An astoundingly large percentage of my personal technical policies are guided by the idea that I want to minimize my losses after the next sudden yet inevitable betrayal.
Remote
-dsr- (unoptimizable)
@dashdsrdash@tilde.zone
mastodon 4.8.0-alpha.3+glitchWhat I say is accurate in all respects, especially predictions and opinions. Would you like to buy a bridge?
LEGO minifig (light tan, goatee, glasses; black t-shirt with green #!; blue jeans) holding two coffee mugs labelled: "Spice must flow"
Header: my XKCD-style cartoon diagram illustrating the notional phase space of coffee.
Probably me: dsr, -dsr-, dashdsrdash.
Just another disembodied voice on the Internet, with the right to use pronouns. You do too.
150 Followers
168 Following
50 Posts
Joined June 09, 2023
email:
dashdsrdash at randomstring.org
hash key:
value
he/him:
are pronouns
Replying to
@cstross@wandering.shop
But minutes are terrible to work with; the Babylonian obsession with base 60 is outdated.
Can we go with accumulated seconds since some benchmark in a specific frame of reference?
100 seconds to the metric minute -- bonus: "I'll be with you in a minute" now 25% more likely to be correctish.
1 kilosecond is the time it takes to do anything non-trivial, so it is a reasonable unit for estimating how long something should take.
30 kiloseconds is a working day or a good night's sleep.
Those are all the timescales that people need to deal with shorter than a day, and everyone reaches for a calculator if they need to turn minutes or hours into days anyway.
Keep the seconds, redefine the minutes and drop the hours, that's my take.
Replying to
@lobingera@chaos.social @tante@tldr.nettime.org
I wish that were true, but it is not.
The word "deaccession" is in use because it happens a lot. There is no backup safety net: everyone assumes that it will be handled by someone else. The libraries of last resort don't get copies of everything.
Boosted by @cstross@wandering.shop
Replying to
@cstross@wandering.shop
I have an alternative hypothesis.
I suspect she wants all of DT's money.
If he dies -- and he will, soon, obviously -- the money gets split up according to his will, which probably doesn't do much for her.
If she divorces him, the prenup controls. Again, not so much.
But if he goes to prison, she can almost certainly have the pre-nup broken, and in New York and Florida, business interests are generally considered part of an equitable settlement.
So it is to her advantage, I think, to get him imprisoned and divorced, in that order, ASAP.
I wonder if she has a clever lawyer who doesn't report to DT?
Replying to
@davidgerard@circumstances.run @mawhrin@circumstances.run
The big problem with computers and the Internet is that it serves as the relief valve for people who otherwise would be building elaborate model cities with trains and a lake and a river and tiny sewers and water treatment plants and very very small flushing toilets in the bathrooms of the houses and apartment buildings and a hydroelectric plant and and also seventy three journals filled with biographies of notable people in the city and thirteen special journals detailing the passionate affair between the engineer's self-insert (an engineer) and the director of the county railroad commission, a stern, demanding but ultimately loving man who introduces his beautiful secretary to the relationship and they live together after volume six.
And there's nothing wrong with that except that now it's all LLM chatbots and code being committed to repositories that for whatever reason, some other people actually use and expect to work.
unsolicited life advice masquerading as an observation
Every physics textbook ever written comes with exercises at the end of each chapter, and every physics professor who has ever stood in front of a lecture hall has said the same thing: you cannot learn physics by watching someone else do it. You have to pick up the pencil. You have to attempt the problem. You have to get it wrong, sit with the wrongness, and figure out where your reasoning broke. Reading the solution manual and nodding along feels like understanding. It is not understanding. Every student who has tried to coast through a problem set by reading the solutions and then bombed the exam knows this in their bones. We have centuries of accumulated pedagogical wisdom telling us that the attempt, including the failed attempt, is where the learning lives. And yet, somehow, when it comes to AI agents, we've collectively decided that maybe this time it's different.
