I have mixed feelings about breakdancing going to the Olympics. On the one hand, this extraordinary artistry and athleticism deserve Olympics-level respect. On the other hand, competition and ranking create calcifying pressures in direct opposition to artistry, creativity, expression, exploration, joy…and as a classical pianist, I am •keenly• aware of what happens to a living, breathing, vital art under those pressures.

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Saw this on Lemmy:

Move the debate from Universal Basic Income to Universal Basic Services

https://en.unesco.org/inclusivepolicylab/analytics/move-debate-universal-basic-income-universal-basic-services

petition to rename "width" to "widgth" for monospace consistency with "height" and "length"

While some athletes have raved about the muffins and others have complained about the cardboard beds, some American Olympians are taking advantage of the free healthcare. Team USA rugby player Ariana Ramsey didn't just get a bronze medal in Paris — she's had a pap smear, X-ray, teeth cleaning, and an eye test. She's posted about this on TikTok, influenced other athletes in the Village to visit medical professionals, and now plans to fight for universal healthcare in the U.S. Here's more from Sports Illustrated.

https://flip.it/AIB6n7

#Olympics #Sports #USA #Healthcare #UniversalHealthcare

I was discussing vegetables with a coworker (a common occurrence when one works with botanists) and she had never heard about any of these brassica memes. So, courtesy of my lovely coworker who gives me pepper plants and wildflower seeds, please enjoy some brassica oleracea humor :)

#brassicas #vegetables

More great work from Kyle, and another reminder that retrying isn't the safe best-practice that many folks assume it is: https://jepsen.io/analyses/jetcd-0.8.2

I feel like most in-house software is tacitly released under the Hot Potato Licence.

My MS Teams meetings today...

CI/CD (Continuous Irritation / Continuous Disappointment)

I see the sports folk are getting upset that a bimodal distribution doesn't neatly map to a pair of disjoint sets. Nature be awkward like that.

Extrapolation from one data point doesn't always take us to a place that makes sense, especially if you follow strict logic. #softwaredevelopment #programming #humor

I really enjoyed Atomic Accidents, and this writeup looking at it through an LFI lens Is also great.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mononcqc/112892753671661329

Last week I wrote a blog post for @stamen about the history of Null Island, the imaginary place where 0º latitude and 0º longitude meet. It has now come to my attention that the NOAA weather station moored at that spot, nicknamed by geographers as the "Null Island Buoy", apparently no longer exists!

Check out the update at the end of my blog post for more details of the buoy's untimely demise. Thanks to @ajnn for the tip!

https://stamen.com/the-many-lives-of-null-island/

#NullIsland #NullIslandBuoy

Interesting analysis of how much sleep on average is lost due to sleeping babies on their backs: https://x.com/ruthgracewong/status/1818895404542627881

Just wrapped up a lovely podcast interview where I said the top skill software developers need right now is not this language or that language but evidence-based reasoning. 🗣️I said what I said 😅😂

Ooooh I remember reading this by @SwiftOnSecurity ten years ago. It contributed to forming and radicalizing my worldview early in my career.

@brainwane's comments on blame are good.

I'll add that any time you complain about the evil security team of a big tech company taking away user freedom for some security benefit that doesn't apply to you... I want you to think of Jessica, of how computers served her in 2014, and of why and how some platforms are different today.

http://harihareswara.net/posts/2024/a-story-about-jessica-by-swiftonsecurity/

I fucked up my repo so bad

A distinction on testing that most people don’t realize, from @nelhage:

… for many teams, the purpose of testing is not to find bugs https://blog.nelhage.com/post/two-kinds-of-testing/

The purpose of testing (by which here I mostly mean “CI” in particular) is to serve as a ratchet and as a point of leverage and control for the ever-evolving system that is “the software and the engineers developing it”, and finding net-new bugs is often a distraction and counterproductive to that goal

This is so much better than the WSJ headline: “Trump attacks Harris’s racial identity at conference for Black journalists”.

RE: https://pdx.social/@zuul/112883235780078978