mathew

Climate refugee in #Duluth Minnesota. Parrot and coffee enthusiast. If it bleeps I probably listen to it. Come for the computer nerdery, stay for the poop jokes. #nobots

My web site: https://www.midwist.com/
Pixelfed: https://pixelfed.social/meta
Gravatar: https://gravatar.com/metamatic

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npub1h2x75tgtgtdtjfks5mcksurqtgetlmsejuzkqhrr82q30zw4z28sm5a88l

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[email protected]

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npub1h2x75tgtgtdtjfks5mcksurqtgetlmsejuzkqhrr82q30zw4z28sm5a88l

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Last Notes

2026-07-09 14:22:12 UTC

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Right now I’m considering sitting outside in the sun for a bit. Since my time has value, by the same argument, sitting in the sun isn’t free. Nothing is free that takes up any time at all in our consciousness. In which case, how is it contributing to the discussion to point that out? And what does “free” even mean in that world view? It clearly has very little resemblance to everyday uses of the word.

2026-07-04 15:06:21 UTC

#4thOfJuly
https://media.universeodon.com/media_attachments/files/116/862/320/431/416/539/original/f3fd57ded9e00d39.jpg

2026-05-28 16:07:34 UTC

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Given what we know about Toyota's software quality (11,000 global variables!) and the fact that they launched a "Global AI Accelerator" a year ago, I bet they're vibe-coding car firmware right now.
https://www.edn.com/toyotas-killer-firmware-bad-design-and-its-consequences/

2026-05-27 21:12:15 UTC

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This is a beautiful documentary. #otters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkoNeESBH94

2026-05-27 21:00:41 UTC

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LEGO launched a sea otter set this year. The otter doesn't float, but the clam is a nice touch. #otters
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/floating-sea-otters-21366

2026-05-27 20:48:52 UTC

It's World Otter Day, so time for some otter content. #otters
https://media.universeodon.com/media_attachments/files/116/648/501/825/957/310/original/3791ea9b47bc6cbd.jpg

2026-05-24 01:10:19 UTC

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May's Patch Tuesday addressed 120 separate vulnerabilities, including 17 classified as critical. GitHub's uptime is now zero nines, and they just had 3,800 internal repositories hacked. For a lot of businesses, those would be catastrophic events, but long term Microsoft customers are used to poor security and unreliability.
https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

2026-05-18 20:16:40 UTC

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Funnily enough Shakespeare is a bit like that too. The first time I heard it with the original pronunciation was a revelation, because suddenly it actually rhymed and had consistent meter.

2026-05-18 19:49:01 UTC

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Might it depend on the translation? I know Lem's "Solaris" has a dull old translation (that was translated via French), and a new one that makes it seem like a whole new novel.

2026-05-18 15:27:15 UTC

This is pretty much what popular country music sounds like to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR2pslqKNP8

2026-05-07 18:20:16 UTC

Went to see if I could update the Alpine NetHack package for 5.0.0. I've got it building on every platform except RISC-V.
Nethack 5 now tries to download and build Lua for preprocessing its data files, and apparently that fails on RISC-V..
In general, NetHack's build scripts for Linux and macOS could use some serious work, and the Xcode project doesn't even load.

2026-05-02 20:47:24 UTC

We haven't had any snow in 4 days, or rain for that matter, and a few of the trails opened up. I've taken the snowshoes off the hiking poles. Probably time to swap the car tires ready for summer.
I went out to get the mail a few days ago and saw that a bear had stripped the bark from a tree to feed on the sapwood. It has been a chilly spring, no berries and not much in the way of green shoots yet. Warm enough today to sit outside and drink iced coffee after lunch, though.
Migratory birds are passing by, and a lot of birders were up on the ridge with binoculars and big camera lenses. Saw some hawks out looking for brunch. One of our neighbors has been away for a few days, and I see that they now have a robin nest on their fireplace vent, complete with broody-looking robin. Left them a note, not much else I can do.

2026-05-01 21:34:04 UTC

If you're one of the (other) people still masking to avoid COVID, you might be interested to know that Flo Masks with EU FFP2 certification are currently 50% off. They're reusable masks with silicone seals and disposable filters. The combo is more breathable than regular disposable N95s; there's also a 99% efficiency filter option. All the parts are replaceable.
I've no commercial relationship with the company other than as a customer.
https://www.flomask.com/ #COVIDIsNotOver #COVID

2026-04-29 02:04:44 UTC

RE: https://universeodon.com/@mathew/116439688014417081
I wrote a followup to this:
https://www.midwist.com/posts/2026/04/music-and-emotion/
#note1y58…x4zx

2026-04-28 23:52:57 UTC

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Frost River? Not quite as large, but close.
https://frostriver.com/products/big-manitou-shoulder-bag

2026-04-20 23:43:57 UTC

Have you ever cried from listening to a piece of purely instrumental music, not from any conscious memories or associations, but just from the music itself?
(Feel free to post links to the music.) #music

2026-04-18 00:11:44 UTC

Controversial opinion: IPv6 is good, actually.

