rk: it’s hyphen-minus actually

https://mastodon.well.com/@rk

Father, husband, some sort of hacker, occasional computer scientist. 

I love programming, fonts, computing esoterica, and learning languages (even if I’m not very good at it).

(He/him, BLM, LGBT+ and reproductive rights are human rights, left==labor, we only have one Earth.)

(Was also lorddimwit is now @rk@well.com (npub1etd…8t0k))

Website: https://people.well.com/~rk/
Lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/~lorddimwit

Public Key

npub1mzgdzx4fqpwgsrdl3qkksaghs4awqcnjyw3j4rh7ggta8xmftepqu0l2g4

NIP-05 Address

rk_at_mastodon.well.com@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsd3yx3r25sqhygpklcsttgw5tc27hqvfez8ge23mlyy97nnd54usspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsm42eg3

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1mzgdzx4fqpwgsrdl3qkksaghs4awqcnjyw3j4rh7ggta8xmftepqu0l2g4

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-05-09 14:29:19 UTC

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-gold-statue-golf-course-pastor-b2972303.html
“Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf,” he said. “This statue is a celebration of life. It is a symbol of resilience, freedom, patriotism, strength, and the will power to keep fighting for the future of America.”
If not idolatry then why idolatry shaped

2026-04-20 21:24:37 UTC

- reply

Huh, lemme take a look at Linode. Haven't looked at them in a while.

2026-04-20 21:15:03 UTC

I want a simple Linux VPS. I don’t need much:
- 2GB RAM
- 25GB
- Bandwidth will be minuscule but I don’t want it metered lest someone hammers my box and costs me $1000
- Latest Ubuntu LTS
- 2FA web console
- Doesn’t require a copy of my passport (when did this become a thing?!?)
- Priced fairly
Hetzner and OVH want my passport. Gandi is ancient Ubuntu LTS. All the US providers want to do per-minute/byte pricing. Fly.io has no cost caps on bandwidth. AWS is expensive.
What do
#linux #hosting

2026-04-15 03:06:27 UTC

The existence of Godzilla Minus Zero implies the existence of Godzilla Plus Zero and the use of one of several possible numeric encodings that provide for signed zeros. Depending on the underlying representation used, increasingly inaccurate sequel designations can be expected as more Godillza films are produced. If midquels are made, it is possible inaccuracy can appear much sooner (for example, Godzilla
0.30000000000000004). In this essay I will
#math #godzilla #shitpost

2026-04-06 00:22:16 UTC

Realized we had nothing ready to prep for dinner. A little taqueria near our house was open.
Abuelita (to my wife): You are so pretty.
Wife: Aw thank you.
Abuelita: Okay your total is $xx. (To me) next! How can I help you?
Wife: We’re together.
Abuelita: Really.
🥲

2026-04-04 16:27:22 UTC

My little embedded scripting language is like 95% done. The only thing stopping me from releasing it is that there’s bits of code that aren’t pretty and I want them to be pretty or else everyone will point at me and laugh.
Plus I context-switched to like two other projects since I last touched it and now my brain is page faulting and I’m dangerously close to a triple fault and rebooting.
#programming

2026-03-21 21:57:00 UTC

- reply

The NES was slightly faster and the PPU was magic.

2026-03-18 22:58:49 UTC

fsck
#unix

2026-03-14 19:04:12 UTC

I am reminded of a time about 10 years ago when I was at my usual bar and my wife had just left. The bartender was like “no offense, but I didn’t expect you’d have an attractive partner.” And I still don’t know what to do with this information.

2026-03-11 16:53:30 UTC

- reply

I think it was Brave New World where this word was used in the sense of “spirited”.
My high school honors English teacher didn’t know this meaning, and explained to the whole class that it meant the character in question was sexually like a piston.
Good times.

