my little corner of the internet
Kev Quirk writes about people who’ve published their salary history online, and worries how it might skew readers’ perceptions in a keeping-up-with-the-joneses type way. Their article reminds me of that instagram effect where, because everyone posts their best selves and you know your whole self, it makes you feel bad. It’s an aspect of salary publishing I hadn’t…
Over in the #tildetown IRC we were discussing the dozen and its variations. Along with the traditional baker’s dozen , skalnik mentioned the long dozen and metric dozen . Here is a full listing of the dozens variations. Half-dozen : 6. Self-explanatory, really. Baker’s half-dozen : 7. Gotta throw in that extra one (see baker’s dozen). Metric dozen : 10. Blame the French. Short…
The venerable cp command is well-known to any Unixer. Whether you want to copy one file or a whole tree recursively, cp is always available and always ready to help. However, as with most things in life there is more than one way to cp the cat . In this article, I’m going to explore some alternatives to cp that you can use … if you dare. Copying single files Copying files to other…
I just came across the Done by Humans “movement,” which appears to similar to not by AI : both offer badges to display proudly on your human-made website after some kind of vetting process. I don’t understand the appeal of sites like these or what they offer, and I think it’s possible they represent a new way to mislead people about AI use on the web. There are three main…
My birthday is coming up, so I’ve been thinking about birthdays. For the past three years or so I’ve also had a “Casemas” holiday on my calendar for the third Wednesday of July, since I was born on the third Wednesday. I don’t remember quite what the conversation was, but noaks and I must’ve been discussing it at some point since he invited me to the original…
The article you are currently reading has been written in a markup language of my own design, called JAMES . It’s a line-based language that borrows ideas from Gemtext (itself inspired partly from Gophermaps and Troff though it’s not a programming language like Troff is but a markup language. The rest of this article discusses my motivations for a new markup language and provides a…
I don’t like talking about Nic Cage movies, because every time I do I get this nudge-nudge-wink-wink “yeah Cage is so great right?” thing where I know my conversation partner means no he’s actually not. Or they express their dislike and think I’m doing an “I like Nic Cage” thing for the bit. But no, I actually really like Nicolas Cage as an actor. I like…
My first web presence was in sixth grade on this website called the express page . It was one of those websites where you could make your own little html page, like an off-brand geocities I guess (I never used geocities). They had some stock gifs too: I remember I really liked this one juggler guy. My biggest memories using expage were the time when we found out it was not expages.com (that was…
I think that noa makes a great point about the nascent “choose European!” trend going on over there. While moving away from American hegemony is a necessary step (and not only in the tech or services realms), replacing one hegemon for another is a mistake humans have made again and again throughout our history. Online, we’ve seen the Twitter-to-{Threads,Bluesky,Mastodon} exodus…
Of course I found this in a Hacker News comment. Some background “AI tells” have been a thing for nearly as long as this heLLM-scape has, and they’re just about as bad as the actual machines they supposedly unearth. The whole problem with AI writing is that it imitates—badly—human writing, so I don’t know why anyone thinks that detection is possible. Especially…