Ode to Taco Bell, by Éros Brousson:

“For years I thought that Taco Bell was a fictional restaurant in video game like GTA, a place that only existed between a strip club, a gun store, and a man in a Hawaiian shirt committing a felony.

“Then I landed in Miami and there it was: between a strip club, a gun store, and a man in a Hawaiian shirt committing a felony. The purple bell glowing in the dark like a church for people whose evening has gone horribly wrong”

(1/?)

hi, bit of an odd thing for this account

my father has vaguely come across A Guy who has a supply of decommissioned retired solar panels but nowhere to offload them

how do i get him and/or The Guy in contact with some community-scale projects that can make use of them (e.g. small-scale backyard/balcony/etc systems, not a scrapper)?

location: Silicon Valley, California, USA

🔁 appreciated

edit: you can start by DMing me on fedi, or email r@arcanenibble.com

it’s easy at this time to point at absurd uses of chatbots when it comes to raising kids, but we’ve collectively outsourced storytelling to our children in a big way over the years. it’s not that we give them a tablet, it’s that we expect the tablet to tell them the stories. because we’re too busy to always be telling them stories, because our parents were too busy to always be telling us stories. we have to break the cycle and start telling them stories again, all together and each individually.

@zwol @ajroach42 Turns out it has a Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apeiron_(video_game)

I am eagerly awaiting @kimcrawley's new book, "Recovering After Gen AI".

This current wave of genAI hyperbole is, IMHO, a bubble which will pop in the not too distant future. Or, at least, there will be considerably more scepticism of its use than there is today.

Either way, thinking about what recovery will look like seems like time well spent.

Kim is smart, provocative, and an excellent writer.

Kim is self-publishing it, and funding it via Kickstarter, so if you fancy helping a fedi author *and* getting something topical and interesting to read very soon, perhaps pledge for a copy?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kimcrawley/recovering-after-gen-ai

#books #author

heard of a van

loaded with notebooks

packed up and ready to go

"Hey Shaun did you install ClassZilla?"

"I unno check the start menu"

"wat"

🎶 when I was driving once I saw this painted on a bridge

🎶 "I don't want the world

🎶 I just want your half"

The Case for Boring Technology

https://deadparrotbbs.com/the-case-for-boring-technology/

Today's bullshit reason to get locked out of something important: they changed their back end and the new one considers my *username* too short.

I swear that's straight out of The BOFH's catalogue of excuses.

https://scifiinterfaces.com/2026/10/06/rocky-horror-the-osha-report/

Thinking this morning about how much of teaching is just taking the time to listen. Hearing what someone’s actual computer problem is and then addressing it is so much harder than just telling them what I think is interesting or cool.

And sometimes I don’t know the answer to their actual problem, and I might not even know how to find out, and that feels bad! But it’s okay to just say “I don’t know” :)

a trusting trust attack based not on the compiler, but on the "strip" utility 🤯

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.24888

I like everything about this except for the part where he keeps randomly shitting on his grandson.

https://thick-coins.net/

one of these days we, as a society, will figure out how to stop teaching people that destroying things and then putting your name on it is a power move, and things will likely improve dramatically.

type of guy

This is insane. Here's a compiler that compiles to x86 using only bytes in the ascii range. It's how we bootstrap uxntal, but this is taking it to a whole new level.
https://tom7.org/abc/paper.txt
https://tom7.org/abc/paper.pdf
#permacomputing

I've recently realized, to the detriment of my ability to concentrate on what I'm reading, that all the academic CS papers I have to read are full of phrases that would make _great_ titles for Murderbot novellas.

Recent examples:
* Isogeny Protocol
* Revelation Phase
* Stochastic Validation
* Confusion Matrix

#AcademicCS #Murderbot #SelfDistraction

I don’t know how to explain to people that just because certain things appear to approximately work doesn’t mean they actually work. This was already horrifically difficult before AI and now it’s damn near impossible to get the point across when literally any trivial example passes muster

The asymmetry between me having to provide a compelling defence that they can actually understand (without the required background knowledge) vs them being able to endlessly generate garbage in seconds is just… exhausting