GeePawHill

GrandPaw, Geek, Software Development Coach, Writer, Ass Pain. Continuously startled by people and people-stuff. Pronouns: Don't care, will respect yours. https://geepawhill.org

Site: https://geepawhill.org

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Last Notes

2026-04-04 19:09:36 UTC

Anyway, setting aside the ethical concerns, it seems perfectly clear that "setting aside the ethical concerns" is *precisely* the problem.
It is what got us in to this nightmare, and it is what is keeping us in this nightmare.
Please stop pretending that "setting aside the ethical concerns" is anything but a verbal signal indicating one's unwillingness to take personal responsibility for one's actions.

2026-03-22 21:24:53 UTC

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Not a heist movie, but a possible angle: "Sneaky Pete" is about a con man, but it does have several heist scenes in it.
Plus Giavanni Ribisi, who's hawt, and the delightful Margo Martindale.
It's kinda a dramedy.

2026-03-17 19:20:21 UTC

The SAVE act is a simple and direct attack on American democracy. It simultaneously imposes a poll tax and a "literacy test" on American citizens. It is a return to Jim Crow, and an effective abolishment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It is the next step in the oligarchs' ambitious effort to reinstate American slavery.
Everyone who advocates for it is a liar, a fascist, a racist, a sexist, a mercenary, a transphobe, a coward, and a raving-mad anti-American.

2026-03-15 20:29:36 UTC

People who characterize DOGE as having failed in its mission startle me.
Of course, that mission wasn't what the thoroughly and repeatedly documented straight-faced liars said it was, so I suppose there's room for some naïve folks to think that.
The mission -- "destroy one of the most successful governments in the history of the world as much as possible as quickly as possible while creating maximum chaos and taking a profit" -- was a stunning success.

2026-03-02 04:45:16 UTC

Every time I say "by and large", I remember that the expression, which is generally understood to mean "generally" -- see what I did there -- is of nautical origin. The UK's Royal Navy created many figures of speech we use today in entirely different contexts.
"By" means "sailing close to against the wind", and "large" means "sailing with the wind behind us".
A ship that sailed well "by and large", was a ship that could do okay regardless of which way the wind was blowing.
i.e.: "Generally".

2026-03-01 06:52:13 UTC

Now I'm gonna rant on Dolly Parton.
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
....
Well, okay.
...
...
...
...
...
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The wigs are kinda weird.
...
...
...
...
That's it. That's all I got.
...
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...
She seems like a pretty good person.

2026-02-25 08:27:14 UTC

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And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?

2026-02-25 07:56:20 UTC

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Upside: I saw many many seals, and a polar bear from a distance. The comedy officer was actually the helicopter maintenance guy, and I got a helicopter tour of an iceberg. All of that was rather awesome.

2026-02-25 07:55:20 UTC

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Not, I repeat, my only great failure as a geek.
But, *damn*, that was humiliating.
I wrote an *excellent* program that *brilliantly* displayed data coming from hardware that didn't work.
It was a gig. I got paid. That's not the point. I was a pro, and pro's deliver *value*.
All I delivered was a good laugh.

2026-02-25 07:52:54 UTC

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Man, I had some fails in my time, but this one wasn't just a fail, it was fucking *embarrassing*.
"Build a special custom icebreaking display using the hardware on the ship, it'll be brilliant!"
The hardware doesn't work in the ice. Any actual icebreaker captain could have told me -- us -- that, had we -- they -- ever actually consulted one.

2026-02-25 07:50:05 UTC

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So my display, which is accurately showing the data, is like:
We're going slower than a Toronto pub crawl. No, wait! We're going faster than the speed of light!
We're somewhere in Mexico. No, wait! We are probably in Kansas.
The client ship is going the exact same speed at the exact same location as us! No wait. It *is* us. No wait, it's *ramming* us at full speed!!

