Chris Martin

I feel like you are picturing something different from a small town e.g. the specific one I am describing
https://files.functional.cafe/media_attachments/files/116/140/882/498/592/763/original/2e61d2e2417deccd.png

2026-02-27 00:22:27 UTC

- reply

I guess but ours is just full of empty buildings for sale

2026-02-27 00:13:11 UTC

- reply

What happened to small town main street? Retirement accounts.

2026-02-27 00:11:07 UTC

- reply

The structure of the US tax system effectively forces everyone to tithe the stock market

2026-02-27 00:09:37 UTC

The best corporate subsidy we have is the 401k: Your money, but you're not allowed to start your own business with it. You can only invest in corporations. That's the tax law turning your capital into their capital.

2025-12-20 02:13:20 UTC

- reply

I believe this is perversely what attracts people to AI interactions. The fact that the system fails often - but in ways that you can correct - is the point. You have (stupid, artificial) opportunities to make progress and fix things

2025-12-20 00:34:36 UTC

- reply

the problem is not that software is too complex to understand, I understand the shitboxes perfectly damn well

2025-12-20 00:29:41 UTC

- reply

when a wooden chair breaks, I can fix it, despite carpentry not being my area of expertise, because chairs are not built as black boxes

2025-12-20 00:25:13 UTC

- reply

Every button that won't activate, screen that wobbles around so you can't click, form that doesn't notice it's filled if you pasted instead of typing, I KNOW WHAT'S WRONG and no sorry I cannot help

2025-12-20 00:19:35 UTC

- reply

What I have is a very particular set of skills, skills that make me know why software doesn't work but mostly powerless to fix it

2025-12-20 00:16:17 UTC

- reply

sometimes the businesses you deal with have shifted personnel into new AI development teams and now you can't do stuff like pay your bills, whaddaya want me to do

2025-12-19 23:04:45 UTC

my wife is always mumbling "how does this website just... not work" and doesn't even appreciate it when I give likely answers for what the company did wrong to get them to that point

2025-12-12 20:51:28 UTC

- reply

It's tough to make sensible moral analogies out of unsentimental animals that'll not think twice about eating one another

2025-12-12 20:38:56 UTC

- reply

We try to protect all of our birds, but they know that they're not equals

2025-12-12 20:34:56 UTC

- reply

rudolph surely takes a little inspiration from this but of course also sanitizes to "games" what is in reality important things like access to food and safe sleeping spots

2025-12-12 20:32:47 UTC

- reply

With this kinda animal the herd really does tend to reject the wonky ones

2025-12-12 19:58:50 UTC

They never let poor Dulcinea
play in any chicken games
https://files.functional.cafe/media_attachments/files/115/708/364/380/786/959/original/36d9233ffbf0b8e8.jpeg

2025-12-04 02:40:19 UTC

watching Casablanca and having a hard time getting past the Germans all being British

2025-11-01 21:45:14 UTC

- reply

If your 401k is mostly Nvidia and Meta, you need to have sold that *before* screaming online at other people's AI choices

2025-11-01 21:22:53 UTC

- reply

I don't know sometimes how to take seriously most people's concerns and complaints when I see very little action taken to attempt to weather the fallout of the likely impending catastrophe

2025-11-01 18:42:08 UTC

- reply

But really the way to demonstrate your lack of confidence in Trump and Sam Altman is to own your residence outright, have a good supply of food and firewood, replace plastics with ceramic and metal objects that don't need replacing for a good while

2025-11-01 18:34:13 UTC

- reply

and sure, fire the guns every once in a while

2025-11-01 18:30:31 UTC

- reply

Though also means, in the Rockies, being ready to flee wildfire

2025-11-01 18:25:52 UTC

"Prepping" to me in this climate mostly means shifting wealth from financial instruments into durable goods.

2025-10-20 18:12:23 UTC

Why the fuck do perfectly smooth round doorknobs even exist? Why would you make something that people have to turn, and go out of your way to build it such that it's as difficult to grip as possible? Why not grease it up while you're at it?

2025-08-18 05:50:23 UTC

- reply

Last time I added diced and fried ham, peas, diced carrot - that's been my favorite incarnation.

2025-07-25 01:11:09 UTC

- reply

multiplied by n

2025-07-25 00:56:46 UTC

- reply

but by the time you've started reading that I've already tested mine, and when you really don't know the ecosystem those distractions add up

2025-07-25 00:08:35 UTC

- reply

I typed "get an env var named x" in a TS file and it spat out
console.log("Value of x:", process.env.x);

2025-07-24 18:39:21 UTC

idk man, LLMs do really get you over some hurdles of "I know how to code, I just don't know the word for this thing in this language"

2025-07-17 16:06:17 UTC

- reply

Yeah I feel like I must be misunderstanding the question, because that possibility seems absurd.
Unless "don't understand" means "don't understand well enough to hear unassisted, but understand a little"?

2025-07-13 22:48:15 UTC

- reply

I don't know how to stress this enough, y'all got to learn to stay the hell away from the bison.

2025-07-13 22:41:33 UTC

- reply

It's nice country and y'all should see it some time. Don't try to pet the bison.