2026-03-07 19:50:47 UTC

Could I write a script that given a Japanese verb poops put a graphviz/dot DAG of the agglutination patterns for the verb?
I mean. I can do the scripting part. I just don’t know if Japanese verb conjugation/agglutination is that regular.
(Also I regret to inform you that I am back on my bullshit.)
#japanese #programming

2026-03-05 02:31:45 UTC

Kids used to have folders that came home every Friday and we went through them.
Now we get 3-4 emails a day from the school. They don’t include the information in the email, it’s just “please click here to log into MySchoolBubbles/ClassMint/SkoolBux to read an important announcement” and 90% of the time the important announcement is completely irrelevant, but God forbid you don’t read it because the one time you forget it’s “sign this document or your child’s project will explode”
#parenthood

2026-03-04 20:27:38 UTC

Young people these days! We had 5KB of RAM, a keyboard that destroyed your wrists, a power supply that was a fire hazard, and a display that was a wobbly fuzzy old black and white television!
Still, we were happy though.

2026-03-03 21:40:05 UTC

- reply

Man why does science gotta ruin everything

2026-03-03 19:39:32 UTC

- reply

The optimist sees the glass as 1/2 full.
The pessimist sees the glass as 1/2 empty.
The Excel user sees the glass as the second of January.

2026-03-03 17:44:55 UTC

Given that the ability to retain heat is proportional to the ratio of surface area to volume, would an infinitely thin sheet of aluminum foil that was infinitely large cool down infinitely fast?
In other news I burned my hand a bit making a tuna melt for lunch.
#physics #food

2026-02-27 00:40:58 UTC

- reply

“I can track marking via linked list reversal and some XORing!”
*ruffles hair* You sure can buddy!

2026-02-27 00:37:56 UTC

“There are all sorts of garbage collection algorithms.”
Are they all basically reimplementations of the classic tricolor algorithm?
“Some of them are generational copying algorithms and there’s a wealth of research around cache-coherent parallel GC on multicore architectures!”
Oh cool, does anyone use them?
“…no”
(Don’t at me with your Go and your super fancy JVM shit here I’m being funny for a shitpost.)
#computerScience

2026-02-26 22:51:51 UTC

- reply

When I was young I thought once a computer could pass the Turing Test I would literally be fighting for their civil rights. Now I’m of the opinion that we should move the goalposts, not because we’re wrong about consciousness but because we put the goal posts in the wrong place.

2026-02-24 00:30:17 UTC

- reply

Marshall Brain’s novella “Manna” talks about this problem exactly.

2026-02-19 19:46:52 UTC

Your first Linux distro
#linux #shitpost

2026-02-16 17:57:46 UTC

Best UNIX desktop environment
#unix

2026-02-15 20:37:02 UTC

Can someone explain to me the kerfluffle around curling? The curlfluffle?
#curling #olympics

2026-02-04 05:42:23 UTC

Has anyone ever really used `pax` instead of using `cpio` or `tar`?
(I don’t remember the last time I used `cpio` outside of RPM packages and even then that was probably over a decade ago.)
#unix

2026-02-03 21:35:16 UTC

- reply

The problem with programmers these days isn’t that they can’t fit a line printer driver in an unused 47 bytes near the top of memory, it’s that they won’t even try.

2026-02-03 17:59:45 UTC

- reply

Haiku solved the major issue with BeOS’s Interface Kit. The classic IK didn’t do font-sensitive layout (or really any auto layout) so changing font sizes would break everything.
Haiku added a lovely constraint solver thing. For older examples, MUI is nice.
Windows back in the day based everything on a metric of like “half letter-X height/width” so dialogs were font size sensitive but raw windows stuff wasn’t, IIRC.

2026-02-03 17:55:40 UTC

- reply

So anyway. The only good GUI API was NeXT/OPENSTEP but reading the classic Be Book (in lovely HTML) about the Interface Kit gives you an idea of an attempt to write a graphical operating system that wasn’t terrible.
The Plan 9 panel library is also kinda neat.
The Amiga Magic User Interface library was also beautiful.
Okay. So. That was way more info than you wanted. Sorry!
Fin.