2026-02-25 07:47:43 UTC

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Here's the thing. Three devices, innit:
1) The GPS works but is spotty, cuz you're in a constant storm.
2) The speed log is basically a vent on the bottom of the hull, measuring the water passing by. But the ice is rushing under the bottom of the hull, and it jams the vent.
3) The radar tracks the target, but the target is so close it might just as well be the icebreaker itself, and the tracker gradually creeps on to the icebreaker's own ass.

2026-02-25 07:45:22 UTC

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Now we're in the ice. We have a convoy of 3 container ships behind us.
If you stand at the stern, you can see those huge twin engines throwing 4-meter chunks of ice up into the air.
And I have my PC. And it has its three devices feeding my slick-assed custom icebreaker display. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

2026-02-25 07:43:14 UTC

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The captain is totally ignoring this guy. He's not even spozed to be on the bridge, let alone covered in little patches (just circular bandaids, actually). But the rest of the crew is laughing their ass off.
And it's *funny*.
I mean, yeah, I was embarrassed, but, whatever, I got it. I took off my stupid patch.
We're getting to the ice, and getting to the ice is so amazingly cool, I didn't even mind the comedy officer making me the butt of the joke.

2026-02-25 07:39:56 UTC

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I'm up on the bridge, with my PC, connected to my three devices, and we're getting close to the ice.
Comedy officer comes up to the bridge, and *he* also has a sea-sickness patch.
Kids, the icebreaker, as I said, is not tiny. There's no tossing about in the waves. You do not need a seasickness patch.
Then he comes back an hour later, and now he's got *two* patches.
An hour later, he's got *four* patches.
Then he comes to the bridge and his whole jaw is covered with them.

2026-02-25 07:37:16 UTC

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And the other Royal Navy tradition: Captains are inviolate commanders, at all times in all settings. They present "serious". They eat and drink separately from the crew. They have only three or four other officers that they ever get to, comparatively, relax with.
So, you have a comedy officer, and you have a captain, and the captain simply looks the other way when the comedy officer is up to their hijinks.
He *knows* the hijinks. He *sees* the hijinks. But he pretends not to.

2026-02-25 07:34:27 UTC

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Now. I was afraid of sea sickness. I'd been on fishing trips on the open ocean, and had been very sick. So I wore a patch.
You may not know this, but there are still Royal Navy traditions practiced aboard ships.
One of the important ones: there's always a comedy officer. Someone whose job it is to be funny, to make sailors smile.
You think that's silly, but sometimes these people are on board these ships for a *year*. It is important that they be amused.

2026-02-25 07:29:51 UTC

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So I fly to Newfoundland, and I get on an actual icebreaker ship.
Oh my people, it was so fucking cool. Icebreakers aren't gigantic, like container ships or tanker ships, but they're *big*, just the same.
And the Canadian Coast Guard is a commercial service, not a military one, so even tho they spend months at sea, they take very good care of their sailors, so, broadly speaking, the place was all modern cons.
(You still have to take navy showers, but other than that.)

2026-02-25 07:19:26 UTC

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First, I had to go before the admiral's board of the Canadian Coast Guard and give a demo.
*Second* comical note: the fucking app froze in the middle of the demo, and w/o in any way acknowledging this, I used it as an opportunity to demonstrate that even if we lost power, the app would restart correctly.
Yep. That's right. I rebooted the computer and startup.bat did its magic.
Anyway, the admiral's board is like, "cool, let's try it in the field."

2026-02-25 07:16:09 UTC

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So, for my juniors, when I tell you "typing is not the bottleneck", I know what I'm fucking talking about.
It took me a couple of weeks to re-create 4 months worth of work. If I had to bet, I'd bet my second edition was *better* than the edition I lost.
So we come down to the day, and I am ready.

2026-02-25 07:14:32 UTC

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And I was sub-contracted to do that. It was about a six month long project. I wrote an entire windowing system on top of DOS to use VGA to show the display.
(I'm a good fucking programmer, and that's not the only time I've written a graphical UI from scratch.)
And. A comical note: about six weeks before the project was due, my hard drive died. And. My backup drive died.
All I had were some two-month old printouts.