2025-07-13 22:38:29 UTC

- reply

In conclusion, for a lot of people in the West who often feel like America forgot that it even bought this territory, getting trains going through it again would feel like real progress

2025-07-13 22:03:13 UTC

- reply

Since transit hubs are great places to conduct surveillance and other law enforcement action, and indeed TSA already has the jurisdiction and a great precedent for the abuses that will take place there, this seems like just a no-brainer political slam dunk

2025-07-13 21:16:02 UTC

- reply

Because it's been made very clear that
"who wants more rail travel?" - all hands raised
"who thinks their life would be improved by a job installing rails?" - silence
in this social class

2025-07-13 20:39:44 UTC

- reply

talk about which groups of people are predisposed to doing jobs we don't want, shit like that

2025-07-13 20:36:30 UTC

- reply

Y'all already use "foreigners picking the crops" to embrace immigration in a racist bipartisan way, why not bring back "foreigners building the rail roads"

2025-07-13 20:31:53 UTC

- reply

Trains are only a left wing thing because you make them that way

2025-07-13 20:29:43 UTC

Everybody talks about "leftists being bad at messaging" but here's one I really believe: Stop fucking talking about urban transit in the US, start talking about cross-country rail routes, restoring the sense of excitement that opening the West once had, and the amount of blue collar jobs that massive rail construction projects will entail

2025-07-06 22:50:01 UTC

- reply

I just throw stuff into a heap in the back yard

2025-06-23 05:08:48 UTC

Why is there no Haskell library for defining a parser and a generator with the same expression

2025-05-04 23:28:43 UTC

what if actually you can't judge whether something is good solely on the basis of whether it is new or traditional

2025-05-01 23:40:28 UTC

a popcorn machine doesn't really make popping corn easier
bagged popcorn is lower quality and expensive
pot on the stove wins easily

2025-02-23 18:13:46 UTC

- reply

A programmer, like a plumber, shouldn't be solving hard problems most or the time, but rather should be judged by how quickly they can solve easy problems without introducing any hard problems

2025-02-23 17:43:22 UTC

- reply

If maintaining a web app requires a whole lot of serious cerebral activity I think something has probably gone wrong

2025-02-23 17:33:18 UTC

Weird, it's the exact opposite for me. I type type type all day in Haskell because it's easy. I sit and stare and think about typescript because it's confusing as hell https://fosstodon.org/@artemissian/114027088523606979

2025-02-17 19:25:37 UTC

- reply

and that's great but every standard only existed because it was made by somebody who did not choose to "just use an existing standard"

2025-02-17 19:04:32 UTC

the maxims "simpler is better" and "standards are better" can be at odds when the standard has complexity that exists to accommodate things you don't need

2025-01-22 06:59:39 UTC

- reply

Not a response to anything recent.

2025-01-22 06:33:18 UTC

- reply

in my mind if you're trying to advocate for "simple haskell" you should therefore should avoid making such abstruse recommendations as "avoid GADTs" and recommend that people simply define whatever datatypes best model their application without worrying about whether that datatype would be permissible in Haskell2010, an irrelevant question that requires a lot of historical trivia to answer

2025-01-22 06:30:24 UTC

- reply

And then like "don't use GADTs" becomes a weird opinion because you're more precisely saying that a constructor should never have a constraint that involves the type's type parameters, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to explain why not

2025-01-22 06:18:35 UTC

It's annoying trying to define GADTs because it's a generalization. All datatypes are "GADTs." It's just that without the extension enabled there are some limitations imposed on what constraints constructors are allowed to have.

2025-01-22 06:15:30 UTC

It's amusing that just as JS got into record destructuring syntax, Haskell moved away from it in favor of JS-style dot field access

2024-12-06 06:20:08 UTC

- reply

I have been thinking about this ever since years ago Julie explained to me that the reason she dislikes graphical user interfaces is they feel like prisons because to a much larger extent they are an experience fully orchestrated by somebody else.

2024-12-05 19:36:27 UTC

- reply

We choose or are required to engage with a person, organization, business, government. They dictate what software to use for the interaction based on what is most convenient and advantageous to them.

2024-12-05 19:14:19 UTC

The notion that people choose to use computer applications because they are useful at accomplishing tasks is extremely outdated. The vast majority of software use is not voluntary.

2024-11-13 16:25:25 UTC

The great american trickery was that we synchronized clocks to make train schedules work, we don't have most of the trains anymore, yet we still have the clocks.

2024-10-25 18:08:10 UTC

"why does software require maintenance, it's not like it wears down"
Because software is not generally useful for any inherent good; what matters is its relationship with the surrounding context, and that context is in perpetual change.

2024-10-23 00:11:31 UTC

As you notice over extended experience systems of continually replacing low quality things, you stop seeing "like new" as an aesthetic to strive for, because most things that are new are just ephemeral pieces of a garbage cycle, not great things that you got lucky enough to encounter at the beginning of a long life

2024-08-19 15:57:36 UTC

- reply

Do you have the same experience at smaller hardware stores? I cannot praise the help at my Ace enough (but idk if your issue is just a man/woman universal problem)

2024-08-10 15:54:36 UTC

- reply

Buddha: Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

2024-08-08 15:23:49 UTC

- reply

you copied a url to curl but it contains some character that fish finds upsetting

2024-06-25 02:45:58 UTC

- reply

It's a fucking lie - "unpackaged" software that you can download and run on an Ubuntu system *is* packaged for Ubuntu, just not under any clearly specified spec. "I developed this on Ubuntu and it runs on the current version of my system, which I accept to be the definition of a normal OS" is a de facto tacit shitty package manager.

2024-06-25 02:42:22 UTC

Ubuntu may more closely resemble traditions that it follows, but in terms of "fuck you, do things like I do" I don't see it as any less of a scorched-earth world domination system than nixos -- Ubuntu simply followed a more expedient path to that end.