tilton

tilton, 4 months ago to random

“Why are Americans so poorly travelled?”

Even with sales and discounts, you’re extremely lucky to find airfare to Europe or Asia for under $800 to $1,000 round trip per person, and it’s very often more. Add to that a hotel. And then there’s the woefully inadequate amount of paid time off work that many Americans have. It’s hard to just decide to drop $5,000 and say “let’s take the kids to France for a few days to get some culture” unless you’re wealthy and privileged.

rysiek, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to Bulgaria

If you are a citizen of any EU Member State, I implore you to consider signing the Tax-the-Rich citizens' initiative:
https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/

The idea is to tax the super rich and then use the money for climate transition. :blobcathappypaws:

This is an official EU citizens' initiative, meaning that if it reaches certain thresholds, it will have to be considered by the EU institutions. That's a really powerful tool, if actually used.

So we should use it. :blobcatcool:

🧵⬇️

#TaxTheRich #EU

tilton, 4 months ago to random

The realization that I haven’t checked in on my Discord account in over a month.

tilton, 4 months ago to random

Hmm this daily standup has been going for an hour now and we’re not even done grooming tickets. Agile!

tilton, 4 months ago to random

Oh no I forgot about Fisher Stevens in brown face 🫣

tilton, 4 months ago to random

Someone I know offline mentioned this as a joke, and it struck me as a perfect "is it real or not?" parody of every single New York Times headline from the past decade, so I grabbed the right font and turned it into one.

tilton, 4 months ago to random

I wish I knew who made this map, but it feels at least mostly accurate

tilton, 4 months ago to random

This is why I’ve basically given up using the web in 2023 almost 2024. “Oh you sent me a link to an article? Let’s read it… oops, never mind”

tilton, 4 months ago to random

My hot take: Duolingo is actually pretty bad. It’s not useless, you can make some progress with it, but the fundamentals are broken and there are vastly better ways to learn a foreign language.

tilton, 5 months ago to random

If I’m honest, one of the main reasons I want to get out of the tech industry so badly is because of the infosec/security arms race. It has made software development increasingly unpleasant and mired in both process and pain, and it’s only going to continue getting worse.

tilton, 5 months ago to random

Under-appreciated and/or embarrassing shows I have on my Jellyfin server

“Sifl & Olly Show”, 1998
“The Mysterious Cities of Gold”, 1982
“Lexx”, 1996

tilton, 5 months ago to random

I was listening to an NPR show about how experts are deeply concerned about a loneliness epidemic and how people used to spend over 6 hours per week with friends, but it’s down to like an hour and a half per week now. Well, I only see friends maybe once every month and a half, on average.

tilton, 5 months ago to random

I just found out I had the Usenet newsgroup "alt.fan.furry" FAQ stashed away on my hard drive. It's from November, 1993. Enjoy! https://archives.loomcom.com/furry_faq.txt

tilton, 5 months ago to random

I think most people know about the letters thorn (þ), eth (ð), and long-s (ſ), which English once used but now does not, but how about the letter wynn (ƿ)? It made the "w" sound before we adopted w as a letter. One problem: it looks almost exactly like a lower-case p, super easy to confuse the two.

ſtill, I ſupport bringing back ðe loſt letters ðat ƿere taken from us! Juſt þink of ðe havock ƿe could cauſe.

tilton, 5 months ago to random

I was a very poor consumer of media in 2023. I think I watched one TV show, “Loki”, but I didn’t finish it. I saw a couple of movies but I honestly can’t name any of them. What came out in 2023? I don’t remember. I started to read three books, but didn’t finish any of them.

tilton, 5 months ago to random

Social media that’s not here is utterly exhausting and I don’t know how people do it.

tilton, 5 months ago to random

Iceland has weaponized cuteness to teach you the Icelandic alphabet

tilton, 5 months ago to random

Apparently I'm really fucking out of the loop because I don't even know what Substack is.

tilton, 5 months ago to random

Ah, the AI revolution of 1986.

tilton, 5 months ago to random

Dear Instance Admins: Please use suspension as an absolute last resort when you have literally no other option left to you. Suspending a popular instance should be a nuclear option that requires two senior admins to turn their keys simultaneously, not something you do just because you got 10 spam reports. You’re severing social relationships that are the only reason we’re here in the first place

tilton, 5 months ago to random

I think I may have finally pinned down what upsets me so much about LLMs. I've been interested in AI for decades, starting way back in the 1980s before the "AI Winter" killed companies like LMI and Symbolics. Before the current gold rush, AI research focused on reasoning, and it sought to build expert systems designed to mimic how the human brain goes about problem solving. This was genuinely fascinating stuff! The goal was to get insights into the human mind, while allowing machines to solve ever more complex problems and to learn from their experience. But now, we decided "Eh, fuck it! Graphics cards are finally cheap enough that we can just brute force it and fake it!" And that's what we did, we just figured, who cares how problems are solved? Who cares about reasoning? Just make something sound plausible, good enough, ship it! Make that bank! And it's so depressing.

tilton, 5 months ago to random

Stop. You had me at "Cake for Breakfast"

tilton, 5 months ago to random

My objection to Discord mostly boils down to "It's overwhelming". Even back when I was really into IRC, I'd be in like 8 or 9 channels, tops. Now every project has a Discord, and every Discord has between 30 and 100 channels, and you're somehow expected to keep up with all of them? No. I simply will not. I will go read a good book instead of doing that.