2026-02-03 17:52:47 UTC

- reply

Anyway classic X was limited: draw string here, move bitmap there. More and more extensions got added, including ones that weren’t network transparent (SHM, etc). Xt was limited and kind of a pain to use, and inherently not portable so toolkits eventually just started hitting X directly and supporting different backends for cross-OS use.
So now GTK is platform independent and draws its own decorations and is quite convoluted.
(Almost done)

2026-02-03 17:50:07 UTC

- reply

In classic X there were no widget sets, not really. Instead there were the “X Toolkit Intrinsics” that let you do low-level stuff like set message handlers and properties and attributes on windows. Toolkit developers would then use these intrinsics to make toolkits; widgets were just windows, and Xt let you tell them how to behave.
Motif was the big one, but there was also the Athena widget set (from Project Athena, which helped create X), and OpenLook and others.
(Cont)

2026-02-03 17:47:08 UTC

- reply

Windows can have KV pairs, called properties. Conventions exist as to what properties are looked at by the window manager, etc. For example, the Motif window manager had a convention that let windows set properties that the manager would then use to add menu options to the window’s menu.
The big conventions are ICCCM, Motif, and EWMH.
(Cont)

2026-02-03 17:45:29 UTC

- reply

That distinguished client is the window manager. In the classic X workflow, it was responsible for drawing window decorations. That’s not built into the protocol, and GTK for example now draws its own decorations on client windows.
But traditionally the window manager drew decorations and reparented client windows into this hierarchy of decorations.
(Cont)

2026-02-03 17:43:16 UTC

- reply

(Forgive me if I tell you things you already know.)
X was all about “mechanism not policy) because it was a bunch of different vendors. The grand idea was network-transparent windowing, with an event-driven architecture and the server controlling the screen and input devices.
The X server of course only knows about windows and font IDs and bitmaps and drawing instructions. One client can request that certain events be forwarded to it, and it can modify/intercept them.
(cont)

2026-02-03 17:41:07 UTC

- reply

So, turns out GUI programming has always sucked terribly. One of the reasons Windows won back in the day was because as bad as it was, its API was significantly better than most of the other options out there (Mac classic had a bunch of weird global variables and fixed point thingies, Intuition on the Amiga was so bad, the primary GUI API ended up being a paid-for third-party library).
For X, as someone who’s written a couple of window managers… (cont)

2026-02-02 17:34:58 UTC

Holy shit. TIL that Janet Jackson is the only Grammy-winning artist with a CVE.
CVE-2022-38392 indicates that playing Rhythm Nation near certain hard drives will cause a crash, because the song contains a resonate frequency with a 5400RPM spinning disk of a certain diameter and construction.
Neat.
#music #infosec

2026-01-26 15:48:14 UTC

Today is the only day it will be 26/26/26 for another thousand years.

2026-01-11 21:21:24 UTC

- reply

So for example, RM620 will be pronounced “milliem six cent vingt”
I’m trying to figure out what the “milliem” is. I think it’s an artifact of the French speech synthesis reading some internal English abbreviation in the map metadata that is explicitly marked by the English speech synthesis to be replaced with “RM”
My thinking is it’s saying “Mile M”? Like reading the English word mile and the letter M? It’s not reading “èr èm”.
Anyone involved in digital mapping ring in too please!
2/2

2026-01-11 21:17:20 UTC

Okay this is a weird deep dive into something quite random. Native French speakers help me out here.
I live in Texas. My phone’s language is French. When giving directions while driving, the speech is in French.
Texas has “Ranch to Market” (RM) roads; they’re a specific class of road, but they often go through cities and such. I regularly drive on RM620.
When my phone says the name of one of these roads it says something like “milliem” for the designator.
1/
#french #cartography #speech

2026-01-03 03:30:30 UTC

If you were writing a bignum library in C what would you call it?
This is a quasi-serious question.
The working name is “Rx” for internal reasons. I’ll stick with that if I can’t get something better.
#programming #math #c

2025-12-27 23:37:29 UTC

- reply

His writing of heterosexual men definitely fell into the “how do you do fellow straight manly men?” territory, like Holt on Brooklyn 99.
But yes, when will we get a true Rendezvous With Rama movie? One that isn’t somehow turned into a action-packed romp?

2025-12-22 06:04:40 UTC

I wanna make a delicious cassoulet but it’s difficult to buy duck, much less duck fat, in Austin and if I don’t do that the French will be mad at me.

