Notices by Tito Swineflu (tito_swineflu@sfba.social)

Street fairs are funny. You have people dedicated to doing evil: cops, sheriffs and chiropractors, all set up next to the library and some woman selling crocheted hats.

@St1ka Also as inspiration to avoid going on reddit.

It appalls me to no end that humans could have rich, abundant lives, but instead we get this. All we need to do is turn all the billionaires into soylent green, but we're too chicken. Yes, I'm irritated by the pollution I'm experiencing today. This shit is not necessary. I'm upset that the blue whales have stopped their song. I'm upset that every time Gazans line up for food, some of them get gunned down. Maybe we just don't deserve this world.

So everyone's excited about those super basic people at a coldplay concert. I'm excited about the company he runs. They manage the use of a pretty esoteric piece of software for other companies? I'm out of the loop, how do you build a company big enough to have an HR dept doing that?

@edgeworth I think it was more that the underlying software didn't seem like something that enough companies would need to support a business managing it. But I'm out of the loop.

@kingrat at least it pays by the hour. :)

@kingrat They can only accept code that stays in gdrive/appscript. Because somehow they've handed all of their IP (this is a top-tier multinational) to google to manage. I can't use a database, only google sheets.

I've built a top-100 web site with load-balanced mysql servers. I've managed hundreds of physical servers. I've written some pretty clever APIs in python. I've written ingestion pipelines with rabbitMQ and python. Of course: the client is requiring that I do all of my work in google drive. No version control, no real editor, no testing, nothing. It's where programmers go to die.

@kingrat reminds me of the time someone dumped an old toilet in the median of 13th st. Only took a few hours for it to be filled..

@kingrat When I lived there that happened all the time. I was always amazed. Like, look around you. What do you think is going to happen in this scenario?

This is all because of an infuriating conversation with my single source of work these days:
Them: "The client has 400 documents, and they want to be able to search them."
Me: "No problem, I'll ingest the documents and apply a text search engine on them."
Them: "No no, they want to use AI."
Me: "So tell them we're using AI and we'll give them something that can actually do a real search."
Them: "Unfortunately, it has to be a real AI."

Good pull quote from this article:

"Without taking my word for it, consider how it show up in the economics: If AI companies could deliver the productivity gains they claim, they wouldn’t sell AI. They’d keep it to themselves and gobble up the software industry."

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2024/11/10/

@kingrat He's a contender, but I'm more looking to the case that I see in media more often, where the use case is self-evidently so good that everyone has to start using it. Bitcoin isn't necessarily the slam-dunk best way to buy drugs, but it did get adopted that way.

Did anyone ever write some magical computer code and then get rich? I think it's a myth, but it always shows up on TV and movies. I can't think of a single instance where someone wrote the killer algorithm and then got wealthy from it. Can you?

@kingrat it looks like a 14- seater or so on the video

This story really raises more questions than it answers: a guy hijacks a plane with a knife, but it ended ok because another random passenger shot him?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/17/belize-hijacking-plane

Ha ha, I was given a warning on reddit for suggesting shooting down police drones with nerf guns. My post was flagged for 'harrassment'. I guess that makes sense in this day and age. Poor police drones.

Eric Adams wearing a hat that incorrectly labels him as "Mayor Adams" rather than "Dipshit".

@kingrat 20 years ago, i knew people who paid the cops $200 a week to keep shows going (no booze) on mission st. Meanwhile a place down the block had a full on bar with large shows weekly, no idea what or if they had to pay. No one cares until they do.

@MLNow I always wonder about the way this works. You could, say, be running an illegal bar/performance area in the 20th and mission area, selling booze without a license, etc. and survive for years. Or you can run one of these places and survive for a few months. What's the difference? Is it which cops you bribe? Is it because some have neighbors and some don't? There's no consistency.