This is really scummy: GitHub won't even tell me who requested Copilot unless I… first turn on Copilot.
I'm trying to keep an open mind about tools like this, but at every turn, I'm repeatedly reminded that the people behind the tools are severely lacking in even basic ethics.
“Reagan, a former actor, was especially shaken after watching WarGames at Camp David. Several days later, Reagan asked John Vessey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whether ‘something like this’ could ‘really happen?’ Vessey returned with the answer: ‘Mr. President, the problem is much worse than you think.’”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/10/04/wargames-hollywood-movies-national-security/
RE: https://newsie.social/@STAT/117439843389803724
Oh no, how sad… Helen Branswell was one of my favorite reporters.
“She loved her work. She loved science and medical writing. She thought her job was a gift. She found it so interesting.”
Thanks for joining me for tonight's episode of “Dumb Moments in Software Engineering”
https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/redesigning-source-control
And later, stay tuned for an update on our earlier story about DOGE's plan to rewrite 60 million lines of COBOL for the Social Security Administration in *just a few months* using Generative AI.
All that and more, after these words from our sponsors.
Ran across this while looking for the Cairo character set, and immediately had a rush of memories return… They must have made a MacPaint file of this available, since I vividly recall (a much younger me) enjoying all the shapes assigned to the keycaps, and the Athens typeface used across the top. (I must have been about 10?)
(Another more obvious memory is the smudgy 72dpi-scaled-to-300dpi that the LaserWriter would use by default… so gross! Gotta check that box in printer setup or scale by 96% so that it's an exact 4x! But even then, the choice to attempt to “smooth” the bitmaps was… a choice.)
Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
From missing characters to damaged reams, this is the tale of recreating Ada Lovelace's Notes.
It's equally an investigation of old books and the work of making new ones:
https://buddybindery.substack.com/p/recreating-ada-lovelaces-notes
For anyone who has ever coveted a beautiful piece of gear from Teenage Engineering
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=562YtXAQDtg
Or if you haven't yet, enjoy: https://teenage.engineering/products
RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@slava/116800243553764171
And unfortunately, I don't think there's a middle ground. I've heard people advocating for a “well you can use an LLM but just pinky swear you know what you're doing and how the code works” position, but to me they sound like the same people advocating for the nonexistent political “center” in US politics right now. It seems moderate and reasoned, but it's just a more comfortable abdication of responsibility.
It's more complicated than pithy social posts, so I don't like this venue for arguing any of it. I've tried writing something more thoughtful but it's 16k words so far and it's a f*king mess. Nobody wants to read that.
Question for my type curious friends… can anyone recommend a good bitmap font editor?
Can be straight black and white, color, or whatever… Need something better than this beauty
We've just added “lambda columns” to Rowboat! (https://rowboat.net)
When starting with a dataset, you often have a column that's not *quite* in the correct format. Heights listed in feet and inches. Temperatures in Fahrenheit when you want celsius. GPS coordinates that are uniquely weird in their own weird way.
You can fix this sort of thing in a complicated data cleaning tool, or by firing up a Python notebook, but it's a lot just to make these quick changes. With this update, you can write a single line function that does the conversion and creates a new column.
ZIP codes trashed by Excel shaving off the leading zeroes? Poof, fixed! And then we can see them mapped instantly (see the first GIF).
Temperature data listed in Kelvin, but needs to be understood by a less Kelvin audience? Easily fixed, and now we can see a more relatable distribution (in the second GIF).
This has been one of our most-requested features. We've been testing it the last couple weeks and have found it incredibly useful for the many quick options it opens up.
We hope you'll enjoy it too!
Let's do this
RE: https://typo.social/@frankrausch/117364587035484121
Ahhhhhhhh! this is fun
RE: https://information.garden/@benfry/117124797059162384
Finished this one, and torn between
1) feeling better that the completely insane behavior from the broligarchs is not just a recent (i.e. post-Trump) phenomenon (buy elections! buy social media! spread right wing hate! cut funding to universities! cut funding for the world's poorest!) or a seat of the pants thing they're making up as they go
and
2) …learning that it's *not* just some random thing; that it's a couple decades in the making, and now we have to live with the consequences of these fringe ideas because the people who adopted them have billions of dollars.
Or maybe more succinctly, I'm just not sure I'm more comfortable with the method version or the madness version of what's happening right now.
🌈
RE: https://typo.social/@letterror/117359374337286656
“Post hoc ergo fucking propter hoc.”
The new Duo rumored to be announced by Apple today is looking sweeeet
so you're saying there's a chance
…while Paul and I plotted about (and started hacking up) what a modern type specimen might look like when your input is the trove of information in a modern font file.
5/5
…Katherine figures out the color changer on the knitting machine and makes a scarf…
4/n
