Dan Slimmon

ah, the joys of researching via old PPT files on the Wayback Machine

I'll vote for whichever politician promises to require all AI value-add offerings to be accompanied by a "Fuck off forever" button

Innovation is key, right? Everybody's gotta be innovating, right? Innovation is the engine of value, right?

Wrong. LABOR is the engine of value. Innovation is the engine of PROFIT

If you want to really succeed in #devops, you have to cultivate a strong personal mystique

But the very next day:

me: (furrows brow briefly, then smiles and nods to himself) This is what will happen.
prof: What? Why on Earth would you say that? No

Anyway, I just wanted to say, I'm ready to accept this about myself 💚

And the prof would look at me, look at the board, look back at me, and go, "No… the opposite of that will happens."

The prof would explain how to derive the correct answer from equations, and I'd look at the equations and nod, saying "I see. Yes. That makes sense." And it did make sense.

I'll never be able to read circuit diagrams, and I think I can finally be at peace with that.

I spent 4 years getting a physics degree. Every time a professor would draw even a simple circuit diagram on the blackboard I would squint at it briefly, then pronounce with authority "This will happen."

in response to the LIES

And that's why now 30 years later every oven comes with a shitty, pain-in-the-ass clock that can't be disabled 👍 Very cool mode of production

At some point in the 90s some appliance company executive had the idea to put digital clocks on all their ovens, because they knew their idiot customers would see their product next to the competitor's product and be like. "Ooh! This one has a clock!"

i am so tired of people wrapping up every useful innovation in coding or machine learning into "AI" as if Anthropic or OpenAI are related to the people who pioneered stuff we universally value.

We were just over here playing a little fun puzzle and the mathematicians slouch in like, "ohoho, but can we prove it in n dimensions? can we generalize to a real number of squares?" shutup nerd

What is it with fucking mathematicians. They always have to turn all the goddamn numbers into letters

When I die, I want to be buried in a tomb just like this, with a gigantic bust of Karl Marx on top

Look, I understand that if we want to "do things at scale" we need to "eliminate sources of toil" such as "managing services" and "running kubectl," then we need "kubernetes operators" that deploy "helm charts." However, to play devil's advocate: fuck off?

what the fuck is the value-add here? if i meant "terrifying" i would've written "terrifying"

The oldest hipster smirked, bemused. He pointed. "That one's green."

#colorblind #daltonism

I stepped toward them, and they kindly paused their game. Hazily, I spoke: "Excuse me but… I don't understand the rules of your game. WHY do you kick the pink balloons????? What rules are there?"

I watched those hipsters kick those balloons for what felt like an hour, but was probably only about 10 minutes. Finally, although I knew that it would be weird, I just had to know.

Could there be some obscure markings to distinguish the balloons? I scrutinized the latex contours. No. There were no markings.

Was it something to do with the surrounding conversation – kicking every time they heard the word "the"? No… the kitchen had emptied out now, but they were still kicking.

How I longed to enter the circle of understanding! To see the field of play as these brilliant tacticians were seeing it! I invented bizarre and ludicrous rule sets, but nothing made sense.

Often there would be false kicks. A hipster would dart toward a pink balloon, but draw back, reconsidering. From time to time, one of them would recoil in embarrassed disappointment, and all the hipsters would laugh.

Each hipster would stare fixedly at the 3 pink balloons on the kitchen floor. Occasionally, one player would kick one of the balloons. A flurry of further kicks would ensue, but not furious. Sometimes furious, but interspersed long periods of intense consideration.

I once got very stoned at a house party in college, and for what felt like an hour, I watched three hipsters play a hypnotic game of kick-the-ballon.

Apparently Thesaurus dot com and I have differing concepts of "659"

uh… if you say so!

How did we ever accept that 80 MHz of bandwidth around 2.4 GHz was an acceptable amount for like, almost all short range consumer radio applications? "Oh we'll just use frequency hopping" They have played us for absolute fools

me: (opening a book on podcasting)

book: It's really easy. You just have to chat with somebody for about an hour and not be weird.

me: (closes book) Fuck!