because she was against militarism, whether British or Irish

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cissie_Cahalan?wprov=sfla1

"Republicans"

In Ireland, this refers to the IRA who gave up their guns and became democratic socialists.

In the US, ... this refers to the GOP who filled their country with child-killing guns so they could be safe from the socialist menace of their fever dreams.

Lamport: "When trying to write a concurrent system, if you just code it without having algorithms, there’s no way that your program is not going to be full of bugs"

(Preferably your algorithm includes Byzantine generals or Einstein's relativity.)

https://www.quantamagazine.org/computing-expert-says-programmers-need-more-math-20220517/

I was getting annoyed at how slow my Mobile Chrome was to open the tab overview screen, so decided to close all my tabs.

Then I realized why it had been so slow.

Here's a way on Android to keep searches private…

1. Long-press Chrome

2. Select "Incognito Tab"

3. Search

4. In notifications, close incognito tabs

Closing incognito removes the phone's history of the search activity, and deletes cookies by which the server knows you.

(Context: https://slate.com/technology/2022/05/roe-overturn-data-privacy-laws.html )

How a tree can design a typeface:

1. Carve letters into a tree.

2. Wait a few years.

3. Capture the changed shapes of the letters.

You can download the font to use yourself from:

https://bjoernkarmann.dk/occlusion-grotesque

I no longer feel I can use their own preferred name:

pro-life movement

given we now have a more accurate name:

forced birth movement