I'm glad I got out of Microsoft. wheresyoured.at/the-cult-of-mi…

When I was there (mid 2017 to late 2020), "growth mindset" was a thing we heard about sometimes, like at new employee orientation and from the executives, but at least on my team (Windows accessibility), I didn't see it being used against employees. Perhaps the Windows org didn't see the worst of it. But now they're encouraging employees to use Copilot to fill out their Connects (reviews), and managers are using it to summarize them.

The Cult of Microsoft

Soundtrack: EL-P - Flyentology At the core of Microsoft, a three-trillion-dollar hardware and software company, lies a kind of social poison — an ill-defined, cult-like pseudo-scientific concept called 'The Growth Mindset" that drives company d…

^{Edward Zitron (Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At)}

Tired of zoom, meet, w/e video conferencing software collecting your data?

Signal's got you❤️

NEW: call links let you start a video call with your fave Signal users easily, no group needed. Announcing these, and other improvements to calling here👇

signal.org/blog/call-links/

Improving Private Signal Calls: Call Links & More

If you love group calls on Signal, but don’t want to create a group chat for every combination of your friends or colleagues, you’re in luck.

^{Signal Messenger}

Welcome to the RB family, Habit Builder 🥳

apt.izzysoft.de/packages/com.o…

Habit Builder provides you with the right tools to keep track of your habits and understand your progress.

Once more, joint efforts with the developer managed to get the app reproducible

#reproducibleBuilds #IzzyOnDroid

„Habit Builder“ – IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repository

Simple habit tracker with insights

^{IzzyOnDroid App Repo}

I’m becoming quite a fan of the @FLOSS_Weekly podcast. The latest episode with @bagder about Curl was super interesting.

Surprisingly for a chat about a seemingly dry subject, had me chuckling to myself a good few times. 🙂

hackaday.com/2024/11/06/floss-…

FLOSS Weekly Episode 808: Curl – Gotta Download ’em All

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Randal Schwartz chat with Daniel Stenberg about curl! How many curl installs are there?! What’s the deal with CVEs? How has curl managed to not break its ABI f…

^Hackaday

The 2024 Web Almanac is out, and this year the accessibility chapter is back, great work @mgifford!

almanac.httparchive.org/en/202…

Accessibility | 2024 | The Web Almanac by HTTP Archive

Accessibility chapter of the 2024 Web Almanac covering ease of reading, navigation, forms, media, ARIA, and accessibility apps.

^{Mike Gifford (HTTP Archive)}

An anecdote that I shared about rolling around on the floor back in 2000 to solve a math problem, both in my #Masterclass at masterclass.com/classes/terenc… , and on #MathOverflow at mathoverflow.net/a/38882/766 , as well as the #NewYorkTimes nytimes.com/2015/07/26/magazin… , has for some reason recently gone viral on various social media. Just for the record, I wanted to add some mathematical background behind the story, which eventually led to my paper arxiv.org/abs/math/0010068 . At the time, I was trying to construct solutions to an equation known as the wave maps equation on the sphere: the solution was like a solution to the wave equation, except being forced to take values in a sphere rather than in a vector space.

I was trying to solve the equation iteratively, breaking up the solution to a low frequency base solution and a high frequency correction. As a first approximation, the low frequency base could also be assumed to stay on the sphere and solve the wave maps equation, so the main problem was to work out what the high frequency correction was doing.

Because the high frequency correction also had to keep the solution on the sphere, one could assume as a first approximation that the high frequency correction was tangent to the low frequency base. So, at any given point in space and time, the low frequency base solution was located on some point on the sphere, and the high frequency correction basically lived on the tangent plane to the sphere at that point. But because the base solution evolved (slowly) in space and time, this tangent space kept rotating around the sphere.

(1/3)

The Singular Mind of Terry Tao

A prodigy grows up to become one of the greatest mathematicians in the world.

^{Gareth Cook (The New York Times)}

Remember the Polish train hackers? The guys who identified why trains being serviced by an independent, licensed train servicing center, "randomly" started failing? And identified the root cause, namely geofencing and/or time-related triggers?

The face charges by the original train manufacturer, who claims the violated copyright and other laws. A fascinating story of contradictory arguments. Enjoy!
#Newag #PolishTrainHackers #Poland #Train #ReverseEngineering
rys.io/en/175.html

Dear authors, and if Netflix or whoever is listening, you too:

If you're out of fun ideas for historical drama, alternate history or the like, how about this: an all-female gang in a European capital, renowned for coming up on top against male gangs and taking good care of their members, and one which may have endured for generations. You don't even need to invent most of it if you don't want to. This gang really existed and they were known as the 40 thieves or the 40 elephants: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_El…

Please write something in this setting. Please!

19th- and 20th-century gang of female shoplifters in the UK

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

This month in Servo…

🔒🔑 early SubtleCrypto support
🎨💡 ‘mix-blend-mode: plus-lighter’
📦↔️ CSS size keywords
📏🏎️ faster layout and compositing
📱🌃 OpenHarmony nightlies

More details → servo.org/blog/2024/11/08/this…

I've seen a number of toots today advising people against scanning random #QRCodes because they can be used in a number of malicious ways.

