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Colin McMillen

@mcmillen.dev

2.7K followers 910 following 6.7K posts

He/him. Somerville, MA. Previously: Google, reCAPTCHA, Carnegie Mellon (Ph.D., Computer Science).

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · Mar 2

I've always been tempted to do a #DailyPhoto thing, but the problem for me is that *taking* photos is easy, but I rarely get around to actually editing & printing them.

So: here's a crow perched at the Tōkagakudō music hall in the Imperial Palace East Gardens, Tokyo Japan, 2023-09-26.

1/365 (?)

A crow is standing on some sort of man-made box while yelling. In the background are a mosaic of the sun (in oranges, reds, and yellows) on a background of light blues and purples. Inside the box are two gilded people; I'm not sure their significance.

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Reposted by Colin McMillen

Norman Bates @formalplates.bsky.social · 1d

CHATGPT: Besides, Elves already have 4 rings

ISILDUR: You mean 3?

CHATGPT: I think you’re making a mistake many do. Just list them and count them: Narya, Nenya, and Vilya.
That’s four.

ISILDUR:

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 17h

tech companies blatantly ignoring user consent, exhibit #6379:

Email screenshot:

We’re always working to make Gemini more helpful and easier to use, so we’re
simplifying your Gemini app experience to automatically include publicly available
data from YouTube, Google Maps, Google Flights, and Google Hotels.
This means you will no longer have to manage individual app settings for Gemini to get
the most current and relevant public results for your prompts—such as up-to-the-minute flight prices, helpful video summaries, or local hotel details. As such, you will no longer
see individual Apps settings for these particular services. This new experience will
begin rolling out to all users, including those who had previously turned the settings off
for these services, on October 13.

(The last sentence is highlighted)

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Reposted by Colin McMillen

Cam Walker @walks30.bsky.social · 1d

Publisher of famous Soviet newspaper Pravda falls to his death from a seventh-floor window

Someone could introduce the Russians to safety glass. 🤷

Publisher of famous Soviet newspaper Pravda falls to his death

The secretive head of Pravda publishing house, Vyacheslav Leontyev, 87, plunged 70ft from his home in western Moscow .

www.dailymail.co.uk

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Reposted by Colin McMillen

Rosemary Mosco @rosemarymosco.com · 1d

Working on a bloödcheëp shirt. I'm proud of those letters.

A black tshirt design with a bald red cardinal in a circle surrounded by flames, with the word bloodcheep in red death metal style letters above it.

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Reposted by Colin McMillen

Brandon Friedman @brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 2d

Judge Diane Goodstein crossed the Trump administration last month. Yesterday, her home burned, her husband was injured and it's being investigated for arson.

www.postandcourier.com/news/crime/s...

Judge blocks South Carolina from giving DOJ millions of voters' data
Sep. 3, 2025

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Reposted by Colin McMillen

depths of wikipedia @depthsofwikipedia.bsky.social · 3d

a Wikipedia editor with the username Vigilantcosmicpenguin explained, "I contacted Brian David Gilbert with a request for freely licensed photographs. He delivered."

gilbert poses after his pizzas fall on the floor

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Reposted by Colin McMillen

John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 2d

If there's just one piece of wisdom I can impart to everyone, it's that trying to post your way though it almost never works out the way you think it will

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 2d

a radiation hazard symbol, with text: "i just personally don't agree with radiation poisoning. you held a rock and now you feel bad? grow up."

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

TIL Itanium was only discontinued 5 years ago

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

for all the rest of that industry's internet innovations, you'd think they'd have made hporntp:// by now, but they haven't yet

Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

Tanenbaum went on to diss the viability of Linux compared to his MINIX, and also used statistical analysis to incorrectly predict Kerry would beat Bush in 2004, so uh I guess he was the Nate Silver of two decades ago

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

Cray supercomputers

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

one of my favorite sentences in any college textbook was my (2003? but already dated at the time) computer networking book by Andrew Tanenbaum: "it is not yet clear whether Gopher or HTTP will become the dominant protocol of the World Wide Web"

(by then it was probably BitTorrent, by traffic)

Chris Steller @chrissteller.bsky.social · 3d

Minnesota Achievements In Computer Stuff
- The Gopher protocol
- Control Data
- Tinyurl
- Oregon Trail
- ???

