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The news about the Wordpress company sounds like a similar sort of “mad king” scenario.
https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117282454894706626
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Brian Marick
@marick@mstdn.social
mastodon 4.7.2Software person (programming and testing). Involved in Agile from relatively early on. One of those grumpy old-timers who think it's lost its way.
I retired during Covid. As I’m “broke to harness,” I keep up what was part of my schtick: read widely and oddly, then explain outside-tech ideas to a mostly-techie audience. Instead of talks, my venues are a blog, a podcast (infrequent), and link-heavy Mastodon posts.
I like boosting other people’s posts. My leftish #uspol posts are so labeled.
2399 Followers
348 Following
50 Posts
Joined October 30, 2022
github:
location:
Champaign, Illinois ("downstate"), USA
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@Spoofer3@infosec.exchange One of the things that Zettelkasten-style people seem to do is cherish links to non-obvious nodes, links that tie two not-obviously-relevant ideas together. As you browse a Zettelkasten with idea X in mind, connections to weirdo ideas Y, Z can spark “Aha!” moments.
Since my whole schtick for 30+ years has been talking about what outlier topic X suggests about programming, that appeals to me. (1/2)
RE: https://mastodon.cloud/@jasongorman/116877113827732750
My career meant nothing.
RE: https://social.wikiworkersunited.org/@wwu/116999843114280732
Yesterday I chose not to fix a typo on Wikipedia in support of @wwu@social.wikiworkersunited.org.
It’s the least I could do. Literally the least I could do.
Wikimedia is not at all strapped for cash (thanks to the generous donations of people like me), so jeez – spread the wealth.
Quoting
Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation declined to voluntarily recognize Wiki Workers United. Today, we launch [union needed]: an evidence-based campaign inspired by Wikipedia's [citation needed] documenting why workers organized.
uspol, Canada, O Canada
"Canada is becoming the abused wife that Trump is lashing out at because things are going so badly at work. His hopes and dreams are crashing: The midterms look bad. His leg is caught in a veritable bear trap in his Iran War. So he goes home and beats up his wife, or in this case, lashes out at Canada.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trump-is-an-angry-violent-man-and-canada-is-his-battered-wife/sharetoken/0f460c62-ef9f-48c7-b55b-f84ce63de833 (1/2)
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Reminiscent of the 1967 attempt to “levitate the pentagon” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_March_on_the_Pentagon)
Power is not wowed by ostentatious performance. Change requires grinding work plus being poised to take advantage of lucky breaks.
Minard’s graph of Napoleon’s Russia campaign was created to show the horrors of war. It “defies the pen of the historian in its brutal eloquence." I get that, but as visual communication, maybe a side-by-side of two famous pictures of Napoleon works better for getting across the “how it started / how it ended” horror?
(Yes, the first picture isn’t set at the start of the invasion of Russia. Work with me here.)
I remember being surprised that all of England is of higher latitude than any of the US. It’s safe to say that the climate in London is… more conducive to human life than the climate in Winnepeg, Canada. But London is north of Winnepeg.¹
Let us hope the current that keeps Europe livable doesn’t crash. We wouldn’t want pasty-white people to become the climate refugees. That would be awkward.
¹ https://ecpmlangues.unistra.fr/civilization/geography/overlay-maps @climatenewsnow@mastodon.social @climatenewsnow@mastodon.social
I’ve been fond of quoting Philip K. Dick’s “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Have recently encountered other quotes:
Bruno Latour describes reality as “what resists all efforts at modification.” (/Science in Action/, p. 179.)
C.S. Peirce: “"There are Real things, whose character[istic]s are entirely independent of our opinions about them" (“The fixation of belief”)
“The great men and women of science to whom prestige accrues are simply too few to account for the gigantic effects they are supposed to produce.” – Bruno Latour, /Science in Action/ (1987), p. 166. (Related: https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2026/05/17/the-heros-journey-views-of.html)
The same might be true of 10X programmers. (Which is not to say that they don’t exist. I’ve met some.)
Disclaimer: I do have what I’d like to think is a cultural American bias toward “the little guy.”
Every team I’ve favored in the World Cup has lost their match.
Argentina fans - Spain fans – you know what to do. I can be bribed to support the other team.
(I confess that Argentina fans will have to give bigger bribes, so I guess Spain is doomed to lose.)
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@heiglandreas@phpc.social @oracle@piaille.fr I can’t really answer because I was born in the USA but raised by old-school German parents (Dad born in 1920, mom in 1933). She to some extent got over being "Pünktlich" but he never did, and I follow in his footsteps. Like him, “on time” means five minutes early.
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@joe@f.duriansoftware.com @inthehands@hachyderm.io Nice point, but notice that such environments are best for *residents* while harder for *visitors*. (Scott makes much of this in /Seeing Like a State/¹.)
The turn-of-the-century fad for the term “habitable software”² fizzled perhaps because vanishingly few people who work on a code base live in it long enough to be called inhabitants.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
² Popularized by Richard P Gabriel in /Patterns of Software/, pdf: https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
A nice example of the failure of utilitarianism as a practical tool is the Kalder-Hicks welfare criterion. It holds that a policy change is a social improvement if those who gain could, in principle, fully compensate those who lose and still be better off.
