Virginia Roberts

AGAIN tho‽

But SUPERMOON!!!

I keep hearing UK podcasters use the verb “fêted,” which they pronounce weird over here. (Like the last é in “résumé,” not like essentially “fetid” which is how I thought one was meant to say it.) Anyway. I’d like to be fêted. Why is no one fêting me? Fête away, please. I ought to also be fêted.

@profgalloway.com keep wanting to surface www.instagram.com/emilysundberg to you and now I have a succinct link to do so: www.gq.com/story/what-e...

She also runs a viral business and culture newsletter (FeedMe on Substack) and has sort of monetised a certain kind of hotness. Take note Scott! 👀

@marcoarment.bsky.social you're possibly the wrong person to ask (bc age/tech job culture/lack of cranky older coder coworkers haha) but maybe you can weigh in or poll your audience - my spidey sense says there was/still is a camp of devs who think tab for syntax completion = not real coding. 🤷‍♀️

Dev question: my sense (as a non-dev working in dev-adjacent jobs for ~20 years ) is that most devs have used syntax completion in popular IDEs for ages. Was there an initial pushback to this from "old school" coders who felt like it was cheating, à la writing an LLM essay? Is there still pushback?

Does the UK (or any other nation, really) have anything akin to the Pentagon Pizza Index? Just curious. 😂

@gruber.foo Fond-ish memories of programming super basic (heh) games for Commodore 64 with my dad as a kid. One was called "Count the Hearts." Guess what the objective was? 😂

Also got into eeeearly chatrooms called QLink, blew my ~8yo mind at the time even though it was also tremendously boring.

Wistfully longing for the days when internet fun was like Caturday, or yahoo answers about how girl get pragnent, or badger badger badger badger mushroom mushroom, or the Harlem Shake, or the llamas and The Dress, or sea shanties, and not motherfucking Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Tung Sahur

As much as I sometimes fret over what good ole Bill would say about the mass-produced printed-in-China wares we can buy with his name on them today, we do have an official William Morris cat bed 😂 (I'll leave @gkr.bsky.social to send pics of them being cute in it someday)

That stickley (?) chair too!!!

The more I learn about William Morris and his gang during the Arts and Crafts movement, the more I regret buying the £17 Morris & Co Strawberry Thief oven mitt sold by John Lewis and definitively printed with the digitally represented design en masse in a Chinese factory 🤦🏼‍♀️ dude would be SO offended

Sometimes religion has its priorities right.

(To be fair, I work in tech and end up evangelising AI a lot; I think there are tons of actually valid use cases, including for generative AI, once the issues around climate impact are more urgently addressed. This “human or computer?” question is still an appropriate lens on the issue!!!!)

One of the reasons this doesn’t yet have the stigma that it should is that overwhelmingly the question is being framed as “Wouldn’t it be interesting if a computer could make XYZ” instead of “Do you want XYZ to be made by a computer instead of a person”

My biggest petty sadness in the great Bluesky migration is that I can't find my buddy Ralph when I want to gab about Apple Watch bullshit. Hey man, you still out there? Talk to me about that Hermès metal band!*

*Others are also allowed and encouraged to talk to me about that Hermès metal band.

As a kid and teen I got by on Carnation Instant Breakfast packets mixed with milk. We had a special Tupperware that was like coffee cup sized with a rubber lid so you could shake it to mix without dirtying an entire blender

Tbh, this was me too before I had kids; only bothering to already make them shit that is protein heavy and healthy ( = dishes already getting dirty, what’s one more egg cracked into the pan/one line higher on the blender I still gotta wash) really got me prioritising breakfast for myself bc ADHD

all the Limes are (all the Limes are down) and the sky is grey

Just made a scammer burst into laughter by shaming him for his stupid technobabble and then tried to guilt him into not scamming too many people right at Christmas . Uhhhh am I doing this right

the ninja turtles have elected a new mayor

Reminder that they/them-ing me is misgendering, and we can all tell when you’re doing it specifically to de-gender a trans woman. Don’t give me this “default pronoun” bullshit.

Ah shit, this is a great explainer. I don't think I've heard anyone do it in the UK where I now live (bc the transphobia is more surface here! Thanks JKR!), but I bet it's insidious among US cis tech bros to push back against workplace inclusivity without explicitly committing a fireable offence. 🤔

@marcoarment.bsky.social Hi hi, feature request - you've already made the thing I most needed (automatic "all episodes" playlist) but I'd also love an automatic playlist that's just 10-ish "recently added" eps. I often add one-offs that someone links to me, but I don't find them easily if older. ✨

I'm so sad that I missed this before actual American Thanksgiving, but still relevant for all the UK folks gearing up for Christmas. Weirdly, I'm gonna share this on LinkedIn too 😂

For those going home to visit family this weekend:

• Samsung calls it Auto Motion Plus
• LG calls it TruMotion
• Sony calls it Motionflow
• Roku calls it Action Smoothing
• Google TV calls it Motion Enhancement
• Vizio calls it Smooth Motion Effect.

Hah, not yet alas - for the second year in around my UK employer held its Christmas holiday party on American Thanksgiving so instead I’m mildly hung over, haha. Turkey this weekend with neighbours!

Have an amazing time getting to meet the whole crew, that’s always invigorating even if it’s tiring

(I struggled with this more in Germany than in Poland bc the internet infrastructure there is pretty poor compared to US/UK; Poland was better.) have fun! ✨ I’ve only been to Poznan but it was surprisingly rad even though I was just there for work without any tourism time.

Also, the model that powers translation apps a) does its processing on the cloud so won’t work when not connected to WiFi or mobile, and b) still drains your battery if you’re using a lot, so try and pack a power pack and/or cable that you can carry around with you esp if phone is older.

Colder than you may think!