So, people know that geese are basically velociraptors with somewhat fewer teeth and claws, and what they create is fear and a fight-or-flight response?

Which leaves me picturing the SoftBank goose Mafia saying "those sure are three lovely eggs you have there, it would be a shame if anything were to happen to them, maybe you should give us one, for safekeeping" 71 times.

🪿🔪

So, Halifax-style donairs are definitely Maritime-local street food (for all that the place is too cold to really have food on the streets regularly). Any other suggestions from the handful of Maritimers?

Someone who knows more about finance tell where I'm wrong, please:

The indexes changing their rules for the AI IPOs is a pretty blatant attempt to leave "working people with a retirement fund" as the bag-holders for the AI bubble burst.

Would anything bad happen if a particularly brave government decided to bail out the people by making registered retirement funds whole after the stock market crash, rather than the billionaires and megacorps who've run up this enormous speculative bubble betting on being able to replace all labour with capital?

Beauty & the Beast 🤝 Les Mis
big musical number about taking up arms to overthrow the local nobles

Just realized that I finished my PhD 7 years ago, which means I've hit the milestone of "as much time since as during". It's a bit melancholy, TBH, given that I quit my faculty job 4 years ago, and did a career pivot out of the domain I studied last spring about this time, so the main relevance of the better part of my 20s to my present employment is "I still write a lot of C++".

I do believe that identity is path-dependent, though, and that the path you take to get somewhere is often a more interesting and fundamental part of who you are than where you are right now. I'll remain an ex-academic for the foreseeable future, but I'm not sure who I'd be if I'd chosen my career path differently 14 years ago.

So, I already migrated off LastPass when it got bought out by a bad actor, with the current PE buyout of Bitwarden, can someone with more security knowledge than me tell me why shouldn't I just go back to my browser's built-in password manager?

Just finished Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar's short story collection. It's beautifully written, delicate and blunt and displaced and grounded and queer. "A Hollow Play" struck me deep (it's been a season of folks disappearing), but the entire collection was fantastic. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐, strong recommend.

Just finished Seasons of Glass and Iron, Amal El-Mohtar's short story collection. It's beautifully written, delicate and blunt and displaced and grounded and queer. "A Hollow Play" struck me deep (it's been a season of folks disappearing), but the entire collection was fantastic. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐, strong recommend.

Just finished Slow Gods by Claire North; it deserves the positive chatter it's getting. The Shine and the binary suns are Star Trek-level blunt analogies for current affairs (but well rendered regardless), the focus on one central/peripheral character lets the plot arc while maintaining a realistically ambiguous closure, and I personally found the protagonist's musing on identity as socially constructed versus intrinsic relatable in this time of transition.

The voice LLM never says "I cannot create a working timer" it just pretends that it can.

Sam explains that this issue could be fixed by "implementing timers" which means someone would write some code to intercept these kinds of requests and treat them differently.

You know, they'd need to write one of the core functions of a voice chat personal assistant software.

But the magic of LLMs was supposed to be that they'd never need to do any of that work, right? 2/2

Just finished The Somewhat Wicked Witch of Brigandale by C.M. Waggoner -- delightful little fantasy comedy, strong Terry Pratchett vibes.

Residents and citizens of Canada, please sign this petition calling on the government to withdraw from the Safe Third Country Agreement with the US, since the US is obviously not a safe country for asylum claimants.

Note that for your signature to be recorded, you will need to click the verification link sent to your email.
https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7120

[saw the pink and purple lawnmower toy outside kiddo's daycare]

First thought: Ugh, do they have to gender segment everything in kids toys? It's not like real lawnmowers come in pink…

Second thought: I would totally have bought a pink lawnmower instead of orange given the choice 🩷

I personally think Buzzes Lightyear sounds better, "Lastname" in "Firstname Lastname" seems like a disambiguating adjective, which I think would make "Firstnames Lastname" the appropriate plural.

Watched the trailer for Toy Story 5 (shame on Disney+ for ranking a trailer for an unreleased movie in the search results), and there's a whole platoon of the space toy acting together. The question raised though, is "what is the proper plural?"

So, the Pokémon Raticate is totally a reverse Spiderman, yeah? "My totally normal rat bit so many mutant spiders (and mice, and bats, and whatever else) that it mutated too."

Anyone else spend high school putting song lyrics in their instant messenger status lines? I still think that would work on fedi.

🎶 It just takes some time, little girl you're in the middle of the ride, everything, everything will be just fine, everything, everything will be alright, all right🎵

#StatusLyrics

New gender, new #introduction: Hi, I'm Aeryn, I enjoy bicycling, cozy romances, and sci-fi (yes, I did name myself after Officer Sun from Farscape, she's totally badass and her series-long deprogramming arc is relatable). If I ever win the lottery I'll go back to teaching, but in the meantime I spend my days being frustrated by computers. I CW politics, which was more fun to follow until the news got so consistently ignorant and cruel. My transition goal is to be just another mom.