I guess you can call it "back on my bullshit", but I'm giving social media another try. I had a Mastodon instance a while back and when I looked at the cost of running my own (I am never not running my own. There's no version of this reality where I'm on someone else's instance. Is that main character energy? I don't care, you should want to own your own creative output), it was like $40 a month, + £25 a year for Ivory and that's just too much. All that, combined with how difficult discoverability is in both directions just made it untenable for me at the time.

However, I recently discovered the linuxserver Mastodon Docker image. I had been using a linuxserver image for FreshRSS until recently (Reeder is now iCloud only so I don't need an RSS backend) and they work so well out-of-the-box that I wanted to give Mastodon another try, on infrastructure that I'm already using (the same server this blog's hosted on) so it's not costing me ~$500 a year.

I've been feeling for a while like there's writing I want to do that is now-focussed. I miss that about how I used Twitter and Instagram - that was always used for what I'm doing now; what I'm thinking now. And my blog was for what I've done of note. I've tried to fold more of that stuff into this blog but a lot of it doesn't fit and is just left un-written, and I love to write. I don't want to not write just because I don't have somewhere for that writing to live.

So I'm writing on Mastodon as well now. It'll take me a while to find my voice there; it always does. But I have my brief - Mastodon is for what I'm doing now, and blog is for what I've done. I like that distinction: it keeps both places focussed.

The discoverability issue is still there, but I've always wanted to be unmotivated by my follower count. The number of people watching shouldn't dictate what you do. That's part of why I don't have comments or anything on here. I assume no-one reads, so when I do get an email or a message about a post, it really means so much, and that's what social media used to be about. I want that again; I got so much from that era.

If you have recommendations for accounts to follow on Mastodon (especially if it's you!), please email me some links!

Aegir shared this post on Mastodon earlier and I think it's an interesting take on something I've attributed to an ability to debug.

Fixing stuff for a living makes you really good at being wrong. Forty times a day you'll be all "Bet it's one of the outputs on this chip. Nope, well let's check the inputs, what're they connected to... okay so it's further up the line," and you get practice at dropping wrong ideas fast before you follow them down a silly rabbithole, you get to be okay with going "Well, it'll be this, unless I was wrong two steps ago and then it'll be that."

I worked with a guy once who was REALLY bad at being wrong. Like, he'd spend literally hours hilariously misaligning a single pair of flippers rather than consider that he might've used the wrong coil stop. He bloody soldered his crimp connections as well!

Being wrong is a skill and with a lot of practice you can get good at it. When you've let enough silly nonsense run through your head and dribble out your ears then it's as easy as inhaling to get a wonderful perfect beautiful boy of an idea, and in the next exhale you can toss that same idea in the trash with all your other nonsense where it belongs.

I won't toot my own horn about many thing but damn it I'm GOOD at being wrong. It's taken me YEARS to get this good at fucking up.

I learned to debug really early on in my career. My first job where I wasn't a junior, I worked on a codebase that had been maintained by someone who was always 100% sure that they were right (this isn't an exaggeration - I've genuinely never met or known someone so arrogant in my entire life), and that had resulted in so many incredibly confusing things that were an example of that "misaligning a single pair of flippers" mentality. Some people have an idea of how they're going to implement something and they will not deviate from it (or consider deviating from it), even if they meet with substantial resistance.

At the inoffensive end, this looks like reimplementing existing functionality (i.e. not stopping to think surely this must have been implemented already or not R-ing TFM), but at the terrible end, you usually end up implementing hacks in your initial idea because you didn't test/think it through sufficiently, and you didn't go back to the drawing board when you hit real problems.

There can obviously be a tonne of reasons that you might not be able to go back as far as you should, to refactor your code or approach to accommodate these realisations, but you should always at least try to learn lessons from them when you can¹. Analysing your own ideas and output and accepting when you were wrong, or could've been better, is the easiest way to improve in almost anything. I do it at work, and I do it whilst playing badminton; it probably fits most places. The ability to be constructively self-critical² gives you a toolset for self-teaching that l've found so incredibly valuable over the years, I couldn't even list the ways it's helped me if I tried.

I'm not really sure what my point is here. That toot got me thinking and I'm not sure I agree with it entirely, but a lot of it fits with me. It can't just be a matter of being wrong because I am terrible at that sometimes, but I think it depends on where I'm wrong. There's at least two people that I can't bear being wrong in front of, but I'm definitely fine being wrong in the comfort and safety of my own office. But it also can't just be a debugging ability because you need to be able to do it before real problems arise.

I should've mulled this for a few days before trying to write something.

