Bill Seitz @BillSeitz@mastodon.social

saw an email about a kashmiri restaurant

wanted to misread it as a katamari restaurant

Wow who could have seen that coming 🙃
https://www.recode.net/2018/10/16/17966102/facebook-portal-ad-targeting-data-collection

@enkiv2 a neural network that watches TV for you and then tries to tell you about what it watched

Sounds like a robotic grandpa

hello!

i've been doing some codestuff to make it easier to make terminal-style games in pygame, with two-color tiles and arbitrary background and foreground colors per tile

Scully rejects proof of magic. Mulder pretends like he cares more about mind control than Scully.

My local town holds a "Daddy Daughter Dance" for 3-15 year olds and I've always found it to be incredibly weird and fucked up and avoided it, but it's a beloved event for most of the town.

It feels like some nonsense out of the 1950s to me.

Calling it now: Hyperloop is the Glomar Explorer of the 2010s.

https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/1052288795478040578

<<Saudi Arabia has cancelled its plan to pretend it's planning on building a hyperloop, in a major blow to Richard Branson's company that pretends to build hyperloops >>>

https://www.ft.com/content/336ea0d8-d160-11e8-a9f2-7574db66bcd5

I open the birdsite and every single tweet from every person I follow in every walk of life is about what the president said today.

Remember "you have been trolled" from early internet days? The president is an elite level shitposter, and everyone is falling for his bait.

Chalk under an electron microscope https://twitter.com/universal_sci/status/1052343883592433664/photo/1
#newsbot

can I please get a tech reporter to look at this list and write a performatively resigned article about how ray kurzweil is putting honest hardworking romcom writers out of a job. "When HAL met Sally," look I already wrote the headline for you.

#CallbackToYourFirstTootOfTheDay

remake of _You've Got Mail_ except the Joe Fox character is a computer programmer making a program to generate romantic comedy scripts in bulk and the Kathleen Kelly character writes romcoms in the traditional intention-typical way, and also they're both trans women who communicate anonymously mainly through an increasingly arcane system of masto alts, also it's probably set in bushwick instead of the upper west side

the alleged role of a f***ing adtech corporation [Twitter] for journalists is very scary..
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1464884918802975

The next submission I want to make is going to be to Highlights magazine. Those 6 year olds are going to love my political satire.

bot to replace the last sentence of every plot summary with this phrase; every narrative becomes a soviet frustration; "Vader leads a squadron of TIE fighters and prepares to attack Luke's X-wing fighter, but Han returns and fires at the Imperials, sending Vader spiraling away. Guided by Obi-Wan's spirit, Luke uses the Force to destroy the Death Star seconds before it can fire on the Rebel base. But unfortunately, due to external circumstances continuation of this connection does not develop."

coming across plot summary prose gems by randomly sampling wikiplots: "...unfortunately, due to external circumstances continuation of this connection does not develop" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Poplars_in_Plyushcikha

StefanKeller: Re MAPTCHA - ReMAPTCHA - A free, map-based anti-spam service that enhances OpenStreetMap

https://wiki.hsr.ch/StefanKeller/wiki.cgi?ReMAPTCHA

At last, some tools to stop working for free for Google and contribute to the commons while reducing spam!

#captcha #osm #openstreetmap #beta #fuckgoogle #g00gle

Bad idea of the day: a bot that posts random joke punchlines but not the actual joke

I signed up for Google+ as soon as it launched. (I was an enthusiastic user of Buzz and Wave when those existed, & a less-enthusiastic user of Orkut.)

I actually used G+ regularly for a couple years. Then they made some change that caused load times to balloon from 2 seconds to 20 minutes & I had to stop.

I was (and remain) the primary administrator of several communities there: one for fans of Robert Anton Wilson, one for fans of Tim Leary, & one for fans of Terence McKenna.

"Sierra Young is a successful, attractive 30-year-old woman. Amy decides to visit her family. While setting a wedding ring with their names engraved on the ski slopes and all ends well."

"Chicago socialite Cynthia Drexel arranges for New York City who is living in the woodland and in their 30s. Andrew blames Heidee for what they get. Carried away by the spirit of the film shows Craig moving out of his safe, secure life."

three separate markov chains trained on wikipedia plot summaries: (1) only first lines; (2) only middle lines (not first or last); (3) only last lines. generating stories composed of one sentence from 1, 2, and 3 respectively:

"Bill Dancer and his efforts to win back his wife, particularly her attraction to golf. MaryAnn and Darrin are last seen fleeing from the divorce papers, resigns from his sick-bed. When they arrive back to the courthouse, where husband and wife are happily reunited."