Dave Slusher - Tech Stuff

Less Sam Altman, more Robert Altman.

Remember when https://developer.yahoo.com/ was a thing anyone cared about? Not even Yahoo cares today.

Remember when coding was a thing you both did and were proud of? Those were the days.

I guess this sticker is taking on a new relevance if the interpretation is "I write code instead of deferring to some LLM."

Bob Mortimer to Andy Dawson on the Athletico Mince #podcast during a question time segment:

"Andy, is there any bus service in Sunderland or is there nowhere anyone wants to go?"

That one made me laugh out loud.

Just asking as a theoretical. Do Flock cameras have any sort of screen or feature that would prevent a paintball from making the lens opaque?

Argumentative white guy: "You have to accept vigorous debate on all subjects, including basic human rights. Anything less is unconscionable. Here's what I think ..."

Me: "Let me stop you there. To quote the great poet 'One must put up barriers to keep oneself intact.' I said good day, sir."

The white guys (and it is always white guys) who think all opinions are valid and should be tolerated and discussed. They are also people who don't have any expectations of being killed for those opinions, mainly because they tend to be the type who kills the other people for their opinions.

That kind of white guy (and it is always a white guy) who thinks blocking because of viewpoint is for simps and all opinions are valid and you should engage with them all. Exhausting. These guys never have opinions that aren't horrific. If their opinions were sensible and palatable, they wouldn't need a worldview about how you're wrong not to accept them.

I'm just noting there is a large overlap between the kind of guy who wants to force his opinion on you over your objections and the kind of guy who wants to force his dick into you over your objections.

RE: @fesshole@mastodon.social

This is the greatest Fesshole confession I have ever seen.

Is there anything more creepy than people like #Hegseth whose whole deal is "I am super Christian and that's why I want to kill everybody?"

Like, what fucked up bloodthirsty death bible are these freaks reading? I read the standard one and it is a story about a Palestinian hippie that commands you to be nice to everyone because he loves them all.

#christianity #HippieJesus

#fuckai #AITeaParty

Here is what an over-performer my one hive is. We installed two nucs on April 8th. Today I needed to add a super brood box because in 15 days they had drawn out comb on the 5 new frames, filled them out and were starting to run out of room.

I got caught flat footed because I had extra deep boxes but they weren't assembled. I assembled one yesterday and one today. I had to put it in unpainted because I don't have time to let it dry and air out. I will paint the second one this weekend and the next time I go in that hive I will replace the unpainted box with the painted one.

What I've seen online says you should let a box sit two weeks after painting before putting in service so that VOC from the paint doesn't bother the bees. In order to have done that, I would have had to know on the day I installed them that they were going to run out of room 2 weeks later. It would have seemed crazy at the time to do that, but here we are.

#bees #beekeeping

I have had my #bees for 15 days. I have a tale of two hives happening. One is so strong that is concerning. We inspected it 8 days after installing the nucs and there was drawn comb on all 5 of the new frames. It is going so gangbusters that the concern is that we might need to add a new box crazy early in this process.

The second hive is underperforming. We did not see either the queen or eggs on the first inspection. We did see larvae but didn't observe eggs. In about every metric, this hive is lagging far behind the other.

I'm going to do a mini-inspection today. My mentor said under normal conditions he would advise waiting until 2 weeks after the previous inspection. However I need to answer the two big questions - do I have a healthy laying queen in the one hive and is the other hive running out of space already?

I'm going to look at the laggard hive. If I see an egg or uncapped larva I will stop immediately because 15 days later seeing either means a queen is working. In the other, I'm just quickly inspecting the outer frames to see where they are at. If the 2nd one in on each end is full of bees when I look, it's time to think about a second brood box.

Like my kid said "Why couldn't we just have two average hives?"

This #beekeeping is a lot of work. Fun fun stuff though.

We went to Colorado for our mini-spring break. We did fun #Denver stuff like Casa Bonita, the Museum of Nature and Science and also Meow Wolf.

We also spent a few days in Winter Park - skiing for me, snowboarding for the kid. He kind of bounced off of it and thought it was too hard. I took some intermediate ski lessons that helped a lot with my control and turns. I had a lot of fun, even with fracturing a rib due to a particularly hard fall.

One of the bits of mental hygiene when I moved to the #fediverse from other places was to never use apps on my phone to read an endless scroll of posts. I dabbled with some and decided that was exactly the wrong move. I occasionally post reading progress with a #Bookwyrm app but I read nothing on my phone.

It really does help avoid feeling like reading the posts is this task you have to do, and you scroll down forever. For all the "we are federated, no algorithm, no VC backing" hippie dippie shit about the fediverse, I truly feel infinite scroll social media is inherently unhealthy. Just because it isn't backed by the same awful billionaires that back every awful thing doesn't mean it is good for you. It's a tool that I use but it should not be a lifestyle.

RE: @bodil@social.treehouse.systems

Truly the release of the #ClaudeCode is the greatest possible gift to AI skeptics like myself. They proudly proclaimed themselves as eating their own dog food in coding it with itself. Like all dog food, it ends up as dog shit.

Recently I disengaged with my local developer community when at an in-person event where I was looking for specific recommendations the only advice given was "Just have Claude code it." At the time I found this unsatisfying. Now that we've seen the quality of what Claude code produces for itself - one would assume the crown jewel of code production - I smugly double down on my rejection of that advice.

I will steadfastly refuse to erode my own skill set in favor of a tool that can achieve short term goals at the cost of all quality, understanding and pride in one's output. Claude and all LLMs can go to hell.

