as far as i'm concerned "#music to refine to" is the best thing "severance" produced as far as hours-enjoyed goes.

i'd love for the browser automation stuff in #pest to be ported to phpunit because i fucking hate writing pest tests and resent using it when there's no way around it.

having an allergy to magic strings & numbers might slow you down a tiny bit but you will thank yourself later.

2 by h.e.r. is such a great and overlooked song

it's weird now that we have a lot of stuff written with genai (with genai very clearly trained on lots and lots of science papers and linkedin-style talk) i find myself gravitating away from staid and conventionally-written articles.

i'm reading an article right now about how culture is trending toward homogenization and i'm having trouble constantly stopping and thinking "oh this sounds like it was written by claude" even though i'm pretty sure it wasn't.

compare this to adam mastrioni or sam kriss--neither of their writings could ever be mistaken for baseline genai. but then again their tone isn't conducive to "serious" and "mainstream" communication.

what's a boy to do?

it's kind of crazy how netflix hasn't produced anything i really want to watch in what... 3 years?

https://buttondown.com/thene/archive/charity-and-sylvia-the-extraordinary-claims-of/

maybe we need to stop writing scifi for a while while humans get their heads on straight.

oh shit all these tech nerds think they're hari seldon.

finished "everyone in my family has killed someone" this weekend. a perfectly serviceable murder mystery with a chatty narrator (something i don't usually like but is executed well here) and a fun meta frame.

recommend for fans of the genre. #books

oh fun github is down AGAIN. ffs.

i wonder how long it's going to take all the chromium-derived non-chrome browsers to understand that chromium is a google product that benefits google and that google is going to continue to change it in ways that do not benefit any other browsers.

at some point i assume they're going to understand how it's more an more of a millstone as they have to become more and more creative to get around the things google chucks into chromium to the detrement of its purported ecosystem (really it has an ecosystem of one: google).

the fact that chrome is still owned and operated by google is a crime actually.

there's a type of critique i broadly agree with but am nonetheless incredibly suspicious of most of the people who make the critique.

for instance i think most contemporary buildings are ugly. i'm not talking about statement buildings. some of those are to my taste (432 park ave for instance). i'm talking about your average 5-over-1.

to me a lot of the average buildings from the past were much nicer to look at and to live around. they had a sense of human scale and proportion and decoration.

i also understand why these things are the way they are; that is to say i know that dual-egress codes and design software and supply chain constraints factor heavily into this.

but though i may *agree* with others on the bland ugliness of these building i also am deeply suspicious of "return to the past" narratives. i do not long for neoclassical whatever. i do not have a soft spot for rome. i do not like fascist architecture.

https://precastreinforced.co.uk/2026/08/16/new-worlds/

when you read cyberpunk it's cool.

when you live in it on the other hand... it's boring and kind of stupid.

so the minecraft launcher simply will not open on the correct screen and this is very annoying.

it's also very important to know that the homeschool movement is a reaction to forced integration of schools!

mix racism and libertarianism and fundamentalism (but i repeat myself) and what do you get? homeschool.

you also get this persistent myth that homeschoolers are better-suited to the world and academia than others which is simply not true!

there aren't a lot of good quality data on how homeschoolers do in higher education (when they even go! which is not that often!) but it's certainly not the ubergenius math whiz story the homeschoolers tell themselves.

i know a bunch of homeschoolers that went to college & university and found they were ill-prepared both socially and academically. this is of course anecdotal but again there's not a lot of high quality data here.

the funny thing about the us conservative movement right now is it's all just warmed-over 1990s homeschooler shit.

like... every time one of those ghouls comes out with their list of people they want to kill, it's all the same people the homeschoolers wanted to kill.

the only genuinely new thing is trans rights and what's happening now is the homeschooler gay handbook. literally no difference.

talk to someone raise on the pensacola/abeka indoctrination curriculum. it's just that stuff sent forward in time. and just to be clear it's the dumbest possible shit you can imagine.

people hate it because it's stupid. anyone who woke up after having that bullshit forced down your throat can tell you that.

based on the price and specs of *all new phones* it would appear that i am simply going to keep the phone i already have until it disintegrates in my hand.

i kind of miss the era maybe 5 years ago where each new version of a phone was a genuine upgrade. that was fun!

now that all phones are the same and all components cost their weight in gold i just don't get any joy from contemplating getting a new one.

right now i use a pixel 8. this was released in 2023. i purchased it on very steep sale in 2025.

i have not been tempted to buy a new phone simply because there's no value proposition there. pixel 8 is fast. it's got fine battery life. the camera is good. everything still works. i look at pixel n and go... ok.

google in particular seems to be leaning into ai as the value prop and i just don't think they've nailed that at all.

and why not a kindle? well it turns out kobos work much better with how i use calibre. and they have overdrive integration here in canada and i like to read stuff from the library.