2026-02-25 07:10:11 UTC

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There are three main modern tools you can use, versus the old days: You have a radar system, you have a speed log, and you have GPS.
All of those tools have serial outputs on them, good ol' RS-232.
So here was the concept: take a PC and make a custom "ice breaking" UI, taking input from the three devices, and rendering it in such a fashion that the icebreaker skipper could get all the info in one place.

2026-02-25 07:07:54 UTC

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You're working in harsh weather. You can't see shit. You have these client ships that are very slow and very large and very expensive. If you even *touch* one of the client ships, that's $3m, minimum, instantly.
An icebreaker would go right through an oil tanker, and come out the other side of it with a broken radar antenna, covered in oil.
And the icebreaker runs in front of the client breaking ice so it can get where it's going.

2026-02-25 07:04:41 UTC

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Canada has serious ports that are, well, kinda up-north-ish. In order to get ships in to those ports, which include some significant manufacturing and other supplies, one must use a kind of ship called an icebreaker.
Icebreakers are, basically, a big-assed razorblade at the prow, and big-assed engines at the stern.
Being an icebreaker captain is one of the most stressful jobs you can imagine.

2026-02-25 07:00:17 UTC

And so but anyway, did I ever tell you about my most humiliating experience as a skilled and successful computer programmer?

2026-02-04 04:46:09 UTC

@npub15w9…2huq Thinking of you tonight.
I am the "Summer's pal" of this household. Wally & Molly are the Summer, my constant companions and comfort. I am increasingly tho not entirely housebound.
My wife, Virginia, often known as "GeeMaw", does nearly all of the caretaking of this family, tho she turns 76 next week, as I turn 66. She is a force of nature, and takes care of the house, the car, the garden, the chickens, the cattle, and me & Wally & Molly.

2026-02-02 04:48:28 UTC

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I checked him out about, idunno, more than a year ago. And he's got serious chops.

2026-02-02 04:47:18 UTC

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The thing is, he's really pretty good.

2026-01-26 22:17:02 UTC

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And it's nearly equally disturbing how many "centrist" Democrats are calling for better training for the murderers.

2026-01-26 22:10:04 UTC

Deeply disturbing how many GOP folks are calling out the Trump administration for its *messaging*, as opposed to its *murders*.

2026-01-25 06:06:51 UTC

I've said it before now, but I'll repeat it in the context of FIFA or the Olympics: Please don't come here. The rule of law is gone. I could never have really "guaranteed your safety" before, one can't. But now, I can't even guarantee that we'll get you out of this.
Do not come to the US, which is currently busily become a failed pariah state with no rule of law.

2026-01-14 05:48:51 UTC

Right. You're scared as fuck, you want to resist, you don't know what to do.
Start here.
Find someone here, on mastodon, someone who makes your life better.
Send them a post. Not a fave, not a boost, a post, and thank them for making your life better.
*Nothing* to you. *Gold* to them.
If you can't be the rockstar who fixes all the things, you can still be the base that makes people strong.
You can change the world. Right now. Tonight. One fucking post.
Go do the thing.

2026-01-14 02:32:55 UTC

A thing I heard earlier tonight, my take:
I don't use the word "pussy" when I mean "coward". I done had my ass kicked by too many 'gina possessors to ever equate those concepts.
I don't use the word "wussy", either, cuz it basically is used by people who don't have the nerve to say "pussy".
And I don't say "milque-toast" cuz it's code-language for gay, and done had my ass kicked by too many gay persons for that formula.
When I mean "coward", I use a particular word. "Coward".

2026-01-14 01:57:53 UTC

You wanna think the government guys and the LLM guys and the ICE guys and the misogyny guys and the racist guys and the anti-trans guys are different.
But. They're not.

2026-01-14 01:23:48 UTC

War in Venezuela. War in Greenland. War in Iran.
The Epstein files must be so much worse than we'd imagined.

