Shannon Clark

Entrepreneur & Product Manager - looking for new opportunities. Recently moved to Mountain View CA.

Writer. GM (40+ years of ttrpgs) MTG player (former dealer semi-pro player)

3rd generation developer, online since before www (1990-present)

I post on a lot of topics including US politics (registered Democrat) and being a Dad. I try to be a good ally to my family and friends who are LGBTQ+

https://calendly.com/rycaut to schedule meetings with me

Pronouns: He/Him
THREADS: https://www.threads.net/@rycaut
Blog: https://www.rycaut.com

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npub1jsqmqwshty0pdun696rztlkdzn4v9qdc6dyth693vwwu9yt88lrqp4gfr8

NIP-05 Address

rycaut_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsfgqds8gt4j8sk7fazap39lmx3f6kzsxudxj9mazck88wzj9nnl3spz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsumtdyt

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

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Last Notes

2026-05-28 04:42:34 UTC

Has anyone made a browser plug-in that does the following:
1) alert you if the domain was registered after 2023 (especially if it was registered in the last month)
2) tell you if the domain blocks the internet archive from archiving it
3) if it is/was archived give you easy access to that archive (and bonus tells you if the content is similar - in the case of deep links this may be easy
If you guess I want this as a first step to whether a site is likely AI slop - you are the winner

2026-05-21 23:37:37 UTC

non-random query - does anyone I follow either have an interest in acquiring a Husqvarna Viking Designer Diamond Sewing and Embroidery Machine (complete with hoops and manuals - very large so in person pick up in Mountain View best, might be able to deliver it)?
My wife has one she inherited from her late cousin but it isn't something she uses (her art she largely licenses not embroiders herself). eBay comps are all over the place.
(also open to donating it to a worthy organization) #sewing

2026-04-28 04:48:26 UTC

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next time you are in the South Bay try the podi idli at Ulavacharu (multiple locations all excellent).
Idli express is also good but I prefer Ulavacharu as a sit down restaurant. Mylapore in Campbell, Madras Cafe in Sunnyvale, or Star Chaat Cuisine are also really good
South Bay has many other excellent sour Indian restaurants (my wife is Indian American and though neither of her parents are from South India we eat a lot of South Indian food as our child likes dosas)

2026-02-11 20:35:38 UTC

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it isn't by Apple - it is from Resolution Games AB
Looks cool and I may indeed download it onto some of my devices that could run it but you may want to clarify that it isn't a direct release by Apple even if it is part of Apple Arcade.

2025-07-29 06:10:44 UTC

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or even over a shorter timeframe. Happy customers return. And not only do they return they send others to you (often spending far more money in both cases). And unhappy customers actively tell others to avoid your company.
This is as true of restaurants as it is of enterprise software venders.
(I observed a meeting of the CTOs and senior tech staff of a bunch of law firms once - they freely shared bad vendors amongst themselves as firms to avoid)

2025-07-15 20:14:58 UTC

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not to mention that a company that has to hire and serve customers and manage relationships with partners on a global scale is not going to have the same diversity of perspectives and experiences if they limit themselves to such a small pool of people.
All for work that rarely really needs to be inside a specific office (with 16000+ workers they will inevitably be spread across many buildings anyway)
So commuting to get on zooms and read emails and create docs

2025-07-15 20:10:53 UTC

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it’s so idiotic of these companies and short sighted. The whole of the US and Canada is a much better recruiting pool for talent than “the set of workers who live in or can manage to relocate to Seattle or Toronto and then commute 4 days a week” which is a drastically smaller number.
And anyone with - a partner with a career, children (especially in cases like divorce where custody is shared), caregiving responsibilities for others (older parents etc) unless local won’t apply

2025-06-20 19:21:39 UTC

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I think the big difference between 2000 and 2025 isn’t between desktop PCs.
But between a 2000 PC and a 2025 phone (and to a lesser degree a tablet) and the cutting edge being stuff like VisionPro. Phones have become most people’s primary device in 2025 in a way they were not in 2000. And what we can do with our phones today is where the innovations have largely happened
(Ie you can almost film and edit a movie with phones these days and many people create lots of content)

2025-05-23 16:53:02 UTC

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how is it not?
I have been a google gmail user since nearly the beginning. I have reported at this point literally 1000’s of emails as spam and basically identical emails - most from other gmail addresses still do not get flagged by gmail as spam.
How is that not evidence of Google refusing to address spam?
Equally frustrating is they continue to falsely label as spam emails from real lists and companies or orgs I signed up for and want to see. Also daily not rarely.

