Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

I think if your consumer product advertises an easily resealable package, you should have to post one video a month of each of the members of your company’s board of directors opening and resealing it.

I believe that if we want SI units to happen in the US, we need to use them (with conversions as necessary), but also, this is true. https://mastodon.murkworks.net/@moira/110733195680813087

Avoiding thinking by mapping: an easy, sustainable mental health strategy.

Drafting and then deleting a talk page argument for why Wikipedia’s eucalypt articles are slightly mis-organized.

Toying with the idea of a linkblog – just web links with 0–3 paragraphs of commentary. Unsure what form this would take. Also not sure I would have the time to keep it going if I got a regular job again. Open to takes.

It’s such a classic MBA-and-no-sense thing for an exec to say. It’s beautiful. It’s ten thousand times more damning than “One former employee said he seemed to ‘drink a lot of his own Kool-Aid’” or whatever. It’s the perfect quote. Sometimes doing things experts disagree with works, but the guy who’s like “Did you know Einstein failed math?” is going to cause more harm than a supervillain could.

The bit where the guy in charge repeats a factoid this thin as if it’s persuasive and illuminating, because he thinks it’s his vision that matters more than his money, is something that I think most reasonably experienced tech workers would recognize as an even bigger red flag than the parts where he’s like “And now I will use unrated equipment in a safety-of-life application against the strong objections of experts!”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-titan-submersible-was-an-accident-waiting-to-happen

@merrysky Yo, I’m seeing big discontinuities in my forecast (in this case, late on Sunday), presumably from models not matching up. Is this expected?

Trying to replace it and finding only two options:

1. Dr Nourishment’s health gel with SkinCling paste-forming technology, glycerol, wood glue, palm oil, vitamin A, vitamin B1, vitamin B2, vitamin B3, vitamin B5, vitamin B6, vitamin B7, vitamin B9, vitamin B12, vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E, vitamin K, textured vegetable protein, plaster, hagfish slime, extra vitamin B2, and The Deserving Pore® skin-clogging microplastics.

2. Killshot Man Violence, the Body Thrashing Exit Wound Sterilizer.

Also, there’s reason to believe that current standard heat index numbers are actually severe underestimates at the high end of the range: https://romps.berkeley.edu/papers/pubdata/2022/heatwave/22heatwave.pdf

I hope US news media learns to take these heat waves as the serious disasters they are, not merely as inconveniences. In terns of excess deaths, say, what’s happening in the South right now is likely to do as much harm as a once-in-a-generation hurricane, tornado, or earthquake.

I know a lot of people are very anti–e-mail, and I respect that, but the idea that unlimited words from friends can show up any time still has a bit of the wonder for me that it had in 1996. I’m sad that contemporary e-mail culture displaced that.

It’s good to see Mastodon and Bluesky showing a lot of life, but I will say that I was secretly hoping Twitter would die without a replacement and we’d start sending personal e-mails again. I miss those.

The NANOGrav papers are open access: https://iopscience.iop.org/collections/apjl-230623-245-Focus-on-NANOGrav-15-year

I am actually giving it one more chance by trying it as the merge block for upsamples and residuals in a U-net, but when it was the final head-to-tail residual merge, the early training of the network was almost flat, so my hopes are not super high.