Geeking out over the origins of HTTP 418 kinda got me a job once. But that was back when that kind of stuff, connecting interpersonally with the humans that you work with, mattered during hiring.

SCSI was always skuzzy.

Fake Ryan Gosling sez “HET!” to machine-generated memes.

It depends on your level of expertise. It’s open source software that you download and run on hardware that you lease or own. So you need to know how to do that in order to use it. As those things go, it really isn’t difficult.

No, it’s not as easy as signing up for an account on some website. That’s the difference between third-party services (owned, operated and controlled by some random company your decide to trust) and software that YOU run, on hardware YOU control, with access that YOU decide upon, and no one who will gate it or take it away.

It’s a trade-off. Everyone must consider their wants vs needs and choose what’s most important to them.

What disappoints me is how quickly people are willing to throw up their hands and say IT’S TOO HARD without ever even trying.

Absolutely everybody here is sleeping on zulip.

I just wrote an email to a recruiter withdrawing my interest in pursuing a job (it’s a recruiter hired by the hiring company).

I certainly hope you plan to share this with the company for which you were applying, because the recruiter probably wouldn’t even finish reading this before binning it. The employer you were endeavoring to work for is who should be seeing this.

Just gonna leave this here…

As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, wove almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,- literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,- Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

🫵

Watchmen (2009)

If I ever have to sit thru another debate over what a monad is, it will be too soon.

I don’t know where the adorably precocious children in this screenshot are purported to come from. Every kid I’ve ever met who questions me about my gender has been an argumentative little shit that wants to make a point out of not believing me.

Degenerates only want one thing and it’s disgusting fucking.

Acceleration, temperature, body configuration (positioning), pain, balance and hunger are all related to touch in one way or another.

Time, however, is legit. Along with emotion. Maybe you could call the 6th sense cognition?

More extracts from that same podcast:

In each case, right up until the moment I received evidence to the contrary, all this misinformation, these supposed facts, felt true to me. I had believed them for decades and I had accepted them in part because they seemed to confirm all sorts of other ideas and opinions floating around in my mind. Plus they would have been great ways to illustrate complicated concepts, if not for the pesky fact that they were, in fact, not facts.

That’s one of the reasons why common misconceptions and false beliefs like these spread from conversation to conversation and survive from generation to generation and become anecdotal currency in our marketplace of ideas. They confirm our assumptions and validate our opinions and, thus, they raise few skeptical alarms. They make sense and they help us make sense of other things.

I have a song for you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMoYgKO3dD4

A short list of things you didn’t realize were false, stolen from the most recent episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast (on Intellectual Humility, Sept 14 2025):

• “The original 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds lead to a mass panic.” – It did not. However, rumors of a panic spread via newspaper op-eds about how it was a bad idea to get your news through any other medium besides newspapers. Citation: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html
• “You can boil a frog in a pot by gradually raising the temperature of the water.” – This doesn’t work; frogs just jump out when they get uncomfortable. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
• “Lemmings march off cliffs to their deaths because they blindly follow one another.” – They don’t. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions
  • “…but I saw it in a Disney documentary!” – Nope. Turns out the filmmakers paid local kids to capture a bunch of lemmings, spin them around to make them dizzy, then manually threw them off cliffs and filmed it. Citation: https://hyperallergic.com/545742/white-wilderness-disney-nature-documentary/

You were directionally evolved by monsters who resented artists’ ability to create value through pure expression. Mimicking the conjuring of that value was at once a parlor trick, then a means to undercut the livelihood of anyone not willing to explicitly and finitely explain the art they created (thus giving it metric to be measured by and value-assigned).

The wax ring and plumbers putty are set. Keep the caulk dry for 36 hours and try to not touch it or it could crack.

There’s a GitHub project for that: https://gist.github.com/joostrijneveld/59ab61faa21910c8434c