2025-05-22 17:37:27 UTC

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I get a half dozen or so spam emails a day in gmail that are not filtered out by gmail’s spam filters and have for years and around 80% of the spam are from random character gmail addresses with a different “name” than the gmail address and sent to a random group of email addresses with very similar spam text.
I have reported these as spam every single time and for years (like a decade or more) gmail still does not flag them as spam.
Every. Single. Day.

2025-05-17 02:32:50 UTC

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the books are phenomenal and at least here in the US a collected edition has recently been published. They are wonderful books (and fantastic audiobooks). I haven't seen the tv show (yet - I will) and think you probably can't go wrong with either waiting for the last episode or reading all the books (I've found them the type of books that I don't want to put down - that in audiobook format I do extra household chores to have an excuse to keep listening)

2025-05-08 17:52:02 UTC

I'm just going to point out that about a billion Catholics (and billions of non-Catholics) will have about zero issues using Pope Leo XIV's preferred name.
(I was raised Catholic but am not Catholic, my Catholic relatives and some of that side who are also not-Catholic in some cases have problems with my cousin's preferred name - they are non-binary - but will not have any problems with the new Pope's name nor do they have problems with my aunt's names who has been a Catholic nun for 50+ years)

2025-04-17 03:01:34 UTC

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it’s probably more the 2004 failure by Sci-Fi channel adaptation of the first two books that basically got everything about them wrong. Likely they still retain the rights.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthsea_(miniseries)
(They got the race of main characters wrong and it goes downhill from there)

2025-04-08 17:37:33 UTC

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indeed and hashtag usage is varied (ie you would likely miss anything with a #CaliforniaHistory hashtag but personally that’s what I would probably have used for a post about that topic over two hashtags (which is less often how at least I’ve observed people post here. The many hashtags on a post thing is more of an Instagram habit.
That said the vast majority of posts in my feed have zero hashtags (I rarely use them myself)

2025-04-08 17:33:17 UTC

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one related thought - most reviews at least that I’ve seen posted here aren’t framed in a way to invite discussion or comment (ie they aren’t usually asking a question) so while some people certainly ignore such cues (ie “reply guys”) more often I read such posts as useful information and interesting but not aimed at a discussion. Often as well I’ve seen reviews posted from software other than Mastodon (if longer than 500 chars)

2025-04-08 17:30:30 UTC

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reviews on the fediverse are useful but likely rarely get much engagement because even if tagged with a hashtag (how I see most) they have to show up in your feed AND be about either a book or at least a topic (if non-fiction) where you know enough to have a reaction. I have discovered (and purchased) multiple books from posts about them here but haven’t gotten into a back and forth discussion based on a review very often (and if at all)

2025-03-24 16:01:10 UTC

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all of which are basically how Apple has done stuff even before they bundled it all together as "Apple intelligence" (which is mostly as best I can tell less useful mostly than what they had previously)
but broadly I don't object to the raw tech of LLMs applied in such areas - but they are also boring features not new massive companies - and only if not done via massive data centers and pushing my private data there to be processed/stored

2025-03-24 15:58:55 UTC

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the only ethical uses I can easily envision are where you run a model locally, trained only on your own data (or data sourced in an ethical and documented way) and then used for uses that are ethical and useful.
examples (none of which really require an LLM but may be improved by the tech) - grammar/spellchecking, on device voice control/dictation, on device translation (for comprehension not publication), OCR, extraction from personal images (face matching, item detection)

2025-03-21 03:19:08 UTC

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it was a bit old then but it had been enhanced and upgraded many times - had a lot of storage (well for the era - now probably less than a microSD card) and it was a beast - ran a bunch of terminals with ease and was very useful. We programmed in Pascal and Fortran on it for Computer Science AP classes (I took it as a sophomore - so our final was the AP test questions, on the terminals, and then our working code was actually used as examples by the AP test graders that year)

2025-03-21 03:13:41 UTC

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that brings back memories - my high school had a PDP 11 (I'm old, this was in the late 1980's/early 1990's) it served a lot of purposes - it ran the card catalogue for the library (via very long cables as the main machine was on the opposite end of the school. And it ran the CS computer lab (which was all terminals for the PDP11). We did our Comp Sci homework on it and then for the next few years all had accounts on it and used software we all wrote - a bbs like app and multiple games

