Twitter has a lot of sins to answer for. But right up there is the post that's just a screenshot of text.

Honestly shocked that this hasn't already caused Schumer and Jeffries to give Trump unlimited funding for ICE and illegal wars

a mind-blowing thing is that humans developed pretty accurate maps of Earth's coastlines and rivers and such BEFORE we were able to take pictures from the sky

I will never in my life say that something is "based" without following it with a preposition. I know that is a function of my age. Which is less than 54.

it is done. i am now an arch linux guy

I should really stop walking home along the bus route and hoping maybe a bus will pick me up before the steep hill.

I am just a guy with no particular claim to being a knower of politics. But both this and Stancil's analysis somewhat resonate with me.

Surprising fact about Excel #1035: the format strings you supply to the TEXT builtin, e.g., =TEXT(A1, "yyyy-mm-dd"), need to be localized. So if you're using Excel on a computer where the OS region is de-DE, the preceding example will eval to an error, and you need to supply "JJJJ-MM-TT" instead.

I've seen multiple people on bluesky proclaim "JSTOR now lets you read 100 articles per month, free!" Finally tried this out today and it just isn't straightforwardly true. Every article I attempted to read has displayed this banner. idk maybe non-philosophy disciplines are more available?

Perspective: the only vegetarian in a group about to order pizza. "You like cheese pizza, right?" "Of course! Everybody likes cheese pizza."

Of all the verbal tics the kids these days have adopted, the one that annoys me most is "hear me out", especially before a bare assertion offered without justification.

3yo old coined "yesbody" last night at bedtime. So proud!

Row Zero is also now a Snowflake partner!

It's been great seeing how AWS uses Row Zero for data analytics. rowzero.com/case-studies...

happy to explain to 3yo that the Patriots are the bad guys

There's an even simpler explanation than "people stopped reading Harry Potter because the author is a bigot". What if people stopped reading Harry Potter because it's not actually that good and the zeitgeist moment/marketing campaign has passed?

This is true! Many of the engineers who designed and led the rewrite of the S3 filesystem are now at rowzero.com

tfw you thought of something to post but the Trump regime has just murdered another Minnesotan

You're on a bus that's not going to DC. The bus company does nothing but shout into phones and promise to pick you up in another bus whenever the driver finishes doing whatever he's doing.

hypothesis: the difference between interesting people and non- is that the former, when someone says a thing, wonder, "hmm, is that true?" and have some idea how they might find out. the latter just add it to their ledger of "things I have heard people say" that they use to decide what to believe.

27 Million Fewer Car Trips could also be the title of the autobiography of any American who moved to the city for the first time after college.* *offer void in Texas

Diminish a band They Probably Aren't Giants

"and a loose community of hyper-intellectually curious posters on X" what a polite way to say "likely marks"

At a certain point the whole construct of a lie breaks down because they don't understand the truth enough to misrepresent it.

I have a different reading of this. Miller is implicitly — in a way that's hard to see without the benefit of hindsight — saying "Trump will only invade countries in the western hemisphere, abandoning the rest of the world to Russia and China" and everyone just read it as "We're anti-war".

hacker news is consistently awful on politics. in today's thread on Venezuela, really striking how "America bad because imperialism" is wielded both as a reason to vote against Dems and as exculpatory for Trump when he does "the same".

Seems like a good time to repost the Trumpiest Baby Names gregat.es/baby-names-t...

Moorean Trump

Ok Stranger Things s5e4, sorcerers weren't introduced until 3e, in 2000.

"Navarro’s mother gave the book four stars, but not five, on Amazon."

Something I think about is how anything with the appearance of systematic rigor can easily seem true and authoritative to an uncritical mind. Like the virtue system from Ultima IV.

I didn't write as much on my blog this year, but here's a thread of a few posts, starting with an explanation of how Excel orders numeric options in its filter control (riveting stuff!) gregat.es/excel-numeri...

The Expanse is just GoT in space. Even written by the same guy!* (*This is the one conspiracy theory I indulge in, which also happens to be at least partially true. And maybe isn't a proper conspiracy theory because I think I am the only one who believes it.)

I did another quick analysis in Row Zero of the SSA baby name data: the trumpiest (and least trumpy) baby names of 2024!

Finally got around to updating the SSA baby name spreadsheet linked in rowzero.com/blog/baby-na... -n names for boys continue their downward trend in popularity!

What happens when it's nine times out of ten? You fire them (after a drawn out PIP process of course), unless they're the CEO's nephew, Claude.

I will reiterate that joining WA's 36th LD Dems as a PCO has been the most rewarding way to get involved in politics I have ever tried (there have been a few). And also a great way to make connections in your community!

Not in the energy world, but in general I have needed to update my views about what things could possibly happen, not about how bad the Republicans are. Exception: USAID. E.g.: I didn’t predict DOGE kids getting into the US payments system, but that was because I didn’t realize that was a thing.

This is nuts. Abolish golf? One of those slogans that makes you sound like a crazy person but is sensible and correct.

Ah, the height of British culinary achievement — a factory-made sandwich that alleges to be seafood yet is somehow shelf stable, sold in drug stores wrapped in plastic, which dares to declare itself superior to a fast food hamburger by pretending to be in a different category.

Let's stipulate that at least some software engineers who claim AI tools make them vastly more productive are neither lying nor misjudging their own productivity. This is not true for all or even most, even among people who happily adopt the tools. So what can explain the difference?

a bit of professional news I'm very proud to share: AWS is officially a Row Zero customer!

There's been a lot of discussion in recent days about the influence of the Stranger in local elections. I had a lot to say about their impact in school board races, which is so decisive that we could say they now effectively appoint the board:

How do whales hydrate? My old favorite counterexample to the claim that everything you might want to know is googleable turns out to also be a useful demonstration of why you shouldn't trust LLM chat bot output.

The Status Interview – Or How To Write Up a Senate Purge List talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-s...

It's a shame that the ST:TNG episode "Conspiracy" came in s1, when multi-episode arcs were still not really a thing. It could have made a very good arc!

Still waiting for Chuck Schumer's "wait for Republicans to do something once Trump's approval is low enough" strategy to bear fruit.

Yeah, the entire caucus is responsible for this, regardless of their vote

Primary all of them everywhere. Hound them at town halls. Show up at their offices. Call or write to them about every issue. That cadre of this party has to go. Clean house.

Since the Democrats worked extra hard to hide who actually supported this, I think the No Kings/Resistance position should be to primary every Democrat unless they publicly call for Schumer's ouster this week Either they go into total rebellion mode, which they won't, or the people will