Thread by @colmmacc: “Have you ever needed to generate a random number in code? whether it’s for rolling a dice, or shuffling a set, this tweet thread is here for […]” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1012719876706840578.html

How to Live in a Dystopian Fiction https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/28/how-to-live-in-a-dystopian-fiction/

The Government Campaign to Get Rid of Singapore’s Unofficial Language - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/singlish-singapore-government-campaign

Tempest 4000 comes to consoles next month - Polygon https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/28/17513074/tempest-4000-launch-date-ps4-xbox-one

Chelsea Manning traces her political roots back to rave | The Outline https://theoutline.com/post/4991/chelsea-manning-traces-her-political-roots-back-to-rave

An oral history of Babylon 5: The beloved TV novel that showed a different way to tell sci-fi http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/an-oral-history-of-babylon-5-the-beloved-tv-novel-that-showed-a-different-way-to-tell-sci

Non-Performing Band Members: From Coldplay to The Grateful Dead https://tedium.co/2018/06/28/non-performing-band-members-coldplay-grateful-dead/

How People Used to Download Games From the Radio | Kotaku UK http://www.kotaku.co.uk/2014/10/13/people-used-download-games-radio

Software only becomes ‘enterprise grade’ if, when its behavior is described to an outsider flatly and precisely, the outsider assumes the description is some kind of elaborate joke.

Javascript is a just-OK language saddled with the world’s worst graphics toolkit: three distinct languages, each with specs so large that nobody has written a new implementation in 20 years, for live-editing a rich tech document to make it resemble a canvas, in ways that are not portable between the 3 implementations or minor revisions of the same implementation.

Revolutionary ideas always are masked as a return to older ideas or appeal to common sense ONLY because they can’t be expressed without the intellectual groundwork that makes them seem inevitable once fully comprehended.

Whoever decided to nae a government agency after a thing that sets your head on fire if you forget your password too many times should also be too self-aware to think having one of these is a good idea.

The Quietus | Opinion | The Quietus Essay | How Did A Major Label Manage To Lose A John Coltrane Record? http://thequietus.com/articles/24852-john-coltrane-both-directions-at-once-the-lost-album-ted-gioia

Onegai Twins is like if David Lynch tried really hard to make an unremarkable harem anime. Everything is just slightly off about it, but not in ways that can be easily articulated.

The new Suspiria, based on the trailer, appears to include Varelli, which may mean that they will try to pack 3 movies worth of story in. This may leave no time for a blind man to have his throat ripped out by his own seeing-eye dog :(

To distribute or not to distribute? Why licensing bugs matter | the morning paper https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/06/25/to-distribute-or-not-to-distribute-why-licensing-bugs-matter/

Hot take: the more powerful you are, the harder people under you will work to save you from your bad choices, & the harder they’ll avoid actually addressing those problems. A perfect storm for inflated confidence: your continued success is owed to the people covering your ass, but you attribute it even more to yourself.

Sail to Savusavu, Fiji | https://wiki.xxiivv.com/fiji

I’m not used to a second match in a tournament already being a ‘do or die’ match. Go #Germany! #GERvsSWE #WorldCup2018

Woke up prior to 7am without alarm. On a weekend. Something must be totally wrong.

Oh hey: https://worldbrain.helprace.com/i62-feature-memex-links-highlight-any-text-and-create-a-link-to-it

hot take: to respond to a post without first reading all other responses is impolite. spend the small mental effort to assimilate other people’s reactions before spending the larger effort of having your own, or expect OP to be angry with you

Thread by @Nick_Hanover: “more and more people are bringing up the Gilded Age lately so it’s probably important to remember how laborers gained victories back then be […]” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1009574091865690115.html

Ecological “law” turns out to just be the result of us fishing | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/ecological-law-turns-out-to-just-be-the-result-of-us-fishing/

Periodic reminder that the state exists at the pleasure of the people who compose it, and should be dissolved when it ceases to benefit them. This means all of us, not just politicians or billionaires.