#AITeaParty #FuckAI

I've now been following #footy long enough to be bothered when players change teams. Brody Mihocek as a Demon? Seems wrong. At least when Mason Cox changed teams it was to the Dockers, the other team I root for. That hurts less.

#afl

RE: @ironicbadger@techhub.social

This was exactly the decision making process I went through when I opted to move to my own self-hosted Forgejo instance. I even got the actions working to build my #11ty blog and it wasn't that difficult.

I don't want to fend off the AI features and I don't want my stuff training the models. Bleh. I'm tired of #microslop in a big way.

https://evilgeniuschronicles.org/posts/2026/02/18/forgejo-actions/

#noai #AITeaParty

Yesterday I bought 12 cinder blocks. My idea was to set up 4 for each hive with 4 more as a backup. Just to experiment, I set them up 2 and 3 high. When the kid got home from school we went out with hive tools and pretended like we were working them (they are still empty.)

It was determined that the 3 high is better and the kid wants a solid tower of 3x3 blocks to make it more stable and less wiggly. Thus I went from having 4 extra to 6 too few in the matter of minutes. I'm absolutely not buying 9 extras for a backup so I'll wait until we need more hives before buying any more.

#beekeeping

As I listen to the backlog of Lost in the Stacks from #WREK911fm I find some interesting stuff. This episode from September 2017 is all about the cable access show The American Music Show. It ran from 1982 to 2003. I was in #Atlanta for 10 of those years but I never heard of it. It was the first time series regular Ru Paul ever appeared on TV amongst other landmarks.

On LITS they talk with the Emory University archivist who received 752 VHS tapes constituting the whole run of the program. As of the time of recording they were in the process of digitizing and you had to go to the Emory library to see them. What would be fantastic is if today they were all digitized and could be given to @newellijaytv . Probably there are rights issues or something that would be a headache for @ajroach42@retro.social but a kid can dream. There are so many episodes they could run it daily and it would take 2 years to get back to the beginning.

https://lostinthestacks.libsyn.com/episode-358-the-american-music-show

Alright fediverse, I'm asking you a question that has been web search resistant.

I have #Plume pods that were provided by my cable company. I have an old decommissioned Netgear Orbi system that I used prior to this. I thought I'd chuck the Plumes as soon as the installer left but I quite like them. I like that they all have 2 Ethernet ports that are uplinks or downlinks depending on what signal is on them. They are all their own adapters which is cool.

I'd like to install #OpenWRT on the #Netgear stuff and make it one big mesh. Will that work or will the two meshes compete with each other and make it worse? I really don't know how it would go.

#networking

How much #beekeeping and #beekeeper Mastodon is there? As a first year newbie, I imagine there is a point where I will get enough discussion about how one can organize a Langstroth hive. It will take a lot to get there, though.

Got my stuff over the weekend, 2 nucs of bees in ~second week of April or whenever they choose to be ready. This week I'm buying cinder blocks, white silage tarp at the rec of my mentor (because the ground in my yard is very friendly to small hive beetles.)

I had to get over my analysis paralysis. There are so many ways to set up a hive so I just had to pick one.

Imagine if some techbros told you they invented a robot. Instead of you going to the gym, it can go for you and do all your exercises with perfect form. You would think they had spectacularly missed the point of what automation is and is not supposed to do.

This is exactly how I feel about 99% of the LLM use cases. We don't need a robot doing the things that skills us up, gives us the wisdom to improve things. It's dumb, and obvious that the goal is to make us helpless. Train the LLM on our expertise, make us forget it then sell it back to us at a hefty markup. Fuck all y'all.

#NoAI #AITeaParty

Time to do my coursework reading about bee pests and diseases. This is the highlight of my day.

I personally am not going to watch Lie-apalooza. I know some people need to for fact-checking and various purposes but oof. I'll settle for reading the Over-the-Cliff Notes version tomorrow.

RE: @transworld@masto.ai

Jeffrey Epstein is dead but his cronies continue his agenda.

From Episode 616 of Roderick on the Line with @hotdogsladies@mastodon.social and John Roderick:

"I spread out all my backstage passes from my career in show business on the kitchen table. I was looking for inspiration for a collage where I would put them in a picture frame where they would be incredibly awesome to the people I never ever invite over to my house."

This is the kind of stuff that troubles me most. The stuff of minimal value today that might have value tomorrow. In a weird way Make Magazine was terrible for my office because it encouraged me that cool things could be made out of broken repurposed technology. In reality it meant I was warehousing a lot of refuse that would be better discarded.

I am trying to deal with those things of > 0 value but < very much value . Yes, this screw or O ring might be useful someday but if need arises I'll never find this specific one so just chuck everything. Your future self and whoever cleans out your shit when you die will thank you.

https://www.merlinmann.com/roderick/ep-616-accruing-crust.html

I post rarely on LinkedIn but I did just now. It was basically an appreciation that I no longer have a job and don't have to pretend to care about LLMs.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/daveslusher_ive-had-a-lot-of-moments-of-good-dumb-luck-activity-7432060610613440513-10_l

I am currently running 3 different Mastodon accounts in #Statuzer. It is interesting how by evening US Eastern time all of them slow down dramatically. These three accounts have overlap but not a huge amount. I guess #Fediverse gets sleepy around now.

This is your periodic reminder to

a) Leave Twitter

b) When you refer to it by the one letter name, you are normalizing Musk's tribute to his weird racist grandfather and his weird secret societies. The grandfather so racist he emigrated to South Africa to **support** apartheid.

https://www.businessinsider.com/who-was-elon-musk-grandfather-joshua-haldeman-technocracy-incorporated-party-2023-9

#FuckTwitter #FuckMusk