Math is when you use numbers, except if you’re doing real math, which doesn’t use numbers, and poetry is when something rhymes, except if you’re doing real poetry, which doesn’t use rhymes

I wrote a small blog post exploring the data supporting (or not) a WaPost claim of a "move to Canada" search spike "after" Biden's election. https://rawdatastudies.com/2023/01/08/disaggregating-google-trends-data/
Looking at daily data, the spike occurred several days before the election was called for Biden and was tiny compared to the 2016 spike. #dataviz

Some folks did this in Cap Hill, and it took SDOT approximately five seconds to send a crew out to undo it. https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2022/11/while-sdot-waits-for-funding-somebody-painted-a-guerilla-crosswalk-at-e-olive-way-and-harvard/

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/debcha/statuses/109655115496370722

Possibly the most annoying UI trend of the last few years is websites changing from

[username] - [ password ] -> Login

to

[username] -> Next -> [ password ] -> Login

RT @WarrenJWells@twitter.com

Very important finding on crosswalks, yield rates, and speed.

At 20 mph, 3 out of every 4 drivers yield to a pedestrian in the basic crosswalk.

At just 30 mph, that rate drops to 1 in 8 drivers.

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/WarrenJWells/status/1611867723608494080

i have no idea how many different pythons i have in my computer. probably across 2 desktops, 2 laptops, and a server, theres like 80 different pythons. sssssss. i type in python and god knows whats going to happen. theyre all wriggling around in there. sssss. what is it? three point ssssseven? three point ten point sssssix? who knows? sssss. sorry you cant quit. usssse quit() or Ctrl-Z plusssss return to exssssit

My 7-year-old does not understand the “Hello Computer” joke from A Voyage Home. You can just talk to computers now… it’s no longer funny. (Unrelated: I’m old.)

Every once in a blue moon, I need to use (^|...) in a regex to check against either the start of the string or certain characters, and it always feels weird to me.

Never used it in production code, but someone at Labs once actually asked for an elegant way to express exactly what a Ruby flip-flop did, and I took much pleasure in demonstrating this ridiculous usage of a Range. This was back during the pre-Slack days of email lists, so I never did find out what people thought of that.

https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1611159965351444480

wow, a thing that seemed obviously fake, and was then shown by data to be probably fake, now has the people who were pushing it saying it was possibly not as true as they claimed all along

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shoplifting-retail/index.html

Woah, this name has been so ingrained in my general consciousness since I’ve been doing tech that this appropriation literally never occurred to me until now. 😞

RE: https://kith.kitchen/users/ehashman/statuses/109643891393466206

Huh.

A while back I saw an r/woodworking post where someone was asking for resources for woodworking plans. A few people told them to Google it.

If you Google it you get absolute horseshit. Just page after page of useless results. So we need to stop the fucking "let me google that for you" era and recognize that search is entirely broken in the modern day. We NEED human recommendations and information sharing now more than ever.

One of the best "anatomy of a bug" stories I've heard in ages: how TikTok's auto-captioning interprets numbers. I love computers so much. (via @nomeatmashers@tiktok.com)

Woah. https://substack.com/app-link/post?publication_id=458709&post_id=68974559

I talked with people at GitHub at the time who told me that, after getting more details from Heroku, the GitHub security team assessed Heroku as a major security risk due to the responses from the Heroku security team. GitHub immediately instructed the use of any Heroku products within its business to stop, and for staff to assume a full compromise on all Heroku keys. Some smaller sites were running on Heroku at the time, and they were turned off, with the secrets and passwords not reused elsewhere.

I wrote a quick thread about adopt a drain, civic tech projects, and tech solutionism vs community resilience over on the (yet another account) where I intend to talk about those sorts of things: https://mastodon.publicinterest.town/web/@christa/109637661557174041 #cawx #sfwx #civictech

TIL about galactic algorithms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_algorithm

An AI test from 1971 shows you need to adjust your #ChatGPT expectations.

In 1971, Terry Winograd devised the Winograd Schemas, simple sentence understanding tasks that require the use of knowledge and commonsense reasoning. Humans understand them easily. ChatGPT... not so much.

Attractive nuisances in software design: https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2023/01/attractive-nuisances.html

A common anti-pattern where a problem has a solution that is obvious, intuitive and wrong.

#python #programming

Finally moved off Terminal.app (to Alacritty, for now) since I was fed up with not having 24-bit color.