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Spending some time this week literally watching a pot boil. 🍁

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Chris Spargo is the new Tom Scott, that’s it, that’s the toot youtube.com/watch?v=qAJmtxC703

Trying to convince LinkedIn to stop emailing me about things I don't give a shit about (everything)

What do you associate with this picture?

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One of the main points of this video is that people often criticize a new technology for its downsides while ignoring the downsides of what it might replace (perhaps justified by "we've always done it that way"). Worth a watch. youtube.com/watch?v=Y2qSaD1v4cQ

We're offering a fabulous 10% discount on our #raspberryPi Pico word clocks & @RaspberryPi Pico coasters. Get yours now in time for the #Easter hols.
Click the link gurgleapps.etsy.com?coupon=EAS to get yours, follow the link & discount applied at checkout. #electronics #easterfun #makers #stem #coding

Read it on Medium coz wanted to hear a male perspective of having survived it.

For context: i was in relationship with a guy who had no boundary with his narcissistic mom.

At 30+, he still lived with her, doing her tasks. She was neither over 55+ or disabled, she also had her own car but he drove her everywhere coz she didn't like to drive.

If I'd realized how enmeshed he was, I'd have walked away sooner. It was only after I fell in love with him that I realized how bad it was. Tried to make it work but didn't.

Despite having my own Psychological tools of how to handle these kinds of situation, it was unsustainable for me so I left when I realized he was incapable of respecting me despite claiming to love me and saying I was the best thing to happen to him.

Y'all be you gay, queer, hear this: anyone who's enmeshed with a parent is a toxic person to be in relationship with. RUN. Now.

medium.com/@rlmartin078/enmesh

🌀 Monthly Recap for March 2025

In February, 995 new Sites were submitted by 55 different users. Also, 407 people joined the Cloudhiker community. All new and existing websites together pulled in 498,341 views!

👉 Explore the new Sites: cloudhiker.net/explore

Found a John Williams concert on Disney+ to settle myself down a bit. Won't get through it all, but with a hot chocolate and some Williams, I'm happy :-)

Today's April Fool gag, courtesy of an excellent school technician forum:

I stick a small test tube in a large beaker of glycerol. The borosilicate glass and glycerol have the same refractive index, so the test tube is basically invisible.

I explain that I've invented a perfect glue that even puts things back in place, smash a test tube, pour the broken glass in to the beaker (it disappears), stir, and pull out a complete test tube.

Yup, I explained what was happening. The nice thing with this trick is that even when you know how it works, and I dip a test tube back into the glycerol, it *still* looks like magic as it disappears as it fills up. Hell,*I* think it's cool, and I'm the one doing the demo.

Ask your #Mastodon admins to update their #ubuntu custom emoji to the current ubuntu logo. They can use mine if needed it’s shared from my server :ubuntu_24: it’s listed as ubuntu_24 on my server of course with : at the start and end. #linux

@ancientjames you can add a subdivision surface modifier and apply it to the mesh of the object, the mesh data is printend, but not the shader you see in the viewport.. would be dope though ^^

maybe 4 or 5 subdivisions and apply; great quality print still, what is it?

The secret to convincing an older person the value of 3d printing is to make a personalised case for their usb dongles..

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I'm building up a nice 16k (not 48k) #ZXSpectrum outfit with a bright red TV and cassette recorder. Also got some absolute bangers of 16k games to load on it.

Yes, I am aware of SD solutions.

Photo
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@_thegeoff
Here is the trick demonstrated
youtu.be/IzpYaaUTCRI

I've seen similar tried and becoming disasters that become expensive and large recovery projects.

I've worked on attempts to understand the scope of doing something and the reality quickly becomes quickly fresh before our eyes that hundreds of rules, laws, guidance, mandated process, and reviews in heavily risk averse organizations (for good reason) and how all these pieces fit together takes a lot more than just sitting and coding. toot.community/@TomShafShafer/

#PopOS #Cosmic news from Twitter cause it doesn’t seem to happen here …

New

@shom @mttaggart
I love this idea, especially since I've wanted to keep tabs on any and all changes to generated files anyway

Boosts

bsky.app/profile/doctorvive.bsky.social/post/3llqpibfwhs23

Want to better understand colony collapse? Read this NY Mag David Wallace-Wells piece from (gulp) ten years ago: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/06/bees-are-literally-worrying-themselves-to-death.html [contains quote post or other embedded…

bsky.app/profile/doctorvive.bsky.social/post/3llqndfk4qs23

Oh look, yet another study finding that the warming we currently expect (without further policy leading to *actual* fossil-fuel phaseout) will wipe out around half the global economy. Just think about what this means.

bsky.app/profile/doctorvive.bsky.social/post/3llqoapn74223

work / volunteer to get Republicans out of power and to educate Democrats on climate and ecological issues. talk in your networks about your desire to end fossil fuels so we can save the future. be the good and fuck despair! remember: a billion drops of…

Berlin Nightlife!

Würde das gerne als Riso-Print drucken lassen.

Would like to make a riso print out of it.

--

#Illustration #Berlin #Comic
Eine

“Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Where to begin?

An ‘Administrative Error’ Send...

Anyone in #Wanstead #London #LondonE11 #Redbridge please follow and come to our events.

Here's a #RepairCafe coming up Saturday 12th April with help from @restartproject Bring your faulty stuff.