-- excerpted from https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/
@housepanther@social.goblackcat.com @roknrol@beige.party
I asked my local tux, Enrico Fermi, and he said that it looked like a fun toy to chase around the kitchen floor but would probably not survive being pushed off the counter.
The present interlocutor is bodily assaulted and is rendered supine, yet presently regains footing. "I deny your future ability to restrain me on the ground!"
The subject of the narration quaffs four ethanol mixtures: distilled grain alcohol matured in casks, neutral spirits, malt fermented by bottom-dwelling yeast, and fermented ripened fruit of malus domestica.
-- "Striking a washing basin to produce a loud, deep tone", Chumbawamba, 1997
Replying to
@stgiga@blahaj.zone
The most common failure mode of 21st century thinking is to have computer issues and blame the computer, instead of the system which enshittified it.
Excessive chaos produces a desire for order. The desire for order is both good and evil: cooperation is good, dictatorship is evil. Everything not trivial is complex.
Excessive order produces a desire for chaos. The desire for chaos is both good and evil: self-determinism is good, denying responsibility is evil. Nothing is purely one or the other.
Improving things is not futile, but it can be difficult and requires maintenance and debugging. It is impossible to predict every consequence, but quite possible to predict the likely consequences of most actions. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Ignoring one or more of the above precepts is a common failure for philosophers, economists, engineers and politicians.
What the website says:
"Stop losing recipes! Save your favorites to [service] for free!"
What I think:
The privacy policy says explicitly that they will use your information against you aggressively, for profit, and maybe you can delete it but that's it.
Someday it will shut down and take all the saved recipes with it.
In the meantime, there will be all the advertising.
What I do:
copy recipes i like to my own wiki, hosted on my own machine
Replying to
@lifewithtrees @lemonlolita @kibcol1049
It's not misogynist -- which means hating women.
It's heteronormative -- which means assuming heterosexuality as a default.
It's also extremely funny, and I read it out loud to my partner with the suggestion that a person with that style of wit is attractive for that alone.
Replying to
@Canuckduff@mas.to
Dinosaurs survived the asteroid and evolved for another 65 million years. Now they revenge themselves upon puny mammals by shouting at them before dawn and crapping on their cars.
You* probably know some of the lyrics to a dozen or so songs by Madonna. Every one of them is pre-2000.
Since then, she's released 42 albums.
Don't worry, you aren't missing anything.
This is slightly different from The Eagles. You can also hum about a dozen Eagles songs, and all of them are pre-2000. Since then, they released one album. You still aren't missing anything.
On the other hand, you** only know two songs from They Might Be Giants, and one of those is a cover. They've released 17 albums since 2000, and there's something interesting on all but one of them.
- By "You", I am of course generalizing from "Me".** Here, "You" is a generic hypothetical reader, probably not you.
Words are defined so that we can communicate effectively. The actual usage of a word gives it meaning, and thus the meaning may change over time.
“Fascism” used to be nationalist, militarist, racist, authoritarian government with cult-leader worship.
Now, I think, “fascism” means advocacy of a capitalist corporate-plutocratic authoritarian structure. Rather than “the blood is the land” mythology, it’s “wealth is self-justifying”.
The classic “fascism” is a set of tools which the current one is willing to use: nationalism, militarism, racism, designation of an external enemy which is labelled as simultaneously weak and cowardly yet also implacable and dangerous, single-leader cult worship.
Those are not core beliefs of these people, those are strategies that they find acceptable to achieve and maintain power.
When someone whines at you that you're incorrect about the giant corpos being fascist because they don't wear shiny leather boots, tell them that they are wrong: words change.
Replying to
@sibrosan @lifewithtrees @lemonlolita @kibcol1049
I think it's quite clear that "she" did not misunderstand. She understood exactly what was meant and came up with a humorous reply, which can be used to gauge "his" sense of humor.
Folks are also correct that this is all in the mind of the reader. Words are great that way.