2025-12-13 16:24:08 UTC

Look at this asshole.
#cat #caturday
https://mastodon.well.com/system/media_attachments/files/115/713/178/676/357/207/original/c8bf963e03bf8c54.jpeg

2025-12-08 07:30:54 UTC

- reply

https://folklore.org/Disk_Swappers_Elbow.html

2025-12-07 21:35:33 UTC

- reply

A friend pointed out that this version of minimalism also only works if you don’t need accessibility help and speak a language that doesn’t require anything more than single characters laid out left to right, which is a good point.

2025-12-07 21:28:20 UTC

- reply

I contributed to suckless many years ago (a patch to dwm). I hadn’t really participated in the community up until then.
Yeah once I started actually poking around I haven’t been back. There’s a weird overlap between extreme minimalism in software and regressive, fashy politics, I’ve come to learn.

2025-12-06 16:15:04 UTC

humans unix
🤝
using ps to find cat
#unix #caturday

2025-12-02 21:28:28 UTC

As a reminder, just because an algorithm is O(n) doesn’t mean it’s practically fast if n is often huge.
This toot brought to you by “things making my life difficult today.”

2025-11-21 03:18:17 UTC

After the Deluge, Noah is checking on all the animals. They’re all doing great, multiplying and filling the Earth, except for this one group of snakes.
“What’s wrong?” asks Noah.
“Cut down some trees for us,” say the snakes.
Noah does so and goes off to check on other animals.
A few weeks later he comes back and sees that there are snakes everywhere!
“Wow, how did cutting down trees do all this?” Noah asks.
“We’re adders,” say the snakes, “and we need logs to multiply.”
#math #dadjoke

2025-11-11 21:10:53 UTC

I am an IEEE 754 NaN value. You are an IEEE 754 NaN value. We are not the same.

2025-11-10 17:59:40 UTC

How hard would it be to adapt a wave-function collapse or other constraint-based procedural generation algorithm to produce tiled maps that were wrap-aroundable? That is, you could treat the map as a sphere or a torus.
Not 100% of the time, obviously. I mean in such a way that after at most a few attempts you get a usable map almost all of the time.
I’ve thought about this for all of 15 seconds so the answer is probably “it’s already been done” or “no, never.”
#graphics #proceduralGeneration

2025-11-03 20:02:34 UTC

- reply

Two thoughts: fast typists are likely to be the primary audience, and also the primary audience might find ghost presses charming.

2025-10-31 00:24:59 UTC

I often go a month, maybe even two, without remembering that C# and .NET exist.
#microsoft #programming #clr

2025-10-27 00:54:21 UTC

#unix #2038
https://mastodon.well.com/system/media_attachments/files/115/443/394/946/572/745/original/2ef64607bbb84aa3.png

2025-10-26 14:50:26 UTC

I mentioned that I needed to get serious about losing weight.
I wake up this morning to 14yo having made breakfast, with an entire meal plan for the day including calories and nutrient amounts.
Breakfast was mashed avocado on rye toast and a protein shake. Lunch will be a salad with grilled chicken.
Afternoon snack is a protein shake.
Chips and beer are, quite sadly, prohibited.
I know he wants to be a lawyer but honestly I think his heart says chef or nutritionist.
#cooking #diet

2025-10-23 15:17:49 UTC

- reply

One of my favorite CS books is “Databases, Types, and the Relational Model: The Third Manifesto”
I actually have a (ginormous) dead-tree copy that doesn’t fit on any shelf but it’s available in PDF format as well: https://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/DTATRM.pdf
(I realize I’m preaching to the choir here, but anyone who happens to find this toot gets to read one of my favorite books!)

