For a while, I was subscribed as a patron to Elisabeth Bik’s Patroeon. She’s a microbiologist turned “Science Integrity Specialist” which means she investigates and exposes scientific fraud. Despite doing work that’s essential to science, she has struggled to get funding because there’s a weird stigma around what she does; It’s not uncommon to hear scientists speak of people like her negatively, because they perceive anti-fraud work as being harmful to public trust in science (which is obviously absurd, because surely recognising that auditing the integrity of research is necessary for building and maintaining trust in science).

Anyway, I mention this because it’s one of the most dystopian things I’ve directly experienced in recent years. A lot of scientists and other academics I know are struggling financially, even though they’re better funded than she is, so I can imagine that it’s even worse for her. How fucked up is it for scientific researchers to have to rely on patrons like me (especially when people like me are also struggling with rising living costs).

I was talking about this recently with someone (read: ranting as they nodded sympathetically) and I finished up by saying “what’s the point of ‘smart’ tech if the humans who use it are steadily disempowered and ultimately, made less smart?”

I’ve recently been dabbling in HomeAssistant and learning how to set things up properly feels like it’s been making me more smart.

I have a random question, if you would indulge my curiosity: why do you use ‘þ’ in place of ‘th’? It’s rare that I see people using thorn in a modern context, and I was wondering why you would go to the effort?

(þis question brought to you by me reflecting on your use of þorn, and specifically how my initial instinctual response was to be irked because it makes þings harder to read (as someone who isn’t used to seeing ‘þ’). However, I quickly realised þat being challenged in þis way is one of þe þings I value about conversations on þis platform, and I decided þat being curious would be much more fun and interesting than being needlessly irritable (as it appears some oþers opt to be, given how I sometimes see unobjectionable comments of yours gaþer inexplicable downvotes. I have written þis postscriptum using “þ” because I þought it would be an amusing way to demonstrate þe good-faiþedness of my question, as I’m sure you get asked þis a lot))

Do you have a link? Because if you tell me you found it but don’t tell me where, then that may put you at risk of being in the same ring of hell as people who comment “nvm, solved it” to their tech forum posts.

This isn’t useful to me at the moment, but nonetheless, I really appreciate when people like you take the time to share knowledge in this way.

There is a special place in heaven for the people who do this, just as there’s a special place in hell for people who reply to their own forum post about a complex technical problem.

(Side note: I tried the find the xkcd where he is yelling at his computer after finding a forum post from someone who has the exact same computer problem as he does, but the original poster hasn’t updated it. Alas, I couldn’t. If anyone knows which one I mean, I’d appreciate you pointing me to it, because it’ll drive me mad until I remember how to find it)

I don’t find the latency with Bluetooth headphones to be a problem if I’m just watching videos, but it’s super jarring if I’m doing something like gaming.

It’s interesting because my current headphones (Steel series Arctic Nova Pro Wireless) can connect via Bluetooth, or wirelessly to a little dock thing that’s plugged into my PC (just a more complex dongle that has few settings on it, and a battery charger). This means that I can easily compare the Bluetooth latency to the dock’s latency, and it’s interesting to see the difference. I haven’t compared wired latency to the dock-wireless, but certainly I haven’t noticed any problems with the dock-wireless

A weird thing about these headphones is that the Bluetooth and the dock-wireless seem to work on different channels, because I can be connected to my phone’s audio by Bluetooth, and to my PC’s audio via the dock. I discovered this randomly after like a year of owning the headphones.

They were quite expensive, but I rather like them, and would recommend them to someone who wants a “jack of all trades” pair of headphones. They were plug and play with Linux, which is a big part of why I got them.

This is supremely silly. I will never use it, but I’m glad that it exists; you’re delightful

I installed Linux on a friend’s old laptop in an attempt to wring a few more years out of it, and they told me that they were surprised at how easy to use it was. I think most people just struggle with feeling intimidated. There is a bit of a learning curve, but the main obstacle is getting over that initial inertia

Mass surveillance was definitely okay with them though, as long as they could hide behind flimsy plausible deniability; I remember one of the early 972mag pieces about this that called bullshit on their claim that they have no knowledge that they are supporting mass surveillance — if military/intelligence services come to you and say “hey, we need servers to store terabytes of audio files”, then it’s bloody obvious what the point

“Seriously people, if you’re a dev learn and get good at code reviewing”

It’s a useful skill, even outside of the context of cleaning up AI code. It seems to be universally the case that it’s easier to write code than it is to read it (which is why I sometimes find myself so baffled at my own code that I end up rewriting it again from scratch (good comments are a gift to future-You)).

I’ve been trying to get into contributing to open-source code recently, and it’s been a useful exercise in learning to understand other people’s code. It’s also been making me a more skilled programmer, because reading lots of code helps me to understand how things are typically done in a way that textbook learning can’t. It’s been especially useful to understand how large code projects are structured, given that most of my experience in writing code that’s used by other people has been in smaller, ad-hoc scientific contexts (e.g. writing a script that adds hydrogens onto the protein structures found in the protein database — by default, they’re not included, because it depends on the pH of the environment the protein exists in)

I sort of like that on my ThinkPad though. It reminds me of the defiance shown in liberating the laptop from its grim past life.

I respect this.

I recently used Jekyll (https://jekyllrb.com/) as a static site generator. I found it easy to use. I personally used Gitlab pages, because I didn’t feel confident hosting on my home internet (didn’t want to inadvertently cause issues for my housemates when I’m still learning this stuff).

The nice thing about static sites is that it’s pretty easy to find free or extremely cheap hosting for them.

Why do you care? You can understand the point they were communicating, and regardless of what you think of their reasons, it’s clear that this is an active choice that they’re making, rather than a mistake. If it bothers you, why engage at all?

I didn’t finish this article because I’m procrastinating before a minor deadline, but I read enough to realise that my prior bias against no-code software was excessively strong and largely based in gatekeepy ideals; I am a weirdo who loves to tinker, and I earnestly believe that many of the people who don’t consider themselves techy could find joy in this path if not for platform capitalism, bullshit laws around software, and IT education that creates a class of obedient users.

However, it’s unrealistic to hope that it’s possible to “convert” everyone to this path, or even the majority of people. It’s useful to remind myself that my goal of facilitating more tinkerers and builders in the world is that I think that’s a route towards greater empowerment and freedom in interfacing with our tech-heavy world, and that the template that feels most natural to me is not the only route to tech empowerment

Ooh, I like the typeface used for headings on this site

I remember way back when I was still intimidated by the command line, I was having issues with a video, and the only info I could find was on using ffmpeg to do some conversions directly. I laugh at the memory of me being nonplussed at trying to launch ffmpeg and expecting a GUI to pop up.

I am glad that I spent some time getting to know ffmpeg directly. There’s been a few times where knowing that it was ffmpeg under the hood helped me.

Whilst I understand the sentiment, I gotta respect someone who is unashamedly embracing their id and chasing that dopamine rush

I bought this game on a whim after reading that the devs had said they’d rather people pirate it than have it spoiled for them. I don’t usually buy games full price, so this was a rare thing for me, but I have no regrets; it was one of my favourite games of that year.

I just love how ripe for thematic analysis it is. For example, I’m a woman who has read a bunch of feminist and queer theory, and some of my interpretations of the themes were drastically different to a friend’s. I found it really cool that I didn’t necessarily disagree with their takes, nor they mine, but we both resonated with the game is strong but different ways