Replying to
@feoh@oldbytes.space
Also:
put up your whole presentation and notes on a website.
Encode the URL into a QR code.
Put the QR code in the corner of most slides, and giant-size on your title and final slides (and, of course, in plain text on one or both of those.)
Replying to
@freediverx@mastodon.social
The Republicans told us that public libraries and good schools and firefighting and clean water were socialism, and they are against that.
Didn't they want us to believe them?
Replying to
@lemonlolita @lifewithtrees @kibcol1049
I was correcting your factual error of terminology. You can feel about it any way you want, but heteronormativity isn't misogyny. They are both standard features of patriarchy, though.
Replying to
@feoh
The word "fascist" as presently used has drifted, and I think my definition is the new usage. The classic "fascism" is a set of tools which the current one is willing to use: nationalism, militarism, racism, designation of an external enemy which is labelled as simultaneously weak and cowardly yet also implacable and dangerous, single-leader cult worship. Those are not core beliefs of these people, those are strategies that they find acceptable to achieve and maintain power.
Replying to
@crystalvisits @AlexxKay
Partially getting rid of capitalism seems to work. That is, a non-corrupt government can regulate a capitalist economy in a way which approximates getting good outcomes.
The problem of having a non-corrupt government is at least two major subproblems: the people have to care about it, and the government must be set up to investigate, judge and punish itself, in public.
And governing well is hard.
There is a long-standing split among philosophers on the subject of names. Realists take them seriously, believing them to be things. Nominalists take them lightly, believing them to be means, believing them to be convenient labels. Every man in the world is either a Realist or a Nominalist. Give yourself a test: if someone called you a gigger or a fell-picker, and you knew it wasn’t true, would you hit him or smile? That’s how easy it is to tell.
-- Alexei Panshin, in The Thurb Revolution
Realists tend toward prescriptive linguistics; nominalists to descriptive linguistics.
I present to you: a candidate for the worst layout of a FAQ ever.
https://www.passbolt.com/docs/hosting/faq/
On my screen, every FAQ's headline is truncated to How Can I.
If I decrease the zoom, I can get one or two more words. None of them is enough to read a whole entry's headline.
And there's no option to read the whole thing at once.
Bad.
Replying to
@coolbean@brain.worm.pink @Daojoan@mastodon.social @ska@social.treehouse.systems
Imagine having a product where many users tell you shortly after they buy it that they enjoyed the experience and will come back for more later.
Replying to
@feoh
I'm trying to describe how people actually use the word today, so I can't make one up.
One of your acquaintances looks at news about Palantir and says "Those fascists..." -- what do they mean?
That's what I'm getting at.
Replying to
@wilbr
I don't find "I don't believe in racism, I just use it as a tool" to be any more acceptable than being a true believer, no.
But there are apologists right now arguing that it's not real fascism because it doesn't use the bundle-of-sticks emblem.
Is it only fascism if it involves a party that calls themselves fascists, or can any advocate of authoritarian corporate plutocracy be considered fascist?
Amazon: Here's a normal price on the toner for your Xerox printer, marked at a 37% discount from the usual price of "nobody buys it at this price".
Also Amazon, just down the page:
Consider this instead: toner for an Epson printer you don't have that isn't compatible at all in any way with your Xerox! It's on sale!
Reminder to all and sundry: the printer you are using at work to run off a thousand copies of your novel?
It logs who, what, when and how much.
The "what" mostly comes from the name of the document you submitted, and is presented by the computer you are using.
If one were to, say, rename the novel's file to "inventory report 2023 revised" or a similarly boring excuse for a ridiculously large print job, nobody is likely to notice. It will still be attributed to your username.
Replying to
@beanclock
Do they not have sub rolls by you?
https://breadtopia.com/classic-submarine-sandwich-rolls/
long-slicing your pain de mie offers no structural support. It's nice way of constructing a cake, but a sandwich ought to be at least nominally edible without chopping it in two or more pieces.
