LaGrange

> This particular one was actually being kept in a house because someone confused it for a "pretty housecat". After a while, the owner realized it didn't want to be tamed and contacted someone for help.

I mean, the dude tried to feed it "noodles, rice, and eggs" so I'm not sure if he'd be able to tame my very own house cat, even starting from the house cat's current stage of being entirely tamed.

You know what actually saves lives? Fewer cars.

> You now can have multiple iPhones.

Thanks, I'd rather pull my fingernails.

That's cute, too bad it's a config file mandated by your boss and it has to be called "terribletool.yaml."

Recovery from forgetting to add something is _much_ easier than recovery from adding some weird configuration file with plaintext private keys in it.

I mean NL is like, there are only really present at train stations, cost money to use, and they look pretty bad. I will say though that “used syringes compartment” is good, actually.

Warsaw and Posen were quite similar to NL by the time I left — paid toilets that weren’t all that great and sometimes outright gross. I’ve also been to Berlin and I wouldn’t call the experience amazing either. I don’t remember using public toilets in Serbia, Switzerland or Spain when I was there.

But so far European track record is not great. To the point where I’m a bit pleasantly surprised other places actually do this well.

You're joking, right? That's an incredibly outmoded view of capitalist "competition."

> I was surprised to read that Anthropic (and probably other data / model companies) are doing this and it's extremely disappointing, as working towards the benefit of humanity

Look, others talked about how this fetishising of paper books is quite silly (though I don't like it when the destructive scanning is just so one could feed it into a chatbot) but I have to say, all I can do after reading the above sentence is laughing bitterly. Anthropic is an American for-profit company, any talk about "working towards the benefit of humanity" is just marketing lies, and it's always incredible to see people treat those seriously.

_Of course_ Anthropic does that.

And now I find myself staring at Zig and Java as my preferred languages. Zig is very C-like, so I feel like I'm back to the 90s - except a bit less miserable in some ways, more miserable in others.

Even the fashion seems similar - at least based on the teens I saw at the concert I went to recently (I'm not exactly a frequent event-goer) - including, of course, the anorexia. I should check out how the demoscene and FastTracker music are doing.

It’s more than one thing but the surfactants are pretty bad.

Actually the aesthetic preferences of people I regularly work with are important to me.

In my own experience it works pretty well. In fact better than the autoformatters.

It was essentially not an issue. Sometimes I’d grumble about someone, but it would never get in my way the way black or ruff would regularly.

Gods forbid I talk to people I work with, learn their preferences, and figure out the way we can accommodate each other. Sounds like such a waste of energy. It’s so much better if we all acquiesce to the preferences of some people neither of works with!

Don’t forget to light some candles and invoke the name of the Omnissiah while you’re at it.

Yeah, that too. Like, being old enough to get my start largely in internet cafes means I actually _had_ in-person interactions with the type of person we're talking about - and they were _not_ nicer.

Being kinda big I might even stand a chance against one - unless they had a knife, which they probably IME did - but there was always at least 5 of the "lonely lost boys," at least one carrying a baseball bat everywhere.

> As a parent now (but oldest is only 5), it's stories like this which make me determined remain aware of the kind of stuff my kids get up to and continually explain that actions have consequences, even if those consequences are seemingly as trivial as making someone else feel shit about themselves.

Weird, somehow without significant parental surveillance or explicit explanation I somehow managed to _not_ do much of the awful stuff my acquaintances with much more engaged parents did.

Must have been my autism, I guess.

Yep, that. Sorry, growing up in Poland I know the amount of horrors the EU _prevented_.

Europe without EU isn’t democracy, it’s a bunch of fiefdoms.

I will keep using POST and not some weird thing that isn’t supported by a proxy living in the basement of a shoe store in Wageningen or whatever.

Frontends and relays are far closer to “quacking like an instance.” That’s where your sysop’s power lives. The PDS itself isn’t very powerful - can’t meaningfully limit who you can talk to, for example.

By 2031 the best employer in Europe will be the water gangs.

Other paper books. Or the same books but electronic or reprinted when the demand is higher. Just not the exact same pieces of highly fetishized dead wood.

Some people truly love paper books more than having people read books. It’s one of the more seemingly paradoxical ways anti-intellectualism manifests.

No we don’t. And the greatest hazard is the soul crushing disappointment that is a Dutch tomato.

It's so funny reading about how the problem with Wayland is that you have many, often incomplete, implementations while being old enough to remember the time when X11 was actually popular (and thus had many, often incomplete, implementations).

If you’re a software engineer then yes, I can and do expect you to understand all that.

I mean normal people shun LLM users so it’s no wonder it’s true for you.

I don't think we're Ukraine's "teachers," and our treatment of Ukraine was historically just as rough at times.

We were. And “hard workers” is code for “easily exploited.”

Anyway the trick to explosive growth as a country is who you trade with and how you count things. We now sell things to Germany instead of USSR, of course there’s “growth.” There’s also some very real growth, quite a bit of it - but I wouldn’t put one bit of care in a “top 20 biggest economies” ranking. NL is one of the biggest food exporters in the world because it sells mediocre tomatoes to Germany instead of selling rice to Brazil and food exports are counted in euros, not calories.

Swimming. Lakes generally don't come with a securely closed box, and even if I come with company, they usually want to swim at the same time.

Of course I don't have to actually _use_ the phone while swimming, so it goes into a waterproof pouch - but having a 2nd layer of defense is nice.

I'm an AI skeptic, but I do think that _he_ will be out-coded by AI, no problem.