[Star Trek Star Fleet Academy Spoilers] Not starting off strong with a justice system with no defense advocate causing secondary harms by applying justice.

This style of management is way too common in the tech industry. I call it Star trek management. We've all seen it. Captain calls down to engineering. "How long to get the warp core back online" and engineering replies "12 hours sir". "You've got 1" comes the response from the captain. And […]

🚨 I know everything is going to hell, but a reminder you still have 4 days left to enroll in #ACA insurance starting Feb. 1st. The expired tax credits are devastating for most enrollees, but there are still some states where many can find surprisingly good deals: acasignups.net/26/01/05/gro...

RE: https://phpc.social/@syntaxseed/115855415960085751 I have such conflicted thoughts on this. What happened? Gross. It's very much a harm as a systemic effect of "AI" But also _open source industry_ is in fact a thing I think has been deeply destructive and somewhat replaced the […]

Y'all's AI criticism would mean a lot more if you weren't factually wrong about its capabilities.

You can spot AI Boosterism if you add "Iä! Iä!" to the end of what's posted and it makes perfect sense.

This year got fired in January and has just been serving out its notice period malevolently.

Dear critics of LLM coding, there's tons to criticize. However, if your argument is an analog to “Wine is terrible! I tasted a Four Loko, and it was awful!” you are in fact making bad arguments and should stop.

@kissane Holy cow the latest Wreckage piece is fantastic.

One thing I'm learning from so many people declaring that LLMs are like a pair programmer you have to guide a lot is how few people I ever want to pair program with.

Here's a reminder about one of the most important results of the past twelve years of ancient DNA research. Northern Europe was overrun by plague-spreading steppe nomads less than 5000 years ago, causing an almost complete population replacement. It's a 1492 event. Everybody knows that us […]

No, little Timmy, the water isn't being "destroyed*. It's going back into the water cycle, like all the other water we use. But it *is* being removed from human (and ecological) usability. We don't get access to that water again until it comes back to us as precipitation, and the amount of […]

A very happy solstice to all!

Happy 61st anniversary of ‘goodbye to Portugal after 451 years’ day to Goa, today

Here's the document release you were waiting for today! The UNIX V4 tape! https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw #retrocomputing

I watch Jeopardy most days, and it’s become clear to me that my knowledge of African geography is abysmal. So I made myself a tiny web app with a blank map to help me practice remembering where all the different countries are on the continent. Test your own knowledge! […]

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@fasterthanlime/115730529166857536 Well this is some bullshit

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sil/115683600028649718 This. And yet: looking at its context, it was _shipped_ soon after that prototype period, renamed to 'java'script to tack on to the zeitgeist, and built as a glue language without basic debugging. Some of the mistakes persist! But it did in […]

This is what every police chief in America should be saying and enforcing. Minneapolis police chief warns officers: Stop unlawful force by ICE or lose your job https://www.ms.now/news/minneapolis-police-chief-unlawful-force-ice-jobs

The idea that propaganda's main effect is in what it makes normal keeps sticking with me. I see it everywhere now. And it's how so much media that doesn't set off alarm bells as trying to manipulate so effectively works as propaganda. Reject or accept the overt message, the covert normalization […]

A true sign of inflation: the Jehovah’s Witnesses have added a new sign to their street preaching stands. ‘Coping with rising prices? Ask us about how to handle the stress’

Update. The #un is dropping #GoogleDocs in favor of #opensource #cryptpad (@CryptPad). https://itsfoss.com/news/un-ditches-google-form/

The tragedy of the commons is not that it is wasted but that the beneficiaries don't band together to stop its unsustainable and unfair exploitation.

e-bike law in the US is so frustrating, drawing lines between things it has no business delineating to circumscribe behavior it never describes.

man debian packaging is so cursed with modern package managers. It's so oriented around everything being C-shaped libfoo-version.tar.gz files at the core, and everything else is forced into that hole. I get _why_ but the trade-offs seem really bad now. I can see why Canonical said 'screw it […]

Home ownership, or “buy-in rent stabilization”

[Horrifying but probably good actually tech idea] What if we defined - XSLT functions for the canonicalizations of JSON-LD - Defined ways to trigger browsers to know to apply XSLT to JSON (headers) and JSON-LD (in band or as headers?) documents.

Dear Restaurants: Frying your own chips does not 'elevate' your nachos. It makes them a greasy mess that reheat even more poorly than before. Buy store brand corn chips. Use those. It will in fact be better. You do not need to even spring for Frito-Lay products or anything. Just Do. Not. Fry […]

[open source whinging] Ugh why is this always the way. I evaluated like 25 authentication servers for a small scale web project — I do want to support things like OIDC and Passkeys, so this is not something I really want to make myself like the old days of “use crypt() on the passwords and just […]

i am a bit of a broken record about this BUT if you 1. live outside the USA, and 2. are viscerally revolted by ICE, then: there is almost certainly something similar happening where you live, and which you are well-placed to take action against: electorally, in your day-to-day conversations […]

Everyone should know that contempt blinds you.

@RuthMalan this seems like something up your alley https://ultralight.school/summer2025.html

Wow this slaps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDn7c_zY5XI

Wild. I had no idea I had a 4 digit github user ID. Was I really that early or was there an early renumbering and I got a low one thanks to a username starting with A? Such a strange thing to learn right after moving most of my stuff away from github.

Please do not lick the millennium-era electronics

I really wish Ghost didn't force you to have bad heading nesting.

New to me music group I am falling in love with, “CATBEAR” https://lnk.bio/catbear https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0X9fG5iqRcqnmDXgUV2xK8_-Z2DTeKww

It's amazing how often "Questions usually have answers, and we can find the specific supporting evidence for them" is both true and a helpful attitude to have when working in tech.

The flooding in Hội An is incredible to see. So much destruction :(

I'll be going to this on Sunday. Join me! Sunday from 5-6:30 at Revolution hotel in Boston https://bpt.me/6732394 Pay what you can, ticket proceeds go to BAGLY

Monster Pho is offering a free meal for kids and 25% off adult meals, for those with SNAP. Folks who can help work food banks and pantry items or direct giving, please do so.

If you've never listened to the advice to add some pasta water to the pasta with sauce on it and heat that together… do it. It really does make a difference.

https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/treat-big-tech-like-big-tobacco I expected to hate this take but actually I think it's great. Curation should be speech, not hosting. Plan accordingly.

kuberbake

Maybe the core point behind Kubernetes is "how can we get young men to yell at clouds too?"

Man I hate the new language for a task one doesn't want to do — "aversive”. Primary reason is that it externalizes the problem. It's fixed mindset framing, that something _else_ has to change to make the situation better, that it's the task's fault for being aversive, instead of our own for not […]