Rachael L

RE: @jonny@neuromatch.social

A thing I find horrifyingly fascinating: the medical ethics folks have long come to a pretty strong consensus that it is wrong to harm people or use their bodies non-consensually in pursuit of knowledge that could literally save lives.

In software, however, we’ve decided it’s fine to reverse a decade’s progress on reducing tech carbon emissions as well as destroy the minds of workers in less wealthy places … in pursuit of maybe faster software development.

I probably spent TOO much time reading phonetics stuff today (otherwise quite a “rest” day) but my PRINT copy of the primary text book for my class came. We have digital “Day One Access” via the university bookstore but we lose it in a couple weeks if we don’t pay for it. I looked up the terms and you can’t download (except to their apps) and “lifetime” access means “typically five years”. Anyway, the rendering in a Chromium browser is terrible so glad I got print.

Very sincerely, I believe that until we have ubiquitous and free toilet facilities everywhere (that do not require begging security or staff at a business), it is unjust that it is illegal to drop your pants, go on the street, and scoop up whatever can be scooped, as we allow for dogs.

I am so tired of #SoundTransit and #KingCountyMetro not having public toilets even at huge stations with the train and many bus routes. #Seattle #Toilets

Used Claude Code [1] today for a fix in a Java spring service. I haven’t done Java in a while but patterns are familiar and Claude is pretty ‘good’ at churning out fairly rote iterative improvements on existing code bases. I am again reminded that Claude and similar tools for dev stuff are so “magic” partly because we’ve built absurdly verbose and painfully designed platforms.

[1] my employe basically mandates learning gen AI tools & current client team I’m on uses it extensively.

Every time someone suggests a Claude “plugin” or “skill” is useful and then I go look at it and it’s just a pile of Markdown files. Markdown files are just a bunch of english language prompts pleading with the LLM to follow some sequence of steps (IMPORTANT DO THIS ONE FIRST, etc.) which it cannot do with any certainty, even if you include examples of code to run (why are you letting it run with your privileges?). I do not understand why anyone likes this.

first summr fall asleep on the hammock in the sun with cat for a while: achieved.

GitHub was a mistake, part the millionth. https://nesbitt.io/2026/04/28/github-actions-is-the-weakest-link.html

Related: https://github.com/TanStack/router/issues/7383

TIL that the Ukrainian word for train station – вокзал – unsurprisingly comes from Russian but the etymology is very surprising.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%BB#Etymology

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlovsk,_Saint_Petersburg#After_Paul_I

tl;dr: the first train line in Russia had a fancy station with gardens and music venues and such around it which got dubbed Vauxhall after Vauxhall Gardens, a public park in London, so that just became the word for train station. The Russian word then was borrowed into a wide variety of other languages.

A delightful Wiktionary. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zounds

@treyhunner@mastodon.social @hynek@mastodon.social @webology@mastodon.social

Really really like this video series! Also made me finally try out just and wow how nice.

Current new vocab item for learning Ukrainian is філіжанка largely because the etymology is delightful and is a good reminder that we are all connected. Also it’s fun to pronunce. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%84%D1%96%D0%BB%D1%96%D0%B6%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0#Ukrainian

Poem for today! From Rumi in the collection "Gold" translated by Haleh Liza Gafori. #poetry