Ben Ramsey @ramsey@phpc.social

I don’t discuss lots of coding or tech challenges because they don’t interest me. I’m interested in people and using tech to make our world a better place.

As a result, politics are a necessary part of the discussion.

I had contemplated leaving politics out of my feed and trying to stick purely to tech, but that feels disingenuous and also does not help accomplish my goal of trying to make the world a better place.

I’m Ben, a web dev, author, & speaker. I’ve been at this for >20 years, & I’m always eager to help. If you have questions about the Web, FOSS, PHP, or APIs, ask.

I advocate for decentralization, open source, open standards, & the Commons; I believe good UX is the key to mass adoption.

I’m active in the PHP community. I founded Atlanta PHP & co-organize @nashvillephp, & I authored the popular ramsey/uuid library.

I’ve spoken at many conferences. If you see me at one, say “hi.”

#introductions

“[Jack] Poulson has started Tech Inquiry, a non-profit that aims to make it easier for coders with a conscience to speak out inside their companies when they feel ethical boundaries are being crossed.” http://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/13/google-whistleblower-launches-project-to-keep-tech-ethical

“Generalise, don't specialise: why focusing too narrowly is bad for us” http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/12/generalise-dont-specialise-why-focusing-too-narrowly-is-bad-for-us

I don’t even understand how this made it passed peer review.

“The study has limitations: only [20] participants were involved, and the experiments only involved responses from white people.”

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/jul/01/other-racial-groups-look-alike-because-of-visual-and-neural-processes-study

Tim Cook: “If we accept as normal and unavoidable that everything in our lives can be aggregated, sold, or even leaked in the event of a hack, then we lose so much more than data. We lose the freedom to be human.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/19/tim-cook-if-youve-built-a-chaos-factory-you-cant-dodge-responsibility-for-the-chaos

“There is no one right way to do APIs. Sure, there are many different processes, practices, & tools that can help you optimize your API operations, but despite popular belief, there is no single ‘right way’ to define, design, provide, or consume APIs.”

https://apievangelist.com/2019/06/16/there-is-no-single-right-way-to-do-apis/

Mostly just lurking.

‪RIP Vonda N. McIntyre. Her Nebula Award winning Dreamsnake is one of my favorite novels.‬

@JPEG For reference, here is the behavior I see. The only thing I did before it started doing this was to add a second account, which was also on the same instance as the first account I added. Both accounts are on this phpc.social instance.

Earlier this morning, it was crashing like this, so I uninstalled it and reinstalled it.

@JPEG I really love Mast. Unfortunately, it often crashes and I have to uninstall and reinstall it. Are there any tips to avoid this? It doesn’t appear that others have the same issue, so maybe it’s my device or the server I’m connecting to? I have multiple accounts on the same server. Could that be an issue?

Is there a way to mute just a particular posting client on Mastodon? I want to mute everything from Mastodon Twitter Crossposter.

New #birdsite in “night mode” looks very familiar. 🤔

Dot social being down is kind of like having a netsplit on IRC. The rest of us are all still here.