beka_valentine

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

today's @pluralistic episode -- Subprime Gadgets -- is REALLY good and you should go listen to it immediately

https://craphound.com/news/2024/03/31/subprime-gadgets/

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

are there any space games where the FTL travel is its own skill that you have to actively learn and use?

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

we live in a world of e-waste and related refuse, from batteries to electronics to fluorescent lights, and yet no where, afaict, has incorporated e-waste pickup into their waste management processes, nor are there widespread e-waste dropoff points

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

wanted: a space adventure game that's actually compelling

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

earthquake in SF?

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

liberals love to justify war crimes by saying that they were uwu smolbeans who were just following orders and had no choice and now they're sad :(((

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

now see, i wrote about this sort of thing like two or three years ago. mastodon fundamentally doesn't change the dynamic of centralization because it relies on centralized internet hosting, so instead of Twitter, Inc. being the power in control of things, it becomes the handful of hosting providers. instances are an illusion, the service is all running on a handful of cloud providers and now THEY have ultimate control. you are still powerless, but have an illusion of power, leading to absurd nonsense like this

https://zoner.work/notes/9r93j3gcwkl402zg

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

does Mastodon have an unfollow bug?? i keep finding folx that I was following who I am no longer following, because they refollow me. what the heck

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

there is no Nobel prize in economics, btw

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

just learned about a Fire Drill Layoff and WOW capitalists suck

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

you should check out @pluralistic 's novel The Bezzle. it's really good

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

over the last oh.. 15-17 years i've become quite frustrated by reading-proper, preferring spoken word when available. it's excruciatingly slow and low bandwidth and i feel like i'm wasting so much time

beka_valentine, 2 months ago to random

the ACLU fighting against the NLRB, claiming that the NLRB is unconstitutional, so that ACLU can engage in wrongful termination of employees is HILARIOUS and 100% what I expect from this group

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

does anyone know of any design patterns in Haskell/FP that make it easy to define functions that have special casing behavior?

i mean like, you might have a function that is recursive and is almost a boring traversal except some cases do special stuff?

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

Lower Decks is the most Star Trek show, and the most utopian of the Star Treks

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

acquiring four different flight suits to try to turn them into a Hackers-inspired jacket. we'll see how this goes lol

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

mastodon is so fucking tedious. i literally cannot follow people on types.pl and they can't follow me because of feuds between the admins of the instances

like, i get that you might not want to like automatically cache data etc etc but for fucks sake, i can't even opt IN to being followed?

mastodon is so terrible at times

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

some of you have never watched the 1941 Superman cartoons and it shows

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

i've discusses this before in the context of decentralization and why so much of the web has become a giant pile of shit tools but it's worth repeating bits of it, so here goes

https://sfba.social/@marcidy/111964900301293558

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

i've had this vision for about a year now of making a fake BART poster that looks like:

top half: photo of bart driver from behind with a bart logo print hankie in the left pocket

bottom half: photo of bart rider from behind with a bart logo print hankie in the right back pocket

text on the top part says: "Whether you drive the train..."

text on bottom part says: "Or love getting railed..."

text on poster bottom: "BART's got you covered"

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

"he was willing to die and gave his life in a way that hurt no one else"

man imagine if he had done it in a way that had stopped israeli soldiers from killing people, huh? dying in a way that "hurts no one" is just another way of saying you didn't even hurt the people committing a genocide

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

this is interesting because the error comes about partially due to how we're trained to think about square roots -- that its the inverse of squaring

a more rigorous introduction to square roots would make it clear that the square root is not a function at all, and doing so would make this kind of reasoning error much harder to commit, because we wouldn't be able to write this equation at all

https://fosstodon.org/@atoponce/111987784618941908

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

a video game where the save system is backed by git

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

star trek ships and space stations are so full of tripping hazards, it's absurd

beka_valentine, 3 months ago to random

Elon Musk is basically cosplaying Deus Ex but as a real world thing. he's on the record as a big fan of the game, he thinks COVID is very similar to the grey death (and probably thinks its a plot), he's paranoid about misinformation on the internet and has acquired control of a major social network because he thinks itll help him stop misinformation (like Bob Page in DX), he's trying to build brain-computer interfaces to let humans merge with AI (like Bob Page)