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Just an old geek. Learned about computers on a CARDIAC (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation). Then the math teacher at HS got an old Navy surplus computer with drum memory. It had a high speed optical paper tape reader. From there it was BASIC, Cobol, FORTRAN, CMS-2Y, Jovial, Ada. Did some Java and C but never got that good. In retirement learning Rust.

Note: the main picture is from the B-24 my father was co-pilot on in the South Pacific

Dissent"'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman"
Ah, yes, masked goons asking people to present their papers in airports, that will restore faith in the United States for the public.
Straight in the hormuz

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/116274161758622263

"The scientific process is slow and careful and it often takes months or years to publish a peer-reviewed result. Companies like SpaceX have stated repeatedly that their method is to “move fast and break things.” They are now close to breaking the atmosphere, the night sky and anything on the ground or in space that their satellites and rockets fall on or crash into."

As we speed-run the history of software engineering via trying to make AI coding reliable, repeatable, robust, and resilient...

We sometimes (re)discover something useful for software engineering in general. Checking architectural decision documents, requirements, constraints, and other artefacts in with the code ensures we have the reason for every fence close at hand when we consider removing it, and we have the history of those reasons alongside the code we wrote according to that history.

There are a few really popular accounts here on the Fediverse that I muted some time ago. It’s not that I don’t understand why folks follow them, it’s more that I couldn’t understand why I felt like those accounts bothered me so much. I mean…it’s folks like Robert Reich and George Takei so it’s certainly not a content issue, and I love reading them under other circumstances.

It took me a while to tease it out and it ultimately comes down to the difference between the Fediverse and sites like Twitter.

When I had an account there I rarely posted anything and after a few attempts to participate in conversations, realized that I was whispering at a Throbbing Gristle concert and no one was hearing me.

So when you look at accounts like Robert Reich or George Takei, they’re not actually here, they’re just mirrors of content they write elsewhere. So even though I see people responding to those posts as if they’re writing to a specific person, they might as well be replying to a bot.

Take as a counterpoint folks like @RickiTarr or @TheBreadmonkey. Very popular accounts, thousands of followers, but they’re actually here, they’re a part of the ecosystem and will boost, reply, favorite, etc.

I love that about this wild, weird, little slice of internet. I think that’s why I muted folks like Robert Reich, they’re not actually here to interact, they’re ultimately not a part of the community. They’re just here so they can access us, not interact with us. That’s not why I’m here. If I reply to someone, I want to know there’s a high likelihood they see it, whether or not they choose to respond to it.
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ETA: A few folks have pointed out that they've gotten replies from George Takei so it seems that this is more my personal experience there and there is at least a human on the other end of the posts which I'm glad to be wrong about as I adore George Takei.

Also when schools gut their arts programs, when they get rid of things like shop class and PE it's really harmful. It's harmful even if all you care about is students learning "the basics" eg. how to read and write, how to understand numbers and a smattering of history. Young people can't understand those things as well when they simply have less experience in everything.

On the positive side, if you want to abolish ICE, I can’t think of a more efficient way to make that happen than forcing the business travel class to interact with ICE agents on a regular basis

#USPol

It's easy to make fun of LLMs, but you can't deny how good they are at turning a mediocre text into a mediocre text that reads like a LinkedIn post.