Every time I complain about how computers can be made better (if we work together) I get a bunch of people criticizing me for being insufficiently grateful. Bitch, I’m a programmer. I know how much effort somebody put into this shit, & it’s not enough.

There’s this approach to computing history where we focus on work that looks shallowly similar to current norms, claim that work was ‘prophetic’ or ‘ahead of its time’, & mostly ignore differences & intent except as quirks. Fuck that.

Teleconferencing is like being on IRC, if everybody was a noob, two people typing at the same time made both of their posts into gibberish, and half the channel has a cat on their keyboard the entire time.

Telekon has a piano cover of Down in the Park & it makes me laugh ever goddamn time I hear it. It’s like having a muzak cover of Bulls On Parade.

Are smartphones bad for you? The science is still out - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/18126154/screen-time-smartphones-bad-health-risk-science-study-wrong-depression-anxiety

Complex networks study ranks the most influential films of all time | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/study-finds-the-wizard-of-oz-is-the-most-influential-film-of-all-time/

Despite MST3K’s riffing, the thing that strikes me most about The Day Time Ended is how closely it hews to the tropes of actual close encounters (as Vallee describes). & this is why it’s a bad movie.

Ask Dr. Time: In Praise of Hope https://kottke.org/18/11/ask-dr-time-in-praise-of-hope

61: just one key labeled ‘sentience’. types out passable novels and essays when pressed, sometimes lewd chat messages. one time it was code in a language I didn’t recognize. locked it away after that.↵70: Egal was ich versuche, es kommt in der falschen Sprache raus.

Build your own time server with a GPS receiver. “ The Doctor ” Medium https://medium.com/@VirtualAdept/build-your-own-time-server-with-a-gps-receiver-a99d4819f634

Hey guys, Evangelion is coming to Netflix in 2019. This will be the first time it’s been available on streaming services afaik

Bad idea of the day: time lapse of just really failing to build and paint miniatures

If you sample your own thoughts at twice the Nyquist frequency, you can theoretically achieve full-fidelity introspection - but only for a very short time, since that frequency doubles every few samples

When you think about it, all search engines are human flesh search engines, except disjointed in time. fite me

Discovered how to set use_abs_time to show absolute times in a timeline.

‘Worse is better’ is not a justification – it is a tragedy, and one that folks who code in their free time are thankfully immune from needing to contribute to. So, y’know, don’t. You’re not on a deadline, so make something good, instead of something you regret.

A fantastic argument in favor of the possibility of a ‘new soviet man’ is the consistent set of persistent behavioral and ideological changes that affect most people who spend too much time on any high-traffic imageboard.

PERIPHERALS; It’s, Well, HyperCard - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/18/science/peripherals-it-s-well-hypercard.html

As the familiar websites start timing out, you flee for the more obscure places but even they vanish between refreshes, and as something moving in your blind spot chews up an old webchat you remembered, you finally

Bad idea of the day: a social network where post literally fade because the contrast is computed with the inverse of time. A spinoff where bugs slowly eat away at posts.

You’ve heard about ghost kanji, but what about yokai kanji – hapax legomemna that, if they don’t occur enough times in the modern corpus, come to life and play tricks on us, drinking lamp oil & jumping backwards over corpses to ressurect them.

Periodic reminder: nothing has prepared us for The Strange Times

These Are the Bad Times – Hmm Daily https://hmmdaily.com/2018/10/30/these-are-the-bad-times/

Hot take: in the absence of full information, provide reasonable defaults that are easily overridden. Making users repeat normally-identical pieces of information several times just because they CAN differ in a corner case is bad design.

The time between “good weather models” and “weather models good enough to make weather manipulation cheap” is the only time there will be accurate weather forecasts, after that it’s up to the highest bidder

SisterWriter is so weirdly lazy at times. Like, just rotating a cut 90 degrees and doing a static panning shot… Though, the characters are constantly off model and rarely animated or properly posed, so that might be for the best…

New repository: aquilax/time66 - Go library to get the 6/6 time. Based on https://xkcd.com/2050/

Is there already a term for going into a piece of media with the expectation that it won’t be a waste of time / there’s something to be gained by paying attention & thinking? (Like ‘good-faith viewership’?)

Bad idea of the day: Use mechanical turk to do a novel-length exquisite corpse, one sentence at a time.

time to do my duolingo bc i’m trying to build up my daily streak

Every time the humans come up with new physics, the simulators work overtime to update the world, “noo I put all that work into those celestial spheres and now they throw it out again”

Me, 3 times a day, “/bin/ksh: :wq: not found”

If we added up all the time spent in airport security in the past seven years, how many average human lifespans would it be?

Steve Jobs’ strange obsession with Billie Jean during the leadup to the Mac release makes a lot more sense when you remember that at the time he too was denying the paternity of his child.

It’s really odd trying to downsize your stuff. Even with stuff you haven’t used in years or use very little, it’s hard to get rid of stuff you have acquired over time.

PC: runs around aimlessly, goes through the same set of animations all the time, can only do what the programmers thought to add↵NPC: has a dayjob but does whatever they want offscreen, has boatloads of money, owns a wicked castle

Recipe for periodic royalty boosts if you’re a hack: 1) create a song about a particular time of year – preferably a particular date that is not a holiday; 2) create a song about a very specific combination of very common feelings

The network uses the latest in content generation to cover for the user when they don’t feel like updating. Or haven’t logged in months. Or have tried to delete their account for the seventh time now.↵The Content must flow.↵(belated #invisiblenetworks, day 30)

Imagine if Mondo 2000 got the Fangoria treatment: instead of occasional issues, four times a year you get a fuckin’ BOOK and it’s super fancy so people are willing to pay 5/issue & more at newsstand.

A gallery of paintings that know where you look: Animals that hide in your blind spot, portraits that always meet your eyes, a little man with a sign running around trying to block the view, Escherian paradoxes that you’d swear were tangled differently the last time you checked

warnings of the end appear in the stars, in randomness streams, on the insides of banana peels↵↵the last day goes by, the last night, and then↵time freezes, stutters, the sun smears across the sky like a video glitch

David Patterson Says It’s Time for New Computer Architectures and Software Languages - IEEE Spectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/computing/hardware/david-patterson-says-its-time-for-new-computer-architectures-and-software-languages

Horror is a dark and piercing reflection of our anxious times | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/horror-is-a-dark-and-piercing-reflection-of-our-anxious-times

Advertising is obsolete “ here’s why it’s time to end it https://theconversation.com/advertising-is-obsolete-heres-why-its-time-to-end-it-101639

@mdom@domgoergen.com my own custom client I wrote, I use cron to run the update my timeline every 20 mins. My update process also processes 10 curl calls at time. I did that to save time when I poll everyone.

A Time-Twisting Visit to the Museum of Capitalism - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/museum-of-capitalism-boston

@nblade@nblade.sdf.org If everybody is happy with the format, sure! Writing a new spec is on my todo list for a long time. Maybe that’s a good reason to do it.

@nblade@nblade.sdf.org: Check my tw.txt file. The specification does not allow a comment. I’ve added this now: 1970-01-01T01:00:00.000000Z▸FF:https://codevoid.de/tw.following.txt. I’d use the special date/time + FF: comment as trigger. This is backwards compatible and shouldn’t really come up in anyones’ timeline.

@sdk@codevoid.de That’s an interesting thought. I Know most are text files but at one time there was someone that used a python CGI Script. That person would have had to make a script for the follows.

One thing for sure on this project I’m working on, being able to run multiple CURL requests at once has been a real time saver.