Notices by Neil Kandalgaonkar (neilk@xoxo.zone)

My apartment building uses a Facebook group and it's been pretty useful. It's the only reason I log into Facebook at all.

Are there any practical alternatives for a loose group of people of varying ages and tech-savviness?

@annika I can’t imagine anyone voluntarily joining a uniformed service with real, kill you very dead, courts-martial for disobedience

It makes so much more sense if it’s advanced LARPing by bored post-humans. Maybe “the Federation” is just part of that group’s canon and the fact that they tell other civilizations it really exists is just their commitment to the bit

@annika 🤔Star Trek is clearly not about having fun, it’s a naval adventure + humanist allegory, with zap guns

In some ways its view of the military was already outmoded on arrival

In the future, if we have one, we will probably all have resources like today’s billionaires and the only reason to do stuff would be for fun, megalomania, impressing others. So yeah I can imagine a flying group home of bohemian aristocrats just trying not to be bored

Every time Claude asks me if I want to see even more info about the topic, and I say “no thanks”, it babbles back summarizing and wrapping up the whole discussion, this polite chitchat costing the earth one 1 femtohurricane

On the other hand, what a world. I can ask a question about pattern matching function signatures in Kotlin, cross a city street, and read a little tutorial by the time I’m on the other side. (For now, Claude cannot tell me if cars are approaching, so I have to keep my head up.)

I’m not quite sure if I will be a permanently necessary part of the loop here. We always did wonder exactly why the Enterpise couldn’t just explore space on its own

@clarity And bills!

@clarity As far as I can tell this is…kinda complicated.

I used to work for a junk mail, ahem, direct mail company. Half the clients were nonprofits sending heart-rending pleas for more cash. The others were pharmas reminding patients to take their meds. Everything was morally grey. 🤷🏻♂️

Commercial mailers get bulk rates. But they also cost even less to process, so at the end of the day, they might be subsidizing that holiday card you addressed by hand

@mcc I also thought this was true and then I met a techie who thought Oracle Cloud was legit

@annika A mutual of mine, @cube_drone , comments on my posts frequently but I do not see them. We followed each other a long time ago, I think. We are not blocked on either end by personal or server config as far as I can tell. Can you help?

@inthehands @yuki2501 The people pushing AI in big companies right now are serial “messes that look like successes” professionals

Thirty seconds after the thing is released, but before everyone realizes it sucks, they leave for some new, more senior role.

You simply must try https://calcgpt.io, a calculator that uses a LLM to do math

VRChat had a massive 30% layoff last week and I was let go. It's been heartbreaking for everyone and one day I will talk more about this very special community.

I'm looking forward to a bit of a reset, and then a new role.

VRChat is a very flat organization, but I would be at least a Principal Engineer in most other companies.

I would love a role where I can help an entire team be better, but I'm also happy just doing backend and cloud engineering.

https://neilk.net/work/

#getfedihired

Tradition is a wonderful thing. Looking forward to this generation of protesters learning that their campus administrators, the cops, and almost all of the media are going to shamelessly lie about them

Managers are just prompt engineers

@Loukas I thought “Black Lives Matter” was the perfect slogan because who could argue with that

young developer: "Wow, how did you get these results? Did you use a traditional db or a vector db?"

me: "lol I used perl & sort on a 42MB text file. it took 1.2 seconds on an old macbook"

Thanks to @kasdeya for posting this highly memeable photo of an old computer book. But I wondered: which book?

I figured out it's from "The Internet Guide for New Users" by Daniel P. Dern, 1994.

The illustrator, Hannah M. G. Shapero, has been involved with technology and art for a very long time. Here she is doing some early electronic music, and appropriately looking like she is going to bring us all into the future

She has a few blogs; this was last updated in 2021. https://pyracanthasketch.blogspot.com/

The best advice I got about Mastodon is that it’s for things you love, not hate