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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
mastodon
4.6.0-nightly.2026-03-16
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
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Joined March 18, 2023
Old Computers:
Computing before it sucked: pre-1981 (release of MS-DOS)
Science Fiction:
Harlan Ellison, Lois McMaster Bujold
History:
Ancient Engineering
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@Gargron@mastodon.social
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@Gargron@mastodon.social
Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
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6d ago
@Gargron@mastodon.social This was even true in the 1600s, when the Companies of (human) Translators were translating the Bible into English (the so-called "King James" version, 1611).
Translations of human language require the ability to translate the _sense_ of some local or regional usage into something similar in the target language.
They include a footnote indicating that one passage was essentially untranslatable, because the phrase was not understood by anyone. So they used context instead.
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
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Feb 28, 2026
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
slash
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
·
Feb 28, 2026
Did I mention that one of my all-time favorite RAH novels, The Door Into Summer, was made into a movie? I was able to watch it online, but had to hit ebay to find a proper DVD.
They did a *really* good job with this. If all book-to-movie translations were done this well, we'd have a lot more great movies. And none of them licensed from Marvel...
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
slash
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
·
Feb 28, 2026
I know it's the end of Girl Scout Cookie Season, but I wanted to share the work being done by New York City Troop 6000. This troop was specifically formed to provide scouting opportunities to girls living in shelters. This is truly humans at their best.
You can buy cookies from them online, although that's likely about over. But they help girls all year round, and have ways beyond cookies for you to help them as well.
Please consider this.
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
slash
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
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Feb 16, 2026
I want to create a new design aesthetic aimed at making better spaces for dogs. I call it "The BauWauHaus". ;)
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@cstross@wandering.shop
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@cstross@wandering.shop
Because a LOT of people are missing the point: No, Elon Musk is NOT serious about putting a million data centres into orbit. It can't work: laws of physics say "nope". But SpaceX is expected to go pub
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
slash
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
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Feb 02, 2026
@cstross@wandering.shop It's a shame to clutter near-Earth orbit with temporary junk, when we could -- for far less money -- just run fiber to every home in the USA, including rural areas. Just like the home electrification program of the past.
And it could be done by the US Government, benefiting people instead of billionaires.
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@agiletortoise@mastodon.social
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@agiletortoise@mastodon.social
Open ancestor post
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
slash
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
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Jan 26, 2026
@agiletortoise@mastodon.social I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit....
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@cstross@wandering.shop
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@cstross@wandering.shop
Because the Calibre ebook library software just acquired AI garbage (as of 8.16.2, this week), it has *already* been forked. For AI-free Calibre, seek out clbre: https://github.com/grimthorpe/clbre
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
slash
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
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Dec 09, 2025
@cstross@wandering.shop @janeishly@beige.party I've actually just not upgraded. I had a few that I needed to roll back, due to prereq's I wasn't willing to install, or just bad code. I've admired Kovid Goyal, to do that much work and help others. I've seen him active on various forums, wanting to help people get more out of his gift. But I believe all software has an inflection point, where it has enough features and is relatively bug free, and changes just make it worse. So once I'm happy, I just leave it alone.
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@cstross@wandering.shop
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@cstross@wandering.shop
Reminder that EVERYTHING Anthropic or OpenAI announce in public is propaganda designed to boost their market cap when they hit the IPO they're aiming for. It's marketing, folks. There is no intelligen
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@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
slash
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
If you send a follow request, I will look at your page and see what sort of things you post before I accept. Don't take this personally. I just want to be sure my home is not cluttered with things I'm not interested in. That's why I prefer Mastodon: I can control what shows up.
mastodon.social
@agreeable_landfall@mastodon.social
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Nov 14, 2025
@cstross@wandering.shop I've been part of an IPO. It's legalized theft. When my company went IPO, the price was set *far* too high, and immediately started tanking. Employees were prohibited from trading their options, I suppose to make sure none of *us* could take down the kind of money the bankers running the IPO did.
We opened at $20, and I noticed our CEO owned...zero shares. Once her trading program kicked in, I could see that she *knew* it was an $8 stock. Should be criminal fraud, but %100 legal.
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