Notices by monkϵyborg 🦾🐵 (monkeyborg@triangletoot.party)

Kids today will never fully appreciate the sense of intimidating physical weight imparted by the line “We got to move these color TVs” in the song Money for Nothing from the 1985 Dire Straits album Brothers in Arms because the color TVs in question are CRT consoles — many of which could weigh in excess of 100 lbs. — and not the relatively light flat-panel displays which in their coddled youths are the only species of color TV they have ever encountered

“Just install Linux” is obnoxious but… you know you’re going to have to eventually, right? The commercial OSes get less usable, fashier, and frankly more insulting to the consumer with each passing year. At some point even you will have had enough.

The jobs are drying up, chips and rare earths are getting tariffed, and having to get another year out of the old hardware is in the cards for all of us.

If you need a tech friend to get you set up, you probably did with Windows, too. It's ok.

@troublewithwords A voice whispers “so I tied an onion to my belt” from the forgotten recesses of time

@troublewithwords The loss of Simpsons references as a common language was the beginning of the end of the Republic.

> So, I'd like to share an example that's been banging around in my head for a while of what a good AI platform might look like. Some of this is just a thought exercise, trying to imagine an alternate future. But this is also an intentional, practical strategy and an attempt at a more effective form of critique — because if we are going to have better AI in the future, we are going to have get lots of people to understand that such a thing is possible.

by @anildash

https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/01/what-would-good-ai-look-like/

Living in a world of nation states and global orders, weʼve scaled up a lot of terminology born in an era of face-to-face interactions between individuals and small groups — largely uncritically.

Consider the idea of “trusting” an HTTPS certificate authority. We supposedly “trust” them to secure our financial interactions. But most people arenʼt even aware they exist.

What if your CA was someone you knew personally, and they only vouched for websites owned by people they knew personally?

@cwebber Thatʼs a very personal question

# UnitedHealth Is Strategically Limiting Access to Critical Treatment for Kids With Autism

> Leaked documents show that UnitedHealth is aggressively targeting the treatment of thousands of children with autism across the country in an effort to cut costs.

> Advocates told ProPublica the insurer’s strategy may be violating federal law.

https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealthcare-insurance-autism-denials-applied-behavior-analysis-medicaid

“Lessons learned from burning things” by @anildash has a lot to say about things that are smoldering.

https://www.anildash.com/2024/11/30/making-fire/

@RickiTarr I’ve noticed conspiracy theories are popular among smart men who didn’t go to college or didn’t thrive there. Their belief in the superiority of street smarts over book smarts is important to them, and they relish opportunities to prove that people with higher education have nothing over on them.

Thus the idea of secret knowledge that provides a shortcut to knowing “what’s really going on” and that will show the educated man up as the fool he really is has a powerful hold.

The greatest trick the Devil ever played was convincing people that he actually exists and isn’t just a metaphor for the evil that people are capable of doing on their own

This is just to say

I have eaten
the glue
that Google
suggested

and which
you were probably
saving
for pizza

Forgive me
it was nontoxic
so sticky
and so cold

@BeAware Iʼm pretty sure if that were the case I would have heard about it. Look man, sometimes you guys make it too easy, but I canʼt feed on the powerless when my cupʼs already overfilled.

@BeAware I donʼt know who Eddie Vedder is, but I know he died of drugs

God, I wish Eddie Vedder was still alive to see this moment

“We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “… It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-garland-holds-news-conference-announcing-ticketmaster-live-nation-anti-trust-lawsuit

I like it when a singer says “guitar!” in the middle of a song, and then a guitar solo starts. How did they know that was going to happen?

@faraiwe Added alt text.

Donald Trump is older than Joe Biden was in 2020, when Republicans said Biden was too old to run. And yet they are overwhelmingly voting for Trump in the primary over younger candidates. Curious 🤔

Dot matrix printers were it, y’all. Want to print a single line of text? Ka-ching. Want to print a 7-foot-long “Happy Birthday” banner? I got you, fam.

Plus remember how satisying it was to tear the tracks off?

Out of ink? No problem, you can get a couple pages more, they’ll just be a little lighter, that’s all.

We gave it all away.

I canʼt believe I have to tell people this, but

- Donʼt buy smart home shit
- Donʼt download an app to get a free smoothie
- Donʼt sign up for something you heard about in a piece of junk mail
- Donʼt create an account with fucking McDonald's or Chipotleʼs or whatever
- Donʼt use a coupon or a discount for something you werenʼt going to buy anyway
- Donʼt sign up for free trials
- Donʼt let the devil in through the front door
- Donʼt let them sell you anything

You will not come out ahead.