Yup, it me. I so rarely watch any TV series anymore since it’s just too much of a time commitment.

https://xkcd.com/2727/

Ah yes, the metric SI unit of "a penguin".

The Globus INK (1967) is a remarkable piece of Soviet spacecraft equipment. Its rotating globe showed cosmonauts the position of their Soyuz spacecraft. An electromechanical analog computer, it used gears, cams, and differentials to compute the position. Let's look inside 🧵

Thinking about all the recent layoffs in tech, media, etc., and how so many of the "Nobody wants to work anymore!"/"Where'd the go-getters go?!"/"The rise of 'quiet quitting'" type articles in the past year or so overlooked the effect that the "hey, maybe we'll just lay a bunch of people off because we want to make a little extra cash" culture the business world has fostered might have on, well, everything involving worker morale/sense of loyalty/etc.

It’s so strange as a Rubyist being in the Python ecosystem nowadays. Still have a strong preference for Ruby over Python, though the thing I miss the most from Python when doing Ruby is probably the static typing.

One of the downsides to running Akkoma is that it seems like none of the native Mastodon apps work with it? Sigh.

CEOs: nobody wants to work

also CEOs: we’re laying off 10,000 workers

i was laid-off twice early in my career in very large reorgs / cost-cutting.

the thing that wld have been helpful for me to hear then was 'this is not abt you. you were a number on someone's spreadsheet. they wanted that number to go down by 1000 or 2000 or 10,000'.

so, to anyone who needs to hear that today:

it's not abt you. you did nothing wrong.

Look, I don't work at a megacorp and I've never accidentally hired, according to my notes, twelve thousand too many people. I get that I'm not speaking from experience. But I feel like "oops, I hired twelve thousand too many people" is something that... should have some sort of consequences for the people who made the decision, in error, that they should hire twelve thousand too many people?

“Don’t show me the same boosted post more than 2×” is my new, most-desired Masto feature. Until quote posts are implemented :)

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RE: https://mastodon.social/users/bigzaphod/statuses/109717894861207161

Desktop Twitterrific got cut off, I guess I’m done with Twitter now!

That was a very nice different view on Chesterton’s Fence, thanks @rixx.

Again, the frustrating thing about this in practice is that no matter how thoroughly we are able to come back and tell our conservative friends that we do fully understand and appreciate the original reasons for the construction of the fence, they remain unwilling to “allow” us to remove it. (The word “allow” there is worth pondering. The presumption there about who is, by definition, always a supplicant, and who holds the authority to permit or to prohibit is telling. “Allow” is, in this instance, very much a fence-builder’s word.)

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2019/10/21/chestertons-fence-and-frosts-wall/

Now I’m picturing soldiers doing Silly Walks to avoid AI detection…

https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1615716082588815363

Huh, TIL.

When using macros to build more complex abstractions, the need for computation and encapsulation arises. To this end, the TEX language provides intermediate storage for different data types (registers), operations on these types, a grouping mechanism, and control flow primitives. Per type, there are 256 registers, numbered from 0 to 255.

I’m don’t consider myself an artist by any stretch of the imagination, but this really resonated with me nonetheless as a programmer.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/creativity_things

"stroustrup" sounds like a legacy C string function that has been proven to have 3 different memory safety issues

Really neat to see both the reverse engineering of a neural network as well as how the neural network learned how to do binary addition.

https://cprimozic.net/blog/reverse-engineering-a-small-neural-network/

I’ve never been a huge fan of the Labs PM mantra of “outcome > output”. Or resolutions and the like, really. I’m more about putting in the time and making sure that aligns with outcome goals instead.

https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/tech-debt-day

If you liked Return of the Obra Dinn, and especially if you were into it but it was maybe a little too much detective work for you to keep track of, I highly highly recommend The Case of the Golden Idol. It's a detective game where you investigate crime scenes and try to reconstruct what happened, similar to Obra Dinn's filling out of the ship manifest through inference. But the puzzles are a little smaller scope, and it's all 2D. It is SO GOOD.

https://www.thegoldenidol.com/