Big tech allows Inciting violence and targeted harassment if it's against the "right people".

They allow coordination and organization if you're with the "right group"

The media, law makers and celebrities embrace the voices of the unheard (RIOTS) if they're the "right voices"

🎉🎉 PHP 7.3 is here!

Here are the things I'm excited about.

🚂 Trailing commas in function/method calls!

This will certainly be a required styling choice for me. Same delightful benefits of trailing comma in multi-line PHP arrays, and JavaScript objects.

🧵 Less disgusting heredoc syntax!

Inlining heredoc strings in any way right now is grrrosssss. Now we get sensible capabilities. Everything that was wrong with it is now fixed!

(Ignore the bad syntax highlighting)

☠️ Finally, not-so-silent json_decode error detection!

This really sucked before, now it just sucks a bit less (who wants to pass a 4th param and pass 2 default params first? (helper function anybody?)

📜 Not horrible functions for getting the first and last item (or key) from an array!

Before you either strung a bunch of functions together or messed with internal array pointers. This is a much-needed improvement.

Today we’re going to talk statistics and semantics. I’m going to do so via the medium of one of Twitter’s favourite stats 1.7% (aka “intersex is as common as red heads.”). The statistic comes from Fausto-Sterling’s work, which you can see a review of

To understand the statistic, we have to drill down into what the meaning of the word intersex is. Most people think of hermaphrodites. Let’s stress at the beginning there has been no example ever of a human being with both sets of working reproductive organs.

There is a very tiny percentage of people who are born with both testicular and ovarian tissue (what Fausto-Sterling calls “true hermaphrodites”). And when I say tiny, we’re talking intersex tiny, as in 0.0117/1,000 live births, or one in 1,000,000. These are very complex cases.

So, how do we arrive at 1.7%? What Fausto-Sterling does is apply a wider scope. Instead, she argues that intersex is anything that doesn’t fit into a platonic ideal. The platonic ideal, in this case, being a phenotypically perfect XX female and a phenotypically perfect XY male.

This means that intersex, used in the context of the 1.7% statistic, includes people for whom there is no sexual ambiguity. Take for example Klinefelter syndrome (XXY males). As Fausto-Sterling acknowledges, many males can go their whole life and not realise they are XXY.

“Why are Tumblr and Facebook cracking down on sex so much? And why is Facebook in so over zealous about it? It’s all Apples fault!” Etc etc

I can explain all. It is largely the fault of a set of US laws called SESTA and FOSTA.

Why was @LudwigAhgren's Twitch stream yesterday a masterpiece in creating live content?

Ludwig started off with a high energy intro with background music that sounded like an entrance theme to a WWE wrestler (or a Saturday morning TV show).

He then moved onto a segment where he attempted to break a 'world record' for speedrunning Unban Bingo.

(a trending piece of content right now, with in-jokes with the Twitch community and funny content that can be repurposed for YouTube).

Ludwig follows this up with a 20 slide presentation on 'how to make it big as a streamer'.

He engaged viewers into chat by asking them to vote directly in chat temporarily, which perfectly broke up what could have been a 'boring' presentation (spoiler, it wasn't boring).

He follows this with a Q&A and answers as many questions as he could, again, engaging chat.

THEN.... we get a PogChamp emote tier list of every PogChamp so far.