Had the dissonant experience today where I saw a newsletter claiming that it had “content in this issue” from … me … and when I looked to see what that meant, it meant that they linked to my blog. They’re not pirating my writing or anything, and more exposure via links is fine so… good, I guess? I don’t want to complain but it seems like such an odd and misleading way to phrase it
@glyph That’s 101 growth-hacking phrasing to making you interested in the newsletter and ideally share it. The first part worked. 🤓 I’m surprised you took it as an admission to piracy… I never read it that way.
Sci-fi story prompt: someone invents a drug that allows its consumer to remain cognizant of all the stuff that they doom-scroll through but without any impact to their executive function or mood. Like they still feel the moral impetus to act but they don’t feel any of the paralysis or despair. Not “limitless” style infinite executive function or anything, just regular neurotypical function that isn’t impaired by constant oppressive knowledge of the omnicrisis. How does this change the world?
Absolutely blew through this game in a few hours with the kiddo, and while it is disappointingly short, it is absolutely a worthwhile experience. If you’ve ever recited that now classic quote about wanting shorter games with worse graphics, buy it immediately: https://kotaku.com/duck-detective-secret-salami-how-long-1851497669
Poking my head in on Twitter to do my monthly check for new crypto scams and block and report a bunch of bots, and … folks, it is dire. If Black Twitter is still willing to tolerate this level of dysfunction order to avoid interacting with the problematic elements of the Mastodon experience we have GOT to find a way to do better over here
The notifications page is just a bunch of loading spinners stacked on top of each other. 95% of the content is ads for weed products or financial or AI tech scams. There’s an upsell interstitial every 90 seconds or so if you’re actively interacting with the site. This one is probably specific to my ad-targeting profile but there are special, super-ads (just UI elements, not tweets) desperately begging me to get an API key and make apps that use it. It is unusable
@glyph See I feel like this is a complicated topic, because I've been in and around the trans community for years and years, been on Mastodon since 2017. The ethos when dealing with nazis, bad actors, transphobes, etc, on Mastodon, has always been block, report, suspend, deny, and it works
So I'm just confused here what the problem is, because surely there is much, much more of that on Twitter
Whenever I post a bunch of stuff on here I get superstitious. Has the site actually managed to process my toots yet? Sometimes I get bursts of notifications that cluster together in odd ways. Sometimes things are so close to real time this feels like a chat app, sometimes it feels like a fidonet email system with even initial reactions delayed for hours. I cannot help but wonder if this is the architecture of Mastodon or some property of my audience or just Internet weather.
Do you use Python's built-in datetime module, but its lack of type safety is annoying? Don't like the fact that datetime.datetime subclasses datetime.date while violating LSP? Bothered by the fact that aware and naive datetimes are the "same" type, with no way to keep them separate? Check out DateType, which solves these problems with custom annotations without even being a separate library; it's all datetime objects at runtime: https://github.com/glyph/DateType
Do you write Python, use Emacs, and sometimes write docstrings, in either epytext or reStructuredText format? I also have an Emacs package that will provide both syntax highlighting and style-appropriate paragraph wrapping for you. (Maybe don't look at this code without appropriate PPE though, you are definitely going to need goggles for the "parsing" it does.) https://github.com/glyph/python-docstring-mode
Normally I’m a purist with TV shows and episode order, but I’m running out of ideas: fellow nerds, if you wanted to introduce a 6-year-old to ST:TNG, is there a watch order you’d recommend? I keep wanting to do this but Encounter at Farpoint involved way more soliloquies about WWII than I remembered, The Naked Now is erotic horror and there’s no way we’re watching Code of Honor, possibly ever. Do I just jump into the last third of Season 3 and hope they pick stuff up from context?
@glyph they were already pretty familiar with the series, age 6 months we were all family at a trek conference, so our example isn't 100% transferable? Big star trek poster in the living room sort of family lol
someone with a good team please hire this man before he accidentally proves that Roko’s basilisk is real and that the the eternal torment is the SF bay hiring pipeline (scroll up from this toot to see the thread of torment, it is at the end of the thread) https://mastodon.social/@3psboyd/112493910609493657
Since we have seen a few positive tests from #PyConUS and it’s very easy to get base-rate brain around this stuff, despite being asymptomatic I popped out to the drug store to get a few COVID tests just in case. Happy to report that I am testing negative at this point.
PyCon is a magical experience, but maybe even more magical is multi-gig wired ethernet at home. Many things about the conference and the hotel were very thoughtfully put together but 0.3Mbps internet wasn't one of them
@glyph@chrisjrn when you try to clone/download something on the first day of sprints and get blocked by github because "request limit exceeded for this IP" is going in mine :blobthinkingeyes: though not sure how fixable that is practically
Logging in to take a look at some talks on the online platform for #PyConUS, even though I'm done with the conference now, I just noticed that the attendee dashboard has a section for "sponsor badge scans", giving transparency over which sponsors got my contact details. That is a really nice touch, thank you @ThePSF .
tell application "System Events"
tell application process "System Settings" to tell window 1 ¬
to tell group 1 ¬
to tell splitter group 1 ¬
to tell group 2 ¬
to tell group 1 ¬
to tell scroll area 2 ¬
to tell group 3 to set elements to its UI elements
if elements is {} then -- no more
return its value
else
return elements
end if
end tell
( macOS 14.5 changed some lists to groups and I am mad becaus I had to rewrite a script and this is all VERY silly, I do not want to think about this program any more for several reasons https://blog.glyph.im/2023/01/a-very-silly-program.html )
As I learned from Dan Olson’s excellent “This Is Financial Advice”, a defining feature of the conspiracy theorist mindset is the firm conviction that the elements of the conspiracy are so persuasive and self-evident that not only does the theorist become themselves overconfident, but also becomes overconfident that everyone, all the real people and not the hired cutouts of the conspiracy, already agree with them. They strongly believe their view is consensus.
Because their reasoning is heavily influenced by social proof (most people value social proof more than they realize, and that includes both me and you, dear reader) if you try too hard to convince them they are wrong on the facts, they will only begin to regard you as a part of the conspiracy, which destroys your own credibility with them. It is always more helpful to find ways to remind them, as gently as possible, that a majority of the people they actually respect don’t share their views.
Obviously if you’ve been watching my feed today I am subtooting one particular guy with notably poor scientific literacy and rhetorical skills but unfortunately this is regularly useful advice these days. Your chances of success are always low and shooting for social proof only helps a little bit, pulling some numbers out of my butt I’d estimate it increases your odds of convincing somebody to chill out from like 5% to 10%. I wasn’t successful in my effort. But it’s still worth remembering.