joe_hills

I need to re-read Constellation Games soon. Lately I keep coming back to considering the expectations that its alien society has for the caretakers of artificial intelligence.

Spinning up AI isn't hard for them from a tech standpoint, but since the AI is advanced enough to be considered life, anyone who creates it needs to be responsible enough to be qualified to adopt.

I was looking at the in-app purchases list and it doesn't explicitly have a family-sharing plan like Weather Line does.

This looks great and I'd definitely consider switching my family Weather Line plan over to an Acme Weather family plan if it becomes possible.

You’re mistaken. The Nazi Party in Germany intentionally killed a lot of German citizens.

That phrase originated from a story in which a lapsed carpenter stopped an execution.

Christ, we need more woodworking classes for kids on the tech path.

Executive order itself: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/elim...

Congrats, Tom! I’m glad to hear there’s more than one moderator here so you can share the workload and hopefully relax well on your time off.

I've been researching Open Source alternatives to WordPress, and apparently Drupal just today released a new variant with modules pre-loaded to cater to marketers considering a similar jump.

Anyone looking at this for their projects?

What a choice, and what poor timing.

Companies that make breaking changes on holiday weekends aren’t going to earn much goodwill from developers.

Yeah, if it was actual spies or junior enlisted, I doubt we’d hear about it, so this may not be the first time.

For a captain not to be able to trust his senior chiefs is what’s most scary here.

If this was a bunch of junior enlisted, I’d be impressed at their ingenuity, and they’d probably get a slap on the wrist for doing the dumb things that nineteen year olds are expected to get caught for.

I can’t imagine the entire senior enlisted crew of a shop risking their careers over better internet access, though. I doubt many captains would have either, though, so I wonder if this presages an imminent crisis of confidence in senior enlisted by senior officers.

Neat!

I wonder if demand for DOS computers for industrial control applications was the driving force behind creating these. I’m sure just buying a new DOS machine with parallel and serial ports might be more straightforward than spinning up a VM on modern hardware in some settings.

I concur on Affinity. For graphic design, pixel art, layout, and photo work I've switched to the Affinity suite.

I used Premiere for about two years but never liked it as much as Final Cut Pro X, so I'm back on FCPX for video now that I've got a better Mac to run it on.

FCPX and Affinity are both one-time purchases, which I appreciate.

Apple ships extra stickers with their logo in the box with a lot of their products, maybe slap one on your computer and see how far it gets you in court?

Wow, I was wondering at first how good a video had to be for a YouTube engineer to add css like this—and after watching this twice now, I'm deeply startled by how many brilliant and resonant choices were made by the folks who created it.

A piece this artistic deserves a curative touch.

I’m part of an artist’s collective, and this really captures the spirit of how we sometimes spend our holidays.

A computer can generate billions of unique seeds, but not billions of relationships with your sales team.

Maybe don't allow companies you don't trust to buy ads?

If only companies with a relationship with your sales team can buy ads from you, and they know they'll lose that ability if they run a fake AI ad, then you have far less to worry about.

It could be argued that this may work for newspapers, TV, and radio stations, but can't scale for serious websites. Serious websites won't be taken seriously if they can't get this under control, and folks will be turning back to newspapers, TV, and radio stations to get away from it. Don't make them competitive again.

Local weekly pinball tournaments are an amazing way to meet folks and hang out in a low-pressure social environment.

Since the rounds of the tournament are randomized groups of four, every round is a chance to introduce yourself to three other players and learn each others' names. If you come back regularly, you'll start to recognize and be recognized by the other regulars. Everyone gets to know each other better at a natural and unforced pace.

I've been playing every Wednesday night for about a year, and I like it so much that I'm shifting my work schedule so I can join the same local regulars for a Thursday night tournament at a different arcade too.

I really hope you have the chance to give it a try!

You can find tournaments in your area at: https://www.ifpapinball.com/calendar/#

I really enjoyed the Bobiverse books, but could understand why folks who favor authoritarian theocracies as a government structure might feel that the novels don’t convey zealots that start planet-destroying conflicts optimistically.