Replying to
@mike805@noc.social @rotorglow@mastodon.social @overholt@glammr.us
It all went downhill in 1995 when money first changed hands for domain names.
Replying to
@tante@tldr.nettime.org
There have always been people who just want to get through life with a minimum of bother.
Now organizations have bought them cocaine subscriptions, so you're seeing the combination.
Replying to
@hakfoo@mstdn.party
If I could rescind all the spending on less worthy keyboards, I wouldn't feel so bad about spending so much on the keyboards I really want.
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
Replying to
@GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
No, because it's upstream in the kernel.
Replying to
@ludicity@mastodon.sprawl.club
The average tech recruiter does not know the difference between Java and JavaScript, wouldn't understand if you (I) explain it to them, and does not think that this is a problem.
Given that tech recruiters want 25-30% of a salary per position, any company that knows that it will hire 5 or more people this year should hire their own clever/ competent/polite person as a dedicated recruiter at an engineering salary. For some reason this rarely occurs to companies of that size -- finding good new employees is not a "core competency" so they outsource it badly instead.
Replying to
@afeinman
The first thing is to give it an appealing name, and the second is to be very careful with the exceptions.
And the third thing is that it needs to be accompanied by a GDPR-style right to view, correct and delete personal information.
Organizations that can store a person's exact birthdate for longer than the time it takes to use it once.
Organizations that can store a person's birth year, but not month or date, for longer than it takes to use it once.
Any organization can store the fact that a person is in one of the following age categories:
senior citizen adult (pick a single relevant number)childbut they cannot store the date on which they accepted a change in category.
That sort of thing.
Replying to
@AlexxKay @crystalvisits
Let's posit that we (i.e. modern society) want journalism: reporting of facts, and clearly separated analysis and opinion.
For about 50 years we had a situation in which newspapers were the primary form of delivery; the infrastructure was extensive and expensive (daily printing on paper and home delivery) but kept affordable through two complementary means: the subscriber base was huge and as a result, the advertising market was the best available. Good newspapers kept a wall between the journalism and advertising systems, and were mocked when those walls developed holes.
That infrastructure and market is gone. As long as we have a capitalist society, how do we pay for journalism?
Government support is great, until you start reporting on the government, or the government becomes corrupt.
Private ownership tends to lead to corruption.
Non-profits (e.g. The Guardian) are susceptible to ideological bias from the largest funders (e.g. the Gates Foundation).
Replying to
@Michkov
Sure, and the wiki is a set of text files with a convenient interface. Dokuwiki uses no database but the filesystem.
If, for some reason, you can't run or access a web server/browser but have access to the filesystem, grep and find and cat all work nicely.
Is there a term for declarative speech, where the words explaining something are told instead of being shown?
e.g. "No pressure" instead of making a gentler suggestion, or "I would like to respectfully request" instead of actually showing any respect.
Replying to
@wollman
We have about six linear feet of cookbooks. That's after at least two major purges in the last few decades.
We have a subscription to Food and Wine (which was much better a decade ago) as a source of inspirations. That turns into a pile of ripped out pages, which I was turning into wiki entries today.
Replying to
@beanclock ah, I didn't realize that the danger of structural sandwich failure was part of the appeal. Carry on.
Replying to
@wollman
The dokuwiki search works really well for me, and I'm unlikely to.be in a culinarily adventurous mood when the power is out.
That said, all collections of recipes actually put into practice need periodic maintenance.
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
Replying to
@GroupNebula563@mastodon.socialhttps://www.kernel.org/
6.6 probably doesn't have much slop in it; it didn't when it was originally released.
Replying to
@mhoye@cosocial.ca
It's pretty common for skating costumes and other dresses meant to get attention. See also "sequins".
Replying to
@wollman@mastodon.social @mike805@noc.social @rotorglow@mastodon.social @overholt@glammr.us
Yes, but who would believe in both Majordomo and Enemies of Carlotta doing the same job?