2026-01-09 03:06:03 UTC

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Vote? Yes.
Simple sabotage? Yes.
Take it to court? Yes.
Write or act or sing or make? Yes.
March in the streets? Yes.
General strike? Yes.
Record? Yes.
And countless others I can't think of right now.
*None* of these will be enough.
Every *one* of them will be a part of it.
Resist!

2026-01-09 03:00:27 UTC

Got *dammit* I'm tired of alleged anti-fascists telling other anti-fascists that their action won't work.
Wake the fuck up, people.
1) *No* single action will be enough.
2) *Every* single action counts.
As far as I'm concerned, wasting time arguing with people on your own side about what is the one true action is *counter*-revolutionary behavior.
Stop cos-playing amateur-hour armchair analyst and start taking actions and supporting the actions of others.

2025-12-19 07:27:14 UTC

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"Well, I was fine with him being convicted of a felony, and I was okay with grabbing women by the pussy, and it didn't bother me that he sexualized his own daughter, or that he snuck in to teen pageant dressing rooms, but now, discovering that every fucking molecule of evidence circumstantially establishes his active and cheerful participation in a sex trafficking ring, now I'm upset."

2025-12-19 07:22:26 UTC

Honestly, however pro-release I am w/the Epstein files, y'all muh-fuckers elected this creepy insane stupid felon already, knowing he was creepy, insane, stupid, and a felon.
Whaddaya think you're gonna get?
"Grab'em by the pussy" was not enough???
Adjudicated sexual assault was not enough???
You think you're gonna get some video of Trump fucking a child, and somehow that will make the difference.

2025-12-18 03:27:47 UTC

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It took me many years to convince my wife that I wasn't kidding when I said I would step out of line and wait for her while she got that one thing she'd forgotten.

2025-12-13 00:55:14 UTC

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This question is a kind of "playing the dozens of ludicrously minor contact with famous people".
It's not about winning, it's about losing and laughing.
G'ahead. Have at me.

2025-12-13 00:48:08 UTC

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Uh-huh. That's right. David *FUCKING* Crosby once tweeted "yeah" to me.
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ME NOWWWWWWW?

2025-12-13 00:47:16 UTC

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1) Jon Cryer once answered a question I asked someone else about "No Small Affair", the remarkable "My Funny Valentine" take from it. He said that Demi wanted to sing it, but the producers hired someone else to do it.
2) David *FUCKING* Crosby once agreed with a musical opinion of mine, a moment I will always cherish. I remarked that Chicago was a good idea, but a weak implementation, and David *FUCKING* Crosby replied. And I quote this. In full, exactly. He said . . .
"yeah".

2025-12-13 00:44:29 UTC

Aight. New thread.
What is your most ridiculously minor and insignifcant contact with celebrity?
WAIT.
I'm looking for a particular tone here.
Before you answer, read the next post, where I will share with you my own two finest moments.

2025-12-11 06:25:14 UTC

Please do not come to the US.
It's okay. I know you know that our government is not us. I know you know that we love you. I know you know that we are in a terrible place.
But please don't come here.
I can not guarantee your safety.
I am horrified to be saying it, it feels awful, I hate hate hate it, but the simple truth is that I can not guarantee your safety.
There is no rule of law here. Our government is led by people who do not believe in any of our shared values.

2025-12-11 04:37:06 UTC

These people are racists and sexists and Nazis.
This is not a judgement call. This is not based on a sophisticated, academic, subtle analysis of them replicating patterns from Weimar Germany.
This is what they fucking say.
It is not coded. It is not masked. It is not gray-area.
Charlie Kirk was a fucking racist sexist creep scumbag Nazi.
You want to install Turning Point in every high school, singing the Horst Wessel song to start each meeting?
You're a racist, and a sexist, and a Nazi.

2025-12-08 06:49:43 UTC

No one self-described as an auto-didact is a person worthy of your attention.
Plenty of people, including myself, have been serious scholars w/o using formal educational institutions. That's fine, and real, and proper.
But we're not auto-didacts. We're not self-taught.
We're taught by dozens, hundreds, *thousands* of others. Just not in a classroom setting.
"I'm an auto-didact" is a red flag.

