Bobby Alexander 🇦🇺

Opinions are my own.

[Bobby Alexander 🇦🇺 @bobbyalex]

Apple is cooked

[Tim Cook @tim_cook]

Meet iPhone 16e, the newest member of the iPhone 16 family! #AppleLaunch

[Pekka Enberg @penberg]

Is there a way to test Github actions locally? It sucks so much to play whac-a-mole with the YAML config to fix one problem at a time...

[Greg Koenig @gak_pdx]

This has been going around, let me explain as a manufacturing guy what you are seeing:

Economic 5th Generation Warfare

That is 100% what this is. The CCP subsidizes every aspect of these operations with the express intent of destroying America’s prototype and production infrastructure. If you are a US startup- why would you boot up a model shop or use your local machine shop when you can just send all your IP to China and get parts back in a week for 1/10th the cost?

If the US Government would:
- Let me buy CNC equipment for 1/4th the price
- Give me a building
- Sell me raw material for 25% the global commodity price
- Subsidize my workforce
- Offer zero repercussions for pirating the most advanced Western CAD/CAM/FAE tools
- Have zero environment, safety, employment regulations
- Offer me a postal service that did FedEx international shipping for 5% the FedEx cost

Give me all of that and you bet your ass I can build you tiny bullshit turbines for $0.75. Sounds like a nice hour long programming/setup project!

Do not be fooled by any of this- this is not Chinese engineers (who are *very* good!) competing against us- this is the Chinese government looking to put a significant percentage of America’s manufacturing base into the ground.

[des @dotnetschizo]

i think everywhere should be more unwelcoming to tourists

[Bobby Alexander 🇦🇺 @bobbyalex]

😭

[Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig]

After they sold their domains business (and customer data) to Squarespace I asked how long it would be until Google Cloud got bored of running relational databases and sold those customers to Oracle.

You all thought I was kidding.

[Molly @mollyfleck]

The shopping cart return discourse bums me out. Returning your cart is one tiny way to demonstrate care for your community, even when it’s (very mildly) inconvenient. We’ve lost so many of those social norms, & it’s depressing to see people defend it, especially parents.

[Jeffrey Wright 🥜 @jfreewright]

Isaac Asimov - 44 years ago. Never gets old, it seems.

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
https://t.co/n4WpEWOM93

[Aaron Francis @aarondfrancis]

My primary responsibility is to provide for my family, and they can't eat Twitter clout.

So if I have to choose between a paycheck and whatever y'all decide is "great UX," I'm gonna choose a paycheck every single time.

I'm intrinsically motivated to do great work and I also believe it's a moral mandate (for me.)

If I ever make something y'all deem as garbage, then one of a few things could be true:

• there are constraints you don't know about
• skill issue
• I have bad taste
• we have differing tastes
• I made a mistake

It's never going to be true that I set out to create garbage. In fact I think that's rarely ever true of anyone, and it's disingenuous to frame it as such.

[Bobby Alexander 🇦🇺 @bobbyalex]

@NotATeslaApp "which they’ve successfully used most recently to replace the ultrasonic parking sensors (USS) on their vehicles." - This is a joke right?

[Adam Lyttle @adamlyttleapps]

POV: Making a YouTube thumbnail

[Culture Crave 🍿 @CultureCrave]

George R.R. Martin calls out producers and screenwriters who change things from the books

"Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and “make them their own.” It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee ... Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain ... Jane Austen, or… well, anyone.  No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and “improve” on it.   “The book is the book, the film is the film,” they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse"

[Jason Lengstorf @jlengstorf]

I like the spirit of this, but I haven’t seen it play out well on teams large enough to have hierarchy. can you say to the CEO, “I’m asking you to disagree and commit”?

in practice, it turns into leadership jargon for, “I’m done hearing feedback; please do what I say”

[James Hutcheon @hutcho66]

In this thread:
- foreigners finding out that Australia commonly sells houses using auctions.
- Australians (including me) finding out that the rest of the world doesn't commonly sell houses using auctions.

[Matt Wensing 🐙 @mattwensing]

Because unlike your website these UI’s do real work.

[Hard Drive @HardDriveMag]

Slight Problem With Windows Solved With Massive Inconvenience of Switching to Linux https://t.co/2jwBzvliOE

[3DCenter.org @3DCenter_org]

Use case for Copilot found 🤣
https://t.co/QEZzsTcCZH

[Bobby Alexander 🇦🇺 @bobbyalex]

Is the current generation of "AI" actually solving any real problems?

[Meredith Whittaker @mer__edith]

Hi, hello, we don’t have evidence of extant vulnerabilities, and haven’t been notified of anything. We follow responsible disclosure practices, and closely monitor [email protected] + respond & fix any valid issues quickly. So if you do have more info hit us up! But beyond this...

...we’ve put a lot of thought into making sure our structure and development practices let people validate our claims, instead of just taking our word for it. This is particularly important to me, since I saw the view from inside a massive tech co and observed how widely their claims could diverge from reality when openness, validation, and an actual commitment to principles were not prioritized. Unlike almost all tech orgs we also build with the belief that the only way to keep data safe is not to collect it in the first place. You can see this in action when you clock the vanishingly small amount of data we have been able to turn over when forced. We fight all subpoenas, and when we are forced to hand anything over, we fight to unseal them and post them here: https://t.co/w6qhHDoEqg

I’ve provided some links below so you can go deeper. In brief:

-- We use cryptography to keep data out of the hands of everyone but those it’s meant for (this includes protecting it from us). The Signal Protocol is the gold standard in the industry for a reason–it’s been hammered and attacked for over a decade, and it continues to stand the test of time.
-- We engage in regular professional audits (last one completed late Jan 2024).
-- We develop in the open, and leverage reproducible builds. A large community of infosec researchers closely scrutinizes every single update, combing through our repos and binaries. This means that any nefarious change that affects the security of the Signal Protocol, of our codebase, or of the binaries we ship, would be detected almost immediately even on platforms like iOS where reproducible builds are not currently possible (BTW, please pressure Apple to make them possible). This is like an immune system protecting Signal from malign forces–wherever they may be–and ensuring the safety of the millions and millions of people who rely on Signal for sensitive communications. (We’re really grateful that so many people care enough about privacy to dedicate time and energy to ensuring Signal’s robustness.)
-- Finally, we’re also a nonprofit, which means we have no incentive to hype bullshit in order to get acquired or bought out–because even if someone did buy Signal, per the 501c3 tax code the money would need to be reinvested in a mission-aligned cause.

https://t.co/rXKIy8nQzf
https://t.co/EmoU8SydES
https://t.co/NRiwqJbVbr
https://t.co/rEmSGVt2sE

[Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン @rakyll]

FOMO in tech is a disease and is working against anyone who wants to tackle hard & important problems. I don't know any other sophisticated/technical industry where trends matter this much, and have this level of impact. We routinely force people to drop what they do and pivot to catch a bus they already missed.