Catherine Berry

Why do you think I followed you shortly after encountering your posts here? 💚 Now, (well past) bedtime for me. Sweet dreams of fire, love, and music for us both.

Gaelic is difficult, but makes for heavenly vocals if you succeed. I was friends with a couple who sang traditional songs in Gaelic, accompanied by a guitar. The memory of their soaring vocal harmonies is making my spine tingle. One of them died, alas, and I've lost touch with the other. 😞

I've always had music at the center of my understanding of life. It's like the index of everything else. I'm very fortunate to have a partner who is wired the same way.

And yes, a hatred of bullies is table stakes for being in my circle. I have no patience for bullies or their enablers.

Four Green Fields - The Dubliners & Jim McCann | Festival Folk (1985) YouTube video by The Dubliners

God damn it, I came here for a bit of wind-down scrolling, and next thing you know I'm crying like a baby listening to that song. Yes indeed, my Donnelly blood knows all about long grudges and bitter victories. Another classic of the genre: youtu.be/MNFeFeeW63E?...

Happy Days went downhill after the episode where Fonzi jumped the strait of hormuz ngl

Just like sports fans wear team jerseys, IR guys wear strait jackets.

A white cat and a woman with red and blue hair sleep on a couch.

I wondered why I had such trouble dragging myself out of bed this morning. Then I walked into the living room and discovered that these two were filling the apartment with sleepiness radiation. Mystery solved! 💤🐱💜🙂

G&MFM should have been an inverse camera show.

As someone with low vision and lacking binocular depth perception, my mental caption for all four of these would be "I wonder how far downstream they'll find my body?" 🙃

Love back atcha! If we spend our golden years together in a robotic hellscape raiding datacenters for water, so be it. Beats cribbage. 🙃

"Now, Mr. Bond, tell me...are you familiar with the Unruh effect?" 😁

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unruh_e...

Why is nobody worried that if AI starts doing important jobs, the ~4 successful AI companies will utterly control those jobs? When software dev is an AI walled garden, only Anthropic will have software dev. If you tick them off, no software for you, and no plan B available. Seems suboptimal.

Just like sports fans wear team jerseys, IR guys wear strait jackets.

Paternal grandfather: British Army officer.

Maternal grandfather: Accountant for MGM.

My dad and his whole line were British Army officers. Sometimes I can feel all of them pursing their lips at me in that uniquely British expression I call "stoic disdain".

I've seen the "no obvious deficiencies" quote previously, but I've never read the full lecture. Thanks for the homework! 🙃

It astonishes me that a single trans person is still on X.

I bitch all the time about the annoying daily process of inserting and removing the scleral contact lens that gives me useful vision. Something can be an unimaginable miracle and also irritating. Welcome to being human. 😁

I think that's just the latest Gaelic spelling system. 🙃💚

Yeah, that too. 😞

It's like he's handing them a roadmap to victory. Gods help us all.

A lot of them are closeted. Out trans people are a classic example of selection bias. We're tough and courageous because trans people who aren't tough and courageous don't come out.

...And that's like the 12th most reprehensible thing about him.

Clearly they learned tactics at the "kung fu henchmen attacking the hero" academy.

I have spent the ensuing 40 years trying to achieve elegance in my own code, and teaching new software engineers to recognize it and (hopefully) cultivate it in their code as well. I owe thanks to Dr. Hoare and the other giants of my field for inspiring my life's work in this noble profession. 3/3

Studying and finally understanding Hoare's Quicksort algorithm filled me with the sort of awe normally associated with cathedrals and thunderstorms. It was my first direct, visceral experience of what "elegance" means in software. 2/3

Communicating sequential processes | Communications of the ACM This paper suggests that input and output are basic primitives of programming and that parallel composition of communicating sequential processes is a fundamental program structuring method. When comb...

It really is. Reading that paper was my first exposure to systematic thinking about concurrent programming. ACM has recently dropped their archive paywall (yay!!), so anyone who wants to enjoy a pivotal paper in the history of computing can do so via the link below. 1/3

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

And beyond even that catastrophe, we must now assume that every system DOGE accessed has been backdoored. You'd have to replace every server and cable and scratch-install every line of code to make these systems secure again. That won't happen, so everyone is just pretending all is well. 2/2

Not "would be", "is". It has been obvious from day one that there was a data exfiltration firehose running during DOGE's penetration of government agencies. And not just by DOGE staffers; a bunch of bad actors inevitably took advantage of the chaos. 1/2

And it succeeded.

Oh, yeah, I just assumed that from day one. There's essentially no way it didn't happen. That data is way too valuable for kids on a data wilding spree to pass up. And even if they somehow missed the opportunity, others were surely exploiting the exfiltration paths opened by the DOGE vandals.