What’s missing is that those who gain almost never do that.
It’s sort of telling that policy makers made policy assuming they would. (I believe this was known in the Clintonite/Blairite ‘90s as “grow, gain, give.”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaldor%E2%80%93Hicks_efficiency
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It perhaps matters that wearing a frog costume can’t be that much fun. It signals a certain amount of commitment and – oddly – seriousness. It’s important for public relations that protesters can’t be seen as *just* having fun. They must be doing something that’s outward rather than inward focused. Self-indulgence is a bad look. (4/4)
@telepyleia@infosec.exchange
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- They wanted the normie perception to be that anti-ICE protests were similarly scary. (Note how they characterized the people they murdered in Minneapolis.)
- The frog/dinosaur costumes brilliantly countered that: who’s afraid of a person in frog costume? Who can respect a person (Noem) who points out people in weird costumes and says they’re scary?
- The costumes, being photogenic, attracted the media’s attention. (2/4) @telepyleia@infosec.exchange
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@telepyleia@infosec.exchange Keeping in mind that I don’t understand whimsy, I offer this analysis of frog costumes at ICE protests.
- The administration wanted everyone to think ICE protests were like Black Lives Matters protests, which had successfully been portrayed so as to make them offputting to normies who dislike chaos. (Portland, etc.) (1/4)
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- Which meant that published images included lots of pictures of absolutely normie protesters in the background – no nighttime scenes of conflict framed by clouds of teargas, etc. (3/4) @telepyleia@infosec.exchange
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@telepyleia@infosec.exchange Seems to me protest has to address two audiences: the uninvolved normies, who might be persuaded to care; and those with power, who need to worry that this could get out of hand (especially if normies get riled up).
That’s a tricky balance: scaring the powerful (things like highway and bridge closures, much less smashing windows) tends to repel the normies. (1/2)
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Contrast to the storming of the Bastille or the Paris Commune, whose (early) success I’d argue depended on already having won over or neutralized the normies.
With reference to donning funny hats, my default assumption is that the normies will be slightly repelled and those with power will be utterly uninterested. My mind could be changed in a particular case. But spending time persuading a fat old white guy is not exactly a good use of resources. (2/2)
@telepyleia@infosec.exchange
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@telepyleia@infosec.exchange In the early ’80s, I was somewhat involved in science fiction fandom. In those days, a convention might book half the rooms in a hotel. So a typical elevator ride involved a mix of some cosplayers (though I don’t think the term existed) and what we called “the mundanes.” This was part of the fun of a convention: “freaking the mundanes.” (1/2)
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Much fun was had by all (of us), but it was pure self-gratification. We were an in-group solidifying in-group ties. Which is fine, but only if you don’t care about the larger out-group. (2/2)
@telepyleia@infosec.exchange
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@deepmud@mas.to Why did you lose your Luddite crown? Where did you *get* your Luddite crown in the first place?
If you’re the original King Ludd, haven’t you been, um, kind of slacking off for quite a long time?
“Last song about Popper” https://blog.oddly-influenced.dev/2026/07/22/last-song-about-popper.html
“Last Song About Satan” by Slim Cessna’s Auto Club leads into my last post being rude to the critical rationalists.
I present three different people’s discovery stories: C.S. Peirce on Kepler, Lakatos on Newton, and Andy Pickering on Hamilton’s quaternions. The first and third are believable to me. They emphasize iteration, action, backtracking, and goals that shift in response to feedback over Big Design Up Front.
I wish I knew enough about musicianship to know why Molly Tuttle’s guitar playing makes me sit up and say “whoa”, but her bandmates (who have pretty fast fingers themselves) do not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5aFKTvLqMg
No matter what our differences, I think we can all agree that Orff’s “O Fortuna” is a banger.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=ZIPQT3fwFxUJjCnU&t=23&v=PHEjODKHvIg&feature=youtu.be
(I left off the first bit because I don’t like it.)
Robert Shaw - Carmina Burana, Introduction: No. 1, O Fortuna (Official Audio)
uspol, I embrace ageism
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@dabeaz@mastodon.social My aunts on my father’s side basically walked from about 150km NNE of Warsaw to Stuttgart, Germany, fleeing ahead of the Russians. Because I was/am a self-centered little shit (and saw them only every five years or so, plus we had no language in common), I never heard more than the barest outline of the story.
I remember seeing the “Joy Luck Club” movie, which has a scene of a long line of fleeing refugees and suddenly realizing: “I’m only one generation removed from *that*.”
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@inthehands@hachyderm.io It’s not horribly wrong, I understand, that “Agile as Practiced” is now one-month waterfalls, so wotthehell wotthehell.
http://donmarquis.com/reading-room/song-of-mehitabel/
I sense a Pulitzer Prize for some photographer next year. @Nonya_Bidniss@infosec.exchange https://infosec.exchange/@Nonya_Bidniss/116862764176799107
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@retrofan64@oldbytes.space @CodingItWrong@oldbytes.space True of Monticello, Illinois, home of Monticello International Airport (a grass field we flew gliders out of). I have fond memories of the Dairy Queen food there. The hamburgers were legit pretty good.
