Today's dumb idea: Use one of these old 1978-era Merlin toys as the shell for a terrible AI assistant. Poke at the buttons like Al did with Ziggy in Quantum Leap.

I have a few Merlins, at least one of which has an intact case but the innards seem beyond repair from battery corrosion.

@mos_8502 I'm thinking some combo of microcontroller nonsense and 3d-printing for new non-destructive guts in one of these Merlins

Been more of a zoom-and-figma-sticky-note engineer than a software engineer at work in recent months. I'm working on evaluating this turn of events. Current draft thinking goes something like this...

@tkinias@historians.social A problem is that nearly anyone who tries to start a phone OS will be used by the hardware manufacturers as merely a tiny cudgel against Google & Apple in negotiations.

(moreso against Google, of course, since Apple's an all-in-one hardware and software stack)

I kinda wish Mastodon described "content warnings" more as "subject headers" to make them maybe sound like a mutual-utility thing than a "censorship aaaaa i thought this was america aaaaa stop bullying me" mess.

It's really handy to have toots labelled with a subject, whether that subject's something folks do or do not want to hear about.

Like, sometimes, a "content warning" / "subject" slapped on a toot gets you more engagement from interested folks - so it's not just a squelching function

@thomasfuchs Yeah, I think hashtags are good for search / discovery, CWs seem better for deciding whether to pay attention to things rolling by in the feed?

Along with that, though, I wish more Mastodon clients had finer control over hiding message bodies based on content warnings. Like, add the ability to hide / not hide based on keyword match not just hide if there's a CW at all

@Greg Yeah, true true

There, I added CWs just to be thorough :D

Oh yeah, one other mastodon pet peeve related to CWs:

Sometimes they're really handy on instances with extra-long character limits - e.g. my instance lets me write 10000 character toots, while others have no limit at all (e.g. wordpress, writefreely).

A CW / subject can be a handy "read more" kind of thing in that case. Except when a mastodon client kind of just applies a blur filter on the really long post, leaving a really long hunk of nothing to scroll past rather than a collapsed post.

Anyway, this toot storm brought to you by me spending too much time in zoom today and puttering over in this mastodon window during a lull

Also, I just made a series of "hmm" noises like a Villager in Minecraft, which I think is a consequence of my current pureed-soup-brain status.