Benjamin Pollack

I thought finding out whether the Indian restaurant down the street had bread or not would be a simple yes-or-no question, but, in reality, the answer was extremely naan-binary

#withings hardware is awesome but its software is written by drunk monkeys under gunpoint with half a keyboard and a mouse that, due to miscommunication, is only able to go up and to the right

Kafka: the ideal technology for when you need to procrastinate, but *at scale*

@schwa@mastodon.social My wife was blissfully in a "fuck this noise" attitude that was already ongoing when this happened, so it ended up being a lighter lift than normal, but ooooof do I feel like I'm playing with half a deck for dumb reasons

@schwa@mastodon.social You know, I think I misspoke when I said there was no problem. What I meant was, "No! ...Problem."

This quote haunts me in most meetings I'm in.

RE: @Daojoan@mastodon.social

I quit. Y'all are just pranking me at this point

Not that it was perfect (it emphatically was not), but I find myself missing my Newton more in the 2020s than I did in the 2000s

@schwa@mastodon.social Did that actually happen? (Like, genuine question; I've been having one hell of a time sorting out what's actually going on through all the misinformation flying about.) If so, that's a *huge* ding on both countries, *and* the F-15.

I really enjoyed reading "Rule 34", but I can't shake the feeling that "Rule 34" being the sequel to "Halting State" would be like if "Saving Private Ryan" were the sequel to "Stripes"

I have complicated opinions on this, but I'll own being wrong on saying you should be able to edit sent messages in chat environments. You shouldn't. It's locked. You said it. We're done.

It's been fun doing a speed-run to zero cloud operators, but I'd been hoping that 1Password would be at the *end* of that sequence, rather than unexpectedly at like step two

I've found a use for AI that I'm personally okay with that I don't *think* is a burning-the-world-down endorsement: it's calling out very legitimate accessibility issues on my blog that I can independently verify on MDN and am fixing. I wish I knew the regs and screen readers well enough to catch these, but I don't. I'm sure (on the flip side) that the screen readers are using LLMs to help them out, but this is a use I don't feel terribly guilty about

Really love that I've got a browser named Zen and a text editor named Zed and they both have black icons with nondescript white squiggles, definitely never messed that one up

How the blank do people use LLMs for stuff? Every once in awhile, in a fit of pique, I pay for Claude or whatever for a month, and *every single time*, I get total hallucinations within three minutes. I do not grok how people rely on these things

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io Well that gets dark fast. Implies a ratio of Bambis to Grown Stags, carbon-wise

This continues to age like fine wine https://youtu.be/yJqfNroFp8U?si=xN9hn9QMT8HeBVl0

If "Anathem" could be less prognostic on AI slop and more prognostic on having havens for scientists, that'd be *greeeaaat*.

(Likewise: if "Diamond Age" could be less prognostic on screens used to subdue kids and more prognostic about a post-scarcity economy and/or the emergency of technical luddites, that, too, would be great.)