Rob Martin - Teaching functional programming to noobs (Lambda Days 2016) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmFKEewRRQg

periodic reminder that weapons in of themselves don’t have a moral valence & we should think materially about whether or not their use is appropriate to our goals, instead of vaguely about accidental associations. this includes social/memetic weaponry like protest techniques

life hex: leash-training your dog can be a pain. Instead, make an effigy of your dog, and wrap around it twine made from his own hair, while chanting ‘I bind you to this image’. Pop the poppet in your pocket and off you go

life hex: sick of dating sites? Instead of trusting a pickup artist, trust Furfur, Earl of Hell. Just remember to put him inside a magic triangle before asking him for relationship advice

A Gentle Intro to PLT https://mpc.sh/blog/a-gentle-intro-to-plt/

x86 assembly doesn’t have to be scary (interactive) https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/interactive-x86-bootloader-tutorial

Why I Taught My Son to Speak Russian | The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/why-did-i-teach-my-son-to-speak-russian

Hot take: ‘truth sandwich’ is a terrible name because sandwiches are named after what’s on the inside of them instead of what’s on the outside. Instead, call it ‘stuffed truth’, by analogy to ‘stuffed bread’.

Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser | Don Hopkins http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/102

Fibonacci Hashing: The Optimization that the World Forgot (or: a Better Alternative to Integer Modulo) | Probably Dance https://probablydance.com/2018/06/16/fibonacci-hashing-the-optimization-that-the-world-forgot-or-a-better-alternative-to-integer-modulo/

Attention knitters: (n) the ad-tech people who make sure your recommended youtube videos smoothly transition from lets-plays to people who are very angry that the lizard people refuse to inflate the flat earth with ghosts

Bad idea of the day: Use ssb to coordinate pinning of ipfs objects

How to Make Perfect Lemon Curd in the Microwave https://skillet.lifehacker.com/how-to-make-perfect-lemon-curd-in-the-microwave-1826812427

I’m starting to think I should post an explanation of my crossposting/linking toolchain. It’s so straightforward that I didn’t think it required explanation, but other people are doing equivalents with webapps?

Is there a prolog implementation that JIT-compiles with LLVM? In particular, something that emits a subset of LLVM bytecode that corresponds to the WAM or BAM?

Bad idea of the day: Scroll back through GUI input events & application states like you scroll back through shell history; inject conditionals and loops; use speculative execution of applications to show projected state from these changes.

Hot take: it’s a good thing that genre films & genre literature aren’t taken seriously by the mainstream, because things that are taken seriously aren’t allowed to be interesting/experimental/meaningful. (See: Star Wars, & associated drama)

Bad idea of the day: A small dedicated machine (like a chumby, maybe based on the raspberry pi) that ships with ipfs & ssb/patchwork, casts from ipfs or peertube to TVs.

My Approach to Getting Dramatically Better as a Programmer – malisper.me http://malisper.me/my-approach-to-getting-dramatically-better-as-a-programmer/

Cursed ontologies in forbidden orthographies. Special tools are required to handle them safely: wands, swords, cups, pantacles – all important safety equipment in any conceptual laboratory environment.

Why it’s so hard to develop the right material for brain implants - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/30/17408852/brain-implant-materials-neuroscience-health-chris-bettinger

Return the pop-culture idea of the MIB to where it was in the mid-60s: tall, pale, completely hairless, wearing bright red lipstick, and with bulging eyes and a robotic, monotone vocal cadence.

A Beginner’s Guide to Coding Graphics Shaders https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/a-beginners-guide-to-coding-graphics-shaders–cms-23313

Survivorship bias spicy take: if someone is successful enough to be notable for their success, they are rare enough that no lessons from their experience apply generally enough to make someone else successful beyond the 50% mark.

can you explain to some degree why SPARC chips run… - kremlin_t http://kremlin.enterprises/post/142778524020/can-you-explain-to-some-degree-why-sparc-chips-run

Hot take: it’s important to distinguish ‘junk food media’ (i.e., stuff that, regardless of technical competence, will succeed by delivering on purience) from ‘premium media’ (works whose popularity depends on craftsmanship). The former is more important for the progress of art, because polish runs counter to experimentation.