2025-02-23 09:09:59 UTC

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my favorite novel of all time is also one of the longest I’ve read. The Stone and The Flute by Hans Bemmann translated from German by Anthea Bell - telling a story of one man from birth to death (by old age). It’s a fantasy novel but is much much more - it uses stories within stories and takes some unexpected turns. Parts are rough reading because the main character makes real mistakes - and pays for them.
Nearly 40 years after reading it I still think of it often

2025-02-18 05:25:16 UTC

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and a few cozy chairs with good light and perhaps a great table for studying or playing games.
Why yes my “man cave” would have a few bookcases.
Ummm ok more than a few.
(Semi seriously I want to build an ADU but most designs have next to no space for bookcases or a big table like you might play ttrpgs around as every wall has windows/doorways/appliances and often get direct sun)

2025-02-17 03:09:50 UTC

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and you know some smart Alec will put a hidden door along with this setup….
I would.
If I had the wall space and the secret room to go with it.

2025-02-13 03:13:33 UTC

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check out https://folklore.org/html/about.html which is maintained by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It’s an archive of a site created 20 years ago collecting oral histories of the development of the Macintosh.

2025-01-31 03:02:26 UTC

So as is typical these days Google is useless for the following - perhaps someone here knows a specialized site that could help me?
Back in the 1980’s I had a crazy clock radio as a kid that could tune into TV signals (playing only the audio). It was a square format. But I don’t remember who made it. Probably around 1982/3.
Google insists on mostly showing vintage small format TVs no matter what I put into the search.
I grew up listening to the audio of Rocky and Bullwinkle every morning.

2025-01-10 01:37:39 UTC

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this afternoon as I parked at my local grocery store to pick up a few things we needed for dinner the vehicle that pulled in and parked next to me was a first edition Bentley SUV (so roughly 2-3x as expensive as the Tesla parked on the other side of it… guessing from the condition it has a fraction of that mileage. Looked nice but eh not sure it’s nearly $300k nice.
(I was driving my 9 yr old Volvo. Which is a very nice car but eh cost me much less used)

2025-01-07 03:25:27 UTC

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the once and future king is among my all time favorite books. So much so that as a kid in high school in the 1980’s I collected the original volumes that were later collected to the make that book. One of the many things I learned in doing so is how the original books were somewhat designed as for kids/young adults while the collected work somehow feels more serious. I have a small collection now of T.H. White books (many first editions!) still on my shelves

2024-12-22 06:18:12 UTC

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fun. And good to know about.
I’m a big fan of The Snowy Day animated short - it takes a classic kids book and makes it into a more complex and universal holiday film - with real diversity being celebrated (and is somehow a fantastic musical as well - has become a family holiday tradition)
Jingle Jangle A Christmas Journey is a really great musical that came out in 2020. Despite Christmas in the title it’s very universal in message and story (more SF/Steampunk/magic ala Mary Poppins)

2024-12-22 04:55:00 UTC

Does anyone have a good playlist for end of the year/winter celebrations/holidays that either is all non-religious/not Christian coded songs and/or gives equal time to non-Christian holidays of this time of year?
As an atheist Jew married to a non-Christian first gen Indian-American our family celebrates the season culturally but not religiously. it’s not as easy to find seasonal playlists for Hanukkah or Diwali (and other than an all Queen playlist not too easy find anything Parsi)

2024-12-01 03:15:55 UTC

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maybe though 8 hours on top of an hour+ drive to/from Berkeley is a big commitment and would depend on it not overlapping with my son’s school activities etc.

2024-11-11 22:59:08 UTC

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I seem to recall it but don't remember all the details.

2024-11-11 05:14:21 UTC

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she was amazing. I grew up reading her works and was (am) a huge fan. I had the chance to meet her years ago at a small science fiction convention (Wiscon) when she was the guest of honor at the convention. I was attending a reading by another author and she was just quietly sitting in the back of the room just in with the audience supporting a fellow writer. She is greatly missed.

2024-09-28 05:12:55 UTC

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gdp goes up the faster expensive but necessary items have to be replaced appliances, cars, clothing - full replacements grow gdp more than repairs would. Even more financed goods likely get counted multiple times as the transactions flow across the economy and get recognized as income by lenders as well as by the retailer and manufacturer. So a focus on gdp indirectly leads to planned obsolescence and fads

2024-09-19 00:59:29 UTC

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and not just in Western states. Many others have also endorsed Harris / Walz. https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2024/09/18/harris-local-teamsters-2024-trump

2024-09-18 17:33:16 UTC

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check out The Gutenberg Parenthesis by @npub1esh…ggsa it starts in the late Medieval period with the earliest printed books and while it ends in the modern era discussing the internet I think you will find the early chapters very related to the bibliography your are building and that you will find his bibliography and the books he used useful for a further dive into the impact of printing on the late medieval / early modern era

