Charlie Loyd @vruba@everything.happens.horse

An old friend is visiting, and we were walking through Berkeley. He pointed at an old restaurant and said “Hey! St Jude¹ took me to lunch at that Burmese place once! She was really nice.” and I felt very connected to a past that is not remembered well enough.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_Milhon

One of the things that always delights me about people is how adaptable we are and how willing we can be to take weird things seriously just to try them.

The older I get the more I see this as the obverse of a terrifying susceptibility to a spectrum of groupthinky social problems that starts merely cringey but ends out in death cult territory.

https://mas.to/@kissane/112769168991913198

Okay, folks. I’ve been asked by a lot of friends who aren’t following the AI discourse to sort of clarify what the main camps are arguing, how they approach the issues, etc. As a trusted observer, I’m happy to provide this orienting service. No questions or comments, please. Hope it helps!

Me, politely but firmly taking the jar of kimchi out of the shooping cart and putting it back on the shelf: Darling, remember we talked about how this isn’t authentically Korean because it contains an ingredient introduced in the sixteenth century? And how that means it’s not tasty?

When people get hung up on cultural authenticity, I’m reminded of the Korean botanists who publish papers stridently arguing the idea that Korean chilis are actually native to Korea and have nothing at all to do with the Columbian exchange. But they’re the only ones who care.

I’m not a religious man, but I do believe there’s insight and value in scripture.

Some days I think a lot of people on social media are deliberately doing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_theory_(psychology) in reverse because they think that’s what empathy means.

It’s like 23 layers of indirection before you find an actual string that will actually appear on the actual user’s actual screen, and I’m sure this is the right choice, and is based on a lot of hard-won lessons about internationalization and ease of contribution and stuff, but … the string I’m looking for doesn’t even show up when I search?

Seeing a typo in an open-source project, going to submit a patch, being unable to find where the typo actually lives in the codebase because contemporary frontend code makes me feel like I’m looking at Solaris from Stanisław Lem’s book “Solaris” (1961).

[Insufferable grocery store customer voice:] So with both of these, that’s 100% off, right?

It is once again the season of highest tension between my somatic preference for order and quietness and my intellectual commitment to disobedience and surprise: yes, it’s late June and people are setting off bottle rockets in the street.