secretdark

Yeah, might add this as a toggle. Seems to be the bit that people ask about.

I have changed it now (see another comment above.) But now it is less accursèd! Ah well.

I tweaked the labels when I was working on the combined mode, where I figured they make more sense as indicative of the general, combined alphabetical area. I hadn't considered they'd be confusing in the 3-hand mode. I've split the positioning of them between the two now. Appreciate the feedback! It does make it _less_ accursèd now, which I feel could be either an improvement or a regression. I leave it to weigh on your consciences.

I mean to be fair the entire thing is pointlessly confusing.

I made an alphabetically-organised clock. I am sorry.

I've been working on an MQTT Broker/Topic tree explorer. It's intended to help someone understand what kinds of data are moving through their broker, what the busiest data is, and just generally be pretty. https://ryanbateman.github.io/mqtt_vis/

OSS, MIT licensed. Feedback welcomed!

A list of every .horse domain.

For a warm-down, the Unwhorl app would be a good way for your snail to unwind: https://www.unwhorl.com/

Neat! A while ago I did something similar using genetic algorithms. https://vimeo.com/666317

That's definitely a position worth considering, but I don't think it relates to the reasons behind this change. For one, the straw-man argument you put forward relies on the seller not knowing the customer's intention with their product. Given the timing, I think it's absolute reasonable to assume why they put forward this change (though I'd be happy to be told otherwise). An appliance seller can reasonably deduce that their pressure cooker will reasonably be used for cooking if there's no evidence to the contrary. If a neo-nazi recently featured on the news for blowing up some people with a pressure cooker turns up at your pressure-cooker store asking to buy a pressure cooker and you knowingly sell them a pressure cooker, yes, you are absolutely complicit if they blow up some people. Similarly, if a government organisation, recently in the news for putting children in cages, wants to buy or license your software, it's reasonable to assume that they're going to use your software to directly or indirectly further their goals, which may or may not include caging children. Washing your hands of it, in a pull-request, is a moral and ethical choice, as much as they wish it wasn't.

What I find most amazing is less the politics aspect and more the moral/ethical issue. For a company to have an explicit stated policy of _actively_ never taking into account the moral/ethical impact of their work is just... astounding.

It is difficult to imagine a more inhuman and bloodless statement.

This is a personal project in which I downloaded, parsed, listened to, and physically indexed every one of my uses of Google's Voice Assistant technology. It is an attempt to get some insight into both the amount and type of metadata contained in these audio recordings, as well as an attempt at understanding the kinds of conclusions that could be drawn from it by people working on 'surveillance capitalism' products.

It consists of 698 annotated index cards and my full voice search audio archive.

Great read, but speaking as someone who lives on one of those houseboats (and passes through Islington occasionally), please don't consider a canal a safe place to 'ditch' potentially exploding things in future.

Well, I think it's tough to tell whether it's Nokia adopting Android or the company that's licensing the Nokia name (a Chinese hardware manufacturer) that's adopting Android. I don't doubt they had sign-off on the Android aspect (and, hopefully, actual device quality) prior to lending their name to it, but it seems like, given their plan to license off the Nokia brand, their "adoption" of anything is kind of moot.

We have plenty of evidence the rest of the solar system exists. Why bother exploring it?

London, UK, Remote, Contract

Stack: J2EE/Java (10 years), Android (4 years)

Resume: http://uk.linkedin.com/in/rbateman

Contact: ryan@darkindustries.co

Overview: I currently develop Android applications and run a small team of freelance/contract developers and designers. We specialise in the development of Android applications for iOS-based startups but have produced apps for everything from large media clients such as NBCSports to individuals with a neat idea.

I ended up working as a developer for an digital agency based in Toronto. It was relatively small (~10 people, in total) but catered to some huge clients. I realised that, with experience in freelancing (managing my own time and projects), consulting (working with non-technical clients on technical projects) and development itself, my skillset was varied enough that the jump from freelancer to simple subcontracting to business owner shouldn't actually that large a move. Once I thought of that, not doing it seemed impossible. I can't say it's been as smooth-sailing as I thought but I've been doing it for a little 2 years now and we're still here.