2025-10-22 04:16:34 UTC

According to the US National Library of Medicine, approximately 65% of the adult human population is lactose intolerant, and in east Asia that number goes up to 70-100%.
But I’ve eaten a whole lot of ice cream and cheese and such in Japan and there seems to be no shortage of ice cream parlors in Tokyo and all sorts of cheese and milk-based confections there.
So, I am forced to conclude that I either do not understand lactose intolerance or that a lot of Japanese folks are masochists.
#milk

2025-10-22 00:39:22 UTC

At dinner.
10yo: You know how my birthday is next month.
Me: Yeah.
10yo: You know what *else* happened in November.
Me: What?
10yo: The Nuremberg Trials.
Me: That is…not what I was expecting you to say.
10yo: And also the Mexican Revolution!
Me: Yes…
10yo: Do you want to know more November things?
Me: I do, yes.
#november #learning

2025-10-20 13:56:48 UTC

Then: The Internet is designed to route around failure.
Now: The Internet is five companies and one of them is broken.
#aws #programming #networking

2025-10-15 23:30:34 UTC

Which nation-state actor is behind the F5 breach?
#infosec #shitpost

2025-10-11 04:01:34 UTC

- reply

Last time we were in Tokyo the Godzilla Cafe was closed. >:(

2025-10-09 23:42:08 UTC

What was this display technology called? It was used on all sorts of devices, especially points-of-sale and printers. Is it a type of VFD? It occurs to me that I’ve seen them thousands of times but I don’t actually know.
EDIT: Looks like it is a VFD.
#technology #retrocomputing
https://mastodon.well.com/system/media_attachments/files/115/346/852/438/913/399/original/6f506ddb2e9695c8.jpeg

2025-09-21 18:56:59 UTC

Humans are also stochastic parrots:
#ai #philosophy

2025-09-14 23:45:33 UTC

- reply

I read the other day that one of the standard Rust TCP crates has an implementation of TCPStream in user space. Like it has its own TCP implementation, in user space. Oh and it sends two end-of-option headers so it’s trivial to fingerprint.
Like…why are you implementing your own user space TCP stack.
(I have not confirmed this; it was a conversation at work, but if the EOO header thing is true, then it’s gotta be writing its own TCP packets…)

2025-09-10 00:11:20 UTC

- reply

I am way (whey) out of my area of expertise here, but this is how they make Greek yogurt, right? At least what’s called Greek yogurt here in the States.

2025-09-07 21:59:11 UTC

- reply

One of my favorite literary stories was from an interview with Heller.
Interviewer: Why haven’t you written anything as good since Catch-22?
Heller: Who has?

2025-09-07 21:56:41 UTC

“Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down.“ - Joseph Heller, Catch-22
#uspol #books

2025-09-03 17:59:36 UTC

- reply

You people have no idea how hard you had to squeeze and how practically invisible the little line was.

2025-09-02 00:58:19 UTC

Buddy of mine is looking for work. Been in #infosec longer than I have, worked with truly old school folks, worked for enormous orgs in high positions.
He’s hit a rough patch the past two years, divorce, depression, layoffs. It’s getting to the point that he’s going to need to move in with a mutual friend to keep above water.
If you need an absolutely brilliant infosec person in a leadership role, hit me up.
EDIT: Austin area or remote; gotta be by his kids. Thank you!
#GetFediHired

2025-08-29 04:30:35 UTC

- reply

Is Pete…human?

2025-08-24 23:15:47 UTC

For tonight’s Monsterdon I propose a thought experiment. If you watched Swamp Thing and then went walking through a swamp and were killed by a bolt of lightning that simultaneously rearranged some nearby atoms into a perfect copy of you and that copy went home and saw the Swamp Thing DVD and thought “there is the Swamp Thing DVD I watched earlier”…is that a meaningful statement?
🤔
#philosophy #shitpost

2025-08-16 16:43:50 UTC

- reply

This is how religions start.

2025-08-01 15:08:58 UTC

- reply

Yep. Structure of the vacuum. Thank you. I guess it becomes a philosophical question at some point, why is there something rather than nothing.

2025-08-01 15:01:26 UTC

- reply

It’s a naive question but what do we consider the “empty” space between the various ions and stuff? The various quantum fields? I guess when a cosmologist says “the fabric of space” what’s the fabric?

2025-07-31 18:56:21 UTC

I truly do not understand the #stockMarket
I have shares in a company that yes, is pre-profit, but has met or exceeded every announced deadline, has 2 years of cash on hand, is producing a real product with real demand, and just had a great earnings call that announced they were months ahead of schedule and reduced their burn rate even more than predicted.
Their stock is down 5.6%.
I suppose they’re not shoving an LLM into something that doesn’t need it, that probably explains it.

