1,061 karma · joined September 14, 2010
Former Technology Director @ Trans Lifeline. they/them
@cmg on the bird site
const index = "Hello HN".indexOf("H")
console.log(index);
>> 0
index == false
>> TRUE
index === false
>> FALSEhttps://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=75314#p753...
It's important to note that Aza Raskin is the son of Jef Raskin, who wrote a lot about interfaces (including a book called The Humane Interface), and worked on the original Macintosh at Apple, on the interface.
Aza Raskin has continued that work at Mozilla and elsewhere and I'm glad he has. Though I miss the original Songza interface https://signalvnoise.com/posts/1117-fresh-ui-ideas-from-song...
Unfortunately the developers weren't able to get Google to work with them on a policy change that impacted the app [0] [1] and so gave up and have moved on to a new and completely different customer support service.
[0] https://developers.googleblog.com/2020/08/guidance-for-our-e... [1] https://mailplaneapp.com/blog/entry/mailplane_stopped_sellin...
So unfortunately
It seemed like absolute magic at the time to me and my friends - from my PowerBook on the couch, we could change the song playing on the iMac on the other side of the room! Wish I still had that source code to look at.
Sad to see this, but not surprised after the Salesforce purchase. Heroku was a great place for hobbyists and tiny one-off projects. What's a good alternative?
My post was general, not specific to CTL.
- A culture of internal anti-Blackness. During the uprising of 2020, staff and volunteers wanted the leadership team to address real issues with race inside the organization. As a member of the leadership team at the Director level, I pushed for many of the staff-led changes, but most of the team wanted to just talk about things instead of implementing policies.
- I had a bug in some software I wrote - applications for a service were supposed to be distributed based on race. A few more white people than they wanted got through. I fixed the bug immediately (it was a concurrency issue), explained it, and was met with absolute hostility - shouted at in meetings, labeled a white supremacist and removed from leadership. A plan was developed to have mediation, but after months nothing happened.
- From what I understand, they have basically gotten rid of their QA program that would review calls to make sure operators are properly trained and handling calls appropriately.
- A former staff member went missing during a mental health crisis. They said they were going to provide FMLA but fired her instead, leaving her partner and children without any financial support.
- Piss-poor answer rate. After they fired their Hotline Program Director last year, basically no one stepped up to run the hotline. Folks I've heard from have reported that many volunteers (the backbone of the hotline department) left, new volunteers weren't being processed properly.
Many, if not most, of these places give the operator full access to your phone number and whatever geolocation data they can get based on that. They also have policies where the operator is allowed/encouraged to call emergency services on you without your ongoing consent, or even without telling you. In my experience talking with others who have been affected by those kinds of policies, this can lead to police breaking down your door while you're naked and crying, or worse. A person in deep crisis is not likely to respond well to armed officers showing up, as the police are more likely to come into the situation looking for conflict.
Sometimes, you can call a local dispatch and just get medical services, or maybe a fire department sent first. But that's entirely up to the discretion of the dispatcher and local protocol.
There's also a relatively common experience I've heard where people who aren't actively suicidal call these lines, and the operator (I won't say counselor) is completely dismissive: "if you're not going to hurt yourself, what do you want me to do?"
Not to mention the stories I've heard where call centers just have passwords for their internal systems on sticky notes laying around on monitors...
The general field is so bleak that some other folks with peer support experience and I have started a nonprofit where one of the things we're doing is building open-source software that will let anyone create their own support line. Security and privacy are our primary concerns, ensuring that operators and callers never see each other's numbers or any kind of information.
[0] non-consensual active rescue is the practice of calling emergency services on someone without their OK
[1] The line was Trans Lifeline, which I cannot recommend supporting for other reasons at this point
Twitter recently started adding a 't=' param to their share links [0] as well, and I can only guess that it's some kind of similar tracking scheme. From watching browser traffic it appears to be generated when you click the share button, but I might be wrong about that.
[0] https://twitter.com/NanoRaptor/status/1548301612246249474?s=... - the first thing in my feed. Link works fine without any of the query params, of course.
Or encode some versioning scheme, and keep trying various versions until one comes up with a valid link. If we can think of these things in seconds, so can the engineers at FB.
After nearly a year, I can help set up for dinner ("Where are the plates?" "There is bread on the table already" "Do you want tea?") and similar things.
Now I'm getting into genitives and such, and that's where Duolingo really seems to not do well. It doesn't explain why a word appears a certain way in a tense, it just makes you memorize that it does. Sometimes I'll ask my husband why, and he just says "Well, because that's the way it is". Of course I'll use the same explanation when my MIL asks me something about English.
> Hi Dr. Jack! My cat is very slow and does not eat cat food. Can you make an appointment for me?
> Sorry, you have the wrong number
> Sorry, I just checked, I entered a wrong number, please don't mind. hope I did not disturb you.
> Best of luck with your cat!
> thank you for understanding. You are a kind person. where do you come from.
And then I just moved on with my day, because as nice as that sounded I wasn't looking for a conversation.
The contact profile image is of a young, attractive Asian woman, I think at a restaurant. No reverse image results on Tineye or Google.
[Edit: I’ve had this number for over 20 years (not “nearly 20”) and now I feel old.]
It's a difficult balance. Power users, engineers, developers - we can (usually) tell when warnings need to be heeded. People who use their devices to achieve a goal without really understanding or caring about what's happening usually won't.