"sane" here referring to people who write assembly code using emojis, by hand, without AI, or draw werewolf schlongs, by hand, without AI

trickle down economy is not self-forming. you need cunning highwaymen in green tights drilling holes into their coffers from below.

You can be replaced by several billions of dollars in infrastructure, another few billions worth of stolen data, and unestimable environmental damage.

@jonny Like, I cannot adequately describe the warm fuzzies this brings. It's like Red Dawn meets Tomorrowland meets Annie.

the latest newsletter from @susanlbridges and me isn't about writing at all, but is a little memorial to the best worst kitty ever

come read about how he was in fact Very Bad, and how that made him So Good

we miss him a lot 💜

https://the-birdguest-broadcast.ghost.io/ode-to-a-dirtbag/

The coolest part? The grape flavor Jolly Rancher is phosphorescent, meaning that it continues to give off fluorescent light after I turn off the UV light. To see phosphorescence I had to switch out my big 395 nm flashlight for a shorter-wavelength 365 nanometer light.

📣 I’m looking for a new role. Ideally, as a Staff+ Designer, but I’ll consider design leadership roles, too. I’m a specialist in #designSystems and #designOps—would love to remain in this space, but open to generalist, 0→1 product design as well.

I have:

→ 18+ years across design and front-end roles
→ co-founded and led a successful observability SaaS

More information on my personal website. Boosts and intros to kind folks are very welcome!

https://karolinaszczur.com/cv

#getFediHired #fediHire

it’s actually very easy to log off i’ve done it 9 or 10 times today

Mastodon makes me feel not as weird because the people here tend to relate to what I'm saying, but then I remember that it's just because we're all weird over here.

I'm hand crafting a training dataset for a proofreading task. Right now, generating errors of missing words by removing necessary words from a healthy text. The surprising part is that most words can be removed and the text is none the worse for it. Am I an editor now?

"However, everything is queer to-day"
-- Alice, while in Wonderland

could i vibe-code this using Claude? sure! but i fucking **guarantee** you it would be way more complicated with way more dependencies and be vastly more difficult to fix if i ever had to. instead, i got the satisfaction of making a glorified Python script into something i actually use in my physical life. https://github.com/pjkrupa/busbusbus

It is extremely distressing that events continue occurring without my express approval. Sometimes I’m not even ready for them.

The other big step was choosing a per-model optimization criterion, F-rho. This allowed a two-phase hyperparameter optimization approach where individual models were tuned before being combined into an ensemble. That leaves fewer free hyperparameters in the ensemble, making that secondary tuning process more practicable.

For the handful of you who are following along this journey, the artisanal language model I'm building to do proofreading is getting more mature.

https://brandonrohrer.org/alms_blended.html

One big step forward is the addition of additive smoothing (alpha) and upward-biased additive smoothing (beta) parameters. These helped to avoid false detections and increase precision - an important precursor to building ensemble models.

I know some folks compare the writing process to giving birth, but to me it seems more like an exorcism

Based on a joke by @simsaens

My child is running the Detroit marathon tomorrow!

It’s official, my kids are collectively more athletic than me, more talented than me, more ambitious than me, cooler than me, and have their shit more together than me. What more could a dad want?

There are a lot of smart people on Mastodon, so I’m looking for someone with the knowledge to help me build a death pod but it's more like a badass bobsled that rides a water slide into a volcano but it can't be plastic because it would melt and it probably shouldn't be metal because it would likely get too hot before you were launched into the lava so please let me know what materials would work best because this is not something I want to mess up.

Please boost for visibility.

My first book, The Dream Pyjamas, was a huge hit at 44 Grieve Avenue, though sadly overlooked by every major award. My second, 36 years later, has had slightly better luck...Drystone - A Life Rebuilt has been shortlisted for the Saltire Society Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2026. The biggest literary prize in Scotland.

I think about where I've come from, and I genuinely cannot believe I'm here.

#WritingCommunity #Writing #Book #Books #Scotland #News #UK