(This was ~40 years ago. I do not endorse the current DQ, but if I ever have a need to drive to Springfield, I commit to stopping by.)
https://www.dairyqueen.com/en-us/locations/il/monticello/101-w-main-st/11701/
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@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud Well, vibe coding deviates from the Chomsky hierarchy and all that “formal language” stuff, and I think you’d agree that’s not going so well.
And attempts to deviate from “don’t bother; that class of problems can’t be solved in polynomial time” frequently end badly.
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@ArtHarg@mastodon.nl @mattsheffield@mastodon.social Topical: “Single dose of magic mushroom psychedelic can cause anatomical brain changes, study finds.” I know, I know, different mechanisms etc etc, but serendipity must be outed.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/may/05/magic-mushrooms-psychedelic-changes-brain-anatomy-psilocybin
I first read about hypertext in the ‘80s, prompted by @hrheingold@mastodon.social’s /Tools for Thought/. Yes, I was hypertext before hypertext was cool. My 1987 M.S. thesis was “Lynx: Hypertext on-the-cheap for software maintenance”.
A thing that grabbed my attention in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “As We May Think” (a foundational document: https://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/think.pdf) was his notion of “trails” through a hyperlinked corpus. (1/2)
There’s a saying, “the purpose of an X is to produce a new X” - or something like that.
Does that ring a bell? Even with Kagi, my search engine skills do not let me find the original.
It’s a bad sign when you write “The upshot of all this is that” and then can’t see how to end the sentence.
Our neighbors have a semi-feral outdoor cat, Pumpkin. For the last two days, she’s let me skritch her head for *multiple* seconds. Today, no - she cowered under their vehicle.
How many generations has it been since the first cats were domesticated? How can they be afraid of a human hunkering down, going “psst psst psst” and holding their open hand out, wiggling their fingers? How often has that ended badly?
Do they know something about us humans that I don’t know?
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Tewodros³ was a devout Christian, though, and faced even fewer institutional/norm-style constraints, so he could have people who disappointed him have their hands and feet chopped off and thrown to hyenas. So today is better in that way. He also drank a lot, which Trump does not.
–––
¹ https://therestishistory.com/episodes/the-mad-emperor-of-abyssinia-part-1
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Madness_of_King_George
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tewodros_II (3/3)
The city of Chicago had:
50,000 residents in 1850.
500,000 residents in the 1880s.
1,700,000 residents in 1900.
Not wildly surprising that things were chaotic. It was, um, unclear who benefited, and low-level workers seem to have been especially whipsawed.
It’s good that we in this era of Unicorn companies have a clearer understanding of how to handle disruptive economic change in a way that benefits society across the board.
https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/m0023gm2
RE: https://mstdn.social/@DemocracyMattersALot/116868444258059787
Being from downstate Illinois (which has the same relationship to Chicago as the rest of England has to London), it pains me to say it but Illinois’ net donor status is probably due to Chicago. Otherwise, we’d be a taker state like Indiana.
Quoting
If it weren't for Democrats, most of America would starve.
#NoRepublicansEverAgain #WelfareQueens #USPol
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This is pretty similar to browsing a physical library or card catalog: it’s loosely organized along some criterion, but there will be quite different books closely clustered, and it’s weird how often the book you needed wasn’t the book you were looking for, but a neighbor.
How are LLMs at calling out serendipitous connections? (2/2)
@Spoofer3@infosec.exchange
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@Spoofer3@infosec.exchange Seems sensible to me, though I’m not sure how to operationalize it.
Judging from my small sample, the scientists working in the “squishy sciences” (biology, medicine) don’t fuss so much about uncertainty and the discovery of capital-L Laws of Nature. Uncertainty is the air they breathe and Laws are unacheivable.
Maybe: living systems are about evading the long-term consequences of physical laws for long enough (thermodynamics), so studying scofflaws is a different kind of science.
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@GeePawHill@mastodon.social @jasongorman@mstdn.business Prompts a thought. Dancing wise, I only ever got (barely) competent at Argentine Tango. It’s been a while, but I don’t remember practice being slowed down. It ran at normal speed, but it was *segmented*. You’d practice a new figure in normal conditions, just doing only that, doing it over and over, and getting feedback.
FWIW
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⁃ Emitting weird messages toward foreign governments that they find hard to sensibly respond to? ✅
⁃ Erratic? ✅
⁃ Impulsive? ✅
⁃ Vengeful? ✅
⁃ Obsessive about strange things? ✅ (cannons rather than catapults and battleships and ballrooms) (2/3)
“Why is the human body so crap except for the liver?”
"What’s going on here? As always in biology, the correct answer is: A lot, it’s complicated. But I think there’s a common thread.” (Defense against cancer, except for the exceptions.)
https://dynomight.net/liver/ via @dynomight@mastodon.social