2025-12-06 04:51:17 UTC

Concept: Mastodon bumper stickers. Like, a little button you can press up at the top of all my posts and view my bumper stickers.
Like, say, . . .
"I BLOCK FOR UNSOLICITED MEDICAL ADVICE."
"DO NOT WANT TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR LLM USE-CASE."

2025-11-28 00:53:23 UTC

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DId you know that Sam Neill owns -- and *runs* -- a sheep ranch? He loves it, and writes his contracts so that he does not have to shoot during lambing or shearing times. He sometimes jokes that the only reason he became an actor was to have enough money to raise sheep. :)

2025-11-28 00:51:59 UTC

On a whim -- fam's all out to community thanksgiving dinner -- I decided to try an oldie: "Reilly: Ace of Spies".
1) Sam Neill was a *very* good looking young man.
2) Watching video that isn't letter-box is so weird.

2025-11-07 06:37:24 UTC

Do you know any poems by memory?
Boost, please, strictly for our amusement. Fuck science, sometimes.

2025-11-02 05:43:30 UTC

Ya know, free food for primary & secondary school students -- btw, pioneered by the Panthers -- has been scientifically studied hundreds of times.
The most negative conclusion: "surprisingly positive effect".
The general consensus: "most effective advance in education since compulsory schooling".
The GOP isn't trying to save money. It is trying to prevent our young people from learning enough to oppose the oligarchy.

2025-10-28 02:58:55 UTC

Remember: If you see someone stealing food, no you fucking didn't.

2025-10-24 05:58:00 UTC

Well, actually, if you've never been poor...
a) you need to shut the fuck up about what poor people should do.
b) you need to experience public official shame.
c) you need to live, from scratch, for a year, on the wage you pay your lowest-paid employee.
d) you need to experience private shame for what you are doing.
Motherfucker.

2025-10-20 16:49:02 UTC

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Here in Virginia, we have local, for instance, the Jefferson Area Board on Aging", that has trained experts. We make an appointment, usually meet via Zoom. Not all of their experts are expert, but the expert ones are *great*.

2025-10-19 06:17:28 UTC

These two statements are not contradictory, and I wish folks would stop treating them as if they were.
1) *Every* *single* *act* of resistance helps.
2) *No* *single* *act* of resistance will fix this.

2025-10-12 03:07:50 UTC

We laugh, but it's really serious.
Wearing a cool costume will not actually prevent fascists from hurting you. But it *will* make them look very very bad if they do it.
It's funny, yes, and it's actually courageous.

2025-10-07 04:19:58 UTC

Hey, word on the street is new mastodonians.
The rules:
1) "Home" and following cool people is the secret. "Local" and "Federated" just ain't gonna cut it. Follow cool people, focus on "Home".
2) Talk to strangers who are interesting and pleasing to you.
3) Seek not to be a dick. Anyone can be a dick sometimes, it . . . it just happens . . . but seek not to go there.
4) DaFuq? There aren't any rules. 1 & 2 & 3 were just advice. Use it, ignore it, whatever.
Take your time, ease in to it.

2025-10-03 02:57:02 UTC

Both my worldwide friends and surprisingly many of my US friends rather casually assume that many more Americans have health insurance than actually do.
About 20% of Americans have zero insurance. About 33% are significantly under-insured, and another 10% at any given time experience insurance breaks longer than a month.
In the US, health insurance is yet another privilege denied to significant parts of the population.

2025-10-01 01:29:08 UTC

Raise your hand if you sing to your dogs or cats, totally made-up, straight, or straight-but -parody songs.

2025-09-29 04:16:14 UTC

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True story: I was medicated in the 3rd grade for being hyperactive. (It didn't help, of course, speed only helps actual hyperactive kids, and I wasn't one.) In the fourth grade, Lucille Davis -- I hope hope hope heaven is everything it's cracked up to be -- said, "Take him off the meds. He's not hyperactive, he's bored. I send him to the school library for five hours a day, and he never gets in trouble there."
Not every noisy problematic child is ill.

