Notices by mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)

“At last! The lost Temple of the Dragon Sword! Wealth beyond imagining is ours!”
“Sir, there’s apparently been a transcription error.”
“A transcription error?”
“This is the Temple of the Dragon’s Word, sir.”
“Word, you say.”
“Yes sir. There’s a plaque.”
“I see. And it says?”
“It says ‘Kindness and friendship are the greatest of all life’s treasures’, sir. It is signed ‘Nydjwallyier’, I believe a dragon’s name.”
“I see. I am somewhat let down by this.”
“We did make friends along the way, sir.”

If Facebook engineers had to moderate content one day a month, to the standards they hold their content moderators to - that is to say, if Facebook engineers actually experienced the consequences of the software they've written - I wonder how many of them would still be working there in six months?

The State Of Mozilla, 2019: http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/10/23/the-state-of-mozilla-2019/

Lazyweb: if I want to sell shirt designs, and I’d like it to be a teespring-like thing where the shirt won’t wear through in 3 months, the material isn’t sourced from somebody dumping trash in the ocean or working meth-addled children through 17 hour days and everyone involved is making something approximating a living wage, what shirt vendor do I want?

Fleshed it out into a post: http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/09/21/retrospect/

The realization: the perfect audience for any advertising company is a person who’s impulsive, angry, frightened and tired. The cyclic relationships between what you see and how you feel and react means that any machine learning effort aimed at improving business outcomes for an advertising company will unavoidably optimize itself towards creating an audience that’s impulsive, angry, frightened and tired. The incentives don’t permit any other outcome, whatever the people working there say.

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/synchronous-messaging-at-mozilla-trial-servers-feedback/44871

Something something rational actors efficient markets something something queen of the social sciences

I'm sorry sir, it's protocol. If you're running for public office we need to do a quick walk-through of your house and if anything is flashing "12:00" you're immediately disqualified. I know you lost the manual, sir. I don't make the rules.

Some kids at the park were tossing around firecrackers wrapped up tightly in paper, to make a that bigger, cherry bomb sound. My daughter found one and unwrapped it, and it turned out to be a scene from Romeo and Juliet. It’s kind of beautiful, in truth.

So, just so I can calibrate, what habits do you have now that you didn’t a few years ago? I am apparently “put the things in half-empty jars into smaller jars” years old.

Shoutout to whoever that was pacing me from parliament to woodbine tonight. It's a rare day I get a rabbit I can't drop in rush hour. #biketo

I wonder what Unix would be like if the -h “human readable” flag was the default and a machine-readable flag was the option.

https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/album/internet-protocol

Red alert: https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/tcpsack

The number one reason I want a laptop with an e-ink screen is so that I can work outside on days like today.

http://cuberule.com/

Some new writing from Tevis Thompson, games critic and author of Second Quest, which I recommend in the strongest of terms.

http://tevisthompson.com/its-not-coming-back/

Has anyone out there put machine learning to the task of making empirical typography available as a service?

Now that Google Maps is letting you report speed traps and redirect traffic thereby, I'd like to propose that it's our civic duty to keep streets safer by reporting speed traps at random throughout the city, with particular attention to bike routes or school zones.