TechTakes

Sorry for you and your cat. You did the right thing, but that doesn't make it any easier.

I'm so sorry to hear that.

also the universe has granted me a small mercy and for once the alcohol/semaglutide thing I mentioned a thread or so ago seems to be totally impotent against the might of scottish chemical engineering. thank you jesus

I’m so sorry. it’s never easy when this happens, but for what it’s worth it sounds like you gave him the best life possible. it takes a great deal of strength to be with a pet until the very end, and I hope you’re able to take the time you need to grieve and recover your emotional strength.

💔

Clinic called back. Its metastasized through his lungs and he’s got months tops. Probably going to be less bc vet said he’s suffering.

part of what helps is coming here and seeing the spectrum of chud output to inoculate yourself a little.

What REALLY helps is broadening your own knowledge and worldview, in the sense that when you realise that everything is political, you start asking yourself the meta questions. Like, what’s the agenda here, what’s not being said, etc. I mean, understanding author intention is already part of reading comprehension, it’s going a little further beyond the face-value meaning. As the memes say, you are not immune to propaganda.

I've joked sometimes that I was lucky in that my childhood reading included more pulp mysteries than pulp science fiction, so my instinct is to think everyone is hiding their agendas by telling half-truths.

"Well, Detective. It looks like this is a house of lies... and wankers."

---Alasdair Beckett-King

My wife has been saying the same thing about her accounting courses. It's absolutely nuts.

Lately, I've become more and more concerned that "systemd free" is shifting from a thoughtful objection to an outright crank signifier

burzum and luke smith, that tracks as well

There are two things here in my opinion:

1. American cops are trained murderers, but they are trained, in particular to avoid causing massive PR disasters with their murders*. A paramilitary goon with a rifle in a government organisation so opaque we still don't even know his identity is materially worse than a cop. It also looks much worse, the police have some completely undue public trust, ICE just looks like military forces.
2. We immediatelly had video with the full event. When cops kill people of colour there's usually no evidence since again, they know how to pull murder off without causing PR disasters. Basically the only reason George Floyd's murder wasn't successfully brushed aside is that we had video of it, and they tried to bury that shit hard. In this case I don't even think the victim being white or a citizen matters, the event itself is so fucking horrifying it'd elicit outrage anyway. I am 100% sure that if there wasn't video, just witness reports, it'd be out of the media cycle already.

* I don't want this to seem like a moral distinction, if anything the decorum granted to police forces is arguably a stepping stone that brought the USA here. Recall Mamdami's recent words: "For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty". HOWEVER, to me personally this is a rather chilling escalation. It shows that the PR part doesn't actually matter anymore. America is so far into the fascist pipeline that paramilitary forces can just execute citizens in broad daylight on the street. They don't need to hide it, they don't need to play coy about it, they can just post-facto label the victim as an Enemy of the State and move on. I'm sorry but to me this is like one step away from just rounding people up against a wall for fun. Human life is not only practically worthless to state actors, it's proudly and openly worthless as a matter of policy.

*pig turned into a frog

dear fuck just when I think I’m out urbit pulls me back in

analysis coming soon, I’m reviewing some technical sources provided by a world-class cryptocurrency expert (yes it’s @dgerard@awful.systems) and howdy fuck does this ever resemble the cardano grift but with Haskell replaced with a much worse ML with a much less coherent type system

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My lack of a Bluesky account spares me again. Thankfully, I have Skyview.social to ensure my eyes are scarred anyway (seriously, do we have to fight another world war over if Nazis are bad or not, it shouldn't take the blood of tens of millions to make that clear)

Also found a nice summary of our current moment in the replies:

(alt: "I am old enough to remember when we all agreed Nazis were bad")

"They might as well be Latvians" is a straight out of Arrested Development.

Complementing sibling comments: Swift requires an enormous amount of syntactic ceremony in order to get things done and it lacks a powerful standard library to abbreviate common tasks. The generative tooling does so well here because Swift is designed for an IDE which provides generative tools of the sort invented in the 80s and 90s; when their editor already generates most of their boilerplate, predicts their types, and tab-completes their very long method/class names, they are already on auto-pilot.

The actual underlying algorithm should be a topological sort with either Kahn's algorithm or Tarjan's algorithm. It should take fewer than twenty lines total when ceremony is kept to a minimum; here is the same algorithm for roughly the same purpose in my Monte-in-Monte compiler, sorting modules based on their dependencies in fifteen lines. Also, a good standard library should have a routine or module implementing topological sorting and other common graph algorithms; for example, Python's graphlib.TopologicalSorter was added in 2020 and POSIX tsort dates back to 1979. I would expect students to immediately memorize this algorithm upon grokking it during third-year undergrad as part of a larger goal of grokking graph-traversal algorithms; the idea of both Kahn and Tarjan is merely to look for vertices with no incoming edges and error if none can be found, not an easy concept to forget or to fail to rediscover when needed. Congrats, the LLM can do your homework.

If there's any Swifties here: Hi! I love Taytay; I too was born in the late 80s and have trouble with my love life. Anyway, the nosology here is pretty easy; Swift's standard library doesn't include algorithms in general, only algorithms associated to data structures, which themselves are associated to standardized types. Since Swift descends from Smalltalk, its data structures include Collections, so a reasonable fix here would be to add a Graph collection and make topological sorting a method; see Python's approach for an example. Another possibility is to abuse the builtin sort routine, but this will cost O(n lg n) path lookups and is much more expensive; it's not a long-term solution.

My 9495 word screed about how I did meth before the cool kids and turned out fine is raising a lot of questions already answered by my 9495 word screed.

yeah that's a classic

MDMA, however, is meth; it’s literally its name: three-four-methylene-deoxy-methamphetamine.

amazing