Slowly coming around to using `org-babel` for most of my config files in emacs. Here's where it's helpful: putting down context of why I added something or what I was trying to accomplish when I did. The trickiest part of using my own emacs config is that it's over twenty years old now and half […]

Scott Alexander treating very gently the legacy of a man who thought himself the smartest in the room and, ultimately, got consumed by that. I don't agree with all his words but I appreciate his approach. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-dilbert-afterlife #scottadams #dilbert

_Star Trek_ is great because it's about space exploration and the things that make us human and the future but it's also about how when you try to train a cat it trains you right back.

As a tool to write your code for you, Copilot is... Room for improvement, though remarkable. As a powered search engine, Copilot is borderline the holy grail. Being able to say "What files have "some complicated thing" in them" without having to build a regexp is actually holy-grail […]

[Marvel Loki spoilers] I was going to make a joke but I just realized that Marvel already made it. Kang's alias is "Victor Timely." Victor and his variants built the infrastructure to maintain the Sacred Timeline, thus locking in one sequence of events relative to the rest of the Multiverse […]

So I logged back into Facebook for awhile. Ugh. You know... I'm gonna just say it. And yes, this is me being snobbish and elitist right now. Feel like an asshole; might delete later. Half the problem with Facebook is me. I can't see people only 2 degrees separate from me be that dumb and not […]

[suicide, news, AI] Jesus Christ. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/chatgpt-wrote-goodnight-moon-suicide-lullaby-for-man-who-later-killed-himself/ Quick reminder that this generation of conversational AI is particularly dangerous for people with suicidal ideation to use alone […]

The first gift we have to give our children is love. It is not necessarily free to give it, and not all of us always have it to give. But it is the first gift because it is the first one they're ready to receive.

Prescriptive English grammar is actually pretty funny when you think about it. Speakers and writers: "Hey, 'is not' and 'are not' are too long. We've shortened them. We have a 'contraction' where you drop some letters and just do 'isn't' or 'aren't'." Grammar: "Yes, good, this is good, we will […]

The pervasive Mastodon etiquette of properly alt-tagging images means it's harder for me to shitpost single-image responses to people's threads. ... this is a feature, not a bug.

"No, I'm not a streamer. I just have Resting Twitch Face."

Announcing my Sandstorm app, _OrgTodo_ : A todo-task tracker with integration into emacs org-mode. This is very, very preliminary: alpha only, might eat your data, lots of missing features. But it scratched an itch: org-mode is great for tracking tasklists, but emacs is hard to run centrally […]

Federal Department of Probability Boons issues the following statement: "In light of recent changes to US Mint practice by the Executive, finding _any_ penny on the ground is considered 'lucky.' Heads or tails no longer matters."

Years ago, my mother-in-law was in the hospital for a pretty serious surgery. They had her in recovery on the really _good_ drugs because she was in some really good pain. _Batman & Robin_ happened to be on the TV, and as she lay there, drifting in and out of painkiller-suffused coherence, she […]

One of the hardest things about being an immigrant is I don’t know what to do wirh ‘rugged individualism’. I am considered one of the most ‘westernized’ and ‘independent’ people in the society I come from (people think it’s too much.. moving to a whole other country? Too independent) but Even […]

We don't talk enough about the poor-farm-boy-who-knew-an-honest-day's-work-but-not-a-lot-of-soft-comfortable-things to […]

The Jerk Store called. Unfortunately, a hack on their customer store has leaked PII from 200,000 customers, product, and former employees, including you. They recommend you contract a service for credit and fraud monitoring and apologize for the inconvenience.

TIL: With a properly-filled-out form VBA-27-2008, presented to any Veterans Affairs office or post office (call ahead to confirm availability), you can acquire same-day a United States flag suitable for use in a burial ceremony with honors for a deceased veteran. ... large systems are […]

So there's a pattern I use repeatedly in emacs and I'm wondering if it already has a name. I call it "Tearoff tasklist." Essentially, I have a template org-babel file that is "a project," and for every ticket I work on at work I clone that template. As tasks are completed, I move the […]

Jesus, Reddit. That's specific. And so near my anniversary too!

Tonight's game was decided by... Ghosts, apparently. Air ghosts. Djinni. #steelers #ravens

Peacock... Listen. You can do what you want with your Goddamn football coverage. ... but if you're gonna rip a chunk of music from _Banjo-Kazooie_ for a joke about how one of the players stands, you'd better bloody-well be paying Grant Kirkhope his _fucking money._ #peacock #nfl #nbc […]

Me doing TypeScript: "This is nearly the perfect language. Clean, clear, and flexible. I don't know why I would want to program in anything else. Me doing TypeScript and it tells me that `Foo | undefined` cannot be assigned to `Foo | null`: "I will _throw this whole language into a fire._ " […]

Sorted out a Peacock subscription just to watch this football game. Just had to reboot the app because the video started to bad-ly-stut-ter. Oh yeah, I'm _loving_ that we had to do this instead of just watching it on cable because Verizon got in a stupid fight with NBC. Truly, this is the […]

🎶 Shawty had them Innsmouth-look genes, gills, fins with spurs The whole cult was chantin' with her Dove in the flow Next thing you know Shawty swam low low low low low low low low... 🎵

https://addyosmani.com/blog/21-lessons/ This resonates with much of my experience.

