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  I got 20, but no way they’ll ever convict me for poisoning Ben E. King a decade ago! 😀 @VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social

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  Alan: "The only numbers that matter in a software design are zero, one, and infinity." Georg Cantor: "א—?" Alan: "Don't start with me, Georg!" https://annas-archive.gd/md5/bc9f99b65b0dc4cd35b2ace8a02f829e

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  Four! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1HQ1zpPi4A

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  AI written text feels—to me—like Jazz without any dissonance. Jerry Coker explained why I find that unsatisfying as a human: Coker’s theory was that as we listen to music, we can’t help but try to play along in our head. We get the most satisfaction when there is a balance between our finding the music familiar enough to correctly play along, and surprising enough to have us experience the joy of something *else* working. Same with words for me. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS2Y_CkaXP0

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  “State Corruption via Bailout” has being going on in Western Economies for my entire lifetime. Private profits, public losses. —— p.s. I get that people are hurting, but black humour is the fifth stage of handling grief. Sending HugOps!

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  LLMs optimize for verisimilitude, not veracity: “The model learned what confidence scores look like in text. It did not learn to make its scores match its accuracy.” https://rumple.github.io/blog/2026/10/20/asking-llm-for-confidence.html

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  “My name is Raganwald, hacker of hackers: Look on my Newton works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away. https://raganwald.com/2023/01/10/ncrypt-lite.html

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  What's the OEIS number for the integer sequence { 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237 }?

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  A society is strong when its elders plant trees, knowing they will not live to enjoy the shade. A society is weak when its elders eat its seed corn, knowing that they will not live to see the coming famine.

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  It has only now occurred to me to construct a joke about a carny being the only person trained to manage a clown and his circus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carny

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  Charlie swimming in the spectacularly clear water of Lake Ontari’io. #dogs #dogsoffedi #dogsofmastodon #canada #ontario

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  It is said of Russia, “Every country has a Mafia, but with Russia, the Mafia has a country.” And it is said of the United States, “Every country has a parasitic billionaire class, but with the USA, the parasitic billionaire class has a country.”

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  Polish Tophat Dandy and Polish Tophat Punk. 🎩🐔 @sundogplanets@mastodon.social

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  The Agile Manifesto: We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: - Individuals and interactions over processes and tools - Working software over comprehensive documentation - Customer collaboration over contract negotiation - Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. https://agilemanifesto.org (1 of 2)

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  Bard Mehldau met JS Bach. And it was good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-6Ts64lm9g

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  Blackmailing into silence those who point out dangers to patient safety is a *totally normal* way to handle the rollout of a system that you sincerely believe is a radical improvement in medical care. https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/mayo-clinic-whistleblower-says-staff-015900709.html https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/07/09/lawsuit-alleges-mayo-clinic-cut-corners-with-ai 🎩 @whiskeysailor@reefahoy.boats

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  Coming soon: Defunding public education in favour of vouchers that redirect tax dollars to consumption pricing from tech companies. It is highly significant that Mr. Miklas’s pitch implies that giving money to AI vendors is better than kids sitting in classrooms being taught by humans. Just another step towards dismantling everything that actually made America great in favour of restoring the Gilded Age. https://xcancel.com/ycombinator/status/2079963722253214112#m

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  “What could be more disrespectful to the Homeric works Musk claims to love than stripping them of humanism that has made them immortal. Musk's ideal Odyssey is one rendered entirely in the hallucination of a computer that, like him, is unable to comprehend the very story it is telling, without the intimacy of human art and labor… As far as art is concerned, it's worth less than the water a data center polluted to make it.” Rolling Stone’s Nikki McCann Ramirez is taking no prisoners.

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  “You people are never happy. You asked for us to be inclusive, and here we are including Nazis, a reviled and persecuted group! Also, who the hell is this Karl Popper you keep mumbling about?" —The Firefix Media Team #mozilla #firefox #twitter

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  "We took a little time away from the Nazi Bar, but we noticed there's less pushback now for partying with the fash. So, back inside we go. Something-something, aren't-we-virtuous." #firefox #twitter #mozilla

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  “I no longer think freedom and democracy are compatible.” —Peter Thiel, Fascist Translation to English: “In order for the .01% to do whatever the fuck we want, we must strip the 99.99% of their rights, their freedoms, and especially, their ability to form governments that place any limitations on our power, whatsoever.”

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  RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116935681120949448 > comments that say "this is bad to do" and then doing it right away. AI may not actually think, but it writes and comments code exactly like a human—to be more specific, a human trapped in a feature factory where good code and sustainable architecture is always “something we’ll fix later,” in a calendar that doesn’t have a month named “Later.” 🧵

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  “I never assumed that some huge clanking monster would stride down Fifth Avenue, devouring New York; I always feared that my own TV set or iron or toaster would, in the privacy of my apartment, when no one else was around to help me, announce to me that they had taken over, and here was a list of rules I was to obey. I never like the idea of doing what a machine says. I hate having to salute something built in a factory.” —Philip K. Dick discussing “Service Call” https://theworlddickmade.com/s...

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  “I recently read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was oddly sad to read. The enthusiasm and optimistic view of open source and the future of software and craftsmanship. Looking at it in 2026… incredibly sad. “Forget the bazaar. Back to the cathedral.” —bitbasher on Hacker News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar 1/2

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  Recently, I was asked to attend a two-day course in “spec-driven development with agentic AI”. If you’ve not heard of it, spec-driven development is the idea that waterfall software development is good, actually, as long as you do it fast enough. —@samir@mastodon.functional.computer https://functional.computer/blog/llms-cant-program

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  Back in the 🍁 Day: 2015-07-01

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  WAY back in the day: Expo 67 in Montréal. That experience planted a seed that grew into the idea that one can be proud of one’s country and culture while welcoming and admiring other countries and their cultures. Happy Canada Day, and wherever you are… I hope you feel the same way about your place in the rich, varied tapestry that is humanity.

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  “For my fellow citizens, the law. For our oppressors, everything.”

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  Just because it’s old enough to vote doesn’t mean it’s wrong:

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  “The US is also a one-party state. But with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” —Dr. Julius Nyerere, first President of Tanzania