How do we extricate ourselves from this nightmare that none of us asked for and is ruining all of our lives and not even enriching the rich people who are forcing it on us in the name of capitalism.

Not shaming anybody directly here but somebody had me running for reasonable posts about Gen X, my hometown and here's gonna be a small thread of them

A billion dollar industry based on combining art, engineering, design and business expertise. How many more of these sectors could we have if we ran the science and innovation system based on nurturing talent and long term vision, rather than managerial alignment theatre and ticket clipping?

Folks

If you're developing an iOS/macOS app that includes a pride flag, did you know you don't need to add a .PNG asset to your bundle (and worry it's high enough res.). Even though your PNG will compress well, nothing will instantiate faster than a raw 8-pixel image! gist.github.com/bentorkingto...

seen on the sub

if you were unequivocally not open to reversing the nuclear free policy, you'd probably fire the guy who said you were, right? like, electorally that would be quite a dangerous and foolish thing to do if you were unequivocally not open to reversing the nuclear free policy

unpopular opinion: 2FA is actually bad, because we're really just training users that the something as banal as logging in requires blindly copying codes, typing additional passwords and clicking 'OK' on a series of dialogs that there's 50 different versions of

classic IRD, sending 15min TTL 2FA tokens, but batch-processing them on some mainframe that runs on kerosene

yeah see the thing about proponents is they tend to say things like that www.rnz.co.nz/news/busines...

That rsync mess is one spicy meatball! It has everything, and is a fantastic referendum on 10 different fronts. Good luck to who writes the long-form explainer with context.

I strongly feel we urgently need to shift away from blaming the government and hoping anything will change there. The only votes that have any meaningful impact right now are the dollars we spend.

Tidying up the post-its on my disorganised WIP & todo board, found one inscribed "book restaurant", and my stupid brain ran in circles thinking "that sounds a lot like a library, Ben, what kinda dumbass techbro idea were you having a month ago". Took me a whole minute.

it appears the cramming-banknotes-into-the-shredder employee leaderboard is having some unintended consequences

💯 “A general pattern for LLMs is that they look really good at things you are bad at. What that means is that if you find yourself thinking of its output as significantly better than yours in a particular domain, there's a high chance that you are not equipped to judge that quality effectively.”

The Sun Dreamstation was Sun Microsystems' brief and deeply confusing attempt to answer the question: What if a Sparcstation was also really good at Crazy Taxi?

Wow I am tired of writing detailed human feedbacks on AI generated texts

The humble leaf blower reveals a lot about us, as a society. You just blow them away, keep blowing until they're gone. Where do they go? It is unknowable – like gravity, dark matter, neutrinos – probably centuries until we figure it out.

An autistic billionaire’s neurotype is not the reason he’s an absolute piece of shit, it has been revealed.

A gas tax holiday in response to the Iran War is a good idea in the same way that subsidizing showers is a smart response to a drought. Come for the frustration, stay for the insight that this idea may actually fatten oil company profits. newsletter.platypuseconomics.com/p/a-gas-tax-...

I shouldn’t laugh since my Kiwisaver is just a shed full of potatoes now and I’m basically in a similar position, but I‘m banking on the spuds holding their value better than elastic cloud compute

and it’s all thanks this one weird trick: listing the actual government on your assets register

The greatest trick the Silicon Valley Devil ever pulled was the idea that "UX" and User Acceptance Testing exists. That there are people who work 9-5 making systems better and easier for users. There is no evidence of this ever happening.

What none of the experts say (probably because it's not clear from the press release) is whether the "AI" is old-fashioned image segmentation or so-4-years-ago deep convolutional neural nets or modern spicy autocomplete. It makes a big difference in technological maturity and ease of evaluation

I think TradeMe's issue is there's no disincentive for side-gig traders to play the long game with fuck-outta-here prices, so the site is full of listings that won't get bids. Those have a negative effect on the platform because they're functionally equivalent to spam. www.rnz.co.nz/news/busines...

I guess even 40 minutes can be 'a while', huh

if anyone links me to XKCD 927 or says "if it ain't broke…" one more time, I swear to god

Our government telling an adversary to disregard the President's social media posts because they're not real and are intended for promotional purposes and US media consumption, says it all. Holy fuck.

They got a billboard that says LONG TERM PLAN on it

Hypothetically speaking, what are the consequences if the PM is caught with his hand in the till? Does he have to stand up in the house and say he’s legit soz, or are we into less-than-ideal territory here? www.thepost.co.nz/politics/361...

It’s always in the last place you look eh www.rnz.co.nz/news/environ...

Oh, we do get Mike Hosking literally telling his listeners "nothing to see here" which should be a big flashing signal to everyone in media that there is indeed very much to see here.

So it looks like NZME is going to Tim Jago this story, i.e. run RNZ's initial story once, bury it in the depths of their website, & then totally ignore it. Also note they gave it an anodyne headline when they could've gone with 'PM tries to hide major polluters writing law change in their favour'

could be worse

I just read a job ad for a boring old city council. They're looking for someone to lead their AI rollout, but (loosely paraphrasing here) so that it's not just a hallucinating dumpster fire of dog shit and asbestos like other orgs with trillions of dollars and armies of CS majors are pumping out

a genre of post I kinda miss is the AI reply guys jumping on these to say "well DUHH! of course it gets it wrong, you're using an example of something LLM *really fucking sucks at*"

“The Al is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you”

Always thought Labour won't win in Whangārei again for a long time, but Vinny C will surely suck up a good chunk of the Nat votes, and Labour's Gary Payinda is incredibly popular. I reckon the votes will probably be split roughly in thirds between them www.nzherald.co.nz/northern-adv...

the only "bsky is a bubble" take you will ever need

If I was a journalist I would have also mentioned how funding for wilding pine control was cut by two thirds by the same government in 2023/24. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

🎂 one year in Poneke. I really like it here, and my MH has improved immensely. It's beautiful, it's walkable, it has birds. Utes and assholes are rare. It's just so calm.

Can't access more than 640kB RAM? Bill issue

Kura Total Landscaping

Employees of a dealership in Olathe, Kan., found the nest, which is protected under federal law, on top of one of the truck’s tires. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/u...

how did it never occur to me there's actually a big overlap between COBOL and graphics shaders github.com/chrisforbes/...

In Boston the same thing happens when you type in "irregard"

It's wild that software used to come in a box, and you installed it and your computer did a useful or entertaining thing. And now there's a system that requires access to ungodly amounts of human-created data, and humans need to clean the input, and fix the output, and I'm supposed to be impressed.

I use metaphors a lot. I woudn't say i reach for them tho, that sounds like metaphors are sitting on a spice rack. What you should do with metaphors is construct them. The deliberation imvolved means you get the building you want.