2025-07-19 20:00:10 UTC

- reply

Modern computers have long surpassed the level of complexity that could be understood by a single human in its entirety.
Think back to when home computers had honest to god schematics and block diagrams on their manuals, a list of ports and device registers, and maybe even the source code for the monitor printed in the back.
Contrast this with, say, ACPI…or don’t, for there lies madness.

2025-07-14 00:52:17 UTC

- reply

*cut to Geordi filling out paperwork with a Starbase engineer*
Geordi (going through checklist): Alien baby thought ship was its mother, check. Ships computer became sentient, check. Holodeck character *also* became sentient, check and check. Hm. What about when an ancient mask turned the ship into an ancient temple, is that just an “other”?
Starbase engineer: Second page.
Geordi: Ah, sorry. Aaaand check. Thanks!

2025-07-12 21:07:27 UTC

- reply

Not that I don’t have fond memories of all those systems but I feel like Commodore and Amiga fans have been particularly targeted by nostalgia snipers.
(I’m reminded of the “official Amiga keyboard” from a few years ago, which was just a cheap generic PC keyboard with an Amiga logo officially licensed by whoever currently owns the corpse of the Amiga trademarks.)

2025-07-03 04:36:28 UTC

I don’t know if it’s doing it in English, but for some reason Apple Maps is prefixing “zero” to a bunch of numbered highways when announcing directions.
Like Highway 183 is just 183, but my phone will say “prenez la sortie pour rejoindre zero cent quatre-vingt-trois.”
Like, am I mishearing it? It seems to happen very consistently, but not 100% of the time. Notably it doesn’t seem to happen with roads designated by four digits.
#french #apple

2025-06-29 23:19:14 UTC

- reply

Any router is a firewall if you configure it badly enough.
#networking

2025-06-23 19:06:31 UTC

- reply

“Peut-être nous pouvons tutoyer maintenant.”
“…si vous voulez.”

2025-06-23 18:35:51 UTC

- reply

This is a real thing, I was reading about it the other day. Better nutrition, spending more time indoors out of the sun, and not smoking, makes our skin look much better for longer.

2025-06-23 15:30:43 UTC

- reply

I contributed to dwm many years ago (the swallow patch), but my non-software opinions have pretty much been constant. After I wrote the dwm patch and started digging around more on their site I was like “oh…oh no” and haven’t been back since.

2025-06-23 15:23:27 UTC

- reply

I contributed to suckless many years ago (the swallow patch for dwm), and my port of sam is linked on cat-v.org, but I never quite realized how far right the culture of those projects were; once I did I was quite frustrated.

2025-06-23 15:21:20 UTC

I’ve noticed that there is often an alignment between extreme minimalism in software and edgelordy falling into the libertarian trap that goes full Nazi, maybe accidentally.
Xlibre, sure (blatantly), but I remember for a while the 9front hone page had a photo of Auschwitz “as a joke.” The docs at cat-v.org (which is associated with 9front/suckless) has a “libertarian” manifesto filled with straw men
It’s frustrating because I like minimalism in software and I hate Nazis

2025-06-18 15:21:26 UTC

I’m going to adopt my cat’s strategy of sitting in the middle of the kitchen and screaming until someone else solves my problems.
#cat

2025-06-14 18:28:08 UTC

- reply

I love my country. Just like loving your children, “love” doesn’t mean “blindly support whatever happens,” it means correcting things so they/it can be the best person/country possible.
This nuance is apparently lost on a lot of people, where the symbol has become the substance.

2025-06-11 20:03:12 UTC

I’m going to be completely honest here, I 100% thought Brian Wilson died a while ago. I think maybe I’m conflating his dementia diagnosis with a death announcement or something.

2025-06-10 01:19:57 UTC

13yo broke his wrist at summer sports conditioning camp. He’s okay, though he’s bummed that he’s out of camp for the rest of the summer.
At the orthopedist, after he was feeling better.
Nurse: Okay now we’re going to measure you for your cast. *takes out tape measure*
Me: You know, ${13YO}, your arm can’t possibly be more than eleven inches long.
13yo: Ugh, here it comes.
Me: ‘cause then it’d be a foot!
Nurse: So you’re his dad, I’m assuming.