2026-04-06 14:55:44 UTC

Thinking about all the software developers who've now seen the Claude Code source code and said "Yes, that's the system I’m going to keep using to build and analyze *my* code."

2026-04-04 18:18:44 UTC

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If it’s not a Lisp I’ll be very disappointed.

2026-02-21 23:30:28 UTC

On reflection, I think the worst part of Cory Doctorow’s argument in favor of LLM use is this:
« Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are "fruits of the poisoned tree" and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in.
Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then _you are totally fucked._ »
This is a form of argument beloved by awful people. I can’t be pure and perfect, they say, so there’s no point my trying to make better or less damaging moral choices.
Stop buying from Amazon? Walmart and Target aren’t perfectly moral. Stop driving an SUV? Your car pollutes too, and so do buses. Stop using Twitter? Facebook and Bluesky are far from morally perfect, and mastodon.social has poor moderation. And so on.
I see this kind of excuse all the time online. It’s a cousin to both whataboutism and Mister Gotcha. It also rests on a false premise. The idea that anyone is expected to achieve complete purity is a straw man. You’re not having sainthood demanded of you, people are just hoping you’ll consider *reducing* the amount of immoral and damaging behavior you engage in *when there are perfectly viable alternatives*. Sure, we can argue about whether the alternatives are truly viable, but the idea that if you can’t be perfect you may as well not even try to be better? That’s moral bankruptcy.
Mocking the desire for people to behave more ethically as “purity culture” is like mocking it as “virtue signaling”. It says things about the person doing the mocking, none of them good. It’s also deeply hypocritical coming from someone who has gone out of his way to avoid using DRM. Isn’t that “purity culture”?

2026-02-21 15:21:30 UTC

The orphan-crushing machine is just a tool. You can also use it to mulch puppies and purée kittens.
Why are you angry? You can use it for harmless tasks like making mashed potatoes. You eat mashed potatoes don't you? Yes, admittedly it leaks machine oil into the potatoes, but they're working on that. It leaks so much less oil than it did when you tried it three months ago. In a year from now it's going to be a Michelin-starred chef.
Well, that’s typical, gatekeeping by telling people they should have to learn to cook. You don’t think people who can’t cook deserve good food?
So what if the machine is powered by slave labor? That's innovation. You're just scared you're going to be one of them. Besides, it's inevitable. Nobody is going to crush orphans by hand any more. You're going to get left behind.
Oh, well there you go with your ridiculous purity culture again.

2026-01-22 21:03:45 UTC

First it was "dumb terminals".
Then "diskless workstations".
Then "network computers".
Now it's "cloud PCs".
Seems like every 10-15 years the industry tries to push the idea of being utterly dependent on a remote server, and everyone hates the idea and it dies.
#GetOffMyLawn #OldManYellsAtCloudPC

2026-01-15 23:27:44 UTC

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How about Reason 4: I edit details into articles, including references to print publications and links to them in Google Books, and someone just edits them out again. After a while it stops being worth trying.

2025-12-16 21:13:21 UTC

I knew that Infocom’s ZIL was based on MDL, which was based on Lisp. What I didn’t know until this week is that ZIL doesn’t have lists. Lisp without lists!
The reason being that Zork was supposed to be a quick hack to make some money while Infocom built their actual product, and they already had Zork written in MDL at MIT. So it was a case of implementing the least MDL possible with the smallest runtime possible so they could port Zork to popular home computers.
Anyway, an article by @npub10qk…n28t will tell you a lot more about ZIL if you’re interested:
https://blog.zarfhome.com/2019/04/what-is-zil-anyway.html #InteractiveFiction

2025-12-09 16:11:09 UTC

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Wow, I just tested and it still exists. Doesn’t seem to be bidirectional any more though.

2025-12-09 15:38:37 UTC

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Back in the 90s US mobile phones had unique email addresses assigned by the carrier. I don’t actually remember when that stopped being a thing, I think part way through the BlackBerry era?

2025-11-19 14:16:35 UTC

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I see complexity as the key problem that the industry is dismally failing to address. It’s everywhere. Programming languages all get more and more features dumped in and end up with horrible complex syntax and bloated standard libraries — or in the case of JavaScript, totally inadequate standard libraries so that you get a combinatorial explosion of dependency complexity. I like Go because its team is trying hard to avoid the complexity trap; other than that it’s pretty mediocre. The complexity problem is also why I’m more interested in Zig than in Rust, and don’t get me started about C++.

