Notices by Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)

like seriously if you don't know how stock dilution works, and you own a few stocks, look it up. you will come to understand that the people confiscating your property _are_ the billionaires, not the government

it is frustrating as someone who knows a few things about finance to see naïve comparisons between personal property and private property. you have an apartment, or if you're really lucky a condo or a house, with stuff in it, that has value. maybe you have anxieties about the government taking that stuff. but *none* of that stuff can be turned into a financial instrument where you can weaponize public ignorance about dilution rules and debt seniority to foist your bad debt onto meme stock dupes

yelling at nobody in particular here, but taxing a billionaire is not the same as the cops seizing your personal property. if you are a person who makes and spends money, or even someone who has a bunch of investments and cares about things like dividends and capital gains, you do not interface with money like a billionaire. the rules that need to change have to do with things you will never touch, like restricting the ability to collateralize margin loans with unrealized gains.

@Gargron @TechConnectify personally I am just excited to find out how ceiling fans are related to the refrigeration cycle

@xerz my post was vague so I can’t fault you for misinterpreting, but:

- I’m not “rejecting the concept”, I am asking activists to avoid having their message co-opted
- sovereignty refers primarily to states in general, the concept of a “sovereign citizen” is both much more obscure and much more significantly far-right coded than nationalistic sovereignty
- this is specifically about sovereignty as it appears *in a specific discourse* where it is being used to refer to nation states

I am really starting to loathe the “sovereignty” framing of open source sustainability, or data privacy, or whatever. It would be good to have a better tech community less beholden to the interests of multinational corporations, more globally distributed, etc, but when you have a problem and you think “I know what would make this better. Intense German, French, and English nationalism” now you have like… at least five problems

“Sure, japanese style room, no problem, that should be fun for a few days” I mutter to myself as my middle-aged American hips turn themselves inside-out in an excruciating new form of body horror that I have discovered while sitting in a zabuton at the chabudai

I am headed back to Tokyo today, and I will be there until the 24th. Then I will be in Osaka until the 27th. Do I know any fedizens in one of these locations in Japan who want to meet up to talk (sadly, in English, I am an uncultured boor) about Python, Twisted, or (sigh, if we must) AI? I kinda expect the answer is “no” but I figured I would check in since I am apparently only here every 45 years or so

I… I don't know, man, why are you asking *me*

It's that time again

ICYMI https://pypi.org/project/MOPUp/

all these "make your camera phone photos look better" videos from professional photographers are like

"well as you can see" (gestures at perfectly nice looking portrait) "this just looks terrible, so, let's go ahead and bring out the subject"

(thirty seconds of incoherently poking at a histogram or something, now the shadows are just a little too dark and it's slightly oversaturated)

"Fantastic. By applying my presets you can get beautiful pictures just like this one"

by "good" I do not mean the most watts or the coolest looking design or the most featureful OLED display. I want a battery pack that will:

1. not catch fire
2. seriously not catch fire, listing it twice because that's the most important point
3. just going to say this once, but it's just as important: not cause >$3000 worth of damage and irreplacable data loss
4. charge a device
5. nice-to-haves but negotiable: QI2, enough power to charge a laptop a little bit

Update: I ended up getting a BMX SolidSafe 5k, which A) has not caught fire or let the magic smoke out of any of my other devices yet and B) actually seems pretty nice? I've used the little OLED charging readout to verify that it supports passthrough charging, it's very legible, and charges WAY faster than my older Anker battery.

really once again I cannot stress how much that catching on fire or burning out my devices' USB-C ports is a deal breaker

@snaums to a first approximation yes, but also things like homebrew or other build systems which don't necessarily look like "distributions". rsync is a thing which gets packaged and updated and people tend to not look too hard at the updates because its reputation is (was) so good

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/115839163441384816

@rmi My initial comparisons to substance abuse were somewhat tentative and reluctant, back in January. But these have gone from being a few troubling-but-subtle bits of hearsay and implication to a drumbeat of near-daily incidents and I wish I were not feeling so validated in this particular view

Like this is a luminary in the field, mocking his critics for making a prediction he finds risible when that prediction HAS ALREADY COME TRUE. He did the thing, and it went badly, in the way that everyone who is mad at him was saying all along that it would go badly. But he still thinks that he's right! This is not an unrepentant dumb guy being dumb, this is one of the smartest engineers in the field BECOMING dumb right before our eyes. That ought to scare you!

Sigh. OK. rsync discourse:

This is not a story about “vibe coding” or “slop” or regressions or even open source sustainability or whatever: it’s a story about mental health.

The timeline of Tridge’s response in particular can be broke down like so:

1. AI skeptics say "LLMs create difficult-to-evaluate defects, even if you're careful"
2. Tridge introduces defects even though he was careful
3. he gets yelled at
4. His response is to say "you dinosaurs don't appreciate how *careful* I was!"

okay so I have been procrastinating on getting a power bank for travel, and I was going to get That One Expensive Anker One That Everyone Seems To Like, but um, Anker has been *generally* having a terrible time of it <https://www.cpsc.gov/Recalls/2025/More-than-One-Million-Anker-Power-Banks-Recalled-Due-to-Fire-and-Burn-Hazards-Manufactured-by-Anker-Innovations>, and apparently this "new, good" one might melt your laptop? <https://youtu.be/tXPfbPckCN8> Can anyone point me at a *good* power bank?