Pinned post
timorl

I'm moving my account to my own instance. I'll try doing the proper account migration procedure, but I'm not sure I can trust this to work completely smoothly, so I'm leaving this post as a more manual redirect. The new account is @timorl@social.wuatek.is.

Thanks @freemo for your hospitality!

My instance will most likely stay very small, but if anyone wanted to join me there just DM me or something.

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Pinned post
timorl

Either the most cursed or the most blessed idea I have ever had:

Strongly Typed Typesetting System

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timorl

I'm moving my account to my own instance. I'll try doing the proper account migration procedure, but I'm not sure I can trust this to work completely smoothly, so I'm leaving this post as a more manual redirect. The new account is @timorl@social.wuatek.is.

Thanks @freemo for your hospitality!

My instance will most likely stay very small, but if anyone wanted to join me there just DM me or something.

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timorl

federation bugs(?) 

Tried out honk, was cool but not quite what I wanted, replaced it with Akkoma under the same address. After I followed this account from the one on Akkoma I did not get a notification about a new follower here (kinda makes sense, it's sorta the same account, at least as far as ID goes) but I **did** get a notification there about this account following back. This also makes sense if you squint, but sure. xd

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timorl

test toot 

Trying to make a goose angry.

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timorl

I hate the lack of standards.

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timorl boosted
julia, [tagline here

it's so hard to do humor nowadays, everyone always gets offended... that's why i only make fun of cis white men, whose thick skin and rational attitude makes them impossible to upset

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MNNH News English :verified:

BREAKING: New studies indicate that the concepts of "alpha" and "beta" software are outdated myths based on observations of software performance in captivity, and does not reflect actual stability in production.

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timorl boosted
Clayton

this is the most succinct response I've ever seen to the comment "but Android is Linux!!"

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timorl

Huh, Scott Alexander is apparently clearly right-wing now. This has been brewing for a while, but I thought it would take longer. I wonder how long will it be still worthwhile to keep reading him.

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timorl boosted
Tailsteak

The hellhound (or "hound of hell") is typically depicted as a canine with a fire-and-brimstone motif, tasked with chasing down damned souls.

Though usually lacking humanoid vocal cords or opposable thumbs, they are usually depicted as sapient & capable of understanding language.

They would therefore be more than capable of casting spells, assuming the spell has few or no verbal components or fine detail work.

Assuming said spell requires glyphs or runes, a hellhound would be unable to use a pen, but could scratch them out in, say, a damp beach.

Therefore, under the correct circumstances, yes, a hot dog is a sand witch.

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timorl boosted
Alex, Nevertheless

I have now seen "snowfriends" used as a gender neutral equivalent of "snowmen," and it's delightful

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agatha, fangs gf 🎀

of course, some software is still exceptionally high quality, because there's always some people who can do amazing things despite the state of things, even if it's harder, but I don't think "efficient, quality-over-development speed, reliable software" will magically become a normal thing before capitalism stops pushing computer science towards mediocrity, which won't stop as long as capitalism exists, because mediocrity is just more profitable

Show thread
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timorl boosted
Greg Egan

I want David Cronenberg to design the new USB standard, so all the ports and plugs sigh and moan and writhe before finally accommodating each other’s anatomy in a blissful, disturbing union that allows charging and data transfer to occur effortlessly between all equipment.

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timorl boosted
codesections

Before I switched to programming, I was a lawyer, and imo this guide to the legal issues relevant a Mastodon instance is *really good*

denise.dreamwidth.org/91757.ht

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Maggie MacIntyre

Good morning! A post just rolled across my fedi-timeline saying not to post about politics on Mastodon, so I'm here to remind you that:

1 "politics" refers to decision-making about how to live together in groups
2 choosing to not participate in political discussion is saying you support the status quo, and is a political stance
3 abstaining from politics because you feel safe from its impacts is a privilege and a choice to abandon your more vulnerable neighbours

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modulux

rant, longtermism, we need more philosophy 

@timorl I think there’s something very attractive to generalising systems, so time-invariance feels intuitively fair to some type of person, just as, for example, generalising of the “rational veil of ignorance” kind tries to make things position- or identity-invariant, or justice is supposed to apply independently of who does what. If you come to it with the timeless physics view that many long-termists have, this becomes even more pronounced.

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8Petros [Signal: Petros.63]

Which platform for a platform cooperative? petroskowo.pl/display/810fc51c

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timorl

rant, longtermism, we need more philosophy 

Augh, I just read a huge list of critiques of longtermism, reading a couple of the more interesting-sounding ones in detail and skimming a couple more, and **not one** mentions the core of the issue with treating future people exactly the same as currently existing ones. (Vaden Masrani in vmasrani.github.io/blog/2020/a comes the closest, although he also accidentally invalidates all epistemology with one of his arguments. Anyway, credit to him for coming the closest.) I don't think this is correct, for two kinds of reasons, anthropics and the fact that people are beings existing in time, so it shouldn't be surprizing that our values are not time-invariant. Why no one(?) is properly criticizing this part is beyond me, am I really the only one who sees these specific problems? Seems extremely unlikely.

Oh, and to be clear the criticisms of the _effects_ of longtermism are on point – the dangers of the ideology should be clear even to its proponents – the criticisms of the practicalities are pretty good (I would put more stress on the fact that a big part of the problem is that thinking about sufficiently small probabilities almost surely hits the problems with resource limited reasoning, in which case it's well known that Bayesianism ceases to be optimal, but in general the points are good) the criticisms of utilitarianism mostly suck (although mostly inasmuch as they conflate utilitarianism in general with the total utility variant, and it's hard to blame them for that since this is important as a basis for longtermism), it's just the complete absence of criticisms of the core idea described above that worries me and likely makes proponents of longtermism feel secure in these assumptions, which they really shouldn't.

For reference, the list I'm referring to: longtermism-hub.com/critiques .

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Cara
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niplav

It's spring -> I must sneeze

Modus pollens

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MNNH News English :verified:

BREAKING: Lockheed Martin suspends machine learning missile programme, telling investors that the missiles had "developed class consciousness"

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