Howdy, fuckos!
A hundred and eight years ago. Great War still raging in Europe. But the Americas were relatively safe. Right?
Wrong. At least for Halifax and Dartmouth, port cities in Nova Scotia.
Two ships, one loaded with tons of high explosives bound for France, collided and burned. Not until 1945 so much energy would be released in a single blast: 2.9 kilotons to Trinity's 25.
Maybe two thousand souls lost, nine thousand bodies maimed, probably twenty thousand persons left without a roof over their heads in December.
The disaster finally got its own song in the year of the recent pandemic. Bit more than a century had passed from the so-called "Spanish flu". Story for another day.
The other ship, after repairs, somehow (read: helmsman left his post to sleep off a drunk) ended up beached on Isla Soledad (that's "East Falkland" for those who don't know how to say "Malvinas").
I've changed since telling this story in Spanish. Damned if I know what that means. But I feel fine.
Evening.
Caption was going to be "Off to Pride" but atmosphere over here got a fit of queerphobia and literally rained on our parade.
So I went to the park around the corner, found a dry spot below a tree (yes, that's how much it's raining... we could have marched under umbrellas if didn't mind everything being wet around us), and told graphically Mother Earth how are we feeling today.
Sincerely, from the ass of the goddamn world, this old tranny that has no more fucks to give.
We'll get our parade, eventually. We always do.
cc @atax1a@infosec.exchange
Duerme el Viejo Mundo.
https://social.treehouse.systems/@angelastella/115624215986521482
Buenas tardes, miserables.
Ustedes han sido inmensamente generosas/os conmigo durante este año. Me salvaron la vida (junto con otras personas e instituciones).
Por eso esta vez les pido por mi amigo @beckermatic, quien está vendiendo este teclado (de los de hacer música, no de escribir).
Esto puede no gustarle y lo digo a mi riesgo para que vean por qué me lo tomo personalmente: lo que está pidiendo por el instrumento es menos que la plata que me dio sin expectativa de devolución. Le estoy enormemente agradecida. Así que si me aprecian, ayúdenlo en mi nombre a venderlo. O cómprenselo. Capaz para donarlo a una escuela que lo precise...
Nada. Eso. Sepan que yo no me olvido nunca. Aunque mi capacidad de dar de vuelta sea un poco limitada por el panorama desastroso de mi salud mental.
Yeah, I get that some of you are excited about Voyager 1 getting close to one light-day from here.
Forty-eight years!
To me it just means that we have to get better interstellar propulsion, and that means nukes. Lots of nukes.
As Douglas Hofstadter has noted, in an open letter to a former student, then at Google working on this project:
It worries me and in fact deeply upsets me that Google is trying to undermine things that I depend on on a daily basis, all the time.When I put something in quotes in a Google search, I always mean it to be taken literally, and for good reason. For example (just one type of example among many), as a careful writer, I am constantly trying to figure out the best way of saying something in one language or another, and so I will very frequently check two possible phrasings against each other, in order to see whether one has a high frequency and the other a very low frequency. This is an extremely important way for me to find things out about phrasings. If Google, however, doesn’t take my phrasings literally but feels free to substitute other words willy-nilly inside what I wrote, then I am being royally misled if I get a high count for a certain phrase. This is very upsetting to me.I want machines to be reliably mechanical, not to be constantly slipping away from what I ask them to do. Supposed “intelligence” in machines may at times be useful, but it may also be extremely unuseful and in fact harmful, and in my experience, the artificial intelligence (here I use the word “artificial” in the sense of “fake,” “non-genuine”) that these days is put into one technological device after another is virtually always a huge turnoff to me.I am thus not delighted by what your group is doing, but in fact greatly troubled by it. It is just one more attempt to make mechanical devices not reliable as such. You ask Google to do X, presuming that it will do precisely X, but in fact it does Y instead, where Y is what it “thinks” you meant. To me, this kind of attempt to read my mind is fantastically annoying if not dangerous, because it almost never is correct or even in the right ballpark. I want machines to remain reliably mechanical, so that I know for sure what I am dealing with. I don’t want them to try to “outsmart” me, because all they will do in the end is mislead and confuse me. This is a very elementary point, and yet it seems to be being totally ignored at Google (or at least in your group). I think it is a very big mistake.
(Personal correspondence, 2010, with Abhijit Mahabal; quoted in Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back, 2017)
Yes, I've highlighted the date. Think about it.
Internal memo:
For self preservation, don't ever argue a technical topic on social networks. Not even mathematics or physics. Definitely not economics. Programming languages? Do you want a war of religion? Because that's how you get a war of religion. Biology?Medicine? GTFO. We don't want no fancy suicides here.
When I'm having a bad day (tip: don't talk to me today) I block the assholes that get attracted to your posts. Reasonable satisfaction at low effort.
It makes me happy to know you exist in this world. But tonight I wish we were closer.
#subtoot
Piove, governo ladro!
Ángela Stella Matutina