Technologies: Bit of everything, full-stack web dev (Vue, React) is what I have most experience with as well as Python. Web scraping, data analysis, recommender systems. Some ML/Pytorch as well albeit not LLMs. Lately I've been focusing a lot on Clojure(Script) and programming language design.
Primarily looking for part-time or contract-based stuff, but totally open to full-time for things that are genuinely interesting or truly aleviate suffering in this world. I'm very available for short-term gigs and odd jobs, so if you just need someone to run chores for you for a couple hours at a reasonable rate, I'm your guy.
Professional experience going back technically to 2012 if I'm allowed to be a little cheeky (used to write Minecraft Bukkit server plugins for some extra money as a teen) and provable professional-quality work going back to 2017.
I think "act like it's ridiculous" is pretty hyperbolic here. I didn't know what ARIA stood for until now (though I knew what it was).
You'd be surprised how many people barely know it exists... I was a TA for my uni's Web Engineering and Ethics in CS courses and accessibility never even came up in either course.
> I was a TA for my uni's Web Engineering and Ethics in CS courses and accessibility never even came up in either course.
That is genuinely baffling to me. How does a university teach web engineering without even mentioning accessibility? It’s not just best practice—it’s often a legal requirement for public-sector sites in many countries. Even outside government work, major companies (FAANG included) publicly invest in accessibility to avoid both reputational and legal fallout. Ignoring it entirely sends the wrong message to students about professional responsibility and real-world standards.
Many schools are not very good at teaching real world skills. Always been this way.
It’s why ‘self taught’ in many disciplines is very doable too, if someone focuses on what people actually want/need.
They might not be good at articulating the differences between fizzbuzz and bubble sort, but they can get shit done that works.
Every PhD that I know that went from Academia to Industry immediately had their stress levels decrease 10x and their pay roughly double too - because they could finally do a thing, see if it worked or not, and if it did, get paid more.
Instead of insane constant bullshitting and reputation management/politics with a hint of real application maybe sprinkled in. Few ‘knives’ have to be as sharp as the academics, in my experience.
Didn’t come up in my ethics course either. Unless you actually know someone with an accessibility issue, it’s unlikely you have encountered it or recognized it if you did.
For example: You don’t realize how absolutely abysmal voice control is for computers until you have to use it.
There are so many assumptions about the world that causes things like neurodivergence to become a disability instead of a difference.
> * I think "act like it's ridiculous" is pretty hyperbolic here.*
Fair. I might’ve read more snark in the “Apparently,” than the commenter intended to convey.
For what it’s worth, the comment you read is the toned down version of what I had initially come up with. I really don’t think being dismissive of accessibility concerns is good style.
You made me realize it's like NASA: a good chunk of the worlds knows it, but I bet most don't know what it stands for (at least outside the US I bet 99.9% don't know -- me included haha)
It's illegal to have navigation in your vehicle tell you there's a camera coming up in France, enforced and punished by high fines (I moved here from NL which has no such law).
"just like the bad-thing-doers of old, today's bad-thing-doers believe what they're doing is actually good" is a keen insight in itself when broadly applied, but useless for distinguishing bad things from good things.
I am wary of their misuse for production of really slick propaganda. One of the weaker spots of the old regimes was that their propaganda was becoming unbelievable. The contrast between glorious posters of the classless future and shabby, decrepit exteriors of the cities that were falling into dysrepair was huge.
AI can probably produce better propaganda than mediocre party hacks.
Except Titan likely has more water on it than Earth. Therefore unless we’re a fluke of a solar system planetary bodies with water on them should be extremely common.
Titan is outside the frost line. There’s no question that there’s a huge amount of water in solar systems, the question is if there’s a consistent transport system (comets, in this case) that moves it inside the frost line to where liquid water can, given an atmosphere and gravity, exist in conditions that match our familiar conditions for life.
The article mentions that the inner planets were initially too hot to retain water, but presumably Titan didn’t have that problem, being much farther from the sun.
Titan is interesting, but much further away from the sun, so different conditions. We want earthlike conditions, life that can sustain on anything else, is just hypothesis so far.
Mars is further out in the solar system, and I'm assuming it was further out than Theia when the collision occurred.
The article doesn't say no planets can have water, but just that originally Earth was too close to the Sun to have liquid water. Theia, according to this hypothesis, was not.
Inspired by another recent post on ATProto I signed up for bsky, but all I see is endless American politics. I relentlessly click "less like this" but it doesn't seem to budge. Is this just what the platform is like? Being constantly barraged by the same predictable takes on today's bizarre overseas controversy is not very conducive to mental peace...
To add a (positive) point of comparison: The concept of multiple named "feeds" with various degrees of "algorithm-ness" to them, including ones largely controlled by the user's explicit signals, is something that Tumblr implemented in a fascinating way.
IMO Tumblr's constraints were quite unique in the social space: a userbase that one could quite naturally (and with a badge of pride) describe as "rabid" in its expectations that their historical dash experience be preserved in much the way it had been in the early 2010s (with or without a ball pit included); a legacy PHP codebase without the benefits of Meta's resources; and ownership under various companies throughout the years that (from an outsider's perspective) did not prioritize algorithmic optimization of its feeds as a C-suite-driven priority, unlike practically every other social network at scale.
