Posts by sovietfish@todon.eu
(DIR) Post #B0EkdfG07g0TWh7ky8 by sovietfish@todon.eu
2025-11-14T13:01:26Z
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@futurebird please keep roasting cars b/c I unfortunately need to replace mine and I need the encouragement to not buy a huge SUV-ish beast like my parents are recommending
(DIR) Post #B0J8l5wSTzV9qZtnEW by sovietfish@todon.eu
2025-11-16T15:50:32Z
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@futurebird bask in the knowledge of how much better this draft is! Do not look at the other things you could revise just now! Vibe!
(DIR) Post #B1DftrAAuHBBH9arZY by sovietfish@todon.eu
2025-12-13T22:25:47Z
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@futurebird My partner is an only child, but does this with everything, even home-cooked meals. I grew up with a close-in-age-but-older sibling and think my partner doing this is baffling.
(DIR) Post #B1MGFrwJqq7ffYaVG4 by sovietfish@todon.eu
2025-12-18T01:50:48Z
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@futurebird how DARE you attempt to SILENCE your cat like this??!!?! 😾
(DIR) Post #B1RPqSishvIY1ONfHM by sovietfish@todon.eu
2025-12-20T13:31:51Z
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@futurebird I worked in education technology for around 5 years and was very quickly disliiusioned that most of the field (i.e. technological approaches to "improve" education) is really just attempts to reduce labor costs/diminish the power of unions. Outcomes was always going to be secondary to the financials involved, because the field is completely captured by the notion that investment/hiring more teachers/improving working conditions for teachers _can't happen_. Their priors are that education has to be done "more cheaply", forgetting that this is a political assertion of ghouls.
(DIR) Post #B1ZnOW9kIjaOj3pk9Y by sovietfish@todon.eu
2025-12-24T14:33:23Z
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@futurebird I think sounding like the Bene Gesserit would only be bad b/c they have a far deeper history of hating such systems than we do, so the historical remove/religiosity of it would be unwarranted.Future generations may religicize our preoccupations, provided we win. It's a good thing to avoid doing with your own forebears' bugbears, but there's essentially no way of preventing future generations from making the mistake. Ideally though we give them a better context/world in which to do so
(DIR) Post #B1wV5AdqjnUfxUcMGu by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-04T13:26:34Z
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@futurebird Semaphore may be a good title if there are sections in which, for example, an academic character explains in passing that it's a false cognate for psammaphora, or if there are other tastefully indirect ways of associating the two ideas based on being homophones to a 5 year old. This might be too literary, or just not jive with other themes of the book. But a suggestion of: you may enjoy sitting down with someone who loves wordplay to try to finagle your dream title into something more easily discoverable. (It's a pretty fun problem to imagine trying to solve with a friend over coffee, to me, at least.)
(DIR) Post #B1yZll6kKu3RLqcJ04 by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-05T13:28:30Z
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@futurebird I think another set of complicating factors (which leads me to be unsure how to vote in your poll): commitment to the truth/"placing faith in exposure" is a quality the left has a lot more than the right does, these days. "The truth will out" and all that. Emphasis on reservation of judgment until facts can be verified, but also some ruthlessness in their devaluing of privacy for public figures accused of wrongdoing.The opposing narrative used on the right is (nominally) the need for strong leaders to have their authority respected, e.g. "you may not agree with everything he does in his personal life but nonetheless we need a man like him at the helm right now" (note the lack of gender neutrality). This sticks out to me because the hierarchicality of it jives poorly with my anarchism. In any event the right's objection can feel very sideways to me, like a bit of a genre error. It's a bit like trying to argue with a character in Severance about something their counterpart-self did on the other side of the divide (I am sorry to invoke this show b/c I never watched it; apologies if I'm getting the terminology wrong). They're compartmentalizing personal morality out of the picture, but only for (usually exclusively male) leaders.
