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• Post #4205227

  Is there a dogmatic reason why folks prefer their sandwiches sliced diagonal vs. horizontal, or vice-versa? I've never actually heard anyone explain their preference other than "this is how them who raised me did it," and I'm curious if there's anything else to it.

• Post #4127214

  I'm a simple gamer. If the RPG gives me a train to fight, I'm gonna try to suplex it. The forms must be observed.

• Post #3991054

  "We don't have to wait for cognitive surrender; if we get them early enough we can stop them from ever wanting to think for themselves…" https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/116958811210258802

• Post #3985630

  Be wary of anyone who responds to a threat to their comfort with a threat to your rights or person. You may have encountered a conservative, a most dangerous and irrational kind of human.

• Post #3531332

  A reminder that today's rulings do not in any way indicate that SCOTUS has found a spine, or is in any way out of pocket. The bad guys are still winning; these rulings mean they're hindered, not defeated... especially when the regime already has shown themselves willing to openly act in defiance of the Court.

• Post #3531331

  Too many folks would rather be monarch of a wasteland than princes in paradise.

• Post #2295078

  I try not to let corporate displays of "compassion" move me these days, but Lego updating their "for ages 4-99" to 100+ for David Attenborough honestly made me tear up briefly.

• Post #2124664

  Honestly convinced now that hyperscalers are deliberately trying to end the personal computing era by denying everyone else access to the tools required. You will have no choice about avoiding "AI" once your older devices stop working and you can't afford parts and your OS upgrade has mandatory AI features. They are leaving us no ground to go to by infecting every level and flavor of computing and ensuring that alternatives without them are unsustainable.

• Post #1901777

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116499721027061689 The chip shortages *are* demand from AI "enthusiasts," and proposing that individuals are a factor in this is just carrying water for corpo interests. The folks mucking about in their basements with a handful of Macs mini are a drop in the bucket compared to the hyperscalers vacuuming up all the fabbed silicon, clean water, and electricity on the planet.

• Post #1863818

  No one prepared me for the number of times I'd ask myself, as an adult, "do you actually want this, or do you want it just because you can *have* it now and couldn't when you were young?"

• Post #1820239

  Outages caused by vibe code should be vibe outages, where the liquidated damages paid out are called vibe damages.

• Post #1804018

  Ayo, imagine how much more leverage tech workers would have had if they'd been able to unionize freely in the 90s and 00s instead of every corporation deciding to thug it out with intimidation and wrongful terminations with little to no legal relief. Most Boomer and Xer techies I know are *virulently* anti-union, and for reasons they can't even really explain beyond "unions take your money." Ideally, you form a union to put more money in your pocket. Otherwise...

• Post #1804015

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@FluentInFinance/116483785948061211 If 25% of my home's current value vanished, it would still be worth an embarrassing multiple of what I bought it for in 2015. If a crash means more of my generational cohorts can afford a home, bring it on.

• Post #1804014

  Looking back, when the advent of personal computing made it apparent to support orgs everywhere that few actually read error messages nor attempted to understand their meaning, that should have set off big warning horns at the Department of Education.

• Post #1804013

  Every time the Heir calls and is feeling out of sorts, I patiently listen until I have the shape of his problem, and then I ask: "When's the last time you ate?" It is invariably "too long ago." So I tell him to go feed himself and then get back to me and we'll talk through his problem. By the time he's done eating, he usually has calmed enough that I get a text, "thanks, dad, I got it." Sometimes fatherhood is just...

• Post #1768662

  Every step toward a just future must be pried from those who think you've had quite enough justice, thank you.

• Post #1564475

  Distrust the soul who would rather automate and abstract away creative expression rather than the tedium of asking for help.

• Post #1564474

  Call me paranoid, but I come from a generation of engineers who *fought* for uptime back when best practices were still being figured out, before everywhere became a code factory. Seeing the number of folks who are just willingly giving an overpriced bag of D&D dice the ability to run commands on their production infrastructure without human intervention is like watching the world silently go mad.

• Post #1564473

  If your goal is to liberate humans from drudgery, you'd apply automation and QoL enhancements to the most unpleasant drudgery of our existence. If your goal is to replicate the convincing appearance of expertise such that it becomes a commodity you can sell to others, you'd start by ripping off as many practices and disciplines as possible that have noticeable indicators of expertise. If you can convincingly trivialize things that many acknowledge as "hard," yo...

• Post #1564472

  Is anyone truly surprised that a Bezos company misdelivered an expensive package?

• Post #1564471

  I would be the most chill dragon. "I *could* burn the village to the ground, and it might even be a good idea, but like... why? I could just grab a cow from Bob's farm tonight. He doesn't even mind. Why start shit I'm just gonna have to end?"

• Post #1564468

  Did we make so much fun of Apple's "Courage" when they dropped the headphone jack that Tim Cook had completely ditched courage entirely by the time Trump came back? Either way, can't wait to see him gone.

• Post #1564467

  You ever consider that some dragons gather hoards because it brings them new houseguests? And usually such talented and clever ones, too.

• Post #1564464

  Modern Family? Shit, I remember when upgrading your family took hours and 10 cm stack of floppy diskettes.

• Post #1564463

  Flowers for Digimon.

• Post #1186018

  One of the principal problems with being trapped inside your own head is that you cannot physically fit all the potential solutions into that tiny physical volume. Connecting with others in the hopes that they may be able to trap a solution or two in their heads increases probability of resolution.

• Post #790815

  Unsure if contents of sauce jar will fit in saucepan. Jar displays mass (in ounces and grams,) but not volume. Serving instructions, though, give serving volume (in cups) with a parenthetical of serving mass in grams. Weird, but OK. Use serving ratio to solve for total volume in the jar, then convert into mL. Put equivalent volume of water into saucepan. Fits. I wouldn't have to do all this math if our food came with sensible labels and sensible units.

• Post #790814

  Boycott the 2028 Olympic Games.

• Post #790812

  "Doing this in $LOCATION allows us to isolate the shape of its needs in a place where it won't have to share resources with anything else." It's infuriating the tortured ways I need to explain basic testing and measuring practices to folks who have trained themselves to shut out good sense delivered in mathy words.

• Post #309220

  The shortest distance between two points is a straight line... except when those points are on a sphere. The shortest path between the metropolis of Apex City and the Imperium provincial capital Parast leads over the northern polar reaches... and the harsh frozen wilds of Mok'tar. Airship captains who brave the Polar Mok'tar Run can expect punishing winds, searing cold, and over a thousand kilometers of forbidding tundra and its (reportedly cannibalistic?) Turahl denizens. 1/2...