mcc

futurebird , 23 days ago to random

Via toothedgoose on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/futurebird/752672809471377408/image-description-two-pie-charts-divided-into?source=share

mcc , 23 days ago

@futurebird oddly in addition to being true of etymology fans it is also true if you are a professional programmer

mcc , 23 days ago

@futurebird one way to look at it, i do a lot of computational art and in the genart community we LOVE our bugs. like we domesticate our bugs and keep them around as new features

(…on an unrelated note there is also a very interesting cellular automata adjacent algorithm named Langton's Ant. So I personally refer to all single-cell agent algorithms as "ants" but I can't seem to get this to catch on.)

mcc , 23 days ago

@futurebird Ah, I was wondering if you had encountered it before. This makes me so happy to hear, that's a great class project

mcc , 24 days ago to random

An intrusive thought I return to often is how "I want a pony" is the canonical example of an unreasonable request but, like, if you look into it even a little you'll find it's not hard at all to acquire a pony. On raw purchase price a pony is far cheaper than a car and probably not much more than a good ebike. You're gonna have to invest time and money into pony upkeep but, of all the aspirational goals you could set yourself in life "a pony" is one of the more attainable ones

mcc OP , 24 days ago

I have similar unproductive kneejerk reactions to "the sky is blue" as the canonical example of a undeniable, basic factual truth (the sky can take many different colors, varying in both time and space; someone insisting "the sky is blue" as an axiomatic, unchanging truth is necessarily denying someone else's lived experience) and also the cliche "you can't have your cake and eat it too" (eat half the cake now and save the other half for later. Don't you have a refrigerator?)

mcc , 27 days ago to random

Gonna upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu 24.04… expecting that, like everything else I have done on this laptop involving Ubuntu, I am going to regret this

mcc OP , 27 days ago

Oh no… I'm going to lose support for cheese…

mcc OP , 26 days ago

I like how GNOME looks better than KDE, but it just has so many strange unnecessary quirks!

Case in point:

• If you have a touchscreen, simply touching the screen will often bring up an on-screen keyboard.
• This will cause all windows to move upward to make room for it.
• But when the keyboard moves back down, the windows don't move back down, often leaving them half-offscreen and stuck.
• You can't turn this "feature" off.
• There's a GNOME extension to force it off, but it breaks in 24.04.

mcc OP , 26 days ago

Now, you'd think a solution would be "so don't touch the screen", but every hardware designer has been bizarrely obsessed with "all bezels must be as small as possible" for the last decade or so so it's actually very difficult to adjust the screen position on my laptop without touching the screen briefly

mcc OP , 26 days ago

Oh

Oh hey, about 24 hours after upgrading Ubuntu I finally found the thing that broke. It was—

—are you ready? are you ready, I'm going to say the line—

My Python environment is broken

Sinjo , 28 days ago to random

OH “If you’re the person who donated items containing radioactive sources to the swap shop, we’d like to talk to you. You’re not in trouble, we just want to know how many more there are.”

#EMFCamp

mcc , 28 days ago

@glyph @Sinjo I'm Not Angry I'm Just Irradiated

vampiress , 1 month ago to random

Side note: I watched "The Fall Guy" last night.

If you know ANYTHING about the geography of Sydney, Australia do NOT watch that film.

4 of us, Sydneysiders all, were going "wait WHAT? How did he get THERE suddenly!” every damn cut during some of the action scenes.

I recognise that perfect geography can be stifling to a director and liberties often need to be taken to compress space, but these cuts just made NO sense.

mcc , 1 month ago

@Cdespinosa @vampiress maybe if an NYC moviegoer sees someone getting around NYC improbably fast, it is wish fulfillment. like we go to movies to see and vicariously experience things that we cannot do ourselves in real life, such as get from one side of Manhattan to the other

futurebird , 1 month ago to random

Why do I have to have a cat clinging to my butt behind me in my chair????why?

mcc , 1 month ago

@futurebird Due to this post I have just realized Wikipedia has an entry for "Making Biscuits"

mcc , 1 month ago to random

Incidentally I'm thankfully still not seeing any of this Google "AI results" stuff. It sounds like nearly everyone else is. I don't know if the difference is because I'm on a Canadian IP, or because my feedback when they briefly opted me into the early beta tests was so aggressively negative they put some kind of "AI Hater" flag on my account

mcc OP , 1 month ago

Finally getting the new Google Shit Flavor. Just really floored that even if you report an AI result it just leaves it up there. Just such a total loathing for the customer being expressed in this feature

pluralistic , 1 month ago to random

If there was any area where we needed a lot of "innovation," it's in climate tech. We've already blown through numerous points-of-no-return for a habitable Earth, and the pace is accelerating.

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

1/

18+ mcc , 1 month ago

@pluralistic To your knowledge is there any meaningful way for people whose work experience already lies in software and/or FPGA engineering to participate in this new economic sector?

18+ mcc , 1 month ago

@pluralistic nod asking because I'll be seeking a job soon and i am focusing like a laser on strategies that will allow me to avoid the risk of being asked to work on or with what they're calling "AI" now

futurebird , 1 month ago to random

I have a powered ant vacuum for emergencies. Bringing it today feels pessimistic— not bringing it is tempting fate.

mcc , 1 month ago

@futurebird @u0421793 Now sincerely wondering if you could use the statistics of brownian motion to prove this mathematically