Karl Fogel kfogel@identi.ca

Chicago, United States

see http://red-bean.com/kfogel

  • 2022-11-28T03:37:47Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Okay, my new Fediverse furniture *finally* arrived, and I've just finished setting it all up!

    Subscribe to @kfogel@rants.org for long-form blog posts. Subscribe to @kfogel@kfogel.org for short tweetidentitoot-style single-thought messages like this one.

    (Or just get out more.)

    what is it that (theoretically) makes rants.org fediverse-enabled?  I couldn't subscribe from gnusocial.net :-(

    Alexandre Oliva at 2022-11-28T23:59:40Z


    Subscribing from mastodon seemed to work.


    Mike Linksvayer at 2022-11-29T03:04:39Z

  • 2022-11-21T17:53:20Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    This article contains the sentence "In Arizona, voters are allowed to cast a split ticket. This means that they don't have to vote exclusively along party lines."

    What an odd implication. Are there are places in the U.S. where that's *not* the case?


  • 2022-11-19T17:17:24Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Zounds, I somehow hadn't seen @krusynth's web site https://billhunt.dev/ before. It's both an aesthetic treat (visit -- you'll see what I mean) and full of interesting information. Highly recommended. It's way better than whatever the Twitter algorithm was about to feed you.

  • 2022-11-17T06:56:40Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Every now and then I remember that Kevin McCarthy is no Nancy Pelosi. And I smile to myself, and go back to sleeping sweetly.
  • 2022-11-11T04:24:51Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers


    All right, any WordPress experts out there?

    I want to just write my posts in raw HTML.  The Block Editor appears to be not working for me (I mean, not even working as it's supposed to -- even if it were it wouldn't be what I'd want to use), and Classic Editor ditto.

    I see that there are a few plugins for this, but most of them appear to be out-of-date w.r.t. the latest WordPress, and the couple that weren't I tried -- and they didn't work at all in the way I wanted.

    I just want to write HTML.  (Why is the platform so resistant to that?)

    To be clear:

    By "any WordPress experts out there", I mean that I'm happy to hire you at your consulting rate.


  • 2022-11-10T22:25:39Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    "Musk told workers in the email that he wants to see subscriptions account for half of Twitter’s revenue."

    This explains everything! Obviously he needs to reduce all other revenue sources drastically enough to achieve this goal. And I think he can do it, I really think he can.

    François Marier, Stephen Michael Kellat, Alexandre Oliva likes this.

  • 2022-11-09T19:14:18Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Never herd cats where you make the sausage.

    Stephen Michael Kellat likes this.

  • 2022-11-08T21:38:29Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    If there is anyone in Chicago who knows a lot about GRUB prompts and Debian GNU/Linux booting, let's talk -- I'll pay your rate. I've got a stubborn new laptop behaving oddly when booting a netinst image. For an expert, this is probably totally solvable, but I'm not an expert.
  • 2022-11-01T17:11:10Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Two pieces of great writing came over my transom recently (that sounds so much better than "showed up in my feed", right?). The first was by my friend @ninapaley -- she's such a good artist that it's easy to forget how good a writer she is too:


    The second was this by @willystaley in the NYT Sunday Magazine:


    I'd been trying to articulate to myself the problem of being consumed by a pervasively performative online identity, and here Willy Staley went and did it.

    (Note: might need subscription?)
  • 2022-10-27T03:35:04Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    You know, people, previous generations ignored history too. You're not the first; you didn't invent this.
  • 2022-10-25T01:58:35Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Just ran across this in an actual LaTeX document I wrote:

    \setlength{\tabcolsep}{.71828182845904523536028747135266249775724709369995em}

    I'm sure if *any* of those digits were changed, the output wouldn't look quite right. I'm glad I was paying such close attention to quality.

  • 2022-10-24T20:33:06Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    There's a headline on Hacker News right now "My next Mac might be the last" and I misread it as "My next cigarette might be the last" at first and then did a double take.
    Perhaps they'll move into the free software world.

    Jason Self at 2022-10-24T21:27:57Z

  • 2022-10-24T18:15:18Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Little known fact:

    The verb "to emulate" originally meant "to emulate an emu". But over time it came to mean to emulate anything, and nowadays we just use the word casually -- especially in computer programming -- without ever thinking about tall flightless birds.

    hey, hey.  you had me going for a bit, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong.

    it was not about an emu, but a mule!

    Alexandre Oliva at 2022-10-24T19:36:44Z

    Karl Fogel likes this.

    The more you know.

    Jason Self at 2022-10-24T19:36:59Z

  • 2022-10-17T14:51:52Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    After many years, I finally dug out my old analog camera again, dusted it off, opened the compartment, found a film cartridge to put in...

    And BOOM, just like that, I was stopped cold by a labor dispute. From what I can gather, they're "tired of working just for the exposure"!

  • 2022-10-15T21:15:38Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    TIL about the term "cadence shear", from @brainwane's blog:

    https://harihareswara.net/posts/2022/managing-cadence-shear-my-upstream-2022-talk/

    (She has a knack for filling holes in the English language that you didn't know were there (until you see her fill them (at which point you realize you'd been tripping over them all the time)).)

  • 2022-10-14T21:12:25Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Impmentum (noun):

    The threshold of motivation required to finally impishly implement a solution to some trivial problem that had been bugging one for a long time but that one had never quite gotten around to solving before.

    As in: "I finally got the impmentum to solve X today."

    In this particular case for me today, X was the fact that by default Etherpad doesn't let one directly paste text copied from a non-browser source (such as my Emacs buffer). I finally reached the impmentum to do the following:



  • 2022-10-14T18:33:06Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Why we will always need the hyphen, exhibit 3.14x10e35:

    "So then I went off on this wild goose chase..."

    Which is wild, the goose or the chase? Could go either way.

    Having received implied doubts from some quarters, I'd like to be clear about something:

    I have, in fact, chased a wild goose before, and the chasing process was itself wild because the goose was wild. So in my, um, lived experience, the linguistic ambiguity remains.

    Karl Fogel at 2022-10-14T19:07:42Z

  • 2022-09-01T14:39:25Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    After much careful thought -- and having avoided any actual research, naturally -- I am now sure that the "is" in "island" and "isthmus" must be cognate.

    That leads to another question:

    What is a thmus? Can I buy some thmusfront property?

  • 2022-07-27T13:59:50Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    If you've been looking for the One True Article that gives every reason why the U.S. Senate filibuster should not be preserved, and convinces, then look no further -- @JoshTPM has written it:

    "The Filibuster Is a Direct Threat to American Democracy"


  • 2022-07-22T03:18:02Z via Identi.ca Web To: Public CC: Followers

    Absolutely wild new technique for random surfing:

    Take any hash (a Git commit, the md5sum of a doc, anything). Put it into ${SEARCH_ENGINE}, then: search, truncate by 1 char, search, truncate, search, and so on.

    Eventually, results start appearing. They're always interesting.

    Mike Linksvayer likes this.