QOTD: “Criticism and negativity alone still secrete a phantom of the reality of power. If they become weak[…] power has no recourse but to artificially revive and hallucinate them.”

Finance has its own term for ‘skin in the game’: ‘insider trading’. It’s also a legal term, because people very occasionally go to jail for being too obvious when they do it.

Bad idea of the day: treating asemic combinations of dictionary words as an aesthetic to be appropriated by commerce, and appropriating it with commerce, thus making attempts to identify dictionary-based chaffing techniques lossier

Bad idea of the day: creating ads that target asemic combinations of dictionary words order to identify people who use dictionary-based chaffing techniques

Bad idea of the day: creating ads that target things that are in dictionaries but could never be sold in order to identify people who use dictionary-based chaffing techniques

Bad idea of the day: running a script that speaks random words aloud all day while you leave your phone at home, in order to chaff your audio-surveillance-based ad targeting

The cyberpunk aesthetic, moreso than mere future noir, is the future as seen through the eyes of Sir Clive Sinclair: sleek but broken, and dominated by posturing. It’s a beveled black hermetically-sealed shell cracked open to fix manufacturing & design flaws, alligator-clipped wire spilling out, but no fix will prevent it from frying your brain if you look at it funny.

My #xmpp #twtxt bot moved to a new repository: https://salsa.debian.org/mdosch-guest/goxtxt

ARM Holdings History: From Acorn to Giant Tree https://tedium.co/2018/06/07/acorn-arm-holdings-history/

Why Foley Artists Use Cabbage and Celery to Create Hollywood’s Distinctive Sounds - Gastro Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-are-film-sound-effects-made

Fuck, Land doesn’t seem to get that any major anomoly would be signal AF & therefore, hiding it behind redundancy is a bug in any information-theoretic channel

TIL that Jaron Lanier is to blame for Second Life’s shitty/dysfunctional internal Linden economy

An Engineer’s Guide to the Docuverse “ Rococo Modem Basilisk ” Medium https://medium.com/@/an-engineers-guide-to-the-docuverse-d080cdbb73a6

Against trendism: ipfs://QmQDqrz8Asn3wPbiTHFH9pyAXPNxwbeytJgzWUHF1PZup2 / http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmQDqrz8Asn3wPbiTHFH9pyAXPNxwbeytJgzWUHF1PZup2 / gopher://fuckup.solutions/1enkiv2/medium-backup/2018-04-01_Against-trendism–how-to-defang-the-social-media-disinformation-complex-81a8e2635956.txt / https://medium.com/@/against-trendism-how-to-defang-the-social-media-disinformation-complex-81a8e2635956

People who have been to Japan: what kind of food (if any) is served in/around japanese video arcades? Does american arcade fare like curly fries or nachos exist? Is it japanese-style junk food like takoyaki? One-handed/clean stuff like stuffed mochi, rice balls, meat buns, stuffed bread?

It’s not unusual that John MacAffee is planning to run for president. It’s sort of unusual that we now have precedent for joke candidates actually winning. Imagine President MacAffee. Imagine him filling the oval office with literal piles of cocaine.

How do elites manage to hijack voters’ ideas of themselves? | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/how-do-elites-manage-to-hijack-voters-ideas-of-themselves

Returning to the Original Social Network https://begriffs.com/posts/2016-07-08-returning-original-social-network.html

FLCL - “It’s Okay To Feel Stupid” - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ncZQkRZ-kQ

Have you tried documenting the problem so that future implementations need to reproduce it?

git ssb - noffle/from-github-to-git-ssb@master https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bGvXQApSXqOBwc%3D.sha256

Have you tried pretending not to care about the problem in order to gain social currency among people who believe that the outgroup only pretends to care about the problem in order to gain social currency?

