Notices by mhoye (temporarily spooky) (mhoye@mastodon.social)

I was almost asleep when my phone beeped and said "a new device has been added to your icloud account" and now I'm extremely awake.

Researchers at the Yokohama City University in Japan have found biomarkers that correlate very strongly with Long-COVID brain fog, suggesting new paths forward for treatment.

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-finally-reveal-biological-basis-of-long-covid-brain-fog/

This paragraph.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2025/10/01/ghost-recon

We need to sit our political class down in front of a computer and show them VNC.

Look, we can say - I am operating a computer on the other side of the country, or the planet, and yet I am sitting right here, in this room. And this room is not special, I can sit in any room, and operate any number of computers at any distance. Look at how this works.

The computer is over there, but I am here. My work is here, my job is counted as a job here.

Why do you think "datacenters" means "jobs"?

@dalias Ah, I was thinking in terms of RSA.

@dalias I've got some reading to do, I guess.

@dalias Um... maybe I don't understand the tech but my understanding is that you should absolutely not be able to derive one part of a public/private keypair from the other. That statement does not align with my understanding of how anything works.

We have our disagreements out here in the fediverse, but if you go to that other site you can see an entire machine dedicated to making sure that the guy who spent 45 billion dollars to be the main character all the time gets his fix from the automatic special-boy attention spigot for whatever lunatic nonsense he's spouting but over here if you know the right instance you can find the guy who created mastodon saying "I got a new hat!" and see a few dozen people replying "It's a nice hat."

Always a good day when I get to drag this out of the vaults.

(from: https://theemptypage.wordpress.com/2013/05/20/critical-perspectives-on-waluigi/ )

ok so to explain the phrase "potemkin mcrib"

https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/115260142350045948

But at the end of the day - The End Of The Days Of McRib, ominous- McRibs are sold to people who want to buy McRibs. You might question their taste, even their judgment, but they are real people who buy McRibs with their real money.

Nobody - I mean, I bet it's happened, because somebody's always at the back end of the bell curve of bad ideas, but nobody in any number that matters - is feeding McRibs to pigs.

Nobody's even hinting that Facebook might have discerned some new customer need here.

You've heard the (true) idea that McDonalds is not actually a fast food restaurant; it is really a commercial real estate company that by historical coincidence just happens to sell hamburgers.

https://storeys.com/mcdonalds-canada-commercial-real-estate/

But McDonalds is so huge that even the "just" in "just sells hamburgers" has a tectonic impact on adjacent markets, and one manifestation of that phenomenon is the McRib.

"A McRib" is a sandwich.

"The McRib" is a huge exercise in pork-market arbitrage.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200303060851/https://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcrib-as-arbitrage/

But that's what I mean about Potemkin McRib - a massive investment in keeping a market afloat, for the sake of appearances, completely divorced from anything you'd call an insight, a customer need, anything. Nobody's even hinting that this is going to solve any problem anyone anywhere has. Facebook's not even trying to make that Double-Amputee-Wii-Sports MMO thing work, whatever that was called. OpenAI's doing... shopping bots?

This is hot air inflating a bubble.

It's McRibs being fed to pigs.

"Potemkin Villages" are apocryphal, but: too good a metaphor not to keep to hand.

"As soon as the barge carrying the Empress and ambassadors arrived, Potemkin's men, dressed as peasants, would populate the village. Once the barge left, the village was disassembled, then rebuilt downstream overnight."

(aside: Imagine having a story like that completely overshadow your life's work? It's like finding out the Earl of Sandwich invented the appendectomy and nobody cares.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village

One of the reasons, maybe the main reason, that I've long argued that high marginal tax rates are a national security question is because, specifically, of this intersection of hypergrowth and hyperreality, this place where market inflatiions can become entirely for its own line-go-up sake.

A taxation scheme that not only rate-throttles hypergrowth but forces _some durable connection to reality_ in the process is Tier 1 critical social infrastructure for a stable economic democracy.

Went looking for a dual-monitor KVM, and found this subtly cursed image. Why USB-A on both ends? What's that control thing about?

@dalias @lo_fye so… for whatever my opinion is worth this is a place I think statistical recognition could really shine, not as a tool on its own but as a dowsing rod for deterministic needs.

As in, if a stochastic analysis or a corpus suggests some set of almost-patterns, great, make them rigorous and deterministic patterns. Use the tool to drive almost towards certainty, not just generate more almost.

I place this in the public domain, hope you find it useful.

I have never once worried that AI is going compete with me.

"Wrangling the basil" sounds like a euphemism for something you'd catch a health code fine for doing in behind a new york pizza joint.