Notices by Lew Perin (wrenpile@mastodon.social), page 7

@HerraBRE Sure, opinions change over time, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they become obsolete; maybe they just require new context.

I think it would be a good idea to relax the ban on comment-boosting for sufficiently old toots. People aren’t going to turn Mastodon into a destructive ego carnival on the backs of ancient toots, I would bet.

After all, there’s always the option of deleting old toots you don’t want the world to see anymore.

The publications I read fall into two categories: those where the unadorned noun “developer” means “programmer” and those where it indicates “real estate mogul”.

Only rarely do they overlap.

@morganth Hmm, the famous St. Felix of Nola seems to have been truly saintly, and Rome did have some of his remains. But there’s another Saint Felix of Nola: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_of_Nola

Btw the reason for my curiosity is, I wonder what meaning was encoded in the gift — that would presumably depend on what kind of life the saint in question was thought to have lived.

@morganth Do you know which saint it was?

@xahlee As far as I know, all Chinese fonts are monospace, and freehand Chinese writing has always been monospace, too.

I agree monospace is irritating in Western text, and don’t understand why it doesn’t bother me (or anyone else) in Chinese.

Today’s xkcd is a brilliant data visualization of the state of play in the USA’s midterm elections: https://xkcd.com/2067/

#usa #politics #datavisualization

@xahlee I can’t help you about a lock, but please don’t forget to get yourself a decent helmet.

@neufv @garfiald Besides, late Wittgenstein is so much more soulful.

This cartoon is a smart take on (one reason) why iOS is unable to conquer the world: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/2561.html

They can’t blame Snowden or Wikileaks for this one: bad cyber opsec led to CIA sources in many countries being rounded up.

Iranian counterintelligence cracked the CIA’s system by … googling!

Also, it looks as if nobody in The Company has been held accountable for this failure.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/cias-communications-suffered-catastrophic-compromise-started-iran-090018710.html?.tsrc=fauxdal

@enkiv2 I think you hit upon a general law there. :thaenkin:

@enkiv2 Ah, here it is: https://wheresthejump.com/full-movie-list/

I'll admit I didn't know the term “jump scare”.

@elecray7k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_String_Cheese_Incident

@enkiv2 I’d watch more horror movies if I could easily tell which ones got interestingly creepy without relying on sudden jolts of shock.

@jpsa That plus its extensibility via multiple corpuses plus…many features you wouldn’t expect from a dictionary.

@jpsa There are lots of places in the world where you don’t get any service from public officials without a bribe, as you probably know. I worry about a slippery slope, as they say.

@jpsa I use Pleco, the brilliant smartphone app that’s both of those and more. It was the reason I bought a Palm Treo before iPhones existed.

@jpsa Wikipedia is a dictionary. I rarely use others in English. Chinese is another matter entirely.

@natecull I’m happy to continue not knowing him.