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Today, after an unfriendly IRC exchange, @prologic deleted all mentions of twtxt.net, the Yarn.social repository (or made it hidden), and shutdown Twtxt.net—yes, it is unreachable. I am hoping that this was a decision taken emotionally in haste, and that the site and service will eventually come back online. 🤞🏻

“Tesla announced Thursday that shareholders had voted to approve the biggest pay package in corporate history for CEO Elon Musk, in a deal worth up to $1 trillion over 10 years if the company meets a list of benchmarks such as selling 1 million humanoid robots.”

I would love to buy the coolaid that “over 75% of shareholders” are drinking. Hmm, ay ay ay!

Every once in a while while jumping from one site to another—starting from a link on Hacker News, more often than not—I come across what I see as a small oasis in the middle of a desert. This morning is PERSONALSIT.ES. It is a blogroll for tastefully designed personal websites. So many gems! 😍

Today I learned which seems, amussingly, a crafty “trick”. All thanks to a comment left by mistake to the wrong article.

“Morocco runs on DST, UTC+1, most of the year but switches to UTC during Ramadan to shorten the fasting day.”

➝ Via Hacker News.

“I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does."

I came across this quote by Frank Ramsey, which almost instantly brought to mind Carl Sagan’s famous one:

“We live on the third piece of debris from the Sun; a tiny world of rock and metal with a thin patina—a veneer—of organic matter on the surface, a tiny fraction of which we happen to constitute.”

Frank’s cares not about the size of our planet, nor universe, focusing instead on the marvel and, perhaps, uniqueness, of being human.

I am all for the drop of the penny, but with a marketing perversely centred around ending prices with “99” that’s going to prove to be difficult, or messy, or both.

These are two little nuggets I have under this domain, which I had forgotten about but found earlier today while cleaning old staled DNS records. Both safe to execute, I promise. The first:

dig +short txt badhorse.netbros.com | sed 's/[\" ]//g' | base64 -d

And the second, similarly:

dig +short txt poem.netbros.com | sed 's/[\" ]//g' | base64 -d

Grokipedia. Created by Elon to “purge out propaganda flooding Wikipedia”. LOL. I mean, Wikipedia deserves competitors. Competition is good, but that one Grok-based one ain’t it.

I came across Joey Yu’s blog entry today, which lead me to a 4 years old post on Reddit. I subscribe to r/Stoicism, but missed this post. That, though, is irrelevant; I have seeing it, and read it now. I share the OPs approach.

“Everything we see around will cease to exist one day. Everything. All those great historical names, all your colleagues, everyone you look up to, everything. Your lifetime is nothing but a microscopic speck of time when taking into account all of the Universe’s history. Don’t spend your valuable and finite energy and time on comparing yourself to others.”

More than 30 people arrested because sport’s betting, and rigged poker games. Some of the details are truly something!

“In some of the rigged games, the poker chip trays had hidden cameras that could read the cards on the table. Sometimes, the cards had markings visible only to people wearing specially designed contact lenses or sunglasses […]”

It is the season of the “AI” backed web browsers (or should I say “Chromets”). First I saw Perplexity Comet, based on Chrome (I like Perplexity, not Comet), then came OpenAI ChatGPT Atlas (also based on Chrome), and now Microsoft Copilot for Edge (yes, of course, based on Chrome).

As I finished the note on Crocker’s Rules, I came across Radical Honesty, which I think is pretty neat too.

“The Radical Honesty technique includes having practitioners state their feelings bluntly and directly, even if it may be in a way typically considered impolite. Avoiding all “white lying” is said to lead to a more truthful relationship with themselves and others.”

Having always liked/wanted a direct communication at work, that is, preferring that people “gets to the point” in the most efficient manner, coming across Crocker’s Rules is never too late.

“Crocker’s rules encourage being tactful with anyone who hasn’t specifically accepted them. This follows the general principle of being ’liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send’.”

