Notices by Ben Zanin (gnomon@mastodon.social), page 3

@dalias Plextor, or Philips..?

@Infoseepage @RainofTerra there's a realtime thread over on the TUHS list where folks are posting updates: https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-December/thread.html#32854

Hmm, I'm starting to get some fan noise from the previously silent Noctua air cooler on the household server. It's been in roughly 24/7/365 service since 2022-03-24: I can't really begrudge it anything for gradually failing. I'll have to book some time and schedule an outage window to replace it this week. Or maybe early January.

@Gargron @Ameboid pe(ACH)es !

Ad: "Office girl. Easy work, good pay."

"How much experience do you have?"

Doing _what_? There was no job description! You haven't described any duties!

#monsterdon

We are ready for #monsterdon tonight! Probably more watching and less yelling online about it tonight, but we're here.

What the heck, the police officer is just going to leave the woman alone with a man who she accused of a crime??

#monsterdon

This feels less like "Attack of the Puppet People" and more like "Desperate Attempt to Survive Horrifying Circumstances of the Puppet People"

#monsterdon

Ah yes, cats _famously_ are fine with standing still in front of weird things making weird noises.

#monsterdon

That is one hundred percent a kitten crawling out of that matchbox, not the full-grown cat that got shrunk down!!

#monsterdon

Egads, more giant rats! Flashbacks to The Food of the Gods (1976)

#monsterdon

OK, so the guys are shaving... which implies that hair grows during this state of suspended animation they enter when they're bottled..?

I have a great many questions

#monsterdon

"Come on, Sally, we'll call the police!"

"Don't leave me... please don't leave me... I'll be alone!"

That's the end?! Two escapees, but the rest of the puppet crew is just left offsccreen? Presumably the mad scientist offs himself per his plan as soon as he's left alone?? And nobody but nobody fucks off into the sea!

AND THAT'S A WRECK

Man, that was a weird one.

#monsterdon

I'm really curious why they bothered to hang on and show the guy loading three or four more boxes on his dolly before cutting to the next scene.

#monsterdon

I think the sole plate of my left cycling shoe just snapped..?

!?!?

I hate the "cattle vs. pets" framing of managing larger clusters of computers with automation, implying that managing small clusters or single machines is done manually.

I hate it because managing a single machine without a framework suitable for automation has been generally poor practice *forever*.

But I hate it even more because the foundation of the metaphor is that it is OK and normal to treat livestock without compassion or care. It is quite simply not.

Retire that framing, please.

@andros psst, hey catboss @cwebber 👀↑↑ (😻)

If you thought that hiring managers were hostile to having cryptocurrency or NFTs on a resume now, that will be as nothing compared to the hostility towards mentions of LLMs or chatbots once a profound market contraction causes unrelated businesses and likely entire small industries to wither.

Annoying users with shitty slop and annoying admins with scrapers will fade as a match to the sun compared with destroying people's hard-built livelihoods.

It is some kind of poetic tragedy that an industry based around hoovering up any web accessible information with extreme aggression is failing to learn the core lessons of the prior two major AI winters¹ while galloping full tilt towards the third.

Namely, that massively overselling and under-delivering will cause the actual benefits and advances of the tech to be irrelevant. Public sentiment will curdle to angry incredulity at best, blind hatred at worst.

¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

@Gargron alas, you've hit on an awfully likely hypothesis there.