Unit-test tautology: it has no opinion about if the code under test is "right", it just tests that the code does what the code does. Now you have two things you have to change when you want to change it.

`git submodule` is terrible and no one should use it As with many things git, it may be possible to build a reasonable flow around this thing with horrible user interface and horrible user experience traps but I'd probably rather have `git checkout repo@version` in my Makefile

Randomly craving a disco-ball finish Dalek

my premature optimization craving is bugged by storing a "uuid" as 36 bytes of text instead of 16 bytes

Shame on @match.com for sending me two dozen emails without confirming that the email was intended (no, one of five guys on the net signed up and doesn't know that he doesn't have my fullname at Gmail )

Proportional Representation would be a great major reform to our Democracy www.pbs.org/newshour/sho...

Group urges Congress to adopt proportional representation to end redistricting battles

As high-profile battles over redistricting have become a fixture in political headlines, a group of scholars is sounding the alarm on the consequences of gerrymandering. In an open letter to Congress,...

pbs.org

TIL .zip files store file modification time in local time with 2 second resolution, 1980 to 2107 zip does not record _what timezone_ that local time is zip has extensions for NTFS and UNIX mtime in int32 seconds UTC, but Python stdlib ZipFile never uses these

There's a joke in software: What idiot wrote this bad code? Oh yeah, me six months ago. As an older, wiser, software engineer I can say: What idiot wrote this code? Me 20 years ago

But Forth Me ❤️ ?

Randall Munroe@xkcd.com · 7d ago

Forth xkcd.com/3277/

This is a great infographic about which Python versions are in active development, getting bug fixes, getting security patches only, or past end-of-life. Nobody should be on Python 3.9 anymore @developer.apple.com ಠ_ಠ [from www.python.org/downloads/ ]

Vibe coding seems bad, but we already have codebases full of code no one understands because it was written by departed employees.

Sir David Attenborough I go for groceries: "Here we have the modern nerd foraging for food" It gets weird when everyone can hear naturalist voice going into courtship and mating behaviours when I see someone pretty walk by

Nanoraptor@nanoraptor.danamania.com · 2w ago

You suddenly get a narrator describing your life and there’s no way to turn it off - everyone can hear it. While shopping, at work, at home, with friends - the voice narrating your every move goes on. Who do you hope is the voice of this narrator?

work-from-homies this is probably _just the thing_ for someone spending a lot of time in a small AC/heated room: a ERV window unit to bring filtered air in and stale air out while keeping the energy you put into heating/cooling the space. $800 for an early-access unit swervair.com

SWERV Window ERV | Ventilation Without Renovation

Breathe fresh filtered air without losing comfort. SWERV is a renter friendly window ERV that lowers CO2 and installs in minutes.

swervair.com

GOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAWAY

The Onion@theonion.com · 2w ago

Report: That’s Enough Soccer For Now https://theonion.com/report-thats-enough-soccer-for-now/

This weird art made my day better Now I'm seeing it as a mashup: Star Trek/Thomas the Train Engine

Emtcub@cumpigcub.bsky.social · 3w ago

Star Trek Forever

I half expect to watch the new Odyssey movie and then decide I like the Ada Palmer cover better

Wyoming, because they have too many Senators-per-person

jesse@jesseltaylor.bsky.social · 3w ago

Name the U.S. state you loathe the most, I don't care what the reason is unless it's like weird or bigoted

is there an award for puns and wordplay in journalism? but now I want to look up what spectrum is best for red-green color-blind data presentation

NPR@npr.org · 3w ago

Everyone knows that red means danger, but how did purple become a cautionary color? At an EPA conference in the late 1990s, attendees nearly came to blows over color coding on the Air Quality Index.

Corporations and capitalism have always made people into "reverse centaurs" (1) where the system tells us that we must do some thing. *And* sometimes this has been a rational treadeoff, *and* I would like a better system pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/r...

The global electronics market distortion (because of big money scrambling to become bigger money) is today making me sad because of Raspberry Pi prices and a tiny cheap computer is now not cheap

Billionaire conspiracy I just made up: they want 'Mars colony' tech to use here on Earth after ecology collapse

What are the economics of Space? We get 1. communications 2. imaging/sensing (maps, weather, spy stuff) 3. GPS 4. Science What's the annual budget for _all of that_ globally? $SPCX needs over 1000 launches a year to justify its P/E I'd bet it's overvalued

Half of the nerds: REALLY!? The other half: SHHHH

Joe G@eastendjoe.bsky.social · 3w ago

I must’ve been going to the wrong libraries all my life.

Ah, the fragility of gerontocracy, where a Senator can be 71 and then just get sick and die. Alas, my Senators are 77 and 80 and the 80 is currently running for another 6 years

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro OR The best thing since Vermin Supreme (New England's local weird costumed politico) www.npr.org/2026/07/10/n...

Count Binface: The intergalactic warrior who could upend Britain's strangest election

Meet Count Binface: the challenger from another planet taking on Nigel Farage as questions over the Reform UK leader's finances overshadow his election comeback.

npr.org

Servers get cranky when UTC has leap-seconds Solution: Switch to TAI "International Atomic Time" (French acronym) instead which never has leap seconds, and has a not-terrible lookup table for conversion to UTC for human presentation en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interna...

Five living writers, of whom you’ve read five books by each. Martha Wells NK Jemison Neal Stephenson Charles Stross Brandon Sanderson

Tim Pierce@unchi.org · 4w ago

Five living writers, of whom you’ve read five books by each. Stephen King Jonathan Lethem Susan Cooper Anne Tyler Martha Wells

Real NASA mission reads like Andy Weir book NASA built a smallish space robot in under a year that they launched from a plane-boosted rocket and it's flying up to a satellite to play tug boat and move it to a higher orbit science.nasa.gov/mission/swif...

Swift Boost Mission - NASA Science

NASA has awarded Katalyst Space a contract to raise the orbit of its Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

science.nasa.gov

Blacksky did it. Bluesky is still daydreaming about a perfect design

Blacksky Algorithms@blackskyweb.xyz · 4w ago

It’s here! Today, we’re announcing the launch of Blacksky-Only Posts! Now, anyone with a blacksky.app handle or anyone on the Blacksky feed can make a private post on blacksky.community. This marks a significant step forward in advancing permissioned data on the open social web.

"Our Bluescreen Means Death"