One of my favorite things about org-mode is when I go "I wonder if it already supports" and the answer is yes. Today's "aw, sweet": check boxes in the same format Markdown uses. #emacs #orgmode

Hacking on emacs really has me in a "strings not things" mood. Just straight-up moving data around from piece to piece by plopping it into a string and then pulling it back out. Does it make my parser really complicated? Yes. Does it burn resources that could be spent otherwise? Also probably […]

Starting to reach that threshold on this personal project where I go "Is this good enough to release to another human being? Do I want to be responsible for that?" Finding it useful in my day-to-day, but also, it kinda sucks? 😄 #sandstorm #todo #opensource

I'm pressing (X) to doubt the benefits of unit testing on any small-scale, personal project. Here's why: on my most recent project I've been taking advantage of emacs time-tracking to do some meticulous clock-in / clock-out of each feature I accomplish. And I've been doing that as I've gone […]

[Discussion of CSAM] Credit where it's due, the fact Grok didn't generate CSAM images sooner is testament to how few people, even in the interests of general-purpose hacking and system integrity checking, are willing to make those kinds of queries. Yes, just this once, I'm giving credit where […]

So Andy Serkis is directing _Animal Farm._ As an animated comedy. I'm not against it, but I think I might skip it for James Gunn's _Sophie's Choice._

Credit where it's due, I will say this about the utility of #facebook ... When I have to go look up when someone died to flesh out an obituary, it's an invaluable resource. This isn't the kind of information I collect out-of-hand, so being able to search someone's timeline to see when the […]

Tracking time working on a little pet project has been... Interesting. * Time to first prototype: ~9 hrs * Oh, you know, I could restructure this as a web app that works without a network... ~**8 additional hours**

I should, at some point, write a blog post about the gap between developers and users, with comment on the gap between users and _other_ users. It's sort of a fascinating topic how the incentives really don't always align between the groups.

Anyone know why the UUID and SHA digest APIs are gated behind the page being loaded over HTTPS in browsers? These seem unrelated. #webdev

"The doors are locked. The windows are barred. The dog does not appear to have woken up. The squeaky floorboards haven't. I really doubt that you are a ghost, and gods generally do not announce themselves so politely. You could, of course, be Death, but I don't believe he bothers with such […]

Pdf is one of the most complicated document formats ever devised. Unfortunately, that also makes it one of the most useful document formats ever devised. The mistakes are inevitable.

The social interprets censorship as damage and boosts it. https://mastodon.online/@davidaugust/115770553002459389

In MacOSX, `killall Dialog` will kill a program that, among other things, can pop up an uncancelable dialog window on your screen with a countdown timer in it. Just something useful to know. For reasons! Productivity reasons. 😉 #macosx

I am a (x) DWARF Looking for a (x) HOLE

[csam meta] You know, when we made all these extremely-stiff-penalty laws about CSAM to try and suppress it by criminalizing the market, not just the creators, I'm not _entirely_ sure people would have been so in favor of it if they realized we'd get to the "advanced deepfake AI technology lets […]

Sometimes, we do the _incredibly potentially destructive_ thing because we've limited the blast radius so our notion of "the worst that could possibly happen" is basically correct. This is called "engineering." (Or possibly "demolitions," which I'm told is a kind of "engineering". 😉 )

Construction accident today. Nobody hurt, thank God.

That feeling when you are a career software engineer and know the best practice, but you also hate the best practice so in your personal project you completely YOLO that part because you would rather pluck out your own left eyeball than write database migration logic at home.

Reminder for #devops, #sre, and other programming types. You have now passed the last point to push to production for 2025. Pushing to production now means you risk debugging your fixes next week sat in your childhood bedroom, on dodgy WiFi, while your uncle makes rude and sexist remarks with […]

Some days are harder than others. This is one of them. We will survive and we will persevere. But those things come on the other side of today.

Ugh. Mental health protip: don't do math on how much of something billionaires could afford. Really wrecks up your faith in humanity.

@TheZeldaZone Oh hey, you made Reddit. ;) https://www.reddit.com/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/comments/1powgo1/peeetah_please_help/

When your Technophile tries to upload their consciousness to the NHP they built. #lancer #lancerrpg