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

& the human judgment of what software *should* do is the most important thing for the success of a project.

so yeah, maybe with reliable AI coding assistance i could have make the easiest part of my Staff Software Engineer job go slightly faster, but that's not 90% of what i was getting paid for.

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

co-signed. a robot might be able to type rote code faster than me, but *typing speed* is not the limiting factor in my effectiveness as a software engineer, and never has been.

*understanding* the code (and the pre-existing human and computational systems it interacts with) is the hard part.

"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 3d

I'd also identify a third position, "I see or imagine there are meaningful uses for LLMs, but that they are relatively few (not 'everything') and relatively small (+10%, not +10000%) and so may not support the cost of model building and inference or the valuation of these companies."

ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 3d

I think a lot of people who are reasonable AI skeptics are saying things like “I don’t see a reliable use for LLMs in areas I’m an expert in” and that those folks are quite distinct from people who argue that LLMs don’t have capabilities that they clearly do

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Reposted by Colin McMillen

Frank Vehafric @fvehafric.bsky.social · 3d

One of the things I took away from the 60s and Richard Nixon, first mentioned by Hunter Thompson, but I believe to be true, is the fact that we believed, at time, that all our protesting, marching and sign waving was futile and pointless when in fact, it drove Richard Nixon to alcohol fueled madness

Brandon Friedman @brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 3d

Everyone is trying to have a normal Saturday night and the president's top advisor is on X announcing that civil war is necessary

@StephenM on X: Legal insurrection. The President is the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, not an Oregon judge. Portland and Oregon law enforcement, at the direction of local leaders, have refused to aid ICE officers facing relentless terrorist assault and threats to life. (There are more local law enforcement officers in Oregon than there are guns and badges in the FBI nationwide). This is an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers, and the deployment of troops is an absolute necessity to defend our personnel, our laws, our government, public order and the Republic itself.

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Mindy Weisberger @laminda.bsky.social · Dec 11

Let it be known that we were all correct in our pronunciation of the mutual nose-touching behavior description "Boops boops boops Boops boops," as proposed by fish research biologist Kate Richerson

Screenshot of a social media post by Kate Richerson (@kate_richerson) dated June 9 showing a photo of a yellow Post-It pad with an ink sketch of two fish booping noses, reading "Boops boops boops Boops boops." Text in the post reads: "I just learned there's a fish with the Latin name Boops boops, so 'Boops boops boops Boops boops' could conceivably be a sentence right?"

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

at long last, we have created the living computer powered by humans, from the 1999 hit movie Don't Create The Living Computer Powered By Humans

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Scientists race to make 'living' computers powered by human cells

BBC News goes inside the lab powering computers with 'mini brains' grown from human cells.

www.bbc.com

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

underrated reply

Reposted by Colin McMillen

Frames @oxinabox.bsky.social · 3d

as a girl with a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning it's actually offensive to me when you say "we don't know how LLMs work so they might be conscious"

I didn't spend 10 years in mines of academia to be told ignorance is morally equal knowledge.

We know exactly how LLMs work.

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

bsky.app/profile/mcmi...

ghost malone ergo propter malone @proptermalone.bsky.social · 3d

gonna be real weird if Trump manages to reinstill urban pride in the greater metro areas through sheer negative polarization

GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE @golikehellmachine.com · 3d

a competent authoritarian regime would understand that maintaining good relationships with local security forces is an absolute top priority, because things can get very bad for the regime in a hurry if metro police decide they’re the enemy

Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

the main benefit of ICE goons carrying assault rifles is that the goons get to cosplay that they're in a videogame warzone

that, and it's good for recruiting the sort of people who want the videogame tough-guy feeling without all the trouble & responsibilities of signing up for the real military

Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 3d

you absolutely do not have to hand it to the police, and to how the US over-funds them but yeah, if local police turn against the regime, that's Bad for the regime. there are 50% more cops in the US than the entire US Army (including Natl Guard and reserves)

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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 4d

the wait is Ranma 12,062/12,063th over

Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 4d

Oh yeah, she's being a jerk *because* she is receiving a firehose of jerk-ful complaints; but unlike the complainers *it is her job* and she needs to either learn to react without blowing up or find someone else to do PR for Bluesky. The CEO of a social website Posting Through It is how we got here.

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