emily

artemist, 6 days ago to random German

they should make factorio but more annoying (power lines have a max current carrying capacity and resistive losses, you can create transformer substations for long-distance 250kV power lines, motors create reactive power)

emily, 9 days ago to random

no not like that

emily, 1 month ago to random

it's time for my annual hardware review, in which I iterate through all the categories of devices I really want to give people money for, and see if anyone has made one yet that fulfills my fairly short requirements lists:

• non-Android non-iOS smartphone that can be bought with the expectation of using it as a handheld communication device and not an OS beta testing device
• non-cloud robot lawnmower that can handle a nontrivially-sized, US-typical lawn, and is not comically expensive
• stretch goal (I don't actively want them for any particular reason but I want them to exist and would play with one given the chance): AR/VR devices that are just displays and input devices and not a whole Ecosystem

you may notice I use "non" and "not" a lot in these descriptions. this is because my technology requirements really are largely gathered by looking at things and going "ugh, not that"

emily, 3 months ago to random

HTML is when you put pictures and words together, and it is not possible

emily, 7 months ago to random

I received a device today. It has an unnecessary password on its configuration.

The password is unchangeable. It is always 7. Just the number 7.

emily, 7 months ago to gardening

The Great Dehydration begins.
#gardening

emily, 8 months ago to gardening

We planted lettuce this year, but we both found it inedibly bitter, so we just let it do its thing without harvesting or trimming it. Now it looks like a weird alien plant.

@gardening

emily, 4 months ago to random

#mastoadmin tip: the command to refetch everyone's avatars after you botched a server migration is tootctl accounts refresh followed by pasting the complete list of your follows with the @ prefix removed from each one, and then rerun it several times removing all the users of whichever long-gone server it choked on from the list

emily, 4 months ago to random

someone invent an inverse-crowdfunding site, where I can take money away from people with bad ideas

emily, 4 months ago to random

Linguistics musing:

The pairs "here"/"there" and "this"/"that" parallel first-person vs second+third-person pronouns; i.e. first-person is "this here person", second- and third-person are different sorts of "that there person who is not me".

Some languages split "there" and "that" into two words each in the same way as second/third person pronouns differ: French has "là"/"là-bas", Japanese has parallel regular sets of words with ko-/so-/aso- prefixes.

Do any languages go the other way and merge second and third person pronouns? Is there a predictable order of splitting like the black/white/red/green/yellow thing?

emily, 2 months ago to random

whenever someone abbreviates "capacitors" to "caps" I imagine capacitors wearing little hats

emily, 10 months ago to random

Weird emails I have sent: "hi, your site is confusing and bad, so I booked a thing not only on the wrong day, but approximately an entire month off, at the wrong convention. please fix or refund, thank you"

emily, 7 months ago to random

It occurs to me that I can't ever write a sudoku solver.

Not because I don't know how to (I can both write code and solve sudoku, combining these skills seems obviously possible), but because it would actively make my life worse to have one: I've discovered that doing sudoku in bed is just the right level of mentally engaging to make me sleepy quickly (a few fixed algorithms that take low but nonzero effort, not exciting enough to stay awake for more), and I also know that I can't bear to do something manually when I spent time automating that specific thing.

emily, 7 months ago to random

having two obscure celebrity names crossing each other is bad crossword puzzle design

emily, 7 months ago to random

Oh, hey. Just logged into my gmail account (which I haven't used in many years, since I got my own domain) and multiple real humans have sent me things there this year.

Probably should've forwarded that when I stopped using it. Oh well.

emily, 10 months ago to random

Suddenly extremely conscious of the fact that, while paper comes from trees, I have literally never heard anyone get hipstery about "this is very fancy small-batch artisan paper from the finest aspen trees in Elsewhereland" like people might for solid-wooden things.

emily, 1 year ago to random

suddenly mildly annoyed that fixed-point arithmetic is totally unrelated to breakpoints

emily, 11 months ago to random

bunzip2 is a tool for making bunnies smaller

emily, 3 months ago to random

"Friends, future Romans, countrymen: we're founding a new country, what should we call it?"

"idk how about boobland"

emily, 3 months ago to random

I can never remember which of "bullish" and "bearish" is supposed to be the good one because they both just make me think of angry animal go rawr and that has no clear economic implications

emily, 3 months ago to random

Today I woke up in a panic thinking a fold in my blanket was a furry snake. I don't live in a place where snakes find their way into my house. Also, snakes don't have fur.

Then I set a DNS override to help evade the literal Taliban.

This is going to be a weird week.

emily, 3 months ago to random

Bizarre week update, late Monday morning: had a weird stuck unkillable process on my work machine that showed up in /proc and htop but not ps, rebooted to get rid of it, machine claims to be rebooting any time now and will not even respond to holding the power button down

emily, 1 month ago to random

Mm. Cardiologist appointments are noticeably different since transitioning.

Cardiologist appointments as a man are like "fuckit, just take your shirt off, display your nipples to the world".

As a woman, I get a robe and a towel while they're poking at my chest with the echocardiothing, and they go out of their way to not look under them and generally be as polite as one can be while intently rubbing a device on a woman's chest.

(nothing is wrong, this is a routine checkup for an Unusual Heart Geometry Issue at birth that has long since stopped being a real issue)

emily, 2 months ago to random

suddenly acutely aware that "bemused", "beloved", "bedazzled", etc. suggest a nonzero level of amusement, love, or dazzling respectively, but "beheaded" suggests a significantly more zero number of heads

emily, 3 days ago to random

Confused the fuck out of some consulting company today because they cold-emailed me at work asking if I'd talk to their clients about stuff. They clearly meant one of the other two Emilies at the same company, but I am emily@company.tld and so people email me a lot when they don't feel like looking up the right email address for the Emily in question and just take a wild guess.

So I stubbornly fill out their form to join their Network(tm), then fill out the other form for the specific client they want me to talk to, mostly with "I am not exposed enough to this side of the business to give useful information" pasted into every text box. Then at the end of this form they ask if I want to decline it, so I finally do.

Less than a minute later they called me, wondering why none of what I entered matches my LinkedIn account.

At this point I finally informed them that I don't have a LinkedIn account.

I hoped they learned a valuable lesson today. If not, I would be happy to charge them the $400/hour they offered me to read to them the entirety of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.