Notices by ryan (ryan@bemrose.social)

“If there’s a more clear-cut case of eminent domain, I’ve never seen it.” – Michael Kitz, “Contact”

@realcaseyrollins

Far too few people understand the true secret to surviving social media with your sanity intact:

Don’t feed the trolls.

The idea is simple: If you’re not going to get anything beneficial out of continuing a conversation then don’t continue it. Don’t engage. Don’t reply. Let the idiot get the last word in. It’s no sweat off your balls.

I feel silly for giving such obvious advice, but the number of y’all who clearly don’t understand this is staggering.

(And of course, as a sometimes-troll myself, I thank you all for being so obtuse)

I just heard a programmer utter, unironically, the sentiment that “We can’t fix bugs until users find them.”

This is the current state of software development. In 2025, most programmers are not old enough to remember a time when developers tested their software before shipping it to end users. When software had to be as good as possible before release, because you couldn’t just patch it the next day.

Nowadays, end users have been conditioned that all software is more or less buggy shit. They crave updates like a junkie for the next fix - hoping that this time, this time maybe the update will fix more bugs than it introduces.

This is the current state of software development.

Not sure who needs this reminder, but…

Stereotyping (and its specialized variants such as nationalism, sexism, racism, etc) is a powerful human instinct, which happens to have been correct just often enough to be passed down through evolution.

Do NOT mistake it for logic.

• “I observe a member of group X to have Y trait or behavior”
• “It seems like a lot of members of group X have Y trait”
• “We can prove that a majority of group X members have Y trait”

These statements have varying levels of confidence which may allow you to make a stastitical inference about an arbitrary member of group X, but NONE of them is sufficient to prove the commonly assumed syllogism:

• α is a member of group X, therefore α has trait Y

This simple fallacious formulation is very often used as the basis for “othering” huge populations of individuals, and, I believe, is the source of most of the injustice in the modern world.