Tweeting, archived
From 2006 to November, 2022, I posted a variety of pithy thoughts on Twitter twitter account @mattly. Sometime around 2014, I started using a script to automatically delete most of these, keeping only tweets that had met a certain favorite / retweet criteria, the specifics of which shifted over time. In May of 2022, I started using Mastodon more, and have settled into a new home at hachyderm. In November 2022, I downloaded my archive from Twitter, deleted everything from their website, and logged out forever.
This page is a new home the contents of that account, which I had referenced in some of my articles here. It is not really a best of, or even really a most popular. I purposefully removed some popular “Quote Tweets” because that would involve copying and pasting words from other people, and I did not want to wade into those murky ethical waters.
As I’ve said, Twitter is a great context-removing machine, so I’ve added a bit of context and hindsight commentary in the asides.
I’ve been looking for an excuse to play with @glitch for a while and tonight I felt like hacking up a solver for NYT’s “Letter Boxed” game… on my iPad, so I present: https://nyt-letter-boxed-solver.glitch.me/
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Twitter is a great context-removing machine.
Something happened! What? Oh we couldn’t tell you that, but we CAN give you everyone’s takes!
If, like me, you’re a fan of the Discworld novels & held off on reading the Tiffany Aching subseries (Wee Free Men +4), ‘coz they’re marketed as “Young Adult” novels, get over it & read them. It’s the same formula skillfully distilled. My kid & I both enjoyed them quite a lot.
Dear Apple:
When I upload an image into a web page, I never, ever, ever want to upload a .heic file. No one knows what that is. They want, and I want to give them, a jpeg.
In a huge personal milestone, I released my first single! Two tracks I’m pretty happy with, people have kind of called my style “lofi cinematic”. This is the start of an album I’m hoping to finish this year.
https://matthewlyon.bandcamp.com/album/when-both-became-neither-single
<click help link>
It takes you to a Slack Channel. The last message is from 2019.
It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
IDK why so many of y’all hate spreadsheets. They’re breadboards for data.
bob: so how do I serve some html
joe: it’s not a server, it’s a container orchestration system
bob: ok it’s not a server. How do I send html to a browser?
joe: You write a Dockerfile, helm chart, & CI pipeline
bob: Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?
joe: I believe I did, Bob
Me: look I don’t have a computer anymore, I can’t use your website to update my kid’s information
School District: what do you mean you don’t have a computer “anymore”, you need one to use our website
Me: yes I threw my computer out the window after trying to use your website
I don’t ever want to hear about the complexity/bloat of modern JavaScript from people who advocate for Docker/Kubernetes ever again
If it’s not clear to people yet, you’re not just going to have to do remote working, but thanks to school closures, asynchronous working as well.
No.1 impediment to that? Meetings. Pare them down to only the necessary, and don’t invite people unless their presence is necessary.
Pro tip: When talking about someone who left the company, say “is no longer with the company” instead of “is no longer with us”.
Especially do this over written asynchronous communication.
Your periodic reminder that the collective noun for “estimate” is fantasy, as in:
Based on this fantasy, we think it’ll be done by the end of the month.
I don’t get people who use a $ in “Micro$oft” and yet trust their entire lives to Google
Two weeks with the hearing aids and I’m not going back. They’re like glasses. And they’ve also changed my attitude towards cybernetics.
Now we just need to make these sorts of accessibility augmentations more accessible.
After four years of working from home, I forgot how distracting offices can be.
“Your password appears too random. Please enter a more memorable password.”
Oh go fuck right off.
Current Mother’s Day Status: helping this little guy and his mom recover from introducing him to the world.
If Facebook really wanted to make the world a better place, they’d buy Snopes and integrate it into the timeline.
I wrote about startups, acquisition, and burnout: https://lyonheart.us/regretting-the-golden-handcuffs
This was difficult to write, but it helped me recover from it.
Every time I think “I should use a state machine for this” and I don’t, I regret it. Every. Single. Time.
when the programmers take over, timezones will be the first against the wall.
There are really four types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Estimates.