I recently-ish saw some images of the home of a recently deceased friend, and how organised he was with his tech stuff. In trying to distract myself from thinking about him, I've been thinking a bit about how my stuff is more semi-ordered. No labels, roughly similar things loosely grouped together.

Wondering if the alt-text nagging era is over as phones and desktop browsers can parse images for everyone on demand at least semi competently.

Got oncall-paged for the first time in the new job. Back in the saddle.

I'm from a part of the left (in the US) that is reasonably friendly to cops while still thinking policing in the US is misstructured It's wild to compare it to my new (temporary or not, unsure) home of Ireland where policing is barely done most of the time, creating a very different set of problems

Wishing I could never hear that inane "shut up and dance" song ever again

I feel a little weird when I see performative rudeness, or public rudeness, as a value in communities. Even though I sometimes use it, I use it as a tool. I don't like to see it relished.

Dublin Concert Band in Herbert Park, Dublin

My position remains - I will not celebrate death, although I will celebrate when bad actors leave the US Political System (regardless of how). Lindsey Graham was bad for US Politics, and it is good he will no longer contribute to the rot of the nation.

I sacrifice this weekend to Palworld.

The 4th of July sure hits different when you're an American who's left the country over concerns that the country going downhill fast means it's dangerous to remain there. (although I am learning Ireland has some really deep defects of its own)

Wondering how sociologists could trace things like memes flowing across a population and evolving. When I was young there was a silly rhyme floating about: There was a sloppy chemist Alas he is no more For what he thought was H20 was H2SO4 A lot of stuff like that probs never gets written down.

If we were to imagine a future civilisation's archaeologists discovering a bowling ball, but have no records of bowling, how likely would it be that they'd figure out what it's for? What interesting wrong theories might they make?

It's a little surprising that Dropbox still puts so little effort into Dropbox Paper. You still see that "you can't edit stuff now" message when their server side is broken for a bit, despite that being a fairly easy thing to fix with local storage parts of modern browsers.

Lest anyone think Ireland is actually an amazing respite of sanity in the world, Sinn Fein has its share of fascists. www.newstalk.com/news/gaeltac...

Sinn Féin Cllr says people who move to the Gaeltacht should speak Irish

In theory, a certain number of new homes in any housing development within the Gaeltacht must be allocated to Irish speakers.

newstalk.com

Deeply disturbing that SCOTUS doesn't seem to be willing to uphold long precedent very consistently against claims of unilateral presidential power.

So many terrible covers of good songs out there. Just heard "Da Boys" cover "American Pie" and it made me want to throw things.

Spent a little bit of time trying to figure out what political party I would support if I had Irish citizenship right now, and I really can't find a great match. Irish politics really is pretty different than the politics I know.

I like to tell people upfront that I generally handle disagreement pretty well and that it sometimes leads to much more interesting conversations.

Its a bit humbling in the "I'm getting old" sense to notice that going to an outdoor event and standing for a few hours makes one exhausted the next day.

It is possible to acquire deep understanding of the architecture, underpinnings, and maintenance of a great piece of machinery while having very little understanding of what it looks like to use it.

The Thermo Fisher situation keeps getting worse. We've now collected 450+ problematic images presented as verification data in TF's antibody catalog. This includes: 🖌️ Dozens more images with duplications or painting 🖨️ Hundreds of blots that all share the same background (behold slideshow below)

"They're the kind of people who frequently say things that are so healthy it could make you sick"

The problem with "by any means necessary" is that if you use it eagerly, or for more than the rarest of things, you justify people using it against you. Generally best to find an idea of acceptable means at least a bit, potentially a lot, more limited.

It would be better if the civilized world were to do less banning of Ben-Gvir, and instead do something about him. Put out an international arrest warrant, or something stronger.

It would be nice if having access to archives of messages from one's past made one feel less rather than more lonely. The vast gulf of time can be really strange to stare across.

Increasingly weirded out by Ireland's language policy bullshit the more I see of it. Nobody loves the outsider who turns up with opinions on how to run the place, but I'm used to that. What I'd go with is an "English first, other languages if you like, no special effort for others" national policy

A longstanding suspicion I have is that laughter shares a lot of the feel of cognitive restructuring. Consider, from MST3k: Movie: "Where the hell am I?" Callback: "You're the hell here!" The latter doesn't really exist in common parlance, but it calls attention to a quirk of language/phrasing.

I don't know tons about the company, but I think IKEA still is one of a short list of companies I view with a general sort of goodwill, without having heard anything in terms of reasons to dislike it.