Notices by Dan Sugalski (wordshaper@weatherishappening.network)

@charlotte @soatok @astrid @tmaher ASN.1 has this weird quantum topological property where it’s simultaneously the worst thing you’ve ever seen and also once you’ve studied it you realize that the only thing worse than ASN.1 is ASN.1.

Oh, look, datacenters driving up the cost of power.

This is one of those cases where I'd say the school district(s) and municipal governments should install some mass solar. Schools tend to have huge parking lots you can put solar shade over, and buildings with lots of flat space on their roofs, plus an in with the planning people. Bonus is you get incremental benefits -- you don't have to wait for everything to be installed and can turn things on as they go in.

https://www.404media.co/henrico-virginia-datacenter-energy-cost-email/

€1.8T in four years exfiltrated from the EU, all for single-use sludge. This is why renewables are such a long term win -- replace that with wind, solar, and batteries (likely for less than €1.8T) *and then you never have to spend that money in the future*. You can do a lot with that money you didn't spend.

Which is why, I expect, all the petrostates and fossil fuel companies are so against renewables, it means cutting off their guaranteed subscription payments.

https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/22/clean-break-eu-can-build-nearly-twice-as-many-wind-turbines-and-evs-as-it-needs-each-year/

@skinnylatte All of Silicon Valley's interaction with its local environment seems to be "well, things are kind of messed up here so let's compensate without actually working to fix the underlying problem".

I remember my first real visit was *right* after finishing a half-decade working in Manhattan (literally, flew from JFK to SFO) and thinking "have these people not heard of multi-story buildings?" My impression of the place didn't get better over the course of that visit either.

Here's @grimalkina bringing some serious truth.

I will point out this bit from the start of the thread: "Picture being the first person to step out onto a dance floor at a party. Scary, right? It feels a lot easier to be the second, even better to be the third or fourth"

This is where folks with comfort/privilege should exercise that comfort/privilege. There's no meaningful downside to being the first, so do that thing. You're safe, so leverage that safety for good.

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116755374133880007

@cwebber @AmyZenunim Good grief -- "Use our own macros instead of fabs()/fmax()/fmin()"

Co-authored by Claude and also JFCWTF no!

@skinnylatte the US immigration system has always seemed like an uneasy compromise between the rabid racists and the genteel racists.

@mjd @nikitonsky Oh, I love those. The ones that are even *better* are the ones where multiple menu options map to the same underlying value so even though you chose "USA" when you pull the menu up again it has "Canada" selected. (Not that I'm staring right at several apps that do this for phone number country codes or anything...)

Oooh, it's 5/4. Dave Brubeck day!

Have a link to possibly the best version of Take Five that we have a surviving recording of.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT9Eh8wNMkw

The more of this I see the more I wonder about the long term effects of COVID, tbh. https://mastodon.social/@prietschka/116513063765127751

@ChristosArgyrop I’m sure there are quite a few. We already know about HPV and cancer, and Epstein-Barr and MS, but no doubt there are a lot of others, as well as a lot of just silent grinding down of capacity over time.

Neat pointer to a thing from @tchambers and I look forward to the outcome.

Also, if you're a person in Big Tech (or even Medium Tech) and think "this is neat, I kinda wish someone was doing that for this other thing I like"... that means you! Yes, you, the person who doesn't have the time but absolutely has the cash. Sponsor a grant for someone to do the work. You can afford it. It's probably even tax-deductible and employer-matchable.

https://indieweb.social/@tchambers/116482539732925313

@cwebber Oh, god, sinfest, there's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I can only imagine how loathsome that's gotten given how bad it was Back In The Day.

At least we still have oglaf, so that's something.

@soatok Is it wrong that I didn't get past "a secure chat app" in the post title before I reflexively assumed they utterly fucked up their hand-rolled cryptography protocols?

New Tank! performance. It's ridiculously self-indulgent and goddamn awesome. 28 years after the original series got released but Yoko Kanno and The Seatbelts absolutely still have it.

https://youtu.be/d75ov4HvRrM

@soatok and you can even pronounce that “no” like “the ROI on collecting that data is negative” because it is for basically everyone. The suits often need you to speak with an accent that way so they can hear you clearly.

@dalias Well, I wouldn't be surprised to find that some of the current animosity is externally incited, but let's be honest -- the region is filled with people and historically people in large groups have been kind of shit. You can blame the specific shape of nonsense on some external factors but the nonsense itself predates those factors by decades, centuries, or millennia depending on which facet of the nonsense you're looking at.

@dalias I suspect to some extent that just won't matter -- everyone in the middle east seems to hate each other and have for a couple of millennia, with the current large power players not really making any difference there. It would mean less money and therefore somewhat smaller explosive toys, but as we've seen with modern drones I'm not sure that would matter either.

We wouldn't have to care as much, though. *That* would be awesome.

I suspect one of the unintended consequences of the current shooting in the middle east is a massive push for most of the world to shift to wind and solar for their electricity generation needs, even moreso than had been underway. The more of your energy generation that's *not* dependent on a regular flow of anything (aside from electrons) the more insulated you are from geopolitical bullshit.

@cwebber Ah, right! Current MBAs make artisanal, handcrafted bad decisions, while VibeMBAs modernize and automate the Bad Decision Industry™️, allowing us to scale up production of Bad Decisions in ways heretofore only ever dreamt of by Deloitte VPs during speedball benders.