it might be worth going over some basic facts and misconceptions while we're sharpening our pitchforks

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@HeliosPi/117136481970426657

I like the learning philosophy described here. I'd summarize it this way:

• If you want to learn something like martial arts, you need to be able to be calm in class, because being stressed makes learning harder, and the way the instructor runs the class has a huge impact on that.
• It helps a ton to be able to experience the class as play, as a fun time, and especially not as something that will trigger trauma responses in you or your fellow students.
• And finally it's key to recognize those fellow students as your partners in learning, not as competitors or opponents, but as people you want to help and who want to help you.

These points are key parts of why I've been enjoying the aikido class I've been in for the last year (and recently successfully tested for my first rank!), but I think lots of training can benefit from the same principles.

thanks for the keyboard tips all, I think the keycap is just broken. 😞 (There is another key that is exactly the same size and the keycap fits onto the Tab switch fine without any stabilizer or anything.) I'll see if replacement keys aren't too expensive. ⌨️

@lauren Similar to what happens with oil wells in the oil & gas industry.

this is too hard. i'm gonna learn about pseudorandom generator functions

My current theory is that feeling pain/annoyance is an integral part of the software engineering process.

Hear me out: when your architecture is starting to fail you, the cost of change goes up. That's painful for developers, who will hopefully be given the time to address this (or sneak these changes in alongside other work). Clankers don't care. Whether it's a couple of lines in a few files or a massive change across the entire codebase, it's all the same to them: tokens in, tokens out.

i suppose it probably is kind of nice to be able to store a very large file in smaller chunks............or to support appends even if they get normalized into a contiguous representation later

"One of our clients received 12 cover letters that were exactly the same, from 12 different people. So they clearly put it into the same bot, and it spat out the same cover letter."

#ShayPeters, then-recruiter at Robert Walters, Feb 2026

https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/the-detail/story/2019023577/reality-bites-for-kiwi-job-seekers-as-unemployment-climbs

That's not the only explanation. There could also be a scammer running a ghostwriting service for cover letters, using good old-fashioned copy'n'paste. But using a Trained #MOLE to burp up a cover letter is the most likely cause.

#AI

Anarchist Black Cross Fed.: **Political Prisoner Updates 8.19.26**

https://www.abcf.net/blog/political-prisoner-updates-8-19-26/

One part of NYC ABC‘s every-other-week Political Prisoner Letter-Writing Dinners is presenting updates and announcements. These typically relate to PPs, POWs, or are especially relevant to folks in NYC. Since February 2011, we’ve been printing and mailing hard copies of the updates and announcements to about a dozen imprisoned comrades. In April 2013, along

Oh I guess I'm not sleeping yet then

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVYmNJGjFnI

like it means you could theoretically add a chunk in the middle..........but you still need to recompute the whole hash tree. and i was thinking oh maybe non-contiguous data? but contiguous data rox

@neil I took my built to be a powerful AI harvesting data exfiltration machine sold to me as a gaming PC, stripped it down to nothing and turned it into a dumb machine. I had to block Microsoft on the network level to stop them from doing whatever they want to my PC. After I happened turn off the internet right when their AI harvesting software they installed on my PC without knowing it was getting ready to exfiltrate data on me, while Intel and Dell also re-installed telemetry, so I said fuck you all and blocked Microsoft and Dell at the network level. Nothing runs in the background ever. If it’s idle it will go you’re not using me so I have nothing to do guess I will just power off then.

I just watched Repo Man for my first time ever. WTF. I enjoyed it, and also how is this a part of the Criterion Collection?!

Sickly hilarious to hear the pro-AI gang trying to talk up jobs that will be created by data centers. Yeah, there will be construction jobs until construction finishes. And then the whole gigantic hyper-scale data center monstrosity will be operated by a dozen people or so. JOBS ARE THE BIG AI LIE. One of them, anyway.

@NewtonMark maybe we need to drop some bears on the island to sort things out

i'm realizing that since i have no need for my in-memory filesystem to correspond to disk blocks, i can make files out of ordered variable-size chunks. this might be completely useless though

Need another imaginary coding speed up besides LLMs?
Try a fast cursor!

@Taweret bars tbh
https://youtu.be/YIpcf9OThvw

@NewtonMark maybe this time they’ll figure out how to deal with sewage without Panama telling them to fuck off into international waters and stop dumping literal shit on their coast.

It’s carnage in my prep kitchen as I finish packaging 50 kg of pickles, podis, ladoos, and namkeens. I have lemon pickles, dried mango pickles, Andhra red chili chutney, carrot radish pickles, green chili pickles and have suddenly found myself very popular among my friends.