ryan @ ryan @the.coolest.zone

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

---

Read more

Posts

1

Comments

211

Joined

2 yr. ago

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.

LaTeX resume templates exist if you wanna get extremely fancy with it. Otherwise, any text editing document that allows some basic level of formatting and headers will do the trick. If I get sent an extremely beautiful and well-formatted resume to read, it's a "good attention to detail" footnote in my mind but ultimately the actual content is much more important.

Since we're on the subject of resumes though, an open message to anyone who might be reading... Don't have an LLM help you write your resume. It's extremely obvious and makes your resume worse because it gets real generic and wordy with it. I've seen them, I've not been impressed by them, it makes me think this person may not actually be able to write coherently on their own.

And remember, a resume is a personal advertisement for you - make it punchy, and keep to bullet points highlighting impressive things you want a recruiter and hiring manager to know. Include buzzwords as pulled directly from the job posting to get through automated screening. Highlight projects you've done and what positive effect they had on the intended audience.

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.

OK so I've read this whole thing and I'm still a bit confused, so help me please: this refers to the "Driving Mode" which hides all my apps and gives some weird simplified interface, right?

Because there's also a "Driving" mode which is only accessible via a widget (why, Google) which gives you a map while driving without having to specifically enter a destination. That one's staying, presumably?

Important context autotldr missed:

The incident happened when the engineer was programming the software that controls the robots, which cut car parts from aluminium, The Information reported.

Two of the robots were disabled, but a third was inadvertently left on. As it went through its normal motions, it caught the worker in its claws.

Yikes, that should be checked multiple times before someone gets close to the clawed aluminum cutting robot. Failure of process, I suspect.

Oh, you "know", eh? Sounds like we got a scientist over here, boys! Let's get him!

(But seriously: I added that bit because I went and looked it up myself based on your post, and I thought it was interesting and other readers might also find it neat. One of those TIL things.)

Somewhat unrelated, but I do find it funny that farts aren't considered acceptable, but sneezes and coughs are. Like, farts have an extra barrier in the form of your clothing (assuming you're not at a nudist colony or bathhouse) and won't make other people sick. I guess it's just because they're stinky.

I vote to normalize farting with an "excuse me", and saying "bless you" to people when they fart.

Devil's Tower is apparently not even a volcano according to science, but "but was injected between sedimentary rock layers and cooled underground. The characteristic furrowed columns are the result of contraction which occurred during the cooling of the magma." source

Anyway, science can be wrong, assume everything is a volcano until proven otherwise. Devil's Tower? Volcano. The hill outside your house? Volcano. Your dog? Believe it or not, volcano.

"client side validation is fine, nobody's gonna open up the dev console"

I can absolutely see the same as what you see there. The brain's pretty good at blocking stuff out like that in general. Between my nose and my glasses frames, it's amazing how I mostly go through the day ignoring impeded vision.

While I get what you're saying and I think sometimes emojis can absolutely be overused or used in place of textual clarification, I feel they also serve as an effective substitute for a lack of non-verbal communication. Generally speaking, "what people say" is only half the story, and "how they say it" (the nuances of facial/bodily expressions, tone of voice, etc) is the other half.

When writing narratives, we get away from this by means of, well, narration. "... he said, cheerfully"; "... he replied, with just a twinge of annoyance to his voice"; "she said, while averting her eyes".

In first person communications like social media, we don't really have an effective way to communicate that sort of nuance. We do have action asterisks shudders in horror, shorthand expressions to represent actions like LOL, and emoji 🤷‍♂️ as potential alternatives, as well as some community-driven linguistic nuance like Reddit's usage of "/s" to indicate sarcasm.

We could also go all old-timey letter writing and say things like "while I find myself hesitant to reply to you in fear that you will consider it an attack, I do find myself with some concerns in regards to your comment and will elaborate below. I hope that you will not take these concerns as dismissive of your opinion in any way, as I simply mean to clarify some doubts and seek your own opinion on my thoughts as presented above." (This might be an example of "overly eloquent" and there is probably a happy medium.)

I find the ever-evolving linguistics of internet communication to be really fascinating, if you can't tell!

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.

Is it actually a Mandela Effect if you've just forgotten what a guy's name is? I always thought it was more about mass confabulations.

Agreed. Instances always have the option to defederate with Threads should it prove spammy or ad-filled or socially awful, but I'm cautiously optimistic that Threads will pave the way for a more open social media paradigm in general. Decentralization is a core tenet of Web3, and everyone started focusing on the block chain and Bitcoins and whatnot but there's so much more to decentralization than that.

It's the style right now. Personally, I'm hoping for a "retro beige case that can hold modern hardware" era because I have terrible taste.

We already exist in a cyberpunk world, and people are just beginning to wake up to it. Implants that go obsolete, corporations controlling everything, the general sense of despair because you can't change the system, only rebel in hopes of improving the immediate life of yourself and those around you...

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.