kechpaja

luckytran, 9 days ago to random

"So this bill will protect the Ku Klux Klan to wear masks in public, but someone who's immunocompromised like myself cannot wear a mask?"
— North Carolina Senator Sydney Batch, who is a cancer survivor

Unbelievable.

futurebird, 4 months ago to random

There is a rumor running around about Nikki Haley not being eligible to run for president. She was born in NC, it's not that complex. Some commenters have suggested this is a misinformation campaign that is playing on the naiveté of the "maga" base? Maybe a little.

I think it's something else. It's another dog whistle. Do you remember when there were people suggesting that only people with parents born in the US should be "natural born citizens?"

This is that. The idea is very nativist.

futurebird, 3 months ago to random

I remember going to the dentist as a kid and the dated old music from the 70s they always played.

Songs like "Take it Easy"

But, here is the mystery. When I go to the dentist now it's the same music. Doesn't matter what dentist I see or what city. The music is still from the 70s.

Shouldn't it be music from the 00s by now?

Why are all Dentist offices frozen in time??

sundogplanets, 3 months ago to random

In addition to the bazillionty things I said I would do this week, I need to get my astrobiology students to pick their final project topics: they have to evaluate a work of scifi on the plausibility of its aliens using what they learned from my astrobiology course.

I've asked here before, but I'll ask again: what are some scifi works that have really great aliens and/or alien worlds?

My list so far:

kechpaja, 5 months ago to random

Is anyone up for running a tech conference with fake AI-generated men on the promotional material, but an all-female cast of actual speakers?

kechpaja, 1 year ago to random

Reminder that in Klingon, cha means “torpedoes”. Käärijä is issuing battle commands at a furious pace.

#Eurovision #euroviisut

kechpaja, 6 months ago to random

"Have you joined Bluesky?"

"Dude, I live in Finland, and it's fall going into winter. The sky hasn't been blue in weeks, and it's not going to be blue again for longer than I care to think about right now. If there's ever a Greysky, I might consider it, but for now I think I'll just stick with Mastodon."

kechpaja, 7 months ago to climate

I guess what scares me most about #ClimateChange is how enthusiastic some people are about accepting the end of the world, rather than trying to do something about it.

How did we overcome this defeatism in past crises? Did we, or were there just enough people willing to do something to ensure that something got done?

kechpaja, 6 months ago to random

"So how do you feel about George Bush Jr. now, 15 years later?"

"Well, I've started writing dubya as dubia..."

(@futurebird)

kechpaja, 8 months ago to random

Tech bloggers: please put dates on all of your posts. Tech knowledge often goes out of date very quickly, as we all know. I need to know whether I'm reading something from this year or ten years ago before I invest a lot of time in the post.

kechpaja, 7 months ago to random

Is it just me, or is LinkedIn just awful these days? Not even the content, but the site itself — slow and unresponsive, combined with a general sense of brittleness and glitchiness.

futurebird, 1 month ago to random

My mom was the head of a math department at a community college and I have fond childhood memories of the crazy mail she got. I think all math departments get this kind of mail. Basically people who think they've proven the Riemann hypothesis and such. She'd have me look for math errors in them because they always had SO MANY errors.

So, the idea of writing about biology scares me because I don't want to be "one of those guys" for some poor biology department head.

kechpaja, 1 month ago to linguistics

What's the equivalent of a mad scientist, but for lingustics?

Asking for a friend.

#linguistics

kechpaja, 3 months ago to random

Alexander Stubb will be the next President of Finland.

This is not the outcome I had hoped for, but given the relatively small margin, I can at least take comfort in knowing that almost half of the country supported Pekka Haavisto, and will hopefully continue to vote those values in the future.

I do, however, wish I didn't have to ask myself whether the outcome would have been different if fewer people were homophobic — a recent poll found that around 40% of Finns felt that Haavisto's sexual orientation disqualified him from serving as president. But that's the world we live in, and the best we can do is try and change it.

kechpaja, 3 months ago to random

My neighbors have acquired a clock that bongs. Every hour, and every half hour. All through the night.

Yes, this may be a part of why I've been having trouble sleeping.

kechpaja, 5 months ago to random

Apparently there's a Finnish company that's still exporting truck parts to Russia: https://yle.fi/a/74-20062182

The crucial quote, which made the headline in the Finnish version but not the English: "We have agreed not to politicise this war thing in any way."

FFS. Sometimes you just have to laugh, or else you'll be overwhelmed with despair.

kechpaja, 1 month ago to random

Alright, that's the second time I've been profiled as a potential thief for wearing a (clearly medical) mask in a store. FFS.

kechpaja, 1 month ago to random

Proposal: all dogs — or at very least, all small dogs — should adopt cat as a universal auxlang for communicating with humans.

This entails, among other things:

() Slow blinking is used to indicate trust, like it should be
() Barking is kept to an absolute minimum
() Untrusted strangers are met with skepticism or fear, rather than aggression

It would be so much easier if all the animals you ran into walking around the city and on trails could communicate in a language that was intuitive and easy to understand. Maybe once dogs are fluent, we can then work on corvids and pheasants.

kechpaja, 5 days ago to random

LRT: Apparently people are starting to refer to non-electric bicycles as "acoustic bikes".

I know why but it's still fascinating.

#LanguageInTheWild

kechpaja, 5 months ago to random

Nazi bar? I'd rather just bar nazis.

kechpaja, 4 months ago to random

Happy EST New Year!

Alon, 8 days ago to random

Machine learning is prime for a "what people think I do" vs. "what I actually do" meme, where the public discourse about it is that it's some kind of AI revolution that will change the nature of work, and what it actually does is provide better modeling for predicting public transit ridership.

xgranade, 2 months ago to random

It's funny, the whole superhero trope where heroes are obligated to use their powers for the good of humanity rather than live their lives for themselves.

Why don't we hold ordinary people to that standard? We do have some limited power in the world around us --- not superpowers, but the ordinary day-to-day power that comes from a place of empathy, care, and advocacy.

atomicpoet, 1 month ago to random

I have a simple rule: if someone asks me a question that can be a Google query, don’t answer them.

This is because I don’t like doing Google queries on someone else’s behalf.

And if they really wanted to know the answer, they would do the work themselves.

recursive, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to random

Technical words that sound worse to people outside of that particular field:

degenerate (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degeneracy#Science,_mathematics,_and_medicine)
regime (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regime_shift)

I'm trying to think of others. Please no outright slurs, we can let those die.

(Edit: folks on Discord mentioned:
"reaping zombie children" (Unix process management)
"performed an illegal operation" (computers in general)
"exploit" (compare resource usage vs. computer security)
)