The biggest shock was probably the amount of time it takes to simply manage the business. While I was used to a degree of bookkeeping and simple project management from freelancing, I wasn't quite prepared to spend a fifth of my time managing the everyday flow of the business, as I find myself doing now. It's a natural progression, but I still can't say I'm quite used to it. I am better at planning for it though, and ensuring that my time spent project managing is taken into account. Hope that helps.

I got there a little while ago and started my own little business (a mobile development company, predominantly for Android). I've had a startup, worked for fairly large web-name, done a bit of consulting, and worked freelance. The business is, by far, the hardest in terms of stress. I can't say I don't spend any time at all envying a few of my friends with stable jobs, salaries and work hours, but it's been an eye-opener in terms of personal growth and my own capabilities (occasionally a lack thereof) and I can't recommend it enough. My own endeavour may well still fail but I've learnt more about myself and my abilities than I'd ever have a chance to in a normal 9-to-5.

I had a recruiter contact me for a developer position recently at a good, interesting company. I politely declined, saying I'd started my own small company. He said again that it was a rare opportunity, likely to disappear, and began going through all their upsides again (or, at least, the ones he figured would appeal) and finished with "and they have a foozball table!"

I don't want to belittle fulltime jobs, fun working environments, or large companies, but in my opinion the chance at working for yourself - even if you suck at it - is worth more than regular access to a foozball table.

Best of luck with your dream. I'm pullin' for you, brother.

Yep, will do when the work continues. It's on pause right now while I'm away.

I live on a canal boat in London (http://everythinginthesky.com/tagged/boatlyfe) that I'm looking to do up in a similar fashion. It's a long road, though - I installed solar panels and a basic 3G wifi setup, but it's all been delayed while I have it stripped back to bare metal and rebuilt. The nice part about the boat is that the arrangements for moving it / living on it are a bit more formalised than I imagine this is and are part of the lifestyle. Still, this seems like a much more mobile solution. Good post!

This is a slightly different take on this 'forgotten employee' story.

I was made redundant by a large, rather famous web-giant once, only they managed to screw it up (forgetting that firing employees in Europe, especially in a large group, is apparently somewhat harder than firing employees in the US). As a result, their intention of firing 120+ techies in our office in one day turned into a 4 month long arbitration period (exacerbated by the fact that we only found out we were all fired via a company-wide webcast, intended to only be broadcast to the surviving employees. They had actually forgotten to come tell us we were fired.)

Since we were all still technically employed during this arbitration period, we were vaguely expected to come to work. Since our managers were all fired as well, though, no one really bothered checking. Since they'd fired an entire department - an entire floor of one in a large, beautiful building - the floor was filled with 100+ geeks, all on a paycheck but with no expected output. Some simply didn't bother coming in, deciding instead 'to work from home.' Most, however, did come in - to play the Wii & foosball, work on their own projects, and idly look for new jobs. A few small startups came out of it. A few fun open-source projects.

My favourite aspect of it, though, was that my old manager made it his personal job in the remaining time to ensure that each and every one of the people he was responsible for had a new job waiting at the end of the 4 month period. He organised recruiting drives with local startups, got everyone's CVs, even rented a pub one evening so we could all catch up with a few local startups.

That large web-giant is hiring again apparently. Not many of my old colleagues are interested, it seems.

Hi Tim,

Yeah, a revenue split model would work much better but unfortunately Marco hasn't chosen an 'official' Android client just yet (and doesn't seem disposed to) and has mandated the subscription model for all third-party apps. It's understandable, given his wariness of Android (which is seemingly somewhat justified.) I am going to make a concerted effort to make the app appeal to users who don't know about Instapaper or the model, though. I've been concentrating on providing the best possible app to those who already understood both of these to the detriment of new users who don't know the service at all, the logic being that if you know what Instapaper is, it's because you're already aware of the excellent iOS apps.

Ryan (the developer of Papermill)