There are a number of legitimate ways people can use such codes to trick others, and it can require some deeper understanding of how systems work to avoid them. For that reason, I'm not going to contradict that recommendation, but I will add to it.

QR codes are usually just URLs encoded in a visual, machine-readable form, so they aren't necessarily more dangerous than a link. The danger comes from the fact that most scanner apps will directly open whatever URL you scan without giving you the opportunity to consider whether that's a good idea.

You can reduce the risk of scanning such codes by installing a better app which requires manual interaction to open URLs after decoding them.

For android users I recommend "BinaryEye", since it's open-source, ad-free, and has a bunch of other useful features.

Its github page links to both F-Droid and the play store:

github.com/markusfisch/BinaryE…

#privacy #security

GitHub - markusfisch/BinaryEye: Yet another barcode scanner for Android

Yet another barcode scanner for Android. Contribute to markusfisch/BinaryEye development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

I just released version 0.4.1 of #rsop, a stateless #OpenPGP ("SOP") CLI tool based on @rpgp:

crates.io/crates/rsop/0.4.1

This release adds support for the 'revoke-key' command.

For more on #SOP, see datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft…

#PGP #GnuPG #StatelessOpenPGP

#AndroidAppRain at apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid today brings you 9 updated and 1 added apps:

* Raccoon for Friendica: a mobile client for Friendica by @dieguitux8623 & team 🛡️

RB stats: 328 apps (27.1%)

Enjoy your #free #Android #apps with the #IzzyOnDroid repo

IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repository

This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).

^{IzzyOnDroid App Repo}

There are many “what should we do next” thinkpieces, but this one is mine.

If you want an abstract summary, the idea is “we need to run a year-round parallel campaign apparatus that just introduces people to progressive ideas by making their lives better in whatever ways we can”.

That is a staggeringly huge project and if it does even happen, I can only be a tiny part of it, so I will need your help. Contact info is at the end of the blog post.

blog.glyph.im/2024/11/its-time…

Deciphering Glyph :: It’s Time For Democrats To Get More Annoying

Deciphering Glyph, the blog of Glyph Lefkowitz.

^{blog.glyph.im}

⚙️ #EtchDroid umí vytvořit instalační USB disk z mobilu

🔗 infoek.cz/etchdroid-umi-vytvor…

#android #linux

The 2024 Web Almanac has been published:

almanac.httparchive.org/en/202…

I have contributed to the chapters on accessibility and sustainability.

#WebAlmanac #WebAlmanac24 #HTTPArchive

The 2024 Web Almanac

The Web Almanac is an annual state of the web report combining the expertise of the web community with the data and trends of the HTTP Archive.

^{Rick Viscomi (HTTP Archive)}

#COP29 will be the third consecutive COP held in an authoritarian state, and the second consecutive #COP hosted by a petro-state.

chathamhouse.org/2024/10/azerb…

One of my favorite Singapore food writers / recipe developers lives in the Netherlands now.

“Having grown up in perpetual summer, living in the Netherlands with the cold as a constant companion often makes me hanker for foods that I’d never craved for in Singapore.”

That’s what I feel too: the perpetual summer.

The newsletter name is a joke because there are no Singapore noodles in Singapore:

sgpnoodles.substack.com/p/bak-…

#Food #Singapore

Bak zhang

making braised pork and glutinous rice dumplings out of season

^{Pamelia Chia (Singapore Noodles)}

EPD Engineering from Greece uses Tuta Mail for their business. Here's why! 👇

"First of all, for principal reasons, we just don’t want anyone to have access to our data. This is crucial for us as a technical company working with sensitive information. 𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐛𝐞 𝐚 𝐰𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐞, 𝐰𝐞 𝐚𝐭 𝐄𝐏𝐃 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐓𝐮𝐭𝐚 𝐌𝐚𝐢𝐥 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭."

👉 tuta.com/blog/tuta-customer-ep…

How EPD Engineering Services boosts security and efficiency with Tuta Mail | Tuta

Why business customer EPD chose Tuta.

^Tuta

nice service by @jaller94: find missing #stolpersteine on #osm in your berlin kiez. simply load the gpx file into your favourite osm app (e.g. osmand) and add missing stolpersteine to #openstreetmap.

gpx-files: osm-check.chrpaul.de/report/st…

sourcecode: gitlab.com/jaller94/osm-check-…

#osmberlin #opendata

Christian Paul / OSM Check scripts · GitLab

GitLab.com

^GitLab

Want to have a play with the new Matrix 2.0 APIs? 🎉

Check out element-docker-demo, a new super-simple way to stand up Element with Synapse, MAS and LiveKit using docker-compose.

element.io/blog/experimenting-…

Experimenting with Matrix 2.0 using element-docker-demo

element-docker-demo gives you a basic Matrix 2.0 implementation. Watch Matthew Hodgson, Element CEO and co-founder of Matrix.org, step through the set up.

^{Matthew Hodgson (Element Blog)}