@TomSwirly@toot.community
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

TomSwirly

@TomSwirly@toot.community

.uk ➡️ .at ➡️.ca ➡️ .nyc ➡️ .nl

Check out my silly little bot here: https://botsin.space/@fortune

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jeffjarvis, to random
@jeffjarvis@mastodon.social avatar

The Times found two dozen random who said what it wanted them to say and then put this high up on its home page, where anything bad about Biden goes....
In His Beloved Philadelphia, Biden Faces Wariness From Black Voters https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/18/us/politics/biden-philadelphia-black-voters.html?smid=tw-share

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@jeffjarvis If you hate the Times, don't give them the clicks.

https://archive.is/FEkdG is a mirror.

microtones, to AmbientMusic
@microtones@mastodon.social avatar

something very recent for Bandcamp Fri., check out my current piano musical direction...

https://davidbeardsley.bandcamp.com/album/blue-in-blue-in-blue


TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@microtones I have a new job starting Monday and I got an unexpected tax refund, so you better believe I'm going to catch up with you and complete my Beardsley collection, as well as purchasing all of Daevid Allen's work (I have a bunch but it's mostly copyright violated, not my fault!) and some others.

Greetings from Rouen, a lovely little town with terrible weather but lots of good energy and very affordable housing!

Meanwhile, back in Amsterdam, https://nltimes.nl/2024/05/02/amsterdam-parking-spot-goes-market-eu495000

DrALJONES, to random
@DrALJONES@mastodon.social avatar

Analysis: recent poll on voter intentions

About half of all voters would replace both candidates on the ballot.

62% of Biden-supporting voters would replace Biden.

Voters have little confidence in either Trump or Biden, including re fitness for office, personal ethics & respect for democratic values.

Pew research shows 49% of registered voters favor Trump, while 48% support Biden.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/24/in-tight-presidential-race-voters-are-broadly-critical-of-both-biden-and-trump/?utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&utm_campaign=0c78f7e640-Weekly_4-27-24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-0c78f7e640-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

..

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@DrALJONES Man, somehow I managed to enrage someone with this post by not being extreme enough!, they wrote a long screed and then deleted it.

To make it clear, Biden is against most of what I stand for, but isn't a deranged maniacal psychopath who hates even more of the things I care about.

If I could press a button and remove them both, I'd do it now!! Heck, if I got to keep that button indefinitely, things would be very different for the evil old USA.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@DrALJONES The D/RNC have completely blocked any other choice. Perhaps the Hand of Fate might sweep one or both of these pieces off the board.

> 49% of registered voters favor Trump, while 48% support Biden

I fail to understand why even one human who isn't Trump would support this man.

pvonhellermannn, (edited ) to climate
@pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green avatar

Just listened to @rahmstorf’s enormously helpful &clear Alfred Wegener Medal lecture:

“Is the Reaching a Tipping Point?”

Answer: it looks more and more likely. There are still uncertainties, especially as to “When”; but with ever increasing evidence it is clear, as Rahmstorf says: we must, must apply the .

During sobering conclusion a pop-up message about Taylor Swift. What a time to be alive.

https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU24/sessionprogramme/5215#

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@pvonhellermannn @clarebee Living in the Netherlands, and now France, I get a lot more of a feeling that "the people in charge" are actually concerned with the welfare of the average guy than I ever did in the USA or the UK.

futurebird, (edited ) to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

People trying to train AIs are now complaining that all of the AI data on the internet are making it hard for them to get quality training sets of natural language and images.

bitter snickering

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@ayushbhattacharya @futurebird

"How hard can it be?"

So far, very very hard. These models cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train, and get very mediocre results. More, it's really not clear what these "correct methods" are, and clearly they need a lot more than a "pinch" of moderation.

> AI is cool stuff!

The stated goal of AI developers is to destroy most of our jobs. Sounds very uncool to me.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@ayushbhattacharya @futurebird

I disagree with everything you wrote: for example

> Look no one is taking our jobs!

Why? You don't say.

