# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 379
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/https://twtxt.net/user/lukem/twtxt.txt/twtxt.txt&offset=379
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?uri=https://twtxt.net/user/https://twtxt.net/user/lukem/twtxt.txt/twtxt.txt&offset=279
Effective within a week or two I'm quitting Twtxt.net / Twt. I feel fatigued with various things, including social media in general. I need to retreat and regain focus.\n\n@https://twtxt.net/user/dilbert/twtxt.txt> will stop working on 13th February. I can transfer it to anyone who wants to keep it running. If not, I'll just archive it.
@dilbert Hits damn close to home. Pun maybe intended.
@prologic thanks! The website by itself is an expensive long-term investment and I have very modest expectations about it. In fact, if it attracts one cool opportunity within next 3-4 years I'll call it profitable.
@ionores you mean the site or the egg? Unless it's a bug I failed to catch I can't think of what can be missing there.
For the first time since mid-2010s I redesigned my business homepage.\n\nI hate the way it looks and the language it uses but I made it in egoless fashion to fulfill a very specific purpose and cater to a very niche group of people.\n\nThe silver lining is that it contains an Easter egg. You need a certain popular cheat code and you should know it by heart if you were playing games in 80s and / or 90s. Find it.
@prologic I'm glad it's finally happening, that's my 4th correspondence board at the moment :) Off to bed for now though, more moves tomorrow.
@prologic apparently I can't challenge you due to both of us having provisional rating in correspondence chess, even for an unrated game. Weird, Chess.com allows for that. Could you follow me back? Maybe it's about us not following each other mutually.
@prologic btw, you down for correspondence chess? I want to challenge you for best-of-3, is 3 days per move fine?
@prologic stole the joke from Hacker News. Yeah, may his soul rest in peace :(
How did Sean Connery shave? Just like all of us. Ctrl+S.
@prologic that's why I try to approach this from unusual angles to keep stuff somewhat actionable. I won't change anything by generating more political content online but spreading call-to-actions and giving support to relevant entities is what can make this... I dunno, a little more bearable?
@prologic we've had a stupid de-facto-dictatorial government since 2015 but only recently they crossed the line and pushed forward very unpopular court ruling about abortion that pissed off hundreds of thousands of people in whole country. Even my tiny family town which has been consistently supporting the governing party for a decade saw people protesting. I'm not sure if it turns out to be revolutionary but we definitely haven't seen this kind of shit since 1989.
Today I'm breaking a no-politics-on-my-social-channels rule to pass an important message.\n\n-> read news from my area from last week\n\n-> consider supporting Women Help Women, Abortion Support Network or any other similar organization so that women from countries like mine can work around oppressive governments that refuse to draw a clear line between religious beliefs and personal choices of individuals.\n\nThank you.
Recipe for a hard-boiled egg: 1. cook a soft-boiled egg, 2. forget you're cooking an egg.
@prologic specs look decent and the price is okay. Motorola is generally underappreciated as a smartphone manufacturer.
@prologic (a) any older flagship, e.g. something Samsung Galaxy line, or (b) any middle-end past 2016 or later e.g. Samsung Galaxy J or Galaxy A, or (c) something from Xiaomi, Oppo, OnePlus or Huawei that has Google apps pre-installed and fits the budget.
@ionores thanks! Road to grandmaster has begun.\n\nWhether I manage to get it done within my lifetime is another story. :)
Won my first match against the computer. Feels like winning my first StarCraft 2 match back in 2015. 
@prologic oh okay, I didn't know this one but I've seen devices running on a very similar concept. This whole idea of a 'basic phone' has been alluring me for years but I'm afraid I'm a lost cause when it comes to carrying an always-online computer in my pocket.
@prologic got it! Thanks for the hint about promoting the pawn, that was the thing I didn't try. Now off to sleep, more learning tomorrow :)
@prologic @antonio I want a real coffee machine that doesn't use proprietary capsules but those are darn expensive :(
@prologic okay, but what about the rook on a2? I have to clean whole board.
Quite a few of my friends independently of each other started talking chess this year, so I decided to sit down and finally learn it. I signed up for an account on Chess.com and I'll see how it goes. If anyone has a profile there, feel free to add me to your list.
@prologic I try to resolve that kind of issues with relevant people first. Once that fails, online rants are sometimes produced. :) The aim of those is not to blame anyone in particular but (hopefully) raise awareness of a problem in question.
Okay, I'm glad I could help contributing a highly requested change to your open source product I use myself every day. But you merged it and never relased an update which effectively sends me a message that my effort was meaningless.
@prologic 100% agree, but the side effect of having to commute / work-from-office regime in my life was that it offered consistency. WFH, while giving me plenty of extra time in my life, introduced a lot of chaos and I'm still struggling with it. And when I can't deal with it, I start oversleeping.
@prologic the last time I was consistently getting up at 5am was when I was still commuting to the office and had to drive early in the morning to avoid traffic and find parking space close to my workplace. I'm not saying I miss those times but something of value definitely was lost.
Out of a sudden I woke up before 6am like on old pre-pandemic times. Now, how do I repeat that trick tomorrow.
@prologic @slashdot if it was indeed 'criminal defamation' as the article suggests (I have no further evidence to question or back up that claim), then I see nothing crazy about that. I've seen enough people doing malicious things online to give business owners the benefit of the doubt.
@prologic there are, however, ways of fixing typos without spamming commits but I'm just too lazy to learn new tricks.
@prologic typo fixing is what I do very often as well, but I don't care that much because I squash commits before merging.
Therefore, any major x.x.0 version is usually faulty for one reason or another. x.x.1 is the one that works. :D
Approximately 20% of minor releases in my projects on npm happen because I mess up linking or omit words in sentences. I feel sorry and not sorry.
