Ben Pfaff

@benpfaff.bsky.social

Co-founder and developer at feldera.com. GNU and former Debian developer. RenFaire enthusiast. He/him.

USPS allows me to provide an online signature allowing them to deliver packages to me without a physical signature for an entire year, but I have to log in to Informed Delivery again after just an hour or two. How does this make sense.

I gave up and called the Waste Management Oakland phone number again and got a human who could help me--if I emailed in a copy of the grant deed. I did, but she says that their email server is slow, so she'll call me back (she claims) when it finally arrives.

So apparently with USPS Informed Delivery, if you move from one address to another, you have to create a new account with a new username for the new place you live. Bizarre.

Governor Newsom has announced that California will be imposing a 100% tax on any payments that are received from the orange felon’s criminal pay off slush fund. That’s my Governor. 💙👊

The employees of this RenFest are wearing shirts that say "I've Been Kighted—Golden Goblin Productions". I had a conversation: Me: Is that an inside joke? Them: yeah Me: So what does "kighted" mean? Them: what? Me: It says "kighted", what does that mean? Them: it's a typo, we're goblins

I'm pretty sure that a regular pthreads program can pthread_exit() the initial thread and the others will carry on, but Rust terminates the whole program when the initial thread exits. The latter behavior feels kind of odd to me.

my genuine advice for using Rust effectively is very close to the joke of "doctor, it hurts when i do this!" "well stop doing that!" 90% of the time the thing you're losing (like being able to easily throw together a doubly linked list implementation) wasn't worth that much anyways.

John McWhorter's NYT article today says: > The “s” in “island” was added because the Latin word was “insula” I didn't realize that the words "island" and "peninsula" were related, but now it seems evident that the "pen" prefix must be the same one in "penultimate". It's almost an island!

CS papers used to be printed for publication and collected proceedings were given to conference-goers and mailed to subscribers. This is hardly the case anymore. The 2-column PDF-based format for papers assumes this usage, and it's relatively hard to read on a screen. It's overdue for replacement.

my conspiracy theory is wall street is doing everything it can to keep everything from collapsing until dems take the house and senate so they can blame the implosion on them

What if all these "orbiting data center" proposals are really elaborate tax and fraud havens? Who collects taxes on revenues that are collected 1000 miles above international waters? Who prosecutes Ponzi schemes that are perpetrated there?