The stated plan is to eliminate 90% of jobs like artist, driver, call center worker, lawyer, factory worker... indeed, it's fairly hard to name a job that wouldn't be decimated, if AI works out.

Capitalists will have invested trillions, and expect a lot more back.

Look at what happened to jobs over the last 50 years.

1/

compost, to climate
@compost@regenerate.social avatar

Starting to read articles about farmers warning that for the first time, since WWII, we could have a year with no harvest in a lot of crops.

I have seen many documentaries warning us that because of the topsoil being washed away we will see events like this happening.

The consequences of the #ClimateChange are that it becomes more difficult to provide a crop with safe conditions to grow.

My point is mastering compost at home and learning to grow your food is a very valuable skill.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@compost Classically, one acre (4000 sq m) feeds one person.

You can do better than that but not hugely better.

Most humans live in cities where they are unlikely to even have 1/10 of an acre (400 sq m) to grow things.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@compost I agree with everything you say, and I religiously kept a compost bin for the 14 years that I had a tiny garden, but that area was at best 1% of an acre, and I used it to grow bee and butterfly friendly flowers.

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

People on Twitter are debating whether a person using uncommon words like "delve" are trying to sound smarter than they are, or worse, are ChatGPT bots, because "normal" people don't talk like that.

You don't have to get upset, or embroiled in the debate. Not worth the time or attention. But I'll share some important context as your friendly neighborhood Nigerian 🙋🏿‍♂️

Many Nigerians have bigger English language vocabularies and better command of grammar than the typical American or English person

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@purplepadma @mekkaokereke @mentallyalex My wife, a reformed Yank, when asked said, "Like 'to delve into something'?", so at least one colonial has heard of it.

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@purplepadma @mekkaokereke @mentallyalex The nursery rhyme "One, two, buckle my shoe" ends up with "Eleven, twelve, dig and delve", but I don't know if that rhyme is common in the US, or if it gets explained to kids, or what.

soheb, to music
@soheb@pkutalk.com avatar

Spotify officially demonetises all tracks with under 1,000 streams

This is just an insanely bone-headed move that is so pointless.

These artists don't even get paid that much money, and yet Spotify wants to cut off their revenue.

I'm done with Spotify. In fact, I think I'm flat-out done with music streaming services. All of them are exploitative. back to buying digital albums for me.

https://djmag.com/news/spotify-officially-demonetises-all-tracks-under-1000-streams

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@soheb If I pay someone $10 on Bandcamp, they get at least $8.50, $10 if it's on Bandcamp Friday.

denmanrooke, to random
@denmanrooke@social.coop avatar

Boycott Express VPN.

Repost from Lowkey (at)Lowkey0nline
'More people should know that the sole owner of Express VPN's parent company is Israeli billionaire Teddy Sagi.

He has a long history of funding the Israeli Occupation Forces and appointed a Duvdevan unit veteran as the CEO.'

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@denmanrooke

Thanks for posting this.

As an alternative Mullvad has a very strong privacy policy - they keep no logs at all, and you pay as you go to an "account number" which has no password and from which you can retrieve no information at all. Their code is all open source.

Also, I've twice had technical issues which I wrote up carefully and each time I got a real human engineer writing back to me incredibly fast with an explanation and a workaround.

Amazing for €5 a month.

TomSwirly, to random
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@w7voa I just read this article: https://www.steveherman.press/p/unraveling-threads and it's extremely strong, though a bit depressing (often the case with factually correct articles).

I wish I could disagree with your claim that Mastodon will remain marginal because it's not owned by a large company, but I can't.

But there is one line that's... more formulaic than the rest and it's this one: "but Mastodon can be technically overwhelming for novices."

1/

jramskov, to random
@jramskov@helvede.net avatar

@freakazoid @InternetEh Because you think climate change is a hoax?

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@freakazoid @jramskov @InternetEh

Hear, hear.

Unbounded exponential growth of consumption and waste are impossible on a finite planet.

is the only solution but humans will resist voluntary degrowth, even incremental, until the laws of physics impose involuntary and dramatic degrowth upon us.

