1. My new bio, courtesy of GPT-2:

    Barnaby Walters is an urn of human bones. No, we're not even sure how long he's been walking. He's a skeleton.

    On one side, he has the human torso covered by a skeleton suit. He's a skeleton's skeleton's skeleton and he's walking upright. On the other side? He has a bunch of human teeth. His face is a skeleton's skeleton and he's smiling like a skeleton.

    (Prompt was “Barnaby Walters is a”, which unfortunately mainly produces slander insinuating that I’m some racist Australian politician. This spookfest was a pleasant exception.)

  2. Aw I forgot that it was Eurovision tonight so instead spent the evening recording me reading weird WP pages aloud for WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia. Hard to pick a favourite quote but “Bacon, with the help of a Friar Bungy or Bungay was said to have spent seven years building one of the devices in order to discover whether it would be possible to render Britain impregnable by ringing it with a wall of brass” was particularly fun.

  3. Aaron Parecki: hot take: Dutch is basically German with a funny accent

    I’ve gotten through entire (admittedly short) conversations in dutch just by speaking german in a dutchey way. It’s not just a weird version of german though, they have some (adorable) words of their own too!

  4. If VLC is behaving weirdly, check that you didn’t accidentally press Command-Z to try to undo something. For some reason, that shortcut activates “Random” playback mode, which can result in the same track repeating, or playback stopping rather than continuing to the next item.

  5. I love doing PCB design because it lets me take advantage of periods of high mental capacity to front-load large amounts of problem solving work, so that in the future I only have to mindlessly solder-paint-by-numbers and everything will Just Work™.

  6. sweet jesus, that’s not philosophy, you’re eating m̧̺͔̳̙͍̫͆ë͙̰̻͖̄ͦ̃͒͗̈́m̱̭ͤ̄̎̓̚̚͠ĕ͉͚ͯ͋ͫ͜s̨̲̳̞̟ͥͅ

    A “sweet jesus, pooh” meme based on the original by Safely Endangered.

Pooh is eating something from a jar.

Tigger: “Sweet jesus pooh, that’s not late Wittgenstein.

Tigger: “You’re eating the Tracatus Logico-philosophicus!”

Pooh: 1. The world is everything that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not things. 1.11 The world is determined by the… [the rest of the text is obscured]
  7. Riddle me this, bible scholars: reading through Genesis 1, it seems like god singles out whales as being particularly significant. They’re the first animals to get created (1:21), other sea creatures get created afterwards, and then when mankind shows up we get dominion over, specifically: the “fish of the sea”, birds, and “creeping things that creepeth” (1:26).

    But NOT whales. They are the only animals created by god which get to escape the dominion of mankind. Is that why one ate Jonah later on? Was this supposed to be a major plot point, but which became less relevant after most of the action moved onto the land?

    Please tell me that this isn’t like the “whoever finds a treetop, he will get the master magic” line at the beginning of the Kalevala which nobody ever mentions again. I read the entire thing, patiently waiting for someone to find a treetop but it never happened. What is the master magic? Is it different from the complete knowledge of the universe Väinämöinen gained from Vipunen to finish his boat? CHECKOV’S GUN, PEOPLE

  8. the direction of a pcbnew (KiCAD) selection changes its behaviour. LtoR only selects completely surrounded parts, RtoL selects partially selected parts.

    I can’t find this feature documented anywhere, but the selection colours are different so I assume it’s supposed to be like this.

    EDIT: apparently it’s something of a de-facto UI standard in CAD apps, probably started by AutoCAD.

  9. Quinn "kind of here" Norton: I've never liked gendered they/them because it introduces ambiguity in plurality. So I have an idea, hear me out. We already use single sound vowel pronouns with no problem, I & (kinda) You, so they're already natural in English. So just take they and them and strip the TH...

    although I’m not convinced that the singular/plural ambiguity is a big problem. “you” already has ambiguous quantity, and both “you” and “we” are inherently ambiguous and context-dependent

  10. Quinn "kind of here" Norton: I've never liked gendered they/them because it introduces ambiguity in plurality. So I have an idea, hear me out. We already use single sound vowel pronouns with no problem, I & (kinda) You, so they're already natural in English. So just take they and them and strip the TH...

    as a staunch “they” proponent, I’d say it’s not a bad idea. I’d type ey/em/eir and pronounce [eɪ] [ɛm] [eə]. Possible use singular verb conjugation too for reduced ambiguity e.g. “ey wants to be referred to using “ey””