@ElleGray According to tradition, it means that someBODY

Boarding a flight that’s experimenting with biometrics to authorize passengers and has a physical cellphone tracking box on the desk, while I’m holding a passport, a phone and a copy of Seeing Like A State, it’s all a bit much.

Today's internet project:
- Quote your favorite song lyrics about God.
- Spell it Zod.
- Attach a picture of Zod.

@zwol @carcinopithecus @brennen there’s a guy on Twitter whose whole gag is drawing an arrow on various economic graphs that points to the moment Reagan was elected. He has a lot of material to work with.

You know that first time you installed an ad blocker and got to experience the whole "the internet, except we have clean running water and penicillin now" feeling? It's like that at the operating system level. It's really, really remarkable.

(Linux people: I get it. I know. If you didn't get your first distro on _one floppy disk_ I've been doing this longer than you. I'm on Windows because most of our users are.)

@zwol The thing that kills me is that it _isn't_ Microsoft's business model. They're not an advertising company, and they're terrible at it.

I guess this seems petty, considering where I work, but if you forcibly disable Microsoft Edge - find the executable, right-click your way into the properties -> security options, choose "change", "disable inheritance" and remove all permissions from it... the whole Windows _experience_ just gets better? No ads in interface, no pestering you to change browsers when you upgrade, none of that? It's all just gone?

@Chronotope @darius If you choose to pursue that path - timezones and cryptography for example - you will have a long, rewarding career ahead of you, and outside of a small cadre of your fellow developers, nobody will ever know who you are, or how much the world owes you.

@Chronotope @darius Told a class once, there are some classes of software problem where you only have two choices; you dedicate your life to them, or you exclusively use tools made by people who have dedicated their lives to to them. Every other option is a road to madness and agony.

@clacke @jonbro Respectfully, that looks like a very complicated way of tying aliases and envvars to shell builtins. There are a lot of tools in this space that exist because writing code is fun and understanding other people's code isn't, and this is a decent example of a problem where the right approach isn't to figure out how to solve it, but to figure out how to not have that problem in the first place.

Geez, Mags is not aging well. https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/04/margaret-atwood-hitchens-prize-speech/629443/

“The so called left and the so called right” oh no Maggie what are you becoming.

We need a word for that thing old people do sometimes when the world has gotten past them and one callout from somebody younger is enough to start them setting their legacies on fire because the yoots aren't grateful enough.

The only April Fools joke I've bitten on in the last decade or so was the pull request to DNS-over-HTTPS that looked like the NSA wanted to become a DoH provider. I thought it was a good gag tbh. I keep wondering when we're going to see a proposal for them to become a certificate authority.

"Ergo" is the latin term; in modern english it is more correct to say "thereforenomics".

It is with a heavy heart that I am obliged to inform you that the elongated muskrat is at it again.

It's kind of amazing, but in this post Google's AI team describes replacing code that doesn't compile with code that does compile, does something different, and now includes exploitable buffer overflow errors as "advancing the state of the art."

https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/04/pathways-language-model-palm-scaling-to.html

Sometimes, when you're confronted with a problem, you might think "I know, I'll use machine learning!" And now you have an arbitrarily large number of other people's turing-complete problems. Each of which will come as a surprise.

Actually, serious question: can I use the Apt repositories for Rust development _at all_ or do I need to start doing the curl-and-contain dance?

Consensus - by which I mean "the people who answered whose advice I have confidence in" - seems to be "you can do this, but it is mildly inconvenient to do so, and the Rust toolchain contains itself well enough that you don't need to."