I came across this on Hacker News. Am I weird for feeling “itchy” at the lack of consistency? I mean, Bash, Python, and Ruby scripts—for what I saw. I would have done them all in Bash or, say, Python. Ruby (eww!) would have never crossed my mind.

➝ Via Hacker News.

I really have no idea what Nelson was/is doing on his Hugo blog, that was causing a space to be added after a link. I am not doing anything out of the ordinary here, and such thing doesn’t happen.

“Leaving aside the idea of access to any form of content being conditional on the use of a proprietary browser, which is a particularly horrid 1990s throwback, I’m going to call this day 0 of an experiment in shifting the funding model of journalism from adtech to agentic AI.”

➝ Via Heather Burns.

AWS was down, is down and it is taking half of the Internet with it. So much about resilience, eh? “Move to the Cloud”, they said. “You will seldom be down”, they said.

“Every single nine is a constant amount of work. Every single nine is the same amount of work. When you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine. Then you need the second nine, a third nine, a fourth nine, a fifth nine.”

This interview with Andrej Karpathy was interesting to see and hear. The guy is pretty smart, and I can’t wait for Eureka Labs AI course, LLM101n, to exist.

“Attribution matters to me, I want contributors to always get full credit for their effort. This is how you preserve the git history of a project you are bringing into another project.”

I came across TIL: Merging two git projects—can’t remember how, it was an open tab—which I think is a good note to keep around here. The gist is pretty much:

cd alpha
git remote add -f  beta [beta repository URL]
git merge beta/main --allow-unrelated-histories

“‘Pig butchering’ scams resemble the practice of fattening a hog before slaughter. Victims invest in supposedly legitimate virtual currency investment opportunities before they are conned out of their money. Scammers refer to victims as “pigs,” and may leverage fictitious identities, the guise of potential relationships, and elaborate storylines to “fatten up” the victim into believing they are in trusted partnerships before they defraud the victims of their assets—the ‘butchering.’”

Today I learned. There are so many names given to scams, financial and otherwise, that one looses track. Pig butchering was one of those I missed.

“In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”

Oh dear, oh dear. Now this spells like “we want more money, and now we’ll get it from poor lonely souls.”

It is not often that I see a rejection of a pull request so politely, and clearly explained. Heck, this one ought to be a first, at least for me. After a thorough explanation, the project’s owner concludes:

“I recommend closing this PR. The original implementation is secure and maintainable. Thank you for your contribution, but we must prioritize security in this security-sensitive codebase.”

For as much as I liked Steve Jobs, I didn’t know him personally. I liked (and still do) how he was presented to us. I know now that he had many issues of his own. This user comment on Hacker News made sense to me:

“One part of his legacy that will forever be misunderstood is that being brutally honest, being demanding, being abrasive is a trait that only translates to success when you are at the top. Countless mid level managers believe it is the only way to lead.

For Steve Jobs, it’s not that being an asshole was his secret sauce. It’s that his unique position allowed him to survive the downsides of his personality.”

Today marks the 14th anniversary of Steve Jobs death, at the age of 56.

An excerpt from Fedric Brown’s 1954 short story “Answer”. Emphasis mine.

“The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.” “Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”
He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?” The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.
“Yes, now there is a God.”
Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch. A bold of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

➝ Via Hacker News.

“It’s dangerous to go alone. Take this!”

I came across the following quote, and that sent me through the rabbit hole. The quote goes (and there are several variations of it):

“Be not afraid of any man, no matter what his size; when danger threatens, call on me and I will equalize”.

It seems that the exact wording for this came from Winchester (not Colt), thought I haven’t found verifiable sources for that. One bit caught my attention, though, which relates to Colt, and a phrase on similar sentiment, which is “God created men equal, Col. Colt made them equal.” According to PBS, Colt died failry young, “having never fired a gun at another person”.

A user on Slashdot, referring to Steve Wozniak’s decision of selling his Apple stock, wrote: “Smart man. Great engineer. Bad decision. Happens to all of us.” To which Woz himself replied:

“I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.”