I have sixteen of the tumblr Verification checkmarks.

I bought some myself as a joke, and then folks gifted me more.

They are just the funniest possible UI choice—they look so broken, they become beautiful.

I second this, AI in the Culture series is the most positive example I've read. It's notable that AI co-exist with humans everywhere in Banks' novels—unlike say Star Trek, where Data is a rare outlier.

I hope anyone who wants to pursue the arts doesn’t let pessimists like this discourage them from expressing themselves in the ways they love best.

I can say from experience that becoming a self-employed artist is possible, but not easy or quick.

My path was to find a full-time job that used different parts of my brain from my art. I used my limited free time to brainstorm, create, and publish whatever I could make time for to slowly build an audience for about a decade.

Eventually enough folks discovered my work (and found themselves jobs themselves that allowed them more discretionary income) that becoming a self-employed artist became feasible for me.

Over three-quarters of my revenue is direct audience support like tips or Patreon. I make enough for my kid to have opportunities my parents couldn’t afford for me—while determining my own schedule and being more available to her day-to-day than my dad could be either.

I acknowledge it’s a gamble to buy supplies and spend time to make something, publish it, and travel to meet your audience a few times a year. I admit I’m lucky it paid off for me. But it isn’t as near impossible as the author makes it out to be.

If you find something that works for you that lets you create artifacts of your interests, go for it! You never know what people will latch on to.

I also have a lot of unrelated interests and ideas for projects I lack the depth to get off the ground.

The real breakthrough for me occurred while I was using Minecraft to practice improvisational comedy on YouTube and realized that I can take any infeasible idea that would never happen like "What if I gave a $40k speech to Goldman Sachs?" and added "... in Minecraft?" to it.

I made a lot of videos people didn't get for about a decade, and now I quit my day job as a LAMP dev and make most of my living off tips from viewers.

Best of luck!

This was a pain to find on mobile, so for the convenience of LAMP developers curious about the included packages:

Apache/httpd: 2.4.52

Mysql: 10.5.13

PHP: 7.4.27

Source: ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware64-15.0/PACKAGES.TXT

I work in video production and could use an engineer in-studio while I'm broadcasting to deal with tech on the fly. I'm hitting the ceiling on what I can do by myself during a live show.

I could make the same amount of money anywhere with internet at this point, so there's no obvious place to move in particular. I loved the idea of hitting the West Coast until the smoke of the last few years caused me to reconsider.

As I consider if climate extremes are likely to keep getting worse, upstate New York or Vermont are seeming more and more viable to me.

Relocating before hiring full-time employees is probably my best move.

I've got a kid, though, so I'm currently trying to assess where we can afford to move that inspires confidence that we can really build something there. If we have to go, I don't wanna move again before she goes to college in a decade.

As someone currently self-employed in Nashville and trying to figure out how to scale up my network of part-time contractors into a real company, my state legislature making decisions like this (and also needlessly harassing trans folks) is incredibly frustrating.

How can I ask people who work for me to live here?

The difference between their old color and their new color is exactly the same hue shift I've seen on broken screens in the past.

Every time I see their icon, I think my phone screen is done.

Thanks! Before everything locked down, I was lucky to have a lot of day-to-day support from my family, friends, and colleagues.

One of the ways I tried to demonstrate appreciation for their help was by actively working to structure my life and career so I could be less reliant on them in the future. I had no idea how soon I wouldn't have any choice, but my preparation for self-employment and plan to minimize outside child-care definitely made handling the COVID-forced changes easier.

Single dad here in a small apartment with a 7yo whose school went fully remote.

I switched to a reduced-hours contractor status at my day job and went "full-time" on my side project so I can make my own schedule.

I do the bulk of my focused work either after my kid goes to bed or before she starts school for the day.

During the day when she's in class, it seems like every class period, there's at least one or two tech issues she needs help with. To keep that time productive for me, I do household chores, meal prep, and any easily-interruptable work-related tasks (like writing correspondence).

It's not ideal, but I feel like I can make it work for us indefinitely.