dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

#communication Articles


"Is This Project Still Maintained?"

If you - like me - regularly check out sourcecode (read: Git) repositories of projects that you stumble across or use in a hobby project/product or at work, you will now and then find one or more issues in their tracker with a title similar to the above, often with remarks …


Why Everyone Needs a Blog

The easiest way to see how much you need a blog is to do this thought exercise. Imagine going back in time to a 21-year-old in 1952 and asking them what their opinions are, and where you could find a book of those opinions. Here’s what they would say …
article header image

Presenting presenting

Tips and thoughts on preparing and giving engaging presentations. As a person who does not give presentations often (lots of reasons), the points and pointers in this article sound really helpful. Also, one of the better explanations about why a full, information dense slide is unhelpful: Now imagine the audience …

The ineffectiveness of lonely icons

If your target audience is a general population, you should not be using icons alone to convey anything meaningful. By doing so, you have made assumptions that are unlikely to be appropriate to a general audience. You should not assume icons or UI elements are known to your users, as …

How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation

When I described the Responsible AI team’s work to other experts on AI ethics and human rights, they noted the incongruity between the problems it was tackling and those, like misinformation, for which Facebook is most notorious. “This seems to be so oddly removed from Facebook as a product …
article header image

OOM killer, gun for hire

shorberg | I think total war got confused... ↪ | it thinks I have, 133 758 976 MB of VRAM tadzik | it's possible if M stands for mili ↪ | this many milibytes is just over 128 megabytes shorberg | :P ↪ | let's hope it doesn't actually try to use that much aquatix | the OOM killer likes …

isso comments are up again

Commenting had been broken since the 19th of December because of the host having upgraded to Python 3.9 and isso breaking. I tried installing it anew from pip, but there is still a really old version on there; installing it as egg directly from its Git repository1 kind …


Slightly sad about a big dish

Almost a week ago, the massive Arecibo Telescope (part of the Arecibo Observatory) collapsed. It used to be an impressive dish lying flat in the lush green forests of Puerto Rico. The construction already was deemed dangerous and was planned to be demolished, but the event still came as a …
article header image


Uncluttering my wife's brain

I am digitally pretty well organised. I keep notes in places I can actually find them back, I use proper ways of keeping the codebases and projects I work on maintainable not only for myself, but for others (quite a fascinating thought), photo archives are sorted by date, subject, I …

COVID-19: day 3 of working from home

We live in interesting times. Countries are in a situation they have not been for multiple decades, if at all. Lots of people will not even remember the last time a situation like this happened. Our prime minister had a historic speech on television (a good one, in my opinion …

Help hunt bugs, do not just report them

Today I came across the forum post Don’t report bugs, contribute to bugs hunting about more directly helping (open source) developers help you. Developers really try to write working solutions and like Aurélien Pierre notes: We are the developers. That means we can guarantee you that the software works …

Meeting budgets: an idea to keep meetings useful

You need meetings. No really, you do. Your team has to line up, get and stay on target and decisions have to be made. The same goes with your stakeholders. However, everyone knows about those meetings that seem to go on forever, have too many participants and/or seem to …