The result is systems like https://github.com/Automattic/stream-builder that enabled Tumblr product teams to define Following, For You, Your Tags, Popular etc. feeds with complex but deterministic and predictable specifications, where each feed would round-robin each slot from a mixture of well-defined component streams.
I'm not as familiar with Bluesky's implementation, but I imagine it has a similarly predictable algorithm for these user-defined feeds.
I would encourage anyone building any kind of discovery experience to look at this repo, at least at its readme and guide, for inspiration. You can, and should, build magical experiences without needing to make your feed algorithms inscrutable. Not everything needs to be TikTok, and I think the world can be a bit more sane if we don't have that as our base assumption as engineers.
For You is based on your likes. If you get an empty feed then you probably haven't liked anything yet. Try liking a couple of posts in Discover feed and get back to For You.
Hmm... I found a couple of accounts I liked and completely removed "Discovery" tab and then I extend the followers list organically by the shared interactions (see some interesting comment in followers posting) or by following account from blogs/websites…
IMHO this is how "social-media" should work instead of being forced-feed with some automatic crap
It does thankfully have a functioning non-algorithmic feed that only shows who you've followed, which I feel is the only way to maintain sanity on any of these platforms.
I imagine myself switching over to that pretty quickly if I do stick with the platform (I also use YouTube that way) but that doesn't address the discovery problem.
It's just really sad that you give people a platform to say whatever they want to the world and most people seem to have little to say beyond "here's what made me unhappy today"...
The real problem is the expectation of immediate discovery. People have gotten used to "give me something new now", and the algorithm complies but then quality is low.
Slow, organic discovery is where it's at. Seed your feed by following people you already know, then slowly add other people you come across. If your feed is half empty for weeks, that's a feature, not a bug.
I made the mistake of selecting "art" as one of my topics of interest during the account setup process and my feed is full of drawings of furries and comic book superhero nonsense.
Lacking any useful deities to give us an objective definition of art, we're going to have to go with the majority opinion here: pictures people create with their hands and brain are art.
I tried bsky for one year, and I agree that I was getting mostly American politics… which as a European is just noise for me.
I went back to Mastodon, it’s much better to follow tech people.
And feedly for RSS to get all the news I can dream of.
Not sure what the point of Bluesky is anymore, it’s just twitter but on the left side of politics. Sad, the tech stack was interesting as an evolution of Nostr.
I would recommend not using an algorithmic home feed.
I don't know how it is on Bluesky, but on Mastodon I only see posts from people I follow, including posts they've boosted. When I see interesting boosts or replies, I check if those are people I want to follow. Works great.
Also go to Settings > Contents and Media > Your Interests and turn off News and Politics. If you were wanting news and politics but just non-American I don't have suggestions.
Do you follow anyone? If so, who? If not, you're in an edge-case for users who haven't yet started following anyone.
Follow people. Carefully curate who you follow. Your feed will be exactly what you pick. It's a lot like old-school Twitter before it went algorithmic.
Unpopular opinion: you do not need Twitter-style social media in your life. In fact, it is actively harmful for your mental well-being.
I signed up for bsky, had the same experience, and realised my life is qualitatively better without constant exposure to manufactured drama, ragebait and American politics. I deleted my account. Life is still meh, but could be much worse.
Use the "Following" feed and select what you want to see as a most recent of what you've followed. The client will stay on the Following feed until you logout. It should be the default, but you aren't forced into an algorithmic feed on bsky.
It's not just who you follow, it feels like the way people post changed as well: I follow mostly the same people as I did on twitter but most act different now, more hot takes and opinions, less signal. To be honest I'm not fond of the popularity contest vibe, but that's irrelevant to the protocol itself.
It depends on your threshold for normal but the guy has maybe 1/100k strange IQ while holding 1/50 strange beliefs. No matter how weird your beliefs are it'll never make you as abnormal as an Einstein or someone who's 270cm tall
Remote: Yes please
Willing to relocate: Nope
Technologies: Bit of everything, full-stack web dev (Vue, React) is what I have most experience with as well as Python. Web scraping, data analysis, recommender systems. Some ML/Pytorch as well albeit not LLMs. Lately I've been focusing a lot on Clojure(Script) and programming language design.
Résumé/CV: https://webbieweb.org/work/looking_for_work.html (haven't gotten around yet to going in detail on portfolio, inquire by email for my actual CV)
Email: akk0@webbieweb.org
Primarily looking for part-time or contract-based stuff, but totally open to full-time for things that are genuinely interesting or truly aleviate suffering in this world. I'm very available for short-term gigs and odd jobs, so if you just need someone to run chores for you for a couple hours at a reasonable rate, I'm your guy.
Professional experience going back technically to 2012 if I'm allowed to be a little cheeky (used to write Minecraft Bukkit server plugins for some extra money as a teen) and provable professional-quality work going back to 2017.