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• Post #715602

  Everlast, "What It's Like". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqkIO86ezHM

• Post #715601

  Albert Ammons & His Rhythm Kings, "Tuxedo Boogie". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYABxElQur4

• Post #715600

  One reason I ain't wish nobody dead and I ain't celebrate nobody dyin' is cuz Trump frequently does. I do not want to be like him, or his, in any way. I follow a lotta lefties, cuz I'm one, too, and I get pretty down sometimes reading them wishing for and then celebrating someone's death. It's just not who I want to be, not how I want to live.

• Post #715599

  Professor Longhair, "Every Day I Have The Blues". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_bHt1r8J2o

• Post #715598

  Indigo Girls, "Least Complicated" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOBZ_dkGpJ4

• Post #715596

  Christ, I'm so close to the red line these days. Bug in Signal, wouldn't let me close a notification. No worries, save my game, reboot. It comes up with a) a 1kx768 screen, b) on only one monitor, c) no mouse cursor, and d) asking for Virginia's PIN, not mine. Tried reconnecting this, reconnecting that, rebooted about a half-dozen times. (Windows is hard to use when you have no mouse.) Went out to the deck more or less crying. *All* I wanted to do tonight was play my...

• Post #698322

  The SAVE act is a simple and direct attack on American democracy. It simultaneously imposes a poll tax and a "literacy test" on American citizens. It is a return to Jim Crow, and an effective abolishment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It is the next step in the oligarchs' ambitious effort to reinstate American slavery. Everyone who advocates for it is a liar, a fascist, a racist, a sexist, a mercenary, a transphobe, a coward, and a...

• Post #660386

  People who characterize DOGE as having failed in its mission startle me. Of course, that mission wasn't what the thoroughly and repeatedly documented straight-faced liars said it was, so I suppose there's room for some naïve folks to think that. The mission -- "destroy one of the most successful governments in the history of the world as much as possible as quickly as possible while creating maximum chaos and taking a profit" -- was a stunning success.

• Post #653070

  Hill headline says: Fetterman on supporting Mullin for DHS secretary: ‘Why can’t you just give someone a chance?’ Answer: cuz we gave *you* one, ya fuckwit.

• Post #616239

  Oh! I still have a little bit of time in #Internationalwomensday, don't I? Some of the *great* sf/f writers are/were women. I just spoke in another thread of CJ Cherryh's extraordinary skill at exposition in fiction. But there are plenty more. Andre Norton lit my youth, and is probably the oldest exemplar I know of. Zilpha Keatley Snyder was there, too, with delightful tween-level fantasy, especially _Black and Blue Magic_.

• Post #491073

  Every time I say "by and large", I remember that the expression, which is generally understood to mean "generally" -- see what I did there -- is of nautical origin. The UK's Royal Navy created many figures of speech we use today in entirely different contexts. "By" means "sailing close to against the wind", and "large" means "sailing with the wind behind us". A ship that sailed w...

• Post #448896

  Christ I'm tired of capitalism.

• Post #418768

  And so but anyway, did I ever tell you about my most humiliating experience as a skilled and successful computer programmer?

• Post #390118

  The Leading Technical Change Seminar: 6 Attendees 4 2-hour Sessions 1 topic Real Change In The Real World April 6,7, 9 & 10, 1-3pm EST LTC is a true seminar, led by me. Each attendee brings their own change challenges, and we tackle them all, as a group. An alumnus writes: "A lot of goodness in Leading Technical Change! Tried methods, good vibes, great discussions with wonderful people. Got me excited about the possibilities." Grab your seat today! https://www.ge...

• Post #390117

  So, wait, what. You're saying putting vegetables up your rectum isn't a correct thing for the Pentagon to do?

• Post #390116

  Slack's UI has "improved" to the point where it's barely usable. The once-excellent text snippet capability now reformats everything you type, and if you have larger sized fonts turned on, it has no way to dismiss it w/o guessing which button is selected via tab. And I'm sure as fuck not gonna use discord, cuz "age verification" is just surveillance. And Matrix/Element is simply shite. Am I really gonna have to go back to IRC?

• Post #390115

  I own more Dylan covers than I own books, and I own a whole lot of books. But this is my favorite Dylan cover. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOHkyZ62jjQ

• Post #390114

  I, personally, don't stream music. No Pandora, no Spotify. I buy, or steal, my music, and it sits on my drive or my phone.

• Post #390112

  In a mood, I'm in a mood, you done caught me in a mood, we have a mood. There is mood. Deep Purple, "Child In Time", live, 1970. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OorZcOzNcgE Fuck all y'all.

• Post #357374

  In analyzing the impact of LLMs, old-timers like me get pretty pissy about how bad the resulting work is. But here's the thing: the bulk of the geek trade already does such shitty work such that LLM-generated code can actually compete.

• Post #347482

  Remember, the geek trade has been grotesquely malformed by forty years of sitting on top a money-printing machine. LLMs didn't do that, the extraordinary decline in the cost of physical computing and the cost of distributing software did that. Most software orgs turn the crank and get the money, turn the crank and get the money. They don't care about quality. They don't care about performance. They don't care about customers. They don't care about anything except whether th...

• Post #298403

  Maybe a geek post. American states have representatives in the US Congress and they have state legislatures, and both of these are based on "districts", where each district contains approximately the same number of people, based on the census. Seems legit, I spoze. But here's the thing: who actually gets elected depends on how those districts are drawn on the map. Manipulating those maps in order to favor a particular party is called "gerrymandering&quot...

• Post #297062

  "My Life In the Bush of Geekery", Part 0 in a potentially reasonably long memoir: The time I was paid $13,000 for a two-line change.

• Post #131721

  Right. You're scared as fuck, you want to resist, you don't know what to do. Start here. Find someone here, on mastodon, someone who makes your life better. Send them a post. Not a fave, not a boost, a post, and thank them for making your life better. *Nothing* to you. *Gold* to them. If you can't be the rockstar who fixes all the things, you can still be the base that makes people strong. You can change the world. Right now. Tonight. One fucking post. Go do the thing.

• Post #64984

  Please do not come to the US. It's okay. I know you know that our government is not us. I know you know that we love you. I know you know that we are in a terrible place. But please don't come here. I can not guarantee your safety. I am horrified to be saying it, it feels awful, I hate hate hate it, but the simple truth is that I can not guarantee your safety. There is no rule of law here. Our government is led by people who do not believe in any of our shared values.