2025-09-29 04:03:17 UTC

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True story: I was once suspended from school for 3 days. The vice-principal heard me utter a profanity, I believe it was "piss", but long time gone, I'm not sure.
He said, "Profanity is a mark of a small vocabulary." And I said, "Really? Cuz I'll match my vocabulary for your vocabulary, word for word, any time, anywhere, for any amount of money."
I was, of course, grounded until I was 40.
But an hour later, confined to my room, I heard her on the phone w/her friend, "And so *he* said ....".

2025-09-29 03:59:27 UTC

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Mothers are clever like that.

2025-09-29 03:52:20 UTC

True story: I once caught a 1.8lb crappie on 2lb test. At that time, the state record for crappie -- not brook crappie, lake crappie -- was just 2.1lbs. Fighting-ist fish I ever caught, and the single best day of my youthful fishing career.
I got my picture taken with it, a trivially small fish, in the newspaper. Somewhere I still have it, as I believe it was on my Mom's Hall of Shame newspaper clipping collection.
The one she proudly showed all my girlfriends, to deter the possibility of sex.

2025-09-26 05:10:30 UTC

The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, theory works.

2025-09-20 04:44:45 UTC

Pro-Tip: You can disagree with people w/o referring to their class or their race or their sexuality.

2025-09-20 03:00:14 UTC

@npub15w9…2huq Also, it is my habit once a week or so, to tell someone on the internet whose participation makes my life better that their participation makes my life better. I've been a bit lax, so you are my second one tonight.
But you are one. Tag, you're it. And Summer. And Summer's friend.
I thank you. <3

2025-09-17 23:49:23 UTC

I'm not deeply concerned for Colbert or Kimmel. They are both seriously wealthy white men. Pretty sure they'll figure something out.
But my country? What it says about my country?
I'm so old I remember being only moderately embarrassed about my country's government.
This goes far beyond moderate, and far beyond embarrassment.
I live in a dictatorship backed by an oligarchy.

2025-09-09 06:11:51 UTC

This whole concept of "why people vote against their interest" is nonsense, of course.
They most definitely voted for their interest.
Sadly for them, they thought it would only hurt others.
Sadly for the rest of us, their interest was unsavory and grotesque and ignorant and racist and sexist and hateful.
I got no patience for "I didn't vote for this."
Of course you did, sugar. And you knew what you were voting for. You *said* what you were voting for.

2025-09-06 00:21:18 UTC

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I can be very slow, of course, history will attest. But I can't help but believe that, somewhere between 1 billion and 10 billion, I would have said, "ya know, at this point I don't think money is what I need more of."
Fun fact: a billion dollars is enough money to give every single public library in the United States a $50,000 no-strings grant.
Even the richest public library in the US, the NYPL, would invite me to galas for the rest of my life for a no-strings $50k check.

2025-09-05 01:45:46 UTC

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More obsessive than avid. I've slacked off over the last decade, so it's maybe 35-40 a year.
A lot of history and biology, a certain amount of mainstream contemporary fiction, the western canon, and then phases: murder mysteries, or dark martial fantasy, or some other random genre.

2025-08-30 23:13:14 UTC

Anyone who's ever seen even a couple of photos of miners, coal picker children, sweat shop children, newsboy children, or tenements in the stretch from 1890 to 1920 knows perfectly well why Labor Day is so important.
My father hated the unions, and I was raised on stories of Hoffa and the Teamsters and the Mob.
But unions saved millions of lives, adult and children both.
I am not a holiday kinda guy. But I honor the men, women, and children who founded America's labor movement.

2025-08-24 05:03:06 UTC

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Things I like about the best BBC murder:
1) Way less implicit race hatred.
2) Many of the cops -- not all of them -- do not routinely break the law.
3) Most graphic violence happens off-screen.
4) The actors aren't Hollywood beauties, they're asymmetrically faced, and lovely.
5) Far less violence against women.
6) Fewer episodes per season give more time for writing and prep.
The *very* best, of course is PBS/BBC/Masterpiece. And the super ultra-best is, of course, "Endeavour".