Repair
Currently trying to (re)implement this cool way of making something watercolour-esque out of polygons: https://www.tylerxhobbs.com/words/how-to-hack-a-painting

Got carried away while experimenting, lots of transparent polygons looks cool
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That's what an induction cooktop looks on a camera without IR filter

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Highlights: Paloma Kop Live A/V at WISE / Union Docs, 2025

videos.scanlines.xyz/videos/wa

@Jeanniewarner @Phosphenes @lemgandi @pluralistic

- IF you can afford a therapist
- IF you can find one available
- your next hurdle is the conservative stigmatization of mental health as a moral failing rather than a societal failing – you need a mental health professional to get you over the hurdle of needing to seek out a mental health professional

Credit to Tim Boudreau on Facebook. I don't know who he is, but a friend of mine shared this on his wall:

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About the whole DOGE-will-rewrite Social Security's COBOL code in some new language thing, since this is a subject I have a whole lot of expertise in, a few anecdotes and thoughts.

Some time in the early 2000s I was doing some work with the real-time Java team at Sun, and there was a huge defense contractor with a peculiar query: Could we document how much memory an instance of every object type in the JDK uses? And could we guarantee that that number would never change, and definitely never grow, in any future Java version?

I remember discussing this with a few colleagues in a pub after work, and talking it through, and we all arrived at the conclusion that the only appropriate answer to this question as "Hell no." and that it was actually kind of idiotic.

Say you've written the code, in Java 5 or whatever, that launches nuclear missiles. You've tested it thoroughly, it's been reviewed six ways to Sunday because you do that with code like this (or you really, really, really should). It launches missiles and it works.

A new version of Java comes out. Do you upgrade? No, of course you don't upgrade. It works. Upgrading buys you nothing but risk. Why on earth would you? Because you could blow up the world 10 milliseconds sooner after someone pushes the button?

It launches fucking missiles. Of COURSE you don't do that.

There is zero reason to ever do that, and to anyone managing such a project who's a grownup, that's obvious. You don't fuck with things that work just to be one of the cool kids. Especially not when the thing that works is life-or-death (well, in this case, just death).

Another case: In the mid 2000s I trained some developers at Boeing. They had all this Fortran materials analysis code from the 70s - really fussy stuff, so you could do calculations like, if you have a sheet of composite material that is 2mm of this grade of aluminum bonded to that variety of fiberglass with this type of resin, and you drill a 1/2" hole in it, what is the effect on the strength of that airplane wing part when this amount of torque is applied at this angle. Really fussy, hard-to-do but when-it's-right-it's-right-forever stuff.

They were taking a very sane, smart approach to it: Leave the Fortran code as-is - it works, don't fuck with it - just build a nice, friendly graphical UI in Java on top of it that *calls* the code as-is.

We are used to broken software. The public has been trained to expect low quality as a fact of life - and the industry is rife with "agile" methodologies *designed* to churn out crappy software, because crappy guarantees a permanent ongoing revenue stream. It's an article of faith that everything is buggy (and if it isn't, we've got a process or two to sell you that will make it that way).

It's ironic. Every other form of engineering involves moving parts and things that wear and decay and break. Software has no moving parts. Done well, it should need *vastly* less maintenance than your car or the bridges it drives on. Software can actually be *finished* - it is heresy to say it, but given a well-defined problem, it is possible to actually *solve* it and move on, and not need to babysit or revisit it. In fact, most of our modern technological world is possible because of such solved problems. But we're trained to ignore that.

Yeah, COBOL is really long-in-the-tooth, and few people on earth want to code in it. But they have a working system with decades invested in addressing bugs and corner-cases.

Rewriting stuff - especially things that are life-and-death - in a fit of pique, or because of an emotional reaction to the technology used, or because you want to use the toys all the cool kids use - is idiotic. It's immaturity on display to the world.

Doing it with AI that's going to read COBOL code and churn something out in another language - so now you have code no human has read, written and understands - is simply insane. And the best software translators plus AI out there, is going to get things wrong - grievously wrong. And the odds of anyone figuring out what or where before it leads to disaster are low, never mind tracing that back to the original code and figuring out what that was supposed to do.

They probably should find their way off COBOL simply because people who know it and want to endure using it are hard to find and expensive. But you do that gradually, walling off parts of the system that work already and calling them from your language-du-jour, not building any new parts of the system in COBOL, and when you do need to make a change in one of those walled off sections, you migrate just that part.

We're basically talking about something like replacing the engine of a plane while it's flying. Now, do you do that a part-at-a-time with the ability to put back any piece where the new version fails? Or does it sound like a fine idea to vaporize the existing engine and beam in an object which a next-word-prediction software *says* is a contraption that does all the things the old engine did, and hope you don't crash?

The people involved in this have ZERO technical judgement.

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[Small edit to emphasize that I did not write this, I just re-copied it from elsewhere.]

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Nokogiri leads to Nokogiri. That's twice now haven't I? BADGES FOR EVERYTHING Just put my rake tasks? You can just about spot on...

RFK Jr will kill your friends and family. He doesn’t care if your kids get poisoned and/or die.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:njhuquor23vkkeamltaxdsnz/post/3llrphibmsk23

Here it is. Our largest journal! Hand-bound in goatskin leather with Japanese Yuzen paper. The Seven Treasures journal is college ruled with 288 pages for your writing pleasure!

thebookforge.etsy.com/listing/

#handmade #journal #diary #forhim #forher #TravelJournal #BOOKFORGE