Notices by mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social), page 2

Justice isn't revenge.

It's kind of amazing how obvious it is that he's got one foot in a k-hole basically all the time now and people didn't really make a big deal of it until today even though it's been going on for months.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:uz5apa2z3jrxhjjzqw5qik65/post/3lqfyoqwyus25

The solution to the trolley problem is a functional society. That’s the solution to all the trolley problems and a million other problems.

A story from time immemorial.

Unix filesystem permissions will let you destroy everything you've ever cared about in a heartbeat, but they'll protect you from having to figure out how to blow an installer image onto a usb stick.

AI or not it is criminally unconscionable that this is still a failure mode that exists in 2025, and that we all act like it's a funny joke.

https://mastodon.social/@puppygirlhornypost2@transfem.social/114570064112016665

This is, in a roundabout way, just more corporate AI marketing/propaganda.

Programs can't want things or feel things or care about things, they can only produce sequences of words that - coincidentally - convince you they might, fundamentally with permutations of human-created text.

Anyone trying to convince you to anthropomorphize them (hi anthropic) either knows full well they're lying to you, or have been lying to themselves.

P.S. Journalists wtf are you doing printing proxy slop.

There is, I strongly suspect, a largely unspoken and uninterrogated neoliberal management philosophy in the world that's much the same shape as the Calfornia mindset, that on one hand believes that the rise of hard right is about messaging - not about having and implementing effective policy - and on the other, the idea that making complex things simpler, or at least easier to describe, is the same as making them better.

Both are fundamentally destructive processes.

"The man who saved a million brains", though the numbers in the article suggest that's being undercounted by a factor of 100.

Dr. Creswell Eastman convinced the Chinese government to mandate iodized salt and changed hundreds of millions of lives for the better.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-25/professor-creswell-eastman-dies-age-85/105318606

"Which government? And ... uh, I guess which bones? Are they being specific?"

"How many bones do I have?"

"I don't know. I think the correct number? You've already lost your baby teeth so I don't think you have any spare bones."

"Oh no!"

"I want to know more about the government part."

Bone marrow, turns out, but conversations get weird around here sometimes.

My kid got the mail that they can volunteer as an organ donor today, and the pamphlet detailed all the lives you can save and how. A noble initiative, but I learned about this when I got home and heard "Dad, the government wants my bones."

After elaborating that the author had the wit to say, maybe the question isn't, why do they do this. Maybe the real question we should be asking is, why aren't the rest of us doing the same.

I think about that a lot. especially when - after we've been through decades of relentless government penury and abdication of responsibility around social and societal infrastructure - politicians start talking about social isolation as a dog whistle for xenophobia.

https://theconversation.com/britain-is-already-becoming-an-island-of-strangers-but-immigration-isnt-the-driver-256724

A short story, and a pattern I want you to recognize:

A few years ago somebody sent a letter into a local paper asking, why do groups of Ethiopian men stand around outside every evening, I'm white and anxious and I don't think like it, what's that about then. And to their credit, the paper did the legwork and replied "In that community, people don't just rush straight home after work; they meet friends, talk about their day, share community news, talk politics, local and back home ..."

In the UK they called it "austerity", I think because of the British total cultural commitment to describing self-inflicted misery in terms of ennobling character traits and nationalist pride, but it's the same neglect all over: when was the last time anyone near you broke ground on a community center?

Not a shopping mall or coffee shop, but an actual third-space you can just go and hang out if you want for no reason, not need to pay anything, community center?

You can't remember, can you?

I want to yell this every day.

"Understanding what the machine is doing, understanding the problems we're trying to solve, doing the work cleanly, efficiently, whenever possible elegantly, in a way that is discoverable and comprehensible", these are ideals that we can still aspire to. That future, those systems, are still possible.

Corporate enclosure of knowledge, the mechanized dilution of comprehensibility, we can choose not to subject ourselves to the learned-helplessness machines.

I can remember when the argument was that you couldn't trust closed-source software because there was no way to really understand what it was doing.

https://mastodon.social/@serpentroots@hachyderm.io/114561242465978873

@GossiTheDog

I don't think that's fair - people buy _curation_. People want to be able to tell their own story about themselves, to themselves, and feel at least decently about that story. This is also why we have mementos of some things but not other things.

The difference between starving and fasting is choice. Choice is everything.

Watching Microsoft’s robots telling Microsoft’s other robots that they need to agree to CLAs in between Microsoft’s developers begging Microsoft’s robots to actually understand the problems they’re trying to fix is kind of amazing.

This is the future Terry Gilliam promised us.

Never know what to make of guys complaining that women have cats and sex toys as options, my man if you’re getting outplayed by the combined forces of “runs on batteries” and “shits in a box” that’s a you problem, work on the you problem.

Japan: your train is the 10:24 train. Do not get on train that is there at 10:22, that is not your train. If you are on the platform at 10:25 you will not be permitted to board because that is not your train either. Your train is already in the next prefecture.

Canada: the ways of the tracks and the trains that waft hither and yon upon them are mysterious and unpredictable, who can say when they will move or why, it is one of the great unknowables of life

So close to success, but Via Rail is Via Rail so now we are parked five minutes from our destination, “waiting for a light”.

One cool thing about owning one share of Amazon stock is that they periodically send you mail saying that the board recommends that you vote for everybody’s nomination and compensation but against anything that looks like reporting or accountability.