Have you tried only pretending to care about the problem in order to gain social currency?

Have you tried accusing the outgroup of only pretending to care about the problem in order to gain social currency?

Have you tried claiming that a recent failure to solve the problem marks the end of all possible progress on or debate about the problem?

Have you tried claiming that all solutions to the problem are worse than the problem?

Have you tried accusing the outgroup of using the problem to introduce a solution that is worse than the problem?

Have you tried accusing the outgroup of believing the problem to be a problem? Have you tried accusing the outgroup of believing the problem not to be a problem?

Have you tried using markov chain monte carlo to perform a weighted random walk of solution space?

Have you tried accusing the outgroup of trying to prevent the ingroup from solving the problem?

Have you tried accusing the outgroup of trying to solve the problem? Have you tried accusing the outgroup of failing to solve the problem? Have you tried accusing the outgroup of successfully solving the problem?

Have you tried switching to manual?

Have you tried making sure the problem is not actually a solution to another problem, so that they could solve each other? For instance, is the problem edible?

Bad idea of the day: A parody of The Haunting of Hill House called The Haunting of White House, from the perspective of a scatterbrained narcissist who is influenced by the angry ghosts of the dead to join the government.

@freemor@freemor.homelinux.net Somehow my #txtnish also always falls back to non-TLS URL for you 🤔

In case you wanted to know how to implement classes & objects in Postscript: http://donhopkins.com/home/monterey86.pdf

When I say ‘luckily software has nothing to do with business’, what I mean is that software is uniquely positioned, compared to all other engineering, to be free of economies of scale: it is cheap to develop and has near zero cost of reproduction.

This Man Committed Paradise Lost to Memory for Mental Exercise http://nautil.us/blog/-this-man-memorized-a-60000_word-poem-using-deep-encoding

Writing long, overly complex, & logically flawed apologia of bad mainstream ideas in order to recast them as revolutionary is a growth industry. (See the ‘intellectual dark web’, whose major unifying trait is boringly normie positions.) Why not reach for a surreal or absurd take?

Bad idea of the day: Put the ‘hyper’ modifier key back on the keyboard, but you hold it while typing to create hyperlinks, press it while clicking to open a hyperlink

Plaques of Future Past: Eccentric Stone Monuments to Anti-Gravity Research - 99% Invisible https://99percentinvisible.org/article/plaques-future-past-eccentric-stone-monuments-anti-gravity-research/

Bad idea of the day: As soon as a topic is identified to be trending, hide all conversation about it from anyone not already in the thread. Keep it hidden for 24 hours.

A new fast hash table in response to Google’s new fast hash table | Probably Dance https://probablydance.com/2018/05/28/a-new-fast-hash-table-in-response-to-googles-new-fast-hash-table/

The easiest path to GDPR compliance: switch to a completely static website with no javascript, CGI, or CSS, and rotate the logs daily.

Hot take: anybody who understands markets isn’t going to be a free-market purist. A market is a piece of social machinery with particular environmental requirements under which it works, & those requirements are rare.

samim - Thoughts on Botnets and CreativityToday, Botnets impact almost every aspect of human life. Promoting products, providing… https://samim.io/p/2018-04-23-the-solution-to-exploding-fake-news-and-spam-botnets-ca/

https://medium.com/@thegrugq/meme-game-on-fleek-yeah-nah-4ce777ba059a (related to https://medium.com/p/how-to-fail-at-culture-jamming-7b409abf5db5 )

It’s interesting to think about how habitual migration patterns break the close association between culture and geography. There’s a psychogeographic wormhole between Fairfield County, CT and south Florida, & used to be one between there & upstate NY.

We spend an enormous amount of time and effort teaching children about animals – even ones that only exist far away (like tigers and elephants and giraffes) or that have been extinct for tens to hundreds of millions of years.