2025-08-22 08:36:17 UTC

Y'all think the "slavery's not so bad" stylings are aberrant.
Oh my sweet summer child, slavery is the entire and total wet dream of these ghouls.
That's your google, that's your microsoft, that's your OpenAI, that's every late stage extractive capitalist.

2025-08-19 02:57:10 UTC

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Which actually reminds me of one of my favorite only-for-software-geeks one-liner:
"Days Since Last Timezone Error: -1"

2025-08-19 02:54:46 UTC

Oh, what the hell, it's Friday night somewhere.
Let's have a drink.

2025-08-17 02:41:22 UTC

<subpost type="grossed out">
JFC, people, get ahold of yourself.
Your enemy's enemy is not your friend.
Gavin Newsom is a right-winger who has done photo-ops of himself destroying homeless people's encampments.
He is your enemy's enemy, and that is something, and I'm as happy as anyone to see him oppose Trump.
That does not make him my friend or your friend, let alone a hero worthy of photo-shopped muscle-bound beefcake in front of the American flag.
smdh.
</subpost>

2025-08-12 05:25:07 UTC

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You don't understand: THIS IS THE MOST BRILLIANT HELLO WORLD THE UNIVERSE HAS YET SEEN!
:)

2025-08-12 05:20:28 UTC

@npub1fh7…ee83 I do have private repos on github. I've decided to not let it matter. They were only private cuz I was fuckin' around with code and I wanted a repo that wasn't on my machine.
But I do have a bunch of friends who'd pay for private, if they could.
And if you don't mind me saying: they'd pay a premium, beyond what they pay github, for a trusted site.

2025-08-08 22:37:09 UTC

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Wally thinks that all the squirrels he sees are his friend Ray. Ray the squirrel. He chases them for about 5 meters, then he comes tail-waggingly back to me: "I saw Ray! He seems really nice."

2025-08-08 21:40:32 UTC

<subpost type="generic">
AhhhhHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.
Uh-huh. Sure. Whatever you say.
</subpost>

2025-08-07 19:58:04 UTC

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Ours are coming in, too. For me, tomato season is, basically, love.

2025-08-06 18:11:19 UTC

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In my youth, we regarded Rockwell as a kind of boring middle-class pop artist. In fact, he was pretty left-leaning in his views, and painted some of the most powerful and poignant works anyone's ever done about American politics and culture.
I read, later in life, that his time as an illustrator for the US Army in WWII deeply radicalized him.

2025-08-06 17:34:26 UTC

What kind of deeply fucked up people announce the creation of a new concentration camp by sitting around a table thinking about what "funny" name they can call it.

2025-07-31 04:53:00 UTC

If you have just joined mastodon, a) welcome, and b) the very first thing you need to do is add data to your profile that makes it clear you are an actual person.
I am sorry that we live in this time, none of us want this, but sometime it just be's that way.
We are all hounded by bots, scammers, spies-for-cause, and spies-for-money, all of the time. We simply cannot assume good faith from anyone who has left no trail, or who has left a trail they are not willing to share.

2025-07-31 00:13:26 UTC

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Unconsidered possibilities:
1) He's talking to the wrong people.
2) He's talking in the wrong way.
3) He's talking about the wrong subjects.
The world is in no shortage of assholes, to be sure, left, middle, and right.
I note his use of the word "arguing", and his use of the phrase "extreme left", and I would be interested in evaluating those conversations to judge the extent of the "sneering, patronizing, self-obsessed" behavior, and from whence its source.

2025-07-30 05:52:10 UTC

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And now we're done. My post, however mistaken it might have been, is not a "kneejerk" reaction.
Bye!

