@neurovagrant the automatic sorting of shopping lists wasn’t that long ago and it’s actually useful, not just UI churn.
Software developer at a big library
@neurovagrant the automatic sorting of shopping lists wasn’t that long ago and it’s actually useful, not just UI churn.
A young German man left the country by kayak in 1932, and spent 7 years kayaking all the way to Australia, only to be interned as an enemy alien. [In the 1st camp he was in, he met *another* German who emigrated by kayak, albeit only as far as Beirut.] A strange, resilient life.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-rewind/abc-rewind/105368900
That story about an AI startup collapsing after it turned out to be 700 Indian developers in a Trenchcoat? It was a made up story by a crypto guy that became clickbait, published unchecked by tech media everywhere. Read the real story behind Builder.ai here: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/builder-ai-did-not-fake-ai/
1/3
Translation: “All these continents are yours except Antarctica. Attempt no settlements there!”
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/strange-radio-pulses-detected-coming-ice-antarctica
Please tell people when you find work they have done to be good.
We just had a client mail and tell us that the spam issue has stopped, and thanks to recent work we did they've just had a booking for 16 people at their project "thank you".
We all perked up so much.
We do good work, but praise or appreciation is _rare_.
“For every item, experts face the agonising question of whether to save it as heritage – or, in cases where the contamination is considered a public safety risk, put into a nuclear waste facility.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250605-the-hunt-for-marie-curies-radioactive-fingerprints-in-paris
#Python 3.13.5, aka "oops".
My secret hobby is feeding story ideas to the 404 Media crew via Signal group chat. This was one of them! https://www.404media.co/spam-blogs-ai-slop-domains-wowlazy/
If you use Mastodon; please pay for your use. Please.
This is not the corporate web of Twitter and Google. No company is paying for your use of this service. Your use of the service is not being sold to ad companies.
You use it? That is costing your admin owner literal actual money.
Pay for things you like. Or they go away. Or they stay but get taken over by exploitative people that will eventually destroy it.
Please, find your instance owner and pay them some money.
Thanks.
“On June 10, 2018, the rover Opportunity sent its last message from the surface of Mars. Originally expected to serve a three-month mission, Opportunity functioned for over 14 years, traveling over 28 miles (45 kilometers) across Mars and unveiling critical discoveries about the planet’s geology.”
https://apnews.com/today-in-history/june-10
I didn’t know Mikeal Rogers well, but I knew him a bit and wish I’d known him better. Wish I’d gotten to hang out with him more than just a couple-three times. He was always so nice, so funny, so genuinely curious and interested in everything. Fuck cancer. https://b.h4x.zip/mikeal/
A cool thing that @nnnnnnnn has been cooking up for the last little while: https://github.com/apple/swift-binary-parsing
1/2 “My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because it focuses on cost, working backward from there.”
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/06/06/My-AI-Angst
The SF Dept of Public Health is hiring a director for their data team https://careers.sf.gov/role/?id=3743990007820346
If you look at 'role type' it is a permanent civil service job which is great.It just takes an ass long time to get hired and there is a pretty arcane process. (Almost all city jobs *are* union jobs, but permanent civil service jobs — as opposed to permanent exempt, which the city often used to hire software people in the past — have far more protections)
Great to hear Dr. Hayden speaking about her work at the Library of Congress. It was a true honor to help bring her vision to life: a library for Congress and the people. As Dr. Hayden reminds us, libraries aren’t just buildings—they’re vital civic infrastructure for democracies. https://youtu.be/rme21qIbVHM
“Daring Fireball: Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74”
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/07/bill-atkinson-rip
Aw, man. Atkinson was a one person turning point for entire history of computing. Without him, computing would have been less playful and more inhumane and much, much less friendly.
“A tiny Pentagon office had spent months investigating conspiracy theories about secret Washington UFO programs when it uncovered a shocking truth: At least one of those theories had been fueled by the Pentagon itself…
At times, military officers spread false documents to create a smokescreen for real secret-weapons programs. In other cases, officials allowed UFO myths to take root in the interest of national security—for instance, to prevent the Soviet Union from detecting vulnerabilities in the systems protecting nuclear installations. Stories tended to take on a life of their own.”
@jimsalter @SorceryForEva @s0 @gsuberland @hailey It hits the deeper problem that humans are much better at recognizing wrong things in front of us than we are at recognizing that something is missing. LLMs don't create that problem but they're a catalyst for hitting it more since they often exude confidence and don't leave the same tells as a human in over their head might leave.
@platypus get the party started!