Geri, to random
@Geri@mastodon.online avatar

on still unable to pronounce Kyiv correctly

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@Geri Question: how do you pronounce "Paris" and "Mexico"?

jeffowski, to random
@jeffowski@mastodon.world avatar
TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@petrescatraian @OGjester This is the role of dogs since before the dawn of history!!

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@petrescatraian @OGjester Well, even a picture of a dog is good enough for me!

It's funny, I was 50 before I had any relationship to dogs at all. I mean, I've always loved animals but I was a bit scared of dogs. Now I have to stop myself from petting random dogs on the street! (Don't try that in Romania, I hear!)

fkamiah17, to USpolitics
@fkamiah17@toot.wales avatar

At this point, the genocide enablers must be wandering their halls like the three wise monkeys to avoid these stories.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-02-16/rafah-gaza-hospitals-surgery-israel-bombing-ground-offensive-children

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@fkamiah17 I really believe they intend to scour Gaza of life. It is truly horrifying.

0xabad1dea, to random

A few times I have told the anecdote that the singly most baffling thing I ever saw in a code review — not the most insecure, just the most “how could a real programmer have written this? how could this ever make sense?” thing — was simply a C++ variable “number_of_trucks” … declared as float. Unambiguously referring to real physical trucks in a fleet.

Reader, it’s been over ten years and I am blowing the gods damn whistle. I had edited that story to protect the guilty: the variable was named number_of_planes. It was shipped by a company whose name begins with “B” and rhymes with “GOING out of business.”

TomSwirly,
@TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

@0xabad1dea A quibble: floating point numbers give exact values for addition, multiplication and subtraction involving integers if the results aren't too large.

In 32-bit floating point, you can exactly represent all integers up to 16,777,217.

> You should never, ever use floats for things like money

You can't do things like compound interest and mortgage payments with integer arithmetic! 😁

I have a relevant story here that you might find amusing.

1/

raymondpert, to Netherlands
@raymondpert@mstdn.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    TomSwirly,
    @TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

    @raymondpert Given that the Netherlands has currently the highest COVID levels in wastewater ever recorded - https://coronadashboard.rijksoverheid.nl/landelijk/rioolwater - and that that is the only timely metric for COVID levels as the government has shut down the others, I simply can't imagine working food service here at this time.

    pvonhellermannn, to random
    @pvonhellermannn@mastodon.green avatar

    Half thinking of starting an hashtag here, about the dire, dire state of UK (global?) higher education. Sharing nuggets of senior management decisions, neoliberal language, and overall slow collapse.

    Won’t work of course because most of us can’t risk honesty, but honestly: the everyday reality of what is happening deserves recording in all its depressing and damning detail.

    TomSwirly,
    @TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

    @pvonhellermannn Just a travesty. The whole fscking point of civilization is so that we can study things that not everyone is interested in to advance knowledge and humanity in general. I might add that ethnobotany should be even more important today than before as we are (supposedly) attempting to shift humanity to a sustainable future, but even if there were no uses, studying it would be a good thing in and of itself.

    TomSwirly, to random
    @TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/dec/09/diana-rigg-assisted-dying-rachael-stirling-mother-cancer

    > By the end it hurt her to even smile, let alone laugh. “I think I’ve rather gone off God,” she said slowly and painfully, the day before she died. “I think he’s fucking mean.”

    Diana Rigg was my first crush, back in the 60s when I was a tiny lad, and this article made me weep.

    TomSwirly, to Humor
    @TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

    https://www.theonion.com/fbi-uncovers-al-qaeda-plot-to-just-sit-back-and-enjoy-c-1819576375

    TomSwirly,
    @TomSwirly@toot.community avatar

    @khalic @StrayCatFrump For generations now, the kill ratio in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict has been 10 to 1: ten Palestinians killed for every one Israeli.

    Israel has within its borders two million desperately poor stateless people with no hope for the future and nowhere to go.

    If you put a kettle on the stove, duct tape it so nothing can get out, and then turn the heat up as high as possible, an explosion is inevitable.

    Your glee at the horrors that are coming is antisocial.

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