Chip_Unicorn

RickiTarr, 10 days ago to random

What is the thing(s) that attracts you to a person romantically or otherwise?

skinnylatte, 17 days ago to food

LA food diary.

Some of you know I’m a big fan of LA food. I think that dollar for dollar you get a tremendous amount of cuisines, varieties of foods, in this melting pot which feels to me like it has far more immigrant and working class food than the Bay Area. Even the density and quality of ‘fancy food’ is high!

I’m keeping a record of my LA 2024 discoveries.

#Food #LAfood #LosAngeles

SallyStrange, 26 days ago to scifi

10 authors, of whose books I've read at least five:

Ursula Le Guin
Kim Stanley Robinson
Octavia Butler
N. K. Jemisin
Becky Chambers
Iain M. Banks
Martha Wells
M. R. Carey
Lois McMaster Bujold
Vonda McIntyre

#scifi #ScienceFiction #SFF #books

#10Authors5BooksEach
@bookstodon

jeffjarvis, 11 days ago to random

Germany now calls the United States the land of forbidden books. Think about that for ten seconds, please.

evan, 21 days ago (edited 20 days ago) to random

Which major change would a time traveler from 1974 notice most about cities today?

#EvanPoll #poll

molly0xfff, 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago) to random

“Crypto researcher Molly White skewered [Chris Dixon’s Read Write Own] with the delight of Pete Wells after downing an Almond Joy cocktail at Guy Fieri’s Flavortown.”

😂

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-05-06/silicon-valley-crypto-investor-chris-dixon-wants-to-overhaul-the-industry (paywall)
https://archive.ph/BDP2I (archive)

#ChrisDixon #web3 #crypto

Chip_Unicorn, 10 months ago to fountainpens

I know a lot of you, like me, enjoy #FountainPens.

I bought an antique #DipPen in Marseille, and I have been using it for my daily diary. It's an even lighter touch than a fountain pen. Though I still have less control of the line widths than I do with a fountain pen.

I have read that the ballpoint pen -- not the computer -- killed cursive. ( https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballpoint-pens-object-lesson-history-handwriting/402205/ [pay link]) After writing with many fountain pens and now a dip pen, it makes perfect sense. Both require extremely light presses on paper, and they make joining letters feel more natural.

I do not recommend dip pens for usual writing; having to dip the pen every sentence gets annoying. But I now understand how authors could hand-write whole novels, which I could not imagine with a ballpoint pen.

Retrying old tech sometimes shows the unexpected trade-offs society has made.

Viss, 3 days ago to random

the 4th of july is a funny time for the uk to have an election, isnt it?

Chip_Unicorn, 6 months ago to random

Oh, crap.

I just got a phone call from an agency.

Someone has scraped my resume -- but replaced my email address with theirs.

Luckily, they didn't change the phone number.

I have confirmed that the email address is live. But it's a @gmail.com address.

Do you have any suggestions on what to do?

#FediHire #Fedihelp

Chip_Unicorn, 10 months ago to random

After a thousand years, Spaniards have restarted making Garum!

Garum was the ketchup of the Roman empire. The Romans would put that sauce on everything. And, according to the Romans, the best garum always came from Hispaniola -- modern Spain.

(Worchestshire sauce is a modern descendant of garum.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum

Chip_Unicorn, 7 months ago to random

A wild idea that I don't have the knowledge to pull off...

Has anyone created a pair of cameras whose distance can be varied? (For example, a motor shifts the distance between the two cameras.)

If a computer knows the distance between its two cameras, it might be able to make a 3-d map of the surface of an object. The varying distance between the cameras would help with further objects -- or with closer, small objects.

Does this exist already?

Update: The above idea is called "Range Imaging" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_imaging ) and it does exist. Thanks!

Chip_Unicorn, 6 months ago to random

I'm at the Hollywood Forever cemetary, for the celebration of Día de los Muertos. Great music, spectacular makeup.

Chip_Unicorn, 4 months ago to random

I strongly disagree with https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ceos-finally-admit-next-return-133000281.html .

CEO's are surrounded by yes-men who agree to every whim they have.

I promise that they yes-men will cherry-pick something else that "improved" during the return-to-office order and use that as justification. There are bonus points if it's not measurable. (The most recent reason that I heard was "imagination".)

The return-to-office order is because middle managers can't strut around and Look Important unless they have their serfs around to lord over.

In software, every programmer can tell you what specifically improves productivity: an office where you can close the door. And every programmer can tell you what ruins productivity: interruptions. Yet, businesses moved to "open offices" not because of programmers, but to make middle management Feel Important.

I appreciated the years of working from home. I expect only the best companies to recognize that it lowers costs and improves morale.

Smootasaurus, 2 days ago to Law

AI in everything is going great, part 9486 (Also, is there a class action here #LawFedi #law?)

Chip_Unicorn, 10 months ago to random

I have a question for folks in Europe:

Have the trains really gotten a lot worse in the last decade?

When I last spent weeks in Spain, six years ago, the AVE trains were new, fast, on-time, and extremely useful.

Now, booking train trips between Barcelona and Marseilles was impossible on some days. (We took the bus.) Two of the three French trains we took were an hour late. According to my mom, the same thing has happened in Germany.

What happened?

Chip_Unicorn, 3 months ago to random

We have literally entered the time when

• HR people get so many resumes that they need a computer to decide which to look at.
• To get a job, job seekers need to use a computer to generate tailored resumes for every job.

On both sides, humans have been mostly taken out of the loop.

I, somehow, don't think that's optimal. Do you have suggestions for a better system?

#fedijobs #fedihired

Chip_Unicorn, 10 months ago to random

I don't know if I've said this yet...

@Deglassco is a superb resource for US history, and I am deeply glad that I'm reading her.

Chip_Unicorn, 6 months ago to random

Do you want to learn German?

Do you like hyper-powered (and hyper-cute) squirrels?

@evrys is creating a website that combines the two ideas: https://sprachy.com .

It's a lot more fun to read than most language learning websites. I've been using it to restart learning German.

And one of the first sentences you read is: Dein Brötchen ist zum Brennstoff für das ewige Feuer meiner Seele geworden. (Your bread roll has become fuel for the eternal fire that is my soul.) Use that sentence seven times, and it will be yours forever.

Chip_Unicorn, 7 months ago to random

I'm going to be doing a nerve-wracking interview in 15 minutes.

It's about statistics.

The good thing: I know statistics backwards and forwards.

The bad thing: I don't know Pandas or the many tools in Python for statistics. And that's what's being used.

I've used R in the distant past. And I know the algorithms -- I have had to implement many of them (because my companies were using Java-based systems.). But not these libraries.

Chip_Unicorn, 9 months ago to random

I heard a Chinese grandmother talking to her grandson in pure Californian.

She pointed to a person and said, "Look at him jump rope!"

She the said something in Mandarin way beyond my level.

She finished with, "¿Tú sabes?"

I wanted to applaud her.

Chip_Unicorn, 2 months ago to random

The most amusing thing about #scale21x :

At a convention all about Linux, the presenters are all using MacBooks.

Chip_Unicorn, 8 months ago to random

Hi Fediverse--

Who was the earliest fictional #genderqueer or #genderfluid character that we can give a specific year to? (I don't want to count mythical figures like Loki, unless we know when the myth of his pregnancy was written.)

The earliest I can think of is Krazy Kat, from the early 1910s.

Chip_Unicorn, 8 months ago to random

This is not trick photography.

This is not something I waited hours for the special moment.

This is not with road closures.

This was 2:20pm on an ordinary Friday.

Los Angeles downtown is officially dead.