@sil@mastodon.social
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

sil

@sil@mastodon.social

I told you, you can have an ice cream when we get there.

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sil, to random
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

“Is it raining? I hadn't noticed.”

sil, to random
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

can't think of a better use for the space in the top panel.

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

catastrophic LOLs at whoever it is playing Things Can Only Get Better, Labour's 1997 election campaign song, at top volume over the top of Sunak announcing a on July 4th.

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

The amazing thing about Threads is that it 100% rewards rage bait.

The only way to get engagement there is to inflame the algorithm.

I have a tiny audience, but over 100 replies from people who are (justifiably) decrying my poll.

https://www.threads.net/

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@Edent I tell you what is interesting. (Apart from your obviously mean but educational outrage experiment :-)) Someone in a reply says

“While in the EU, every bank app from every bank allows you to just generate a QR code to do an instant transfer of any amount to anyone.”

Is this true? This would be great if it’s true! I don’t think Nationwide do it, at least. I know posh internet banks like Monzo do, but not mine. Nationwide is not a bank and not in the EU, mind.

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@Edent yeah, I've seen it, but that person sorta implied that it's a rule and everyone does it. This would be very cool if so! But I also think they're wrong :)

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@tante @Edent interesting! Natwest at least seem to support this in the UK: https://www.natwest.com/waystopay/payme.html suggests it does, anyway!

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@tante @Edent ah, right. I have no way to scan such a code, as far as I can tell. (The standard scanner on my phone's camera doesn't know what to do with it and just does a google search for the contents.) I assume that my bank's app would need a "scan the QR code to pay this person" bit, and it doesn't have one. It's cool for people who do have it though!

patrick_h_lauke, to random
@patrick_h_lauke@mastodon.social avatar

want to open a barber shop called Occam...

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@patrick_h_lauke it will not surprise you to learn that you are not the first to have this idea :) https://occamsrazorworks.com/

jonhicks, to random
@jonhicks@mastodon.social avatar

I've reached the best album so far in the Apple Music Top 100 - is Portishead's ‘Dummy’. Haven't listened to it in a few years, but by golly is this just brilliance. Still sounds fresh every time.

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@jonhicks Dummy is the best album there has ever been. It's amazing, and it hasn't got any less amazing even though its thirtieth anniversary is in about three months!

sil, to random
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

The Rollright Stones, a stone circle in the Cotswolds. The story is that they were the servants of a king who were turned to stone by a witch, although as far as I can tell when someone came up with that story, the stones had already been there for about three thousand years. I’m sure whoever assembled them is happy about that.

A lovely place to be in the sunshine. Far from the world of people and jobs and hassle.

A small collection of big stones in a sunny green grass field. The stones are all taller than a person, and heavily eroded by water; they lean up against one another almost like a tent. They’re surrounded by a metal fence at waist height, painted green

sil, to random
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

Height is often used figuratively to express how good something is: higher is better, lower is worse. One might be of high intelligence, or low breeding, or whatever, which don’t have anything to do with actual height off the ground the way a high mountain does. Is this metaphor ancient? Would the ancient Greeks or the Phoenicians have used “high” metaphorically as we do?

(I think Latin did: dēcidere means to fall, but also figuratively to perish or die, which seems related.)

sil, to random
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

astounded to discover that you can still buy Shake n'Vac! yes! They still make it! I assumed it went away in about 1985! Why is this still a thing?

rasterweb, to random
@rasterweb@mastodon.social avatar

Someone told me that Chat-GPT saved them hours of work...

My response: If Chat-GPT is saving you hours, are you now able to work less hours and instead spend that time doing other things? That should be the primary goal of AI... Give humans more time to do as they please, not just cram even more work into the same amount of hours.

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@rasterweb well said. Ask them: what did you do with these hours that AI saved you? If the answer is “more work”, then it didn’t save you hours at all; it saved your employer hours instead.

html5test, to random
@html5test@mastodon.social avatar

The web turns 35 this year…. Wait what? I used Tim Berners-Lee’s first webbrowser on the NeXT. I feel old.

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@html5test goodness me, really? You were in the game that early? My first was lynx in a terminal and mosaic in X, in 1994. I never used the original one! Nice.

jonhicks, to random
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Remember in Wayne’s World when they had “The Shitty Beatles”?

I’ve just watched the new Dr Who episode 2

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@jonhicks I think I saw them as a tribute band in a dodgy pub a couple of years ago :) But I quite liked that the vibe the show went for was to be enough them that you knew who they were meant to be, without putting in tons of effort to make them indistinguishable.

(I wasn’t as moved by the episode as I felt I ought to have been. Defeating evil through a meaningful chord is ground zero for pathos and it didn’t deliver. Still reserving judgement on whether I’m super into the new series or not.)

bkardell, to random
@bkardell@toot.cafe avatar

Not sure how unpopular this opinion is but: Using an 's for possessive is the more intuitive thing with "it's" despite being "wrong" and I think we should just all rebel and do that.

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@bkardell it's its. if its is it's, it's confusing.

sil, to random
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

Genius work, Reddit. I can't think why people say you're dying.

Edent, to random
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Grrrr. Google Slides doesn't support WebP.

Why, yes, my talk prep is proceeding nicely, thanks!

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@Edent also beware -- if you're not presenting off your own laptop (I imagine at EMF you would be, but just in case) and if you share the google slides with someone else, and those slides have a private video in, you have to share the video with them too separately. It isn't shared along with the slides. This bit me half an hour before going on stage at a conference, meaning panickedly trying to fix it from my phone...

sil, to DnD
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

Researching purple metals for a thing (or possibly a novel, although I can’t see where I get the time) and there are a few interesting possibilities. Purple bronze is probably a no-no (the various varieties of it have all sorts of mad stuff in the alloy like molybdenum, and I can’t see how you’d make it at that tech level) and Japanese shakudo is cool but the patina wears off with handling. But I may have found the answer in hepatizon, which nobody knows how to make any more. Cool.

gamingonlinux, to random
@gamingonlinux@mastodon.social avatar

I have 4TB in my PC 😆

I'm using nearly all of it 💀

No, I will not uninstall all those games I haven't played for over a year.

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@gamingonlinux thought for a second there that you meant memory :)

popey, (edited ) to random
@popey@mastodon.social avatar

[POLL]

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@popey “Forsooth, Falstaff, empresseth [Altimeter] alongside ye [Tabulation] key for to be switcheth betwixt applicationments” — Windows Minus Sixteen manual

sil, to random
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

Hey cool, Eurovision is Saturday? Excellent! Only a few days until I get to like the French song and it doesn’t win, again! Gonna get some beers In and live post it on here, I reckon.

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@falken I’m not watching the practice time :) only the final for me!

sil, to random
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

Many years ago (2012!) I was invited to be part of “The Pastry Box Project”, a writing project which "every year gathers 30 people who are each influential in their field and asks them to share thoughts regarding what they do" once a month. It's since dropped off the web, but I was asked about something I wrote there and it's still at archive.org and on Github. So I dug my posts out of it and republished them on my site for ease of reference. Others could do this too!

https://www.kryogenix.org/days/2024/05/03/the-pastry-box-project-archaeology/

sil,
@sil@mastodon.social avatar

@sally I thought the same! Also, I discovered that they're all conveniently markdown files at github juuuust after I extracted them all out of the archive.org pages and reformatted them, which should hopefully save you some work :)

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