Phil Landmeier @shuttersparks@social.cleverlibre.org

Kummakivi is a 500,000 kg rock in Finland that has been balancing on top of another rock for 11,000 years

Cleaned up a lot of the banding issues, thanks to
@gmic with h/t to
@stim3on

Pretty incredible to see the #Mastodon app at the very top of the list of free apps in the iOS App Store here in 🇨🇦. For reference, Twitter is currently #45.

#TwitterMigration #RIPTwitter #iOS #Apple #AppStore #Apps #iPhone #Twitter

#riptwitter

The list of things that have gone wrong at Twitter is, well, extensive. But the simplest one happened at the very start, was exacerbated by Musk's subsequent communication, and was extremely, IMHO, predictable.

So, let's talk about the difference between startups and established tech companies.

I worked at a startup as my first job out of college. Put five years in. It was an amazing experience and I was truly fortunate to have it; I was thrown into the deep end, learned things about software architecture that would serve me well throughout my whole career, and wouldn't trade it for anything.

I also:

* broke off a date with my future wife because I was the only one of three team members who could make a demo work for the next day. We pulled an all-nighter.

* became well-familiar with the biker gang that pulled up to the bar across the street from our office every Saturday night; could set my clock by them arriving. Did often, on account of all the seven-day weeks.

* got the sickest I'd ever been, out three weeks. Week two, my CEO calls and checks to see if there's any duty I could take on because we had no other hands to do it. I wrote some user-facing documentation. Three months later, someone caught all the obvious typos and asked "What idiot wrote this?" I dead-panned that I think I missed some issues on account of all the vivid hallucinations.

* had a conversation with my doctor about the indigestion that was waking me up at night. He suggested I relieve stress. I responded "I work at a startup, so what are the options that don't require a career change?"

And eventually, I left because I was ready to stop living like that.

Here's the thing: there is *so much* of the software dev ecosystem where you don't *live* like that. You live like that because you're working on something you're willing to sacrifice yourself for it (I'm not talking about being passionate about the work---you can be passionate and have a work-life balance---I'm talking actual sacrifice; things you won't get back) or you are expecting a *huge* payout relative to the invested effort. If those ingredients aren't there? You don't take that gig. And companies that aren't willing to offer that payout or the kind of we-are-here-to-change-the-world opportunity don't get those employees.

Twitter was once such a startup. It's not anymore. It went public. Once a company goes public, it's no longer a startup; it's a place people who want a reliable paycheck and a reasonable work-life balance go to work. At Google, we were counseled to have a "startup mentality" by leadership, and people certainly tried to give it their all, but... You just don't work like you're at a startup at a 100,000-person company. You can't. The buy-in isn't there. It does you no good to pull seven-day weeks when the database team you're relying upon works five-day weeks, holds all the credentials to modify the DB, and just won't answer their email on a Saturday. What's the point then? Go home, love your spouse, work on your house, hike in the park, touch grass.

Musk tried something I don't think I've seen before: he tried taking a company that "won the game," as it were, and *roll it back to a startup.* He took a place people had a stable job making a product people use and tried to make it a place where the future was uncertain again. And then he confirmed that, yes, he *was* expecting those employees to work seven-day weeks to realize a vision... A vision he didn't even enunciate.

Twitter was a place steady hands were working to maintain a mature product for a reliable paycheck. A mass exodus is entirely expected. I don't know why *he* didn't expect it.

On Twitter when I posed species I tried to hashtag them correctly with a full name so one could track various photos of a species. I don't think it ever caught on, but maybe we could do that here?

If you know the species of the bird you're posting, add a hashtag with "camel case" so screen readers know where each new word begins, as hashtags here have no spaces, hyphens, or apostrophe.

#OrchardOriole for this one. Photo taken at Long Point, Ontario.

#birds #birding #birdphotography #phenology

Along the lonely US395, in California but on the other side of the mountains, and flagged by a highway sign and some rock pillars is a monument that the US tried to forget

Thousands of Japanese were interred here during WWII stripped of their freedom, their property, their belongings, much of which was never recovered

Most of the site was bulldozed after the war, trying to give it back to the chaparral

Foundations like the hospital here and the cemetery are all that is left

This was Manzanar

Hello, world.

When I execute say an #-search on Mastodon, is my search crawling every instance that my instance has a relation to? Or how is my my search executed? #Mastodon #search

I'm seeing a lot of image posts in here (even from famous people) with no alt-text. We're losing accessibility, guys. 😢

If Musk leaves hate speech up on Twitter, even "unboosted" and unmonetized as he now says he's planning to do, he will most likely be violating the terms of the Apple App Store and Google (Android) Play Store, and of course various EU regulations.

Twitter's trending box right now is perfection

One thing that's getting a little lost in this mix, is that some of the people desperately holding on at Twitter are because they are trapped by either healthcare or visas.

That there are systemic traps that trap worker in America so they feel unable to move freely to new employers who want them and would have better pay or conditions is *nuts* and deserves a lot more attention than it gets.

So, uh, hi Mastodon! I mainly post about amateur radio stuff. I work HF, satellites, launch weather balloons and chase radiosondes. I also help @xssfox run sondehub.org, and develop software related to that, like radiosonde_auto_rx, the Horus Binary 4FSK telemetry mode, and ChaseMapper.