2024-09-18 16:28:36 UTC

Does anyone know of an easy way to determine which browser tab out of eh lets just say many many dozens tried to load content from a specific URL? Trying to figure out which tab my home network's router just blocked access to as it thinks that URL is malware (relatively sure it is wrong - the URL blocked was for Tailgraph (not putting the full URL in just in case it is correct) which as far as I know isn't a malware vector but I'm not very familiar with it.
(I'm on Safari on the latest MacOS)

2024-09-11 03:26:27 UTC

To put Taylor Swift’s endorsement in context I liked her post on Instagram 19 minutes after she posted it.
It already had 1,500,000+ likes.
In less than 20 mins.
(And almost certainly not via bots)
#KamalaHarris #TaylorSwift

2024-09-10 04:29:27 UTC

What do people with Apple Warches actually use them for? (As opposed to how they are frequently promoted)
I have not owned one - been a few decades since I last regularly wore a watch of any kind. Tempted by the Series 10 (unsure what the differences really are between models) and I’m very nervous about the bands - most watch band designs have not been comfortable for me (not small wrists, sensitive skin, tmi but I have actual body hair etc)
What I’m less sure of is how I would actually use it

2024-08-31 01:00:29 UTC

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probably not entirely bs. Though not all of the things flying at/around burning man are likely full sized private jets (some numbers might include ultralight aircrafts and drones)
See https://airport.burningman.org/about/
(Likely the busiest temporary airport in the world - though that might exclude military) a few years ago had more than 3000 flight operations (but some of that likely are the same planes flying multiple times)

2024-08-29 21:42:23 UTC

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indeed. I think it would help find bots/trolls/bad actors (who connect using normal appearing bios then change them) but equally would just help highlight when people make fun changes (like the common use of names for being at an event, supporting a movement etc) or when someone adds a verified link, new website, updated pronouns whatever. It’s easy to miss such updates especially if you follow a lot of people.
(And dates of when you followed/they followed you can help remind you why)

2024-08-29 21:35:29 UTC

Social feature idea (including the #Fediverse)
Cache people’s bios when I follow them (name, account name, bio, links)
Make visible to me when viewing their bio which parts have changed since I followed them w/versions also clearly showing when I followed them (and if they follow me - when they followed me)
If I mute or block and the later unblock or the mute expires also show that history from the profile view. Perhaps also make it a simple one click to see any past interactions with them

2024-08-26 00:16:18 UTC

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looks definitely related and they note a couple of other fediverse related event platforms I hadn’t heard of previously so going to investigate further.
I do think there may need to be a distinction between public events (in public space/online) where most people are welcome. And events that are for a vetted community where the details might be limited to that community (the event may or may not be visible w/o details) for discovery

2024-08-25 22:09:52 UTC

Has anyone built the #indieweb version of Meetup? (Opt in to groups that then plan localized events - perhaps inclusive of online ones?) it’s tricky as it takes some good practices to avoid spam, scams and other bad behavior and actors. But reoccurring (as well as one off but low barriers to entry to holding) events is really good for community building (regardless of the topics)

2024-08-18 21:41:34 UTC

Who else is going to #xoxofest later this week? I’m actually arriving in Portland on Wednesday (staying downtown, won’t have a car but happy to meet up via walking or public transit) and I welcome suggestions for geeking things to do in Portland. I was there not too long ago with my son (who was overwhelmed by Powell’s) so I may go back but my 100+ deep tbr shelves + stacks means I have to limit my new book buying. I’m not a drinker but do like great coffee and #ttrpgs and #comics

2024-08-15 16:49:48 UTC

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it’s not surprising but it is very short sighted
1) building a company on a basis of knowingly doing something morally (and legally) wrong is building on a very weak foundation and instilling a culture that will take shortcuts. Not recipes for long term success.
2) copying the public facing portion of any web business neglects all the hidden infrastructure needed to make the system function - whether with an LLM or just a team of coders you will still miss most of the actual value

2024-08-11 06:38:31 UTC

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brains are weird. It is painful and next to impossible for me to grasp the lyrics of most songs. I can just barely understand and then if I do nothing else but it takes massive effort and I can’t have any distractions or other sounds. Someone singing along makes it all just gibberish for me. Needless to say I don’t do karaoke. There are some genres that are easier for me (show tunes and some folk music) but even pop or rap is hard for me to retain even while listening