Rob Lion
@rnlion.bsky.social
360 followers 530 following 300 posts
Mechanical engineer building particle accelerators, formerly quantum computers. Technology and infrastructure history; reverse engineering. Cats. He/him. Also @rnlion@Twitter and @[email protected]
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Reposted by Rob Lion
hyperlexic.bsky.social
Reminder that California golf courses have a special massive property tax benefit over and above Prop 13. www.evolve-ca.org/news/hole-in...
Reposted by Rob Lion
tef.bsky.social
it's kinda weird that all the software i am expected to use for work are all written by distributed teams, go, python, postgres, linux, chrome, k8s etc

and despite being told "the best teams work in an office together" i don't know of any software i use that's actually written that way
Reposted by Rob Lion
nicholasgrossman.bsky.social
Police officers who publicly declare that they’ll quit if a mayoral candidate they dislike wins the election are (1) usually bluffing—sure buddy, toss away that paycheck and pension—and (2) exactly the sort of cops cities would be better off without, ones who don’t see themselves as public servants.
Reposted by Rob Lion
tedmccormick.bsky.social
University leaders: [terminate programs, close campuses, cave in to political pressure from demagogues]

Faculty, students, staff: you’re killing the university

Management consultants: looks like you got a real comms challenge here
Reposted by Rob Lion
theophite.bsky.social
this is a common insane Korean nationalist belief. from History of Korean Gochu, Gochujang, and Kimchi:
Reposted by Rob Lion
volts.wtf
The high-profile success of Olivia Nuzzi & Bari Weiss sends such an awful, awful signal to, and about, female journalists. So many sharp, careful, dedicated journalists out there and *this* is what the establishment rewards? This is the incentive structure? It's so gross.
Reposted by Rob Lion
cara.city
like, I don't really care about shoplifting (theft has v little impact on retail profits and is miniscule compared to other inefficiencies), but human interaction is so important and automating it away makes all our lives worse
Reposted by Rob Lion
clairewillett.bsky.social
I saw someone once describe Trader Joe’s as not a food store but a food accessories store and to be completely honest that is in fact exactly how I shop there

sometimes I sprinkle that everything bagel seasoning on my everything bagels just to feel alive
Reposted by Rob Lion
vituperativeerb.bsky.social
My college roommate wanted to install Linux on an old PC to record a version of the Radiohead song Weird Fishes and like 2 weeks into the project I walk into the house and he’s soldering something on the bong table, at that moment I decided Linux was not for me
Reposted by Rob Lion
drandrewthaler.bsky.social
You don't have to judge Columbus by the standards of today. His tenure as governor of Hispaniola was so horrific that he was dragged back to Spain in chains to answer for his many crimes.

Plus he never set foot on any land that would ever be a part of the United States of America.
Reposted by Rob Lion
eric-reinhart.com
New article out this month on how doctors become fascists.

50% of German physicians joined the Nazi Party––twice the proportion of any other profession. US doctors today are arguably the most conservative in the world, and we're heading along a similar path.
drive.google.com/file/d/1CAk9...
Reposted by Rob Lion
pookleblinky.bsky.social
Like, even snake oil salesmen had to promise their customers a benefit. This snake oil will heal your ailments. It will benefit you. You get something out of buying my snake oil.

These fash tech dipshits can't even do that. It's just "if you buy my snake oil I get to have more money."
pookleblinky.bsky.social
It's funny that literally the only use case zuckerberg can imagine for technology is "I get to surveil you 24/7 inside the panopticon I own"

Like he can't even be arsed to detail the benefit to anyone other than him.
sazeracla.bsky.social
“‘Personal devices like glasses that understand our context because they can see what we see, hear what we hear, and interact with us throughout the day will become our primary computing devices,’ he wrote Wednesday in an online post detailing how Meta will bring AI to users.”

No, they won’t.
Reposted by Rob Lion
theophite.bsky.social
it is a tremendous technological achievement which i have no interest in being part of. the release was inevitable because once you have the recipe, it's like an atomic bomb you can make with tap water
Reposted by Rob Lion
theophite.bsky.social
it isn't even profitable. LLMs, sure. they do a bunch of useful things. video models are just rolling coal to piss in the world's information environment.
Reposted by Rob Lion
tubetime.bsky.social
things are getting pretty complicated
Pentium motherboard with the CPU plugged into a complex interposer board with a huge bundle of ribbon cables coming out. next to it is a logic analyzer.
Reposted by Rob Lion
clairezagorski.bsky.social
A student on TikTok has been documenting her journey with a professor who “wrote” the anatomy textbook and it’s all a bunch of AI hallucinations.

She’s saying that, understandably, the students are doing super poorly!

Behold what we’re teaching the healthcare professionals of tomorrow:
A diagram of the bones and (some) deep muscles of the hand and forearm. AI says that we only have four digits. It’s also identified a tendon as the median nerve, another tendon as the ulnar nerve, among other issues. An AI generated diagram of the muscles of the neck. It hallucinated the “ennocleidomasid” muscle, and the “anterior scalpalin muscle”. An AI generated diagram of the muscles of the lateral thigh. It says that the gluteus Maximus (the big juicy butt muscle) is on the anterior side. It also points to the quadriceps muscle and says “attattment”. It also says that the same structure is the tibia AND the deep fascia of the leg. An AI generated diagram of the bones of the hand and forearm. This time AI says we have 6 digits. It also says that the radius is the ulnar artery. Among other many issues.
Reposted by Rob Lion
lu.is
“I am a god-like genius within my tech company → therefore I can solve S.F.→ oh no I couldn’t solve S.F. → what the US needs is to elect Trump and burn it all down”

is a horrifyingly frequent path and, if you don’t have the brain rot, suffers from several obvious problems at each →
Reposted by Rob Lion
dryad.technology
What I'm listening to today: "Olson"

Boards of Canada arranged to play on a DEC PDP-1 from 1959. The PDP-1 doesn't have sound, but it does have front-panel light bulbs for debugging, so they rewired the light bulb lines into speakers to create 4 square wave channels

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wubk...
Boards of Canada "Olson" on a 1959 PDP-1 Computer
YouTube video by Joe Lynch
www.youtube.com
Reposted by Rob Lion
as-val-gijinka.bsky.social
"Yeah I put in $1k two years ago and now the exchange says I'm a gorillionaire, no they're not regulated why do you ask?"
Reposted by Rob Lion
niedermeyer.online
the weather is downright miserable right now, if they pull ten people for a naked bike ride in these conditions it will still be an awe-inspiring tribute to this town's fierce fighting spirit
portlandmercury.com
Organizers of the Emergency World Naked Bike Ride plan to hold the protest despite a steady rain forecast, saying:

“It's going to be very very wet. Our numbers will be lower but a slight bit of discomfort for us is nothing.
Emergency World
Naked Bike Ride. Oct 12th. 2:30pm.”
portlandmercury.com
World Naked Bike Ride organizers and other local groups are getting on bikes in the buff to protest the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in South Portland. The demonstration is planned for Sunday Oct 12 at 2:30 pm; now we know the starting spot is Oregon Convention Center Plaza.
Reposted by Rob Lion
octopodeeznuts.bsky.social
their website design suggests that McMaster-Carr is either extremely woke or extremely fash and i'm kind of afraid to find out which

can someone just tell me that Grainger is normal
Reposted by Rob Lion
criminalerin.bsky.social
What I'm saying is people everywhere of all demographics love doing fast loud dangerous shit in cars with their friends but you don't see the governor of Vermont deploying SWAT on all those dangerous mudders in their jacked up trucks running over equally drunk helmetless ATV drivers