¹ Most notably, every relational database relationship is many-to-many, given enough time. Always design systems so that converting to many-to-many would be minimally disruptive
² I don't recommend just being self-critical if you can help it

Apple Intelligence isn't just an inferior product, it seems to actively make everything it touches worse. Lasted three days before turning it all off. Does time just make everything worse? It seems to.

I bought Forza Horizon 4 on Steam because it was super cheap, and everyone says it runs better than 5 (it does seem to), and it's so fun. I feel like I knew, but it didn't occur to me, that it's set in England and that might mean I would recognise parts of it. It has the Southwick Hill Tunnel (or something that looks a lot like it), and they talk about Broadway, which is a Cotswold village where we used to go and get sweets as kids when we passed our driving test. Is this how Americans feel about every other game?

It does have one thing I hate though. The licensing for all the DLC expired so you can't buy any of it any more. Fortunately, that means that all of the signposting and upselling from the game is gone, too. I mean, it wouldn't make sense to regularly nudge me to buy DLC that I can't buy so it's good that that's all gone.

Of course it's not gone. The game is still full of nags to upgrade, and there's a big LEGO logo on the map that you can't interact with unless you like looking at feature lists for dead DLC, then clicking links to Steam pages that don't exist any more. Personally, that's not what gaming is about.

It's a shame because the game is a lot of fun. I'm hoping that I can ignore the completist side of my brain long enough to play the game until I can't win races any more, then let it fall down my recently played until I fully forget about it like I did with Forza Horizon 5. In fact I should probably get the 5 DLC whilst I still can, so that that can gather digital dust in some database row with my user ID on it.

Licensing is truly one of the worst things about 21st century media. It makes me laugh that a thing designed to curb piracy and preserve ownership actually does neither.

Does anyone have a contact at the EU? If they're going to legislate on cookies, I'm going to need them to step in on share-tracking. Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, probably others; when you share a link, they add an fbclid, si, whatever, unique ID to your link that they can use to track who you shared that link with and associate you with people even if you're not friends with them on that platform.

If you share links from these platforms with people, please strip that crap out before you share. iMessage has added an extremely unhelpful feature that automatically obfuscates these share-tracking links by loading previews immediately so you can't even see that you're sharing these links.

I hate technology and the people who create it. The internet had such potential and we let the scumbag normies in and they've ruined it.

It has taken me about two months to drop Google as my search engine and web browser. The reason it's taken so long is the alternatives suuuck. Oh my god they suck.

I am now using DuckDuckGo as my search engine and the results are bafflingly stupid sometimes. You'll run a search and it chooses completely the wrong word in your query to focus on, and there doesn't seem to be a thing you can do about it. But I'm now just used to it?

I've switched browsers to Firefox because Google are limiting the extent that ublock can block ads, and this is the most difficult one. Stupid search results, I can live with, but Firefox is unbelievably annoying in some ways.

I do a lot of local web development, and I have dnsmasq running the localdev TLD. Both Chrome and Firefox do not like it when I go to clientname.localdev - both search that value in your default search engine. Both require you, first time, to enter http://clientname.localdev. Annoying. Firefox, however, requires you to enter http:// every time you type out a subfolder path on an existing fake domain for the first time, too. Google has figured it out but Firefox just cannot and it makes me scream every time I type out clientname.localdev/path/to/something and end up on a list of search results rather than my local version of that site. As I write this, it occurs to me that I could point one of my real domains to localhost and it might solve that problem, but I feel like I shouldn't have to do that!

That's the primary annoyance but there's loads of other slightly annoying things about Firefox that make me want to jump out of the window (we live in a bungalow). I think I'm now just used to being annoyed all the time.

Is this what it means to be a grumpy old man? I don't care for it.

I think it's maybe a symptom of advancing age but I've been enjoying watching sports a lot lately. Between F1 and badminton, I spend a fair amount of time on this already, but apparently there's always time for more. I like having it on in the background, too. Something about the sound of sport creates an atmosphere that I find comfortable. F1 is good for this; anything with an engine is good background noise.

I wanted to try watching some NBA again; I used to watch it a lot as a kid so I watched a Lakers game. I also had no idea what the format of an NFL game was but I've been super intrigued about it for a long time so I watched a match and loved it. Hugely preferred it to basketball, so I've signed up for a DAZN mid-season pass to watch some more NFL for the rest of the year. Who wants to talk football? I don't know anything about it and I'm going to have questions.

In a game where you can play as a pangolin, how are you going to play as anything other than a pangolin? Don't talk to me about axolotls; have you even seen a pangolin?