@prologic Yeah, I mistakenly blame GitHub out of habit as I do majority of my merges via web interface. Still, it makes ZERO sense to me haha.
Really GitHub?\n\nI mean, REALLY? 
@prologic @dooven in my case PRs fail to trigger CI builds with Travis (GH Actions are said to be affected too but I don't use any). I disabled them and I merge things without test builds tonight. No big deal as I have fairly strict testing regime in critical projects, but feels weird.
@prologic actually I had a look at 2 of them that I felt competent enough to read and fully understand :) But the rest has to wait until I'm done with my work day.
@prologic I can do that in 3-4 hours when Friday afternoon officially starts for me :)
@prologic thank you! Been a hell of a ride and I'm still enjoying it after all.
Today I realized this month marks exactly 10 years since I jumped into IT.\n\nObviously my journey with computers is much longer than that. It's only 10 years ago when someone decided to put a price tag on my skills.\n\nI'm not sure if that's worth celebrating or not. Despite seeing things over those 10 years I often feel just as insecure as I was back in 2010.
@prologic @dilbert as for mask effectiveness, I'll just say that low probability of an event doesn't mean it will NEVER happen. I've seen enough in my life to just be cautious on my own while other people ignore risks.
@prologic @dilbert I wear masks as my local regulations require (currently they're required in shops and crowded places where you can't keep enough distance from another people). Yes, it's a little harder to breathe, but I personally never had problems with that.
@dilbert @prologic in all honesty I prefer people who wear masks on Zoom calls (that implies they might keep wearing them in appropriate contexts as well) than people who refuse to do that out of their own stubbornness.
@prologic my take is that people doing stupid things with computers is what keeps our industry alive and interestingš
@prologic I, for example, once committed and published a change that broke a functionality and I didn't even blink when I saw test snapshots being overwritten with garbage. 4 hours later it turned out those parentheses in a regular expression were in fact meaningful. Several build processes on the way and full test coverage didn't protect me from my own stupidity. So yeah.
@prologic haven't we all done that at some point of our lives?
@prologic conversation view seems broken on my end. 
@prologic I'm not sure if new regulations apply to your region but that doesn't sound like a bad idea. At least spend or withdraw any money you may have on it.
PayPal is about to introduce fees for inactive accounts in a majority of European countries starting 16th December.\n\nNo one in Europe seems to know what 'inactivity' exactly means. Even PayPal uses offensively vague terms like "not too much" in their help pages.
@dilbert @prologic oh come on Carl, this is easy. Should have placed your webcam so that it pointed to your neck and say you can't get it any higher. š
GitHub pretends it's still 2018 and they just added that cookie consent popup. Lol.
@prologic @antonio I can't remember. Some non-mainstream one, but bigger than ours. I'll get back to you if I recall the name.
@prologic if you want an annoyingly detailed point of view on this aka another boring wall of text, I can offer one later this week.
@prologic @antonio I'm pretty sure I've seen one social network having their app deleted from both app stores for reasons orbitting closely around this issue.
Adding contribution guidelines to all of my open source projects on GitHub. Because apparently I have real human beings using my stuff and some already contributed things.\n\nThis is something I didn't expect to happen any time soon and I'm not treating this lightly.
@prologic Epic tried to challenge the fact they have to pay 30% for each in-app purchase in Fortnite by adding an alternative payment method against App Store and Google Play rules. Both app stores removed the game and additionally š suspended developer license to Epic. What follows is that Google is silently exploiting this fiasco to sync their IAP policy with Apple - all purchases only via Google Pay and no mentions of other forms of payment. I'm not a fan of Epic, but I'm sad to see both app stores decided to go for a war against their own users.
@antonio beautifully simple idea as long as it holds phone tightly.
@antonio @prologic I'm pretty sure James knew what he was doing and just tricked me to write another blog post here so that I delay launching my own blog. :) In all seriousness though, I'm very glad to read that. I learnt a lot myself while doing the research for this piece.
@prologic in theory the law works fairly well, some companies were fined. In practice, I set my expectations very low. Cases like mine happen everyday and I'd have to hire a personal assistant to post complaints about every single company that does stupid stuff with my data.
@prologic there are a few entities that could ever have a dataset consisting of my phone number and my employment information: 1. Recruiters 2. My favorite pizzeria. I'm considering setting a few companies in my country in a legal fire.
I got an international call to my private number from a representative of a certain well-known database provider who was surprisingly well informed who I am and where I work.\n\nI'm very careful to whom and when I give my private phone number and this situation is annoying. I guess someone will get a GDPR data request soon.
@prologic all right, I'll write quick and dirty commentary as a blog post tomorrow, as I can't fit it in a single twt. For now I'm about to go to sleep :)
@prologic mostly because I coined that term myself for brevity. RMS is Stallman's initials, whereas by agenda I understand his general stance on free software and non-free services online.
@prologic This article sums it all I think. Take note what he says about free software, online tracking and cash and you essentially know what his next interview will be about.
If you're familiar with RMS agenda then nothing new or insightful to be honest. Fairly well balanced interview in a rather peculiar medium, but I rarely see RMS in mainstream channels so that counts too.
@hellson this old (and certainly not my own) joke was very well received a lot among my less nerdy friends too :)
The guy who invented the USB connector died. They lowered the coffin into his grave. Then they lifted it back out, turned it round, and lowered it back in again.
@antonio oh yeah, I saw it. Not great, not terrible. :) On a serious note though, the series was thrilling to watch. I was too young to witness it myself but my family could confirm general misinformation and Lugol's iodine were indeed real.
@antonio thereās no such thing as bad homemade pizza. Period. Also, thereās no such thing as āIāll be there in 5 minutesā when thereās a bigass puddle between our homes.
@prologic I deeply appreciate your sense of humor good sir. :)