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• Post #4492872

  There's an idea that's missing from a lot of public conversations, which I wish I could call "political science", but something less useful to society is squatting the name. We'll make do. The thing that makes science worth our time isn't that it allows us to make trebuchets and work our way up the tech tree to CRISPR. That's good stuff, but it's positive side effects. The sales pitch of science is epistemological: it can be wrong, but it can't be wrong *fo...

• Post #4403052

  Moonshine is just a gateway drug that gets people hooked on crystal methanol. #thingsthatmademypartnerlaugh

• Post #4395264

  I pray I live to see a world where there's a Wikipedia with none of Jimmy Wales' fingers in it. (although, watch as the universe monkey-paws that into an acquisition by someone like Larry Ellison)

• Post #4387872

  Saw a post about the tarantula hawk earlier today, and I don't think I can come up with a better candidate to replace the bald eagle as our national bird. First of all, the name is misleading, because it's a wasp. Duplicity, check. But here's what really fits the American spirit of private equity and rightward political motion. This thing paralyzes a tarantula, injects its victim with eggs, and the maggoty babies slowly eat the host, saving vital organs for last so they can extract...

• Post #4386691

  They should invent a way to know in advance which cup of coffee is going to be one too many. "Up to this line, more caffeine will make it easier to read about Supreme Court cases and summarize them into your personal notes. The next one will make your heart palpitate, and your brain disassociate to the astral plane to dance with the Migraine Fairy. So watch out!"

• Post #4383091

  I just realized with all the medical stuff today (still waiting on one more call back) and the carpets being supposedly replaced today (I have my doubts), I never showed my morning walk! I even felt up for selfies today. As I said in conversation with @loon@transfem.social earlier, I look damn good in a tank top and shorts. I didn't bring my glasses, but I still observed something I'd somehow missed before. Remember that mysterious object I saw in the distance? Today I realized there&#3...

• Post #4380174

  I need a tech industry that doesn't make regular old software engineering that I've been doing for 20-ish years feel like the freakin' "I studied the blade" meme. Which, I forgot had the blockchain reference in it, that's so much funnier than I even remembered.

• Post #4378013

  Obviously the thing you want your wireless earbuds to do, when you give them a quick top-up charge before walking to the doctor's office, is to brick in a likely permanent way, which takes awhile to realize because the power button takes like 12 seconds when things are working. I'm never getting a phone without a headphone jack again. Fuck these people.

• Post #4365963

  It's unreasonable how much I wish this was one of the brands that phrased it as "large dill wholes." Hand for scale. I think we're probably doing okay on pickle supply.

• Post #4358369

  One of the proto-verbal design tensions I'm turning over in the back of my mind lately is about the axes that are actually appropriate for subdividing a single-host computing environment into multiple mutually-isolated functional domains. Which is a lot of highfalutin' words, so let me point at a familiar landmark: Docker. It's pretty easy to say Docker sucks, or containers suck (there are valid arguments there), but they don't tend to appreciate why Docker got so popular in the...

• Post #4351614

  The figure of speech "so-and-so hates your guts" is so funny to me at this point in my medical history. Like OMG, you too? Twinsies! That's so supportive, thank you, they really are the worst aren't they

• Post #4351303

  Yeah, that tracks. @oxy@social.bsdlab.au @ryanc@infosec.exchange

• Post #4334717

  I really don't want to hear from any broskis about alignment. We've had this problem for the entire lifetime of proprietary software, DRM, and pop-ups. The problem has always been some flesh and blood asshole who thinks he's found a good way to control your behavior and extract your money. It's not suddenly different now. The existence of a pointless sparkle icon on some website I used to or currently rely on IS AN ALIGNMENT FAILURE. Alignment to what an executive wants has *neve...

• Post #4260737

  LLMs inspire or surface a *lot* of lotus-eating incuriosity, but the thing I keep coming back to in particular is that they give you a perceived freedom to never address a root cause ever again, which allows you to live with the problems you can't practically solve. "I use AI to summarize my emails!" Because it's normal to get too many emails from too many people with too little substance, and now that can be normal-er! "I use AI to find the important parts of a large sp...

