Notices by Mike Taylor 🦕 (mike@sauropods.win)

@jwildeboer There's always a dry humour just beneath the surface in Kernighan's book. In Kernighan & Pike's "The UNIX Programming Environment", one set of exercises has you add a sequence of a features to the "cal" program, then finishes with the question: When should you have stopped adding features to `cal'?

"If someone’s expecting actual professional human writers to keep to very simple, rigid parameters, purely to ensure that the clueless AI that’s going to ‘acquire’ and regurgitate their work without permission or compensation doesn’t get things wrong… Do you want me to hold my front door open while you rob my house as well?"
https://theneuroscienceofeverydaylife.substack.com/p/no-ai-i-do-not-think-nuclear-war

The Royal Society is dead

A few months ago, Dorothy Bishop resigned her fellowship in the Royal Society in protest at Elon Musk's continuing fellowship. This was a highly principled stand. Eight weeks ago, Steven Curry wrote an open letter to the President of the Royal Society asking him to explain how Musk's activities and pronouncements can be considered compatible with the Society's code of conduct.

http://svpow.com/2025/04/04/the-royal-society-is-dead/

@danstowell The #RoyalSociety is dead in the water. Three hundred and sixty-five years of history, and it's ended it as a beard for a facist. What an utterly utterly shameful end for a once-great society.

"Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him."
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-trump-column-read.html

@cstross @vnvobit I agree on the "clownshows" part.

@vnvobit @cstross In our family we've long used the term "eighteen-threes" to describe people like Boris Johnson.

One of many penetrating insights from https://matt.might.net/articles/tenure/

"In computer science, academic paywalls stifle.

In medicine, academic paywalls kill."

@davidallengreen Counterpoints at https://bylinetimes.com/2024/12/20/labour-government-annoucements-explained/ — "All the Big Government Reforms the Media Hasn’t Been Telling You About".

I would certainly like them to be doing more, but let's not underplay the very significant changes between the last government and this.

@dalias @drmambobob "You can always delete all friends except your mother or a few other "immovable" ones."

Oh, I did that long ago.

@dalias @drmambobob I' not sure you understand the logistics of this. My mum lives hundreds of miles away. She's in her eighties. It's a wonder she's online at all. It's simply not an option to bring her through the process of migrating to the Fediverse or Signal AND losing all her other Facebook connections.

So. Do I detest Zuck? Yes. Do I hate how he's making a terrible space even worse? Yes. Am I going to abandon my family. No.

Eugen Rochko (the primary creator of Mastodon) asks "Have you already deleted or are planning to delete your Threads/Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp account in light of recent policy changes?" — https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/113807557377979747

No, I have not (and will not). I have always detested Facebook. But it's where my mum is, and my sister, and my brother and his wife. There's simply no way they're all coming across to the Fediverse. So I'll retain a (silent) presence where they are.

This is reality for many of us.

@drmambobob Exactly. Activists (which I often count myself as) make it sound very simple.

@Infoseepage @leahstokes.bsky.social I did wonder about cracking that joke myself 🙂

But the truth is, I read a published paper on an international flight. When the flight took off, I was merely an informed layman. By the time it landed, I thought "I could do better than that" and I was on my way to a second career.

@Infoseepage @leahstokes.bsky.social That's the same origin story as how I became a palaeontological researcher.

@dansup @pixelfed The 2019 one is best.

And it's interesting, reading the other replies, that EVERYONE agrees the 2022 one is a backward step.

"The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) calls for action to specify a minimum marriage age of 18. While 186 of 193 countries have ratified the CEDAW treaty, the United States shamefully remains as one of only seven countries that has to date refused to ratify it. We join Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Nauru, Palau, and Tonga on this indefensible list."

https://www.qasimrashid.com/p/america-has-a-child-marriage-epidemicand

An elderly couple who I know and love currently both have flu. One of them was hospitalised: it was so bad that there was the spectre of a death at Christmas hanging in the air, though it's now receded with treatment. Now the one of them with less bad flu is working through that to care for the one with worse flu.

Why? Because they declined vaccines.

NO NOT DO THIS. YOU MIGHT DIE.

And if you're contributing in any way to vaccine hesitancy? You're killing people. Yes, you are. Stop it.

"Why are we paying so much attention to Silicon Valley pump-and-dumps and ignoring all this incredible, potentially planet-saving, real innovation?"
— @pluralistic at https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-30-posiwid-social-cost-of-carbon-ea59fe4ba150

"Climate tech is unselfish tech. It’s a gift to the future and to the broad public. It shares its spoils with workers. It requires public action. By contrast, Silicon Valley is greedy tech that is relentlessly focused on the shortest-term returns that can be extracted with the least share going to labor."
— @pluralistic at https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-05-30-posiwid-social-cost-of-carbon-ea59fe4ba150