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airspeedswift.bsky.social
Ben Cohen
@airspeedswift.bsky.social
1.2K followers 180 following 120 posts
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airspeedswift.bsky.social
Accurate script dialog brought to you by one of my most beloved childhood possessions.
A photo of a dog-eared book of the original radio scripts for: HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY THE ORIGINAL RADIO SCRIPTS BY DOUGLAS ADAMS EDITED, AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GEOFFREY PERKINS (WHO PRODUCED IT) WITH ANOTHER INTRODUCTION BY, DOUGLAS ADAMS, LARGELY CONTRADICTING THE ONE BY GEOFFREY PERKINS
November 13, 2025 at 5:56 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
FORD: They make a big thing out of the ship’s cybernetics. "A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature."
ARTHUR: GPP? What’s that?
FORD: Er ...... It says Genuine People Personalities.
ARTHUR: Sounds ghastly.
Screenshot of headline from The Verge OpenAl says the brand-new GPT-5.1 is 'warmer' and has more 'personality' options / You can now toggle between Default, Professional, Friendly, Candid, Quirky, Efficient, Nerdy, and Cynical.
November 13, 2025 at 5:55 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
A far side cartoon. Everything in the cartoon has been sloppily painted with text naming it – The Cat, The Dog, The House, the painter's Shirt and Pants. The caption reads "Now!... That should clear up a few things around here."
November 5, 2025 at 4:56 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
their page for FTX still claims it was because of a liquidity crunch
A screenshot from Sequoia's page about their investment in FTX. FTX.COM is a cryptocurrency exchange. It offers derivatives, options and volatility products, tokenized stocks, prediction markets, leveraged tokens and an OTC desk. Update: November 9, 2022 A liquidity crunch has created solvency risk for FTX and its future is uncertain.
October 22, 2025 at 3:22 AM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
get it together, tiffany
A textbook math problem. Applications 55. Salary. Tiffany has started tutoring students x hours per week. Her income is modeled as f(x) = (x- 1)(x - 3)(x - 7) a. Graph the polynomial function. b. Give any real zeros that occur. c. How many hours of tutoring are financially beneficial to Tiffany?
September 21, 2025 at 9:27 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
It was Professor Plum, in the library, with the service award.
A prism made out of solid aluminum. It’s being held by a hand showing scale of about 6im square and 2in deep. It has a mirror apple logo on the square face like you see on MacBook lids, and a 10 engraved on the side.
August 16, 2025 at 4:11 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
A photo from behind third base of the nationals losing epically
August 13, 2025 at 4:50 AM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
They really needed to think through this sign placement more carefully.
A photo of a sign for a restaurant. Because it has been partially obscured, it reads “nazi”.
July 28, 2025 at 6:49 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
The EU DOESNT INVEST IN THINGS WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT
A screenshot of a NYT story saying: The 27-nation bloc also agreed to increase its investment in the United States by more than $600 billion above current levels, Mr. Trump said, adding that the European Union would
July 28, 2025 at 1:49 AM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
ah, but at least they're left neatly upright, unlike these shotgunned beers left behind by our local American youths
April 27, 2025 at 3:14 AM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
Here's the quote in context. It's good advice! But it's clear about how you absolutely need to spend time on that 3%.

Key is to get your project into a state where you can continuously identify the 3% whenever you add new code.
A screenshot of an old computer science paper. It has been OCRd but is clearly a high quality scan of a printout. There is no doubt that the grail of effi- ciency leads to abuse. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficieney actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: pre- mature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportuni- ties in that critical 3%. A good programmer will not be lulled into complacency by such reasoning, he will be wise to look carefully at the critical code; but only after that code has been identified. It is often a mistake to make a priori judgments about what parts of a program are really critical, since the universal experience of programmers who have been using measurement tools has been that their intuitive guesses fail. After work- ing with such tools for seven years, I've be- come convinced that all compilers written from now on should be designed to provide all programmers with feedback indicating what parts of their programs are costing the most; indeed, this feedback should be supplied automatically unless it has been specifically turned off.
April 26, 2025 at 7:58 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
Find the bar the aws sales rep who pulled this off is at they’re buying.
The @USGSA IT team just saved $1M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records. Below it is a community note. Despite its age, magnetic tape is still highly favorable for long-term, static data archives. It offers cost-effectiveness (cheaper than disk/cloud), longevity (outlasts disk drives), offline security (resists cyber threats), and high capacity (up to 50TB per tape).
April 7, 2025 at 1:34 AM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
Schumer will be 84 at the end of this term. They have learned NOTHING.

www.politico.com/news/2025/04...
A screenshot from the linked Politico article. It is unclear what the Schumer-Ocasio-Cortez poll could mean for the New York primary in three years, however, with surveys this early rarely being predictive. Ocasio-Cortez has also been noncommittal about a potential Senate run. Schumer has filed paperwork to run for reelection.
April 4, 2025 at 3:14 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
But don't worry, this all makes sense because math. Where the math is just “we import more than we export” with some greek letters thrown in where the values for them cancel out due to the numbers being made up.

(4 times 0.25 = 1)
A screenshot from the website of the Office of the United States Trade Representative. The section is Basic Approach, full page here: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations In the center is a formula for tarrifs where the numerator is exports minus imports, and the denominator is imports, multiplied by ε and φ where below they explain ε is 4 and φ is 0.25
April 3, 2025 at 4:05 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
The #Java room at #FOSDEM is probably the most Univerty Lecture Theatre of the rooms, complete with graffiti scratched into the wood of the back rows. Feeling very nostalgic. @ktoso should do some diagrams on the chalkboard showing how structs bridge over from Swift.
A photo of Konrad speaking about Java Swift interoperability. He is on a very classic university lecture theatre with wooden desks. There is a wooden bench in front of him and chalkboards behind him on either side.
February 1, 2025 at 3:18 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
Kicking off our #FOSDEM #Swift devroom, @parisinbmore.bsky.social has some exciting news. Apple is open sourcing the Xcode build system, with cross-platform support, as swift-build.
A photo of Paris announcing the new Swift Build initiative. The slide shows the url GitHub.com/swiftlang/swift-build
February 1, 2025 at 2:10 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
Talking about how #swift avoids the rewrite the world problem.
Doug in front of a slide about how “just” rewrite in a new language is hard.
February 1, 2025 at 11:28 AM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
A photo of Doug on the FOSDEM stage in front of his title slide, Incremental Memory Safety in an Established Software Stack
February 1, 2025 at 11:05 AM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
I am constantly insulted on this platform.
A screen capture of Super Mario World. Mario is sitting on Yoshi, up in the clouds, on top of some blocks that will shortly be disappearing beneath him because they move.
December 29, 2024 at 12:09 AM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
cooking the recipe again that has an instruction that makes me mutter “oh fuck off” whenever I read it
A screenshot of a recipe. It says “Place pasta in a large bowl and add 2 cups sauce. Stir to coat pasta evenly encouraging the sauce to go inside each tube.” The last part is highlighted.
November 24, 2024 at 12:54 AM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
Bluesky is taking off. Here’s why that’s bad for Bluesky.
A headline from the New York Times: Bluesky Is Growing Up. Maybe Too Fast. The fledgling social media site has been flooded by people seeking alternatives to Facebook, X and Threads. It hasn’t all been easy.
November 17, 2024 at 5:52 PM
airspeedswift.bsky.social
The Geordie La Forge / Drake meme, where Geordi is saying no to the phrase “Vaccine Skeptic”, and instead pointing favorably at “Disease Advocate”
November 15, 2024 at 7:53 PM