Oh my gawd! This is an incident I didn’t know about, and I would have rather remained ignorant about it. Now can’t erase it from mind… I mean, it “went into passengers’ eyes, mouths, hair, and onto clothing and personal belongings, many of which were soaked”. Primordial shudders.

We wouldn’t need ad blockers if your ads weren’t obnoxius, privacy invasive, and tasteless. Now you want us to subscribe, or stop using ad blockers (or both!), so that you can be supported. See the cycle you have created? If I were to condone ads, I would for sure pick Carbon Ads.

“hi <my GitHub nick>, I noticed you stargazed <repository I starred>. Seems like you’re interested in the same kind of productivity software. I’d love your feedback for <web page for product they are advertising>.”

Getting more and more of these type of emails. They must be getting that information from some kind of GitHub API, right? I mean, sometimes they are plainly inventing things, but sometimes they are right on the spot. Is GitHub selling us out? Microsoft would never do such thing, wouldn’t they?

Re: #1752083523

It believe it means they are not leaning left, nor right or, in other words, neutral. Kind of “factual, impartial, and fair”. Makes sense, right? Anyway, unless told otherwise, “that’s my story, and I sticking to it.”

Does anyone knows what the meaning of this symbol is? I have seem it on websites without explanations, nor links to anywhere. Just the SVG by itself. All my searches have been futile.

In love with the work of Max. Specifically minimator, graxel, breaklock, commitbeat, and vivus. Go browse his repositories, you will not be disappointed!

Learning how to fly, just like birds do, it’s quite easy. But don’t take my words for it, read it all by yourself—the illustrated version is awesome! I am talking—if you haven’t followed the previous links—about “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

There is an art, it says, or rather a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, it suggests, and try it. The first part is easy.

All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it’s going to hurt. That is, it’s going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground.

Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.

It has been almost 14 years since Mark Pilgrim disappeared akin to what has been described as an “infosuicide”. I still miss his writings, and hold the hope that he may, one day, come back. I hope and wish all is well with him, and family.

I want to inform you about a very bad situation for you. However, you can benefit from it, if you will act wisely. Have you heard of Pegasus? This is a spyware program that installs on computers and smartphones and allows hackers to monitor the activity of device owners. It provides access to your webcam, messengers, emails, call records, etc. It works well on Android, iOS, and Windows. I guess, you already figured out where I’m getting at.

These people watching all my moves, specifically when I engage in activities related to “highly controversial porn videos”, recording all my actions with their “spyware program”, learning “about all aspects of [my] private life”, and concluding that I have a “sick perversion” are getting it all wrong. Instead of demanding BTC from me they should, instead, be paying me for all the entertainment I sure am bringing them.

At the end of 2024, Moo Deng was a cutie, admired by millions around the world. I mean, how could we not, right? She was, and remains, a very famous pygmy hippopotamus! 🥰🦛

Freepik has lots of AI in it, amongst other things. The site looks crafted with good taste, it is clean, and fast, and has freebies that could come handy. This isn’t an advert, of course; merely a note to myself reminding me it exists, in case it’s ever needed.

I used to keep bookmarks for the boy, keeping resources I thought might be useful for him to be used on school assignments, etc. Reviewing them today I found this gem from 2016. So much has changed since! Prices, for sure, and some of the things we eat, maybe? Notice how much healthier the food from some poorer countries is, in comparison to, say, the US.

Check out also “Rise and Shine”, to see what kids around the world eat for breakfast (from 2014).

Getting lost on the interweb is my newly found hobby, and the reason I have gotten so fond of blogrolls, and webrings. It is amazing what you can find while aimlessly following links that happen to catch your attention—or simply clicking/tapping, daring to see what’s on the other side. For each rubbish site out there that we should avoid, there are 10 others wholesomely worth it. I am specially fond of minimalist, text only websites, and those who use exquisite typography.