(DIR) Post #B26v3mQmUClC1SPxyq by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-09T14:04:46Z
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@futurebird Oi vey that is some primo marketing bullshit right thereBut if you're going to peddle weird "I AM YOUR IDENTITY NOW" subtext, NYC is probably a good choice of place to do it. I guess rather a lot of young people move to the city to "find themselves", maybe some of them are dumb enough to use public advertisements as sole source material from which to cobble together a new sense of self
(DIR) Post #B26vYekT6Dm1AmLiOe by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-09T14:10:21Z
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@futurebird Who indeed, who indeedI find NYC to be anthropologically fascinating in many ways, but the ways in which advertisers are quick to capitalize on/encourage a sense of "you've made it; you're a New Yorker; you are among the trendsetters; this weird nut milk no one has heard of is REALLY big here and you're a part of that, aren't you?"
(DIR) Post #B272MHP2lsA0yKNDma by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-09T15:26:32Z
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@futurebird @Karen5Lund "Pistachio Milk: It's a Thing Now! Available in Unusually Bougie Bodegas Citywide"
(DIR) Post #B28tZOaYr5lBkerNQ0 by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-10T12:57:29Z
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@futurebird "Heated Rivalry"
(DIR) Post #B2RmqGH9jMJux7fRU8 by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-19T15:41:37Z
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@futurebird Brb gonna' set up a photobooth on the sidewalk in which I present the Wim Wenders film about a Japanese man who cleans toilets and lock people in until they've watched the entire movie.This is my supervillain origin story
(DIR) Post #B2WuR4BNKJWDd8GCA4 by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-22T02:58:58Z
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@claralistensprechen5th @futurebird @fcbsd I think numbers (real or rational) ought to be grammatically countable when we're talking about a finite number of them. If we're talking about the size of an infinite subset of the real numbers, then I think it sort of does flip over to making sense to talk about those numbers as grammatically uncountable. "Much of the real numbers were contained therein" makes perfect sense to me. But I think this is true of pretty much any infinite set, not just (mathematically) uncountable ones.
(DIR) Post #B2WuYYXkqN7XouIcSm by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-22T03:01:38Z
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@futurebird @claralistensprechen5th @fcbsd pardon my ignorance, what does that initialism stand for?
(DIR) Post #B2Wui8JRDyc5MWAZcG by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-22T03:03:21Z
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@futurebird @claralistensprechen5th @fcbsd haha I love it
(DIR) Post #B2WupaAu20IXnpjHSC by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-22T03:04:42Z
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@futurebird @claralistensprechen5th @fcbsd it's a good thing math has a grammar of its own for describing these sorts of sets more specifically!
(DIR) Post #B2XqcV0NjfB3LWH3SK by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-22T13:52:12Z
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@futurebird @aeveltstra I agree that this ought to be considered a core feature, but that unfortunately is the myth of progress at work.Realistically speaking if a use case is sufficiently obscure that someone would expect to need to do an internet search to figure out how to do it/remind themselves how they did it last time, then that used case will never be considered core to the product by the product managers, and it will be lost in one or another rearchitecture. (In this case it was not lost, but explicitly moved to a plugin, away from the "core" feature set of Google Docs.)But the social dynamic at play feels like a physical force in the development of software, once you know it well enough to recognize it.
(DIR) Post #B2XrW409K0wxoPf0sa by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-22T14:02:16Z
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@futurebird @aeveltstra Yeah re: help functions maybe the more general Unified Law of Software is something like: Features are Constituted by the Expectations User Have of Them, i.e. if no one expects something to work then it never will. The only way things get fixed is if the product manager's mental model of their user is a person who would care about something being broken. One of many ways in which agile has deeply broken our expectations of the world.
(DIR) Post #B2g85DrzUc5mOzrBLM by sovietfish@todon.eu
2026-01-26T13:45:35Z
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@futurebird @sakhavi And now, due to Heated Rivalry, Americans can only imagine such a Canadian as gay (and smokin' hot)