half/byte

I'm working on materials for a ruby course I'll teach in about a week's time and while it is fun (in a stressful kinda way, because of course I'm late with it), the main feeling I feel is grief. About a community that was once one of my happy places. About our craft and industry that moves in directions I hate with a passion. About how a lot of friends I made there I have already lost again, for so many different reasons.

Aarhus, as we found out by chance last year, has one of the best board game shops I've ever seen (Games Aarhus in Klostergade). This year I spoiled myself with an actually nice 3x3 Rubik's cube with the clear intention to finally, at over 50, try to learn how to solve them. I'm still in the "how the f**k to these algorithms work" phase.

If anyone has any good resources, I'm all ears.

#RubiksCube #Learning

Maybe it is just a matter of this being more transparent due to social media and so on but was there ever a similar situation in human history where basically the largest economy in the world depends on the actions of a small group of people who have very obviously lost all touch with reality and are quite possible actually clinically mentally unhealthy?

(Okay, if you go all the way back to Nero's Rome, there are probably a handful of examples)

Every time I enjoy the niceties of Scandinavian cities, I also get a bit bitter, because as Germans, we have collectively decided that we don't want any of those niceties and that it is more important that we cater to the needs of motorists, real estate companies and generally value capitalism more important than stupid things like "the well being of people".

(Lots of Asterisks to explain that, no, not everything is perfect in Scandinavia and not everything in Germany is terrible are implied)

I think I severely underestimated the ways in which LLM's usefulness is tailored exactly for the use cases of overworked CEO's (as in: they feel overworked), thus making them the perfect victim of LLM psychosis.

I think I am watching what could be the beginning of a company unraveling because of that. I hope, for all the wonderful humans working there, that I am wrong.

There's a very good joke hidden somewhere between the phrase "we're standing on the shoulders of giants", that xkcd open source comic and AI pilled bros who have already forgotten how software is built. The question is who will laugh about it in the long term.

RE: @alineblankertz@indieweb.social

Ich scheitere daran quasi täglich, also vor allem am Verständnis für all das was @alineblankertz@indieweb.social beschreibt. Und zwar so sehr, das ich bestimmte Dinge in bestimmten Kontexten einfach nicht erwähne. Und das sage ich als jemand, der in Ramallah mit Palästinensern über die Existenz der Shoah gestritten hat. Hat das Spaß gemacht? Nein. Aber in eine Debatte mit deutschen Linken über Antisemitismus und oder Antizionismus zu gehen macht mir deutlich mehr Angst und ist vermutlich deutlich unproduktiver.

Kenne ich hier eine Person die eine Person kennt, die Türkisch spricht und mir für ein Ehrenamt drei sehr kurze Sätze aus dem deutschen oder englischen übersetzen kann?

Ich möchte das ungern ungeprüft aus der großen Sprachmaschine entnehmen.

Periodic reminder (mostly to myself) that no, it's not just you who thinks the world has completely and utterly gone off the rails and that it's fine to completely tune out for periods of time if that's necessary to keep your own sanity.

(Not that there's much left of it, I feel)

I keep thinking: Who in the world thought that it was a good idea to implement "social engineering as a service"*?

Again, I would never claim that word salad machines are never useful in any context, but making unpredictable word salad machines important parts of your infrastructure seems, dunno, ill informed at the best of days.

* My own flesh and blood word salad machine has no idea if I've heard this before or not, so forgive me if you feel plagiarized, I'm happy to give credit.

Context and perspective are weird things. I've just had a group of people thank me for participating (on short notice, to be fair) in a photoshoot as if I'd saved their lives. That group of people has literally, as in, you know, literally, saved my life at least twice.

So, my mangled body may, at some point, turn up in official info material of Hamburg's university clinic. It is, as they say, the least I could do.

RE: @bsletten@mastodon.social

This hit surprisingly hard.

I didn't think the English language needed the expression "competency porn" but here we are.

First impression on the Pebble Time 2 that just arrived: A bit heavier than I expected, a bit thicker, too, but that's mainly due to the HR sensor. The B&W display of the 2 Duo has significantly more contrast, but readability without backlight is good.

The buttons are really nice, especially in contrast to the sticky mess of the P2D.

Call me a weirdo or call me a nerd, but there is nothing as satisfying to me as a really good sounding, relatively dry rim shot snare. I can't help it, my brain instantly locks to it. Or rather, my whole body.

Clack.

Clack.

Clack.

Someone should write a song about that.

Oh.

(originally this was about dubstep, but I realised that it works in almost any genre. including Erykah Badu songs)

Spent half the weekend in the emergency room with an unclear infection with a short burst of high fever. These sounded familiar and in the end, it indeed points to a bile duct infection. I knew this could happen eventually, as my small intestines are directly bolted on to the bile duct, but the relative calm of more than a year had given me a false sense of security.

Everyone was calm but very serious about it. I left with antibiotics and some bubbling up trauma.

"I have a Cryptpad instance running somewhere" he said.

3 hours of debugging later, login finally works again.

RE: @lwv_wa@mastodon.social

Because billions are such a hard to understand number, I looked up the USA's population. It's roughly 340 million. So this is 200 USD per inhabitant. For financing, let's face it, Trumps equivalent of the Gestapo. Nice.

Or, put differently, more than 8 USD for every human being currently walking the earth. (Sorry, ISS personnel, you're a rounding error)

Look, I don't *actually* have an issue with being misgendered in a message, but if your email boasts how much upfront research you've done before writing your sales pitch, I don't really know what to say to you.

How many female German Jans do exist? I would wager the number is bigger than zero. Slightly.

#spam #Sales #underwhelmed

Still my No1 favourite :depfu: error message, it cracks me up every time. Happens to the best of us.

"ArgumentError: Malformed version number string <<<<<<< HEAD"

#TalesFromTheMachineRoom

Do you think that you can hold on, when the beat gets too strong and you feel that you need help to move along

Do you think that you can hang tough, when the rhythm gets rough and the DJ says "I think you've had enough"

Do you think that you can digest, when I start to digress, better get yourself a lyric proof vest!

Do you think that you can compete when you hear the fat beat, you need stamina like an athlete!

I have seen a couple of card heavy international footie matches in my life but I just watched a summary video of the US/Brazil women's friendly and ... wow. No notes. Obviously a complete failure of refereeing. Among other things, let's say.