• Post #4178329

  "Yeah shurre, I'm good to program right now. I'm fiiiine. Give me the keys board. I just had a little cognition brownout oopsie-doodle and almost overfilled my mug with water, but like... hey who hasn't done that" - my state of mind rn between losing all mental context because my one brain cell keeps getting retasked any time my chatty severely high wife starts a random conversation with me

• Post #4173157

  We live in a world where some of the values that we reward feel "suspiciously chosen" - in particular, around a masculine ideal. I had an uncle who would teach me how to give firm handshakes and practice on him, so that men would take me seriously. My dad tried to get me into golfing. Women's suits in the 80's were famous for the shoulder pads. But these are obviously all pretty surface-level, when we're also told to be assertive and confident and loud. I'm not saying...

• Post #4144350

  It's another road trip today! I'll have to show the photogenic parts.

• Post #4099125

  Well, considering the 2AM wakeup, it's getting pretty late for me despite being hours from sundown. About to make my third mug of tea. Feeling kind of weird, but like, pfft, no biggie right

• Post #4091027

  I think it's kind of remarkable that the incentives in corporate/centralized social media are so consistent, that 15 years later we're still seeing the same hostage-taking behavior patterns that make me want to shatter my phone against the nearest concrete surface. What do I use Instagram for? Talking to my goddaughter, and on occasion, one of my long-distance boyfriends (the massage therapist one). Maintaining these lines of communication (particularly, being reachable via notificatio...

• Post #4073756

  Here's a pattern that keeps happening: 1. Malignant actors within or entering a community cause problems for some of the people there. 2. The victims talk about it, because they need to, and have a right to. Sometimes they put up practical boundaries to defend themselves. They certainly make it clear who's victimizing them. 3. The original malignant actors pull a DARVO and accuse their own victims of "dividing the community." This depends entirely on a credulous public, or at...

• Post #4067937

  The Amazing Digital Service

• Post #4052274

  And now my wife is standing topless in the kitchen while she puts butter on bread. My life is so fucking cool UPDATE: She shared some with me and it was jalapeno cheddar bread oh my goodddddddd

• Post #4043061

  A Banh Mi is a fresh and savory sandwich from the most brilliant culinary minds in Vietnam. A "ban me" sandwich is when you Just Ask Questions about women's sports in between two posts about how revolutionary Claude Fable is.

• Post #4039768

  My system-oriented code thread yesterday is a good example of the gap between looking eloquent to other people vs feeling like I'm rigorously expressing and exploring ideas. Honestly, good post in its own right. But there's a subsequent idea I wanted to build on top of it, and then literally could not remember what it was after getting the initial post done. https://raphus.social/@MaddieM4/116965519725934081 Now I finally remember, but the idea is something I haven't explored enoug...

• Post #4019855

  I feel like the conventional idea of systems programming - depending who you ask, some constellation of low-level utilityware written carefully for performance, resource efficiency and correct integration with the underlying abstractions - is all well and good, but it's also not a coincidence that code written in these styles is usually internally system-oriented. Most systems programs don't have objects. Simple data structures are common, and some programs warrant complex ones. What yo...

• Post #4016647

  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/116960969908967244 We're sowwwy we got caught and it made such bad publicity, which we can't really ride out at the same time as the privacy-violating adtech updates that make money for us directly. And if we're going to pick one extraction of value from user data to survive that cage match, it's going to be *our* violations, not somebody else's subletting app in our app store.

• Post #4001582

  Ever had enchilada sauce and wondered how it was made? In my case, the biggest source of oil is going to be elbow grease because we don't have a blender 😅

• Post #3991976

  The Human Santapede

• Post #3961086

  If your Italian family is sorely lacking a family business to pass on generationally, may I recommend tile installation? Groutfellas Tile and Mortar is not a taken name. Except as "Grout Fellas" in Perth.

• Post #3944662

  DENZEL https://makertube.net/w/fW5svpkVgjXrT4igMSD1VJ