2025-06-06 20:53:26 UTC

MTU stands for Mritish Thermal Unit
#networking

2025-06-06 00:07:20 UTC

1000mg of amoxicillin twice a day for ten days to see if we can knock out whatever the fuck this is that just won’t leave. It’s progressed from laryngeal spasms to what is now likely a sinus infection.
Get it together, man! Get it together.

2025-06-03 05:14:34 UTC

I fell asleep sitting up in the chair in the living room. I woke up to the smoke alarm going off, but only for a second (it woke my wife up too).
Checked all over the house, no smoke, no fire. But then Biscuit T. Dog started staring from the living room into my bedroom and growling. He wouldn’t go in there. I threw his ball, he looked at me briefly and kept growling.
I went in there, nothing.
I can only assume that I (a) have ghosts and (b) they smoke.

2025-05-21 16:15:08 UTC

- reply

Yep. I also got into an argument at a bar one time because someone didn’t believe me when I said “prophylactic” didn’t just mean “condom.”
(This was right before the smartphone era so we couldn’t just check, and well before the LLM era where we could get wrong information, but faster.)

2025-05-21 15:28:24 UTC

- reply

There’s all these bake-offs and vendor comparisons in the industry where analysts are scoring products based on “best use of AI” or whatever and it’s like…what if your product doesn’t need to use AI at all in the first place*?”
There’s this manufactured consent via the implication “everyone MUST use AI, now it’s just a matter of seeing who’s doing it the best.”
*it almost certainly doesn’t.

2025-05-21 13:59:18 UTC

- reply

He often moves at relativistic speeds yes. Also drugs.

2025-05-12 14:45:31 UTC

My nephew (who is 19) really likes to investigate and dig into various topics. He’ll regularly text me things like “how much do you know about the Ebionites in early Christianity?” or “have you heard of a book called Slaughterhouse Five?”
Anyway he just texted me this:
#BeOS #haiku
https://mastodon.well.com/system/media_attachments/files/114/495/394/576/611/955/original/5225633c9e38e0a0.jpeg

2025-05-06 02:27:04 UTC

“So this is Lost Ruins of Arnak. We’re archeologists investigating these lost ruins to gather artifacts. We gather idols and occasionally encounter guardians thereof, whom we kill.”
…are we the baddies?
“…yes.”
#boardGames
https://mastodon.well.com/system/media_attachments/files/114/458/517/115/930/723/original/74b8180cd6503b87.jpeg

2025-04-29 00:20:49 UTC

- reply

Does it support ANSI escape codes for insert/delete line/char? And change-scrolling-region? If so, and they’re efficient, that opens up a lot of possibilities.

2025-04-25 12:22:48 UTC

Can someone on #physics Fedi explain to me how, given Noether’s Theorem and the fact that in a curved spacetime, energy is not conserved…how does that work for mass-energy equivalence? Like, if energy is not conserved in a curved Universe, does that mean mass isn’t either? Or is this one of those situations where rest mass becomes really applicable?
Please explain this to me like I’m a goddamn idiot. Thank you.
#science

2025-04-22 04:13:48 UTC

#Japanese
https://mastodon.well.com/system/media_attachments/files/114/379/659/394/764/849/original/f97f8a569bdfd241.jpeg

2025-04-10 21:52:37 UTC

The US is too big and too powerful to be completely destroyed by a single President, at least I hope so.
But we are now the Byzantine Empire, not the Roman Empire. We still call ourselves the same thing, a lot of people see us as the same thing, but our power and prestige is still fundamentally diminished and likely unrecoverable.
We’re still one of the big kids on campus, maybe the biggest, and maybe even for decades or centuries more…but things are different now and will be forever.

2025-04-02 19:31:35 UTC

So I’ve been using vi for over three decades now, and vim was often the flavor of vi being used.
I just noticed that when editing a compressed file in vim (e.g. vim foo.gz), the implicit decompression step is entered into the undo log. You can hit u right after file load and get the compressed binary data.
Huh.
#vim #vi #editors