Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

I can't figure out if mastodon is a high context culture or not. People seem to be expected to give long introductions and do a lot of identity/positionality disclosure, but also an enormous reply guy culture which is defined by low context drive-by. Conversational turn-taking is extremely low compared to other platforms ime, but depth-seeking is high. What an interesting mix.

*obviously, these experiences are all situated within my own network effects, and I'm not well networked here.

my favourite detail about today is that a geomagnetic storm of this magnitude induces currents exceeding 200A through metal pipelines. hope those earth stakes are beefy enough!

I just discovered that a good chunk of the infosec community that left Twitter about a year and a half ago is back on the site tweeting away.

And a whole bunch of infosec journalists have either returned or never left.

Leaving Twitter cost me a lot of traffic to Metacurity and cut my ability to promote my work, but man, I'm never going back.

Thinking about slow work, of which all justice work is a part, in a world that wants you to feel worthless for it. Thinking about how I got off a plane in time to hug my wife after we saw a picture of snipers on her campus surveilling her students. Thinking about how many backyard bbqs we've had those students over for (rented tables outside, our tiny cottage can't hold them all). Thinking what is the exchange rate of bbqs to guns on campus in the calculus of whether a student feels safe

Answer: `\x01c` is an escape sequence that translates to a single character. Any amount of hexadecimal digits after `\x` designate a single character.

Fully half of the respondents do not know this! It's a really interesting result to me; nearly every C programmer has used this escape sequence at some point, and yet. Even some really experienced people have been tripped up by this.

I love these metatextual type specimens from 1907--the opposite of lorem ipsum. https://uwmspeccoll.tumblr.com/post/749853640601255936/typography-tuesday

I found a lil something unexpected.
Not sure this will be such a big deal to you but I was pleasantly surprised by this behavior.

FYI if you use Medium it requires a sign-in to read posts. So I won’t ever read your posts because I don’t want to hand over my info to them.

Also I’m not interested enough to go through a bunch of extra clicks

And if a lot of other people aren’t in the first camp, you can bet a ton of them are in the second

@whitequark wait wait I just remembered I made this a few years ago

Mouth Biohacking

I'm not one to shy away from random things I find on the internet, so when I came across the Scott Alexander article on a discovery in the 80s about people who don't get cavities, my first thought was "how far is Honduras from Houston?" So on February 28th, my friend Rene and I became the 50th and 51st people to get our normal mouth bacteria scrubbed away and hopefully replaced by a genetically modified strain of…

https://ma.tt/2024/05/mouth-biohacking/

“Dream Scenario” fell flat for me on every level: comedy, metaphysics, metaphor, social satire — there wasn’t a trace of energy or inventiveness in the whole 90 minutes. I would have had a thousand times more fun rewatching “Nightmare on Elm Street” or “Being John Malkovich.”

@whitequark IEEE 754.00000000004

please tell me the most obscure joke you know

(feel free to explain or not explain it, depending on what you find more amusing to think of me reading it)

@ljrk @whitequark The. B in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stands for Benoit B. Mandelbrot

@whitequark@mastodon.social
Q: Why does a desktop computer eventually arc over and blow up after a few years of Web browsing?

A: Too much tracking.