2025-07-30 05:47:14 UTC

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Note, too, that using LLM output in that hotel case is *not* actually doing what I said I wished people did not do.
(3/3)

2025-07-30 05:46:12 UTC

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Now, having said that. The hotel room case is an interesting one, and I will have to think that over.
So far, I have not experienced sufficient trust in LLM output to distinguish those three bottles.
But I wonder, if I *did* experience that trust, if I believed the LLMs were reliable, would I, even then, pay the monstrous costs to society for that service to me?
I can't say no, truly. But I can wonder.
(2/x)

2025-07-30 05:44:23 UTC

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An interesting point.
I would say that I made a request, I didn't castigate any reader who isn't a broligarchy scam artist.
As for alt-text? I say it here several times a week: "Alt-text or it didn't happen."
I don't read or fave or boost posts that have images w/o alt-text, being not blind but severely vision-impaired myself.
If someone's indifferent to whether I can parse their post, I'm indifferent to parsing their post.
(1/x)

2025-07-30 03:00:25 UTC

I sure wish you wouldn't post LLM output.
Not even to make fun of it.
The fact that you're sharing it means that you're using it. The fact that you're using it means that you're counted as a user. The fact that you're a user means that you're helping extractive-capitalist con men steal money while simultaneously worsening the climate crisis.

2025-07-29 21:01:25 UTC

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When I was regularly writing about my code and coding, I a) did it here in a thread, then b) went to masto-reader to collect the threaded thing as one article, then c) added it to my blog, then d) edited, added things like headers or more images.
That was actually all pretty easy, and it gave me the pleasure of the *immediacy* of describing my work to live humans interactively.

2025-07-28 06:04:12 UTC

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I'm reminded of the prose poem "Desiderata".
"You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."

2025-07-26 06:33:25 UTC

Holocaust or no. Wartime or no. Terrorism or no.
There is no possible moral justification for starving people to death.
No matter what your history. No matter what your fear. No matter what their crimes.
No matter what.

2025-07-23 01:37:17 UTC

Free food for students -- an idea pioneered by the Black Panthers -- is arguably the single most proven innovation in 20th century American education.
It's been tested over and over again, challenged over and over again, studied over and over again.
The universal conclusion: it works, works cheaply, works well, and works everywhere.
Ending free food for students isn't a money-saving measure of any kind: it's just one more effort by the masters to make more slaves.

2025-07-22 01:40:23 UTC

Reminder: Many bsky links require a sign-in, and are, hence, useless to anyone who is not on bluesky.
I am not on bluesky. I have reasons not to be, that I won't bother rehashing for you.
If you want to share things on mastodon, you might want to consider using links that are usable by people who are on mastodon.

2025-07-14 17:11:05 UTC

Oxygen Not Included: Today's a light work day, so I'll be playing in fits and bursts.
This is a continuation from https://mastodon.social/@GeePawHill/114847290392407466
It's c50, census 8 dups.
We have a very tall and kind of empty base, but we'll be filling it up soon.
#ONI
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/852/685/856/697/322/original/4dd811df2f1477cc.png

2025-07-13 01:42:25 UTC

I do wish folks would stop using "alligator alcatraz".
It is a concentration camp.
It is not intended as a form of punishment or deterrence for criminals. It is intended as a means of removing humans the government does not like from society.
It's not a joke, it's not a meme, it's not a t-shirt.
It's a concentration camp.

2025-07-11 06:54:22 UTC

The idea that "alphas" are strong violent males has been debunked more times than the flat-earth theory, including by its own original proposers.
Many troupe leaders, amongst primates, wolves, and others, are female. And, male or female, they mostly lead by ensuring peace and prosperity, not by violence.
Like.
You know.
Read a fucking book one time.

2025-07-09 02:17:24 UTC

As a 65yo, I have achieved a certain hard-earned wisdom that may have eluded you. I will share:
1) Just get up and go pee, it's not goin' away.
2) Start the fitted sheet at the hardest-to-reach corner.
3) If you get a cold drink, only to discover that you already had one, drink the coldest one first.
4) Work and feel shitty, or don't-work and don't feel shitty. Don't-work and feel shitty is a lousy choice.
5) Being weird is, in fact, a perfectly normal thing to be. *Everyone* does it.