Man, every since my visit to Pittsburgh I've been low key into funiculars, these twin cable cars on hill sides where one is the counterweight for the other.
I never thought of myself as a "guy on the spectrum who is into trains" but I guess I never found the right kind of train.
@AlSweigart In the United States, public transportation infrastructure in general and trains in particular have been systemically underfunded, resulting in a low level of awareness in the general public about different types of transport. Also, autism spectrum conditions are systemically underdiagnosed. In this essay I will
@foone I seem to remember a performance-art bit in the floppy disk era which was a single-user experience (a hypertext book, IIRC) that deleted itself after viewing, and was never put online. This reminded me of it but I cannot remember what it was called. Fitting, perhaps.
I'm drinking this pretty decent cotes du rhone for the past few hours and let me just say it's made my one off opinions and social media takes of things totally awesome
write a fairly inflammatory toot then see how many of them blocked you. but I've been thinking about this a lot, for literally decades, and I can't avoid this conclusion.
@zzzeek@faassen I keep falling into this trap myself. Yelling at pudding-brained anarchists who are ostentatiously posting about not voting, while I know that they're this vanishingly small population who have such a fundamental misunderstanding of the political system that it's a waste of time to try to convince them of anything. But it is precisely because they are such a perfect crystallization of a particular type of misunderstanding that they are such an attractive nuisance
Does anyone happen to know if it is possible to get a projector for an open space at #PyConUS? I have some ideas that involve discussions of code where it would be useful if a participant could share their screen with a larger group.
I have a soft spot for Libertarians even though I shouldn't and they don't deserve it. When I was a kid I had a weird neighbor who was always giving me Libertarian books... I wish I still had some of them they were WILD. He was a thorn in the side of the local, school board as well insisting that if they had an event at the school that involved politics Libertarians had to be included.
And in defense of the guy, he was about as likable and earnest as a Libertarian could be.
@richpuchalsky@futurebird@jonquass@ehproque@moira yes sure whatever, but the voting itself is not a piece of performance art that expresses your abstract endorsement of “the state” as a concept. It’s a mechanism you use to exercise control over the state. It’s not direct, perfect control to align it with your values, but it is the control we have got. By not voting, you are sacrificing collective praxis for personal aesthetic preference.
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
@cmdr_nova I confess I don’t really get it either, but people tell me they experience more racism here than on twitter and I believe them. I suspect it’s a confluence of differing norms, tech, and network effects. White people are more racist than Black people, so if everyone is white—even if most of them are well-meaning—it might feel bad. much as I don’t think the average mastodonian is more racist than the average twitterer, I can’t deny that not all of us here are particularly well-meaning
Using Python 3.11 or higher, I want to create an output file and add a line describing it to a log file as an atomic operation: either the output file is created and the log entry is added, or neither happens. fcntl.flock() is only advisory - will something else give me stronger guarantees, preferably on all three major OSes? #python#file-lock #atomic-operation #question
@gvwilson uh, generally speaking this is not going to be possible, flock or not. You can’t make this atomic. You could write a write-ahead-log journaling system that would allow replay of these actions in a sort of bespoke two-phase commit but you would need to fully control the file I/O to the “log file” as well, and it would probably need to be a non-textual format, something like an SQLite database. Are you talking about writing to a system log or something else?
@bhearsum@gvwilson the file system is within its rights to replay the move or the log line, though; making the creation atomic is easy, queuing up the log-file write in such a way that it will un-happen in the event of a power loss is not
@bhearsum@gvwilson testing this sort of stuff is also a complete nightmare, because 99.99% of the time or thereabouts a modern OS & SSD will make a technically “wrong” solution look like it works fine