2025-11-17 13:28:12 UTC

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SoftBank dumped all their Nvidia shares too. The tech bro community knows that the bubble they all engineered is going to burst, so it’s time to look for bag-holders and make a swift and profitable exit.
https://apnews.com/article/japan-softbank-son-nvidia-ai-chips-d8a10172850628c317a214280a4d94c9

2025-11-13 23:26:01 UTC

https://media.universeodon.com/media_attachments/files/115/544/966/291/470/070/original/fed9410e66668a9c.jpeg

2025-10-15 17:19:58 UTC

A mysterious company called Harmony Group, LLC wants to build a massive AI data center 9.5km from my house, and the local police want to start using Axon Draft One generative AI to write their reports for them.
Can we please burst this fucking bubble?

2025-09-30 15:32:43 UTC

The POS at Costco crashed, so I got to watch a Java stack trace followed by a core dump scroll up the display.
https://media.universeodon.com/media_attachments/files/115/293/966/827/023/714/original/6e7e3abb24581b56.jpeg

2025-08-20 02:10:40 UTC

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A security-minded comparison with Eternal Terminal would be good too.

2025-06-30 21:06:02 UTC

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I tell people that Rust is for people who like C++, whereas Go is for people who think C++ was a horrible mistake.

2025-03-27 15:02:55 UTC

This is some next level AI bullshit.
https://media.universeodon.com/media_attachments/files/114/234/994/409/469/263/original/21a33b9309abb76b.png

2025-03-20 18:38:55 UTC

User interface menu control options. #ui #ux
https://media.universeodon.com/media_attachments/files/114/196/207/844/015/396/original/08976b9000b8e37e.png

2025-01-09 03:25:21 UTC

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Is the point you're making that a person shouldn't criticize what someone's doing right now, if the person doing the criticizing makes use of a service that used to be run by someone who made a questionable decision about some other matter at some time in the past?

2025-01-09 02:53:09 UTC

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Ah, found it, Byron Miller.
Though it sounds like he'd also be defederating Threads at this point:
https://medium.com/@sn2006gy/universeodon-com-planning-for-the-future-2dd66a7d66ef

2025-01-09 02:37:22 UTC

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I don't remember anything about Ryan Wild meeting with Meta. Even if he did, he's now participating in fediblock and limiting Threads.
https://universeodon.com/@npub19au…9lss/113788958867855420

2025-01-01 16:07:33 UTC

Happy New Year!
https://media.universeodon.com/media_attachments/files/113/753/952/576/314/049/original/e91f163b18ef690c.jpg

2024-10-29 23:23:28 UTC

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Attn @npub1ep8…29a5 ↑

2024-10-28 23:01:14 UTC

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Nobody's telling you that there won't ever be a more important election than this one.

2024-10-28 20:01:23 UTC

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I got told that 2022 was the hottest year on record. Then I got told that 2023 was the hottest year on record. You're crying wolf, climate scientists!

2024-08-20 21:04:55 UTC

GIMP maintainers respond to criticism of project name, change it to GNU Open Art Tools Supporting Editing.

2024-08-18 21:36:02 UTC

FYI: mpox can be transmitted through the air.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247(23)00059-9/fulltext
CDC web site states that it can be spread through "prolonged face-to-face interactions (such as talking or breathing)".
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/mpox/if-sick/transmission.html
Mentioning this now because you might remember that the authorities insisted for years that COVID-19 wasn't airborne, even though there were studies as early as July 2020 suggesting strongly that it was.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article #mpox

2024-08-16 01:40:54 UTC

https://media.universeodon.com/media_attachments/files/112/969/148/996/436/892/original/589d470ed333a7e5.jpg

2024-08-15 01:10:01 UTC

On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend screaming into the void to a friend?

2024-07-09 02:15:32 UTC

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AC is certainly significantly better for long range high voltage transmission, but I'm not convinced it's enough of a factor at house scale and house voltage. As far as heat from the wiring goes, in data centers the use of DC apparently reduces heat produced and cuts AC costs.
There are also other issues to consider — e-waste from all the circuits inside light bulbs, electric cars with batteries that need DC, increased efficiency of DC heat pumps (that we need to replace our heating and cooling systems with if we're going to get to net zero), and the houses now generating DC from solar panels and having to convert it to AC to feed it into the house then convert it back to DC in each device in order to use it.
Anyway, the IEEE seem to think it's even worth pursuing as a larger scale distribution method now:
https://www.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee-org/ieee/web/org/about/european-public-policy/eppi-dc-electricity-distribution.pdf