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

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.

Didn't denim jeans last more than two years, once upon a time? I feel like they did, and that I used them harder when I was younger too.

(I strongly dislike clothes shopping. I suppose I could generalize that to "I strongly dislike clothes".)

@Gargron thank you! I'll check em out!

@Gargron hey, what new music has been on your radar recently? Not necessarily what's good, just what's interesting.

@Gargron no no, don't apologize, it's all good! I understand. Thanks for the info.

@Gargron I want to frame this only as a question and not a request, because I understand that managing sales and logistics in foreign countries across multiple currencies can be a nightmare, but: do you happen to know if shipping to Canada might become an option in the future?

The greasy, thoughtless mediocrity of slop billboard images is offensively bland, to pick an overused phrase. It's like whipped saltless vegetable oil smeared across a stale slice of wonderbread with a dollar store garden trowel, tossed half off a dinner plate by a server allergic to eye contact holding a leaking trash bag in their other hand.

That is, the offense comes not just from the garbage immediately in front of me, but rather every aspect of the entire experience.

Distilled contempt.

@phire it was never that annoying. I read my feed in batches, querying my local feed reader database for specific groups of topics. It's really quite delightfully asynchronous, so temporal bunching of posts never caused issues.

Sample size of one, of course, and I'm sure this definitely is an improvement for a much larger swath of your readership.

@phire eep, good point, that's not something I'd considered!!

(For unrelated reasons I was reading about the RFCs for RSS pagination and for HTTP dictionary compression the other week, and that's when I learned that (1) paginating back into RSS history has only been technically been solved relatively recently and (2) support on the server side and in reader clients is awfully thin on the ground in 2025.)

@Gargron excellent gourd! Excellent gourd inspectors!!

@Gargron @ConnyDuck aka one milli-Odin

@Gargron yaaaaaay excellent catting (except for the food stealing, even though it is very much on brand for cat)