Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@qoto.org

Just got one of those unsolicited pollster texts, which began:

"Hello, this is Kymberleigh. We are conducting a survey ..."

Of course I replied with the URL for reddit's /r/tragedeigh

iPhone app integration is still pretty poor; the health app knows I was runnin' up that hill, but it has no way of knowing I made a deal with God

I think Quora might be the first major website casualty of AI. It's been pretty bad for a long time, but from what I can see, it's mostly people posting terrible, just embarrassingly bad AI-generated responses, half the time to what they don't know are AI-generated questions.

At this point it's the knowledge equivalent of feedback noise, trivially human-mediated.

Russian disinfo network abandons X, migrates to Bluesky.

(Parasites need a healthy body to infest. A corpse can't sustain them any longer and will soon poison even them.)

https://theins.press/en/news/277378

One Portland thing I'll never get used to is bicyclists riding aggressively and breaking laws as a part a kind of deranged "civil disobedience".

It's sort of the overall pattern I observe in people who've moved here in the past 20 years: they seem to think they're joining a religion: like moving to Portland will automatically fill them with purpose.

Within a few months they find, to their crushing disappointment, that it's just a city. It hasn't provided them with meaning, hasn't told them who they are and what they're meant to do. They're the same person they were when they decided to move here.

Some of them don't cope with it well, and start acting out; acting out publicly in weird, aggressive ways apparently meant to be a display of virtue, but it's impossible for someone not living in their heads to discern exactly what virtue they're displaying.

Has anyone got to the point where they can see a Tesla Cybertruck without an intense feeling of incredulity that, despite it all, someone actually bought it, and looking around for the owner to see if he has visible signs of idiocy?

A few nights ago I watched an episode of "Route 66" from 1962. It's set in Oregon City, and opens with Martin Milner, at the wheel as always, giving George Maharis an encyclopedic recitation of all the Oregon City "firsts".

One rather cool thing about it is that most of the things shown in the episode haven't changed all that much. Apart from the main street businesses. And the way people dress. Even the municipal elevator, looking like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, was already there in '62.

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Oregon City.

https://www.opb.org/article/2024/12/24/oregon-city-180-anniversary/

The fact that Kate Bush never guested on The Muppet Show is surely one of the great missed opportunities of the 20th century. Picture her, surrounded by pigs, singing "I'm Living In a Pig Sty" to the tune of Big Sky. What might have been.

Apparently whether you're a radical islamist or a radical anti-islamist, the solution is the same: to indiscriminately run crowds of people over.

Why is it you never see a story about a nuclear power plant that isn't decades late with cost overruns on the order of a multiple of the original proposed total?

It's almost as if planners know that if they submitted a realistic proposal it would never get approved, so they just flat out lie from the get go.

Getting reports from credible-sounding people who say they do indeed get these even if they've blocked him.

Reportedly on Xhitter now everyone gets a notification when Musk tweets, irrespective of whether they follow him. I have no info about whether muting him or blocking him affects this.

There's a common behavior on the intarwebs that we need a word for.

When you ask for advice on how to do or avoid doing a thing, there's a category of person who will invariably respond by questioning your desire to do or not do that thing. Often aggressively/defensively, as they themselves are invested in doing the opposite of what you're asking about.

Examples from my own experience:

"Now that ebay will no longer simply credit a card, is there a way I can sell on ebay without giving them my bank account info?"

Response: replies from people who insist there's something wrong with you for not wanting to give ebay your bank account info. Nothing actually useful.

"Does anyone know of a decent webmail server that's not written in PHP?"

Response: Whole lot of deeply butthurt "what's wrong with PHP????!!?!?!" replies. (Answer: far too much to go into.) Not one useful answer.

What people like that need to do is not reply. Y'know, because that's what you do when you don't have an answer. But instead they go for the hard derail.

Sealioning is a great word for a certain kind of reply-guy behavior, that of badgering you to engage them on something you've said or which they've chosen to infer from what you've said. This isn't quite that. It is however bloody irritating.