Coder so old my #CPAN account is literally "MICHAEL".
Public Key
npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Profile Code
nprofile1qqs04cyhrk5s9djtcz9r2tq5rm497z2677066clq8tmevd3p9ra7uucpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds25y6dz
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Published at
2026-08-25T13:41:07Z Event JSON
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"content": "{\"name\":\"Michael Roberts\",\"about\":\"Coder so old my #CPAN account is literally \\\"MICHAEL\\\".\\n\\nI pay the bills with #technical_translation, mostly German to English, but I also work from French, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, and on occasion Portuguese or Dutch.\\n\\nI've lived in #PuertoRico off and on since 2004, and now own and live on a #coffee farm working on land tending #robotics and - very eventually - harvest.\\n\\nMy wife is #Hungarian and a theoretical physicist with a side gig in banana bread biscotti.\",\"picture\":\"https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/accounts/avatars/000/129/491/original/39b6d75e3805c313.jpg\",\"nip05\":\"[email protected] \",\"fields\":[]}" ,
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Last Notes npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…d0yj The first step in the dismantling of democracy is to talk about education only in terms of its production of human resources and to maintain a guarded silence regarding its role in the production of informed citizens. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts Hey @nprofile…acpk, I got a question. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…pfuj He would, sure. He's proud of it. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…pfuj Oh god npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…pfuj And you're thinking that futurebird saying ants are boring actually is a situation where we should [checks notes] not panic and think "and now this too? is nothing off limits?"? Is that what you're saying here? npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…hzu2 Funny thing is, that code isn't copyrightable (in the United States, anyway), as it's been generated by Claude Code. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…acpk They're asking for $200 billion for further Iran War funding. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…d0yj 100% this. When our son was little, that's actually what brought us back here. The hospital in Indianapolis had the primary goal of separating us from our money, but the doctors here - and most especially the pediatric nephrologist we ended up finding - actually treated him and us as human beings. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…acpk How have I never even heard of this one? npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…acpk @nprofile…9p7q So beyond a *technology* of epistemology we also need a better culture of epistemology, really. My bias is naturally to focus on the technical first. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…acpk @nprofile…9p7q I think that "flooding the zone" goes beyond mere mis/disinformation, in the sense that it's one thing to muddy the waters as to what is true, but it's an entirely different level to make people believe that what is or isn't true is *inherently unknowable*. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…acpk @nprofile…9p7q "A lie goes around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on." npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…pfuj AGI = a guy inside npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…x2fp @nprofile…ugpy In 1991, when my new wife came back to the States with me, the INS phone line was operated for only *one hour per week*. And there was no waiting line, you just had to keep calling the number - in Nebraska - until you got through or until the hour for the week was up. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…acpk I've never actually seen it run. This is so cool. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…d0yj npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…acpk It'd be more surprising if it turned out he isn't. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…pfuj Is this someone you trust? So far all you have is hearsay. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/115/907/837/787/862/772/original/954c7527b0dddf51.png npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…l70y Implying that ICE is enforcing law. That's a pernicious frame, and easy to slump into, but it just ain't so no matter how much it's repeated. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…n2fr I dreamed about a useful feature for my notes system, then woke up with the realization that I could easily implement it. And did, that day. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…d0yj In six *minutes*? How could *anything* be that bad? npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts Hey, @nprofile…acpk, I have a question I keep meaning to ask, and it's OK if you don't remember, but by any chance do you know roughly how many codelets per second the Examiner was running while you were working on it? npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…e4ry She just wants a cut of the royalties. Cats are smart like that. They know what they've got. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…e4ry That's not a mad face. That's an intrepid face. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…4unj "A brilliant new theory of the mind that upends our understanding of how the brain interacts with the world" npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…w47d @nprofile…scce Ha. The primary use of MT in the translation industry - in my experience - is to lower the rates you pay translators while demanding "identical" output quality. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…scce Just a data point on this; I'm a freelance technical translator, and my biggest corporate client now says that any independent use of AI on my part constitutes fraud and is grounds for termination. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…9ake You can run Win11 in a VirtualBox. Windows can't tell at all, it's a complete virtual machine. Seriously, try it out, I've used it for over a decade and it works perfectly. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…9ake VirtualBox! I've run Win7 in a virtual environment since 2013 so I can run Windows tools while still using Linux for everything else. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts It's getting scarier! npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…4unj Pretty sure M. Bonesaw is just helping out with emoluments. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…m9j9 npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…4unj npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts Hey, Fedi, what's the best way under Linux to OCR a scanned PDF and put the resulting text into the PDF? I haven't found any particularly convincing recipes yet. (I mean, Tesseract for the OCR part, I know that much - but what's the best way to get the text into the PDF for searchability and text selection? Ideally without disturbing any annotations I've already made.) npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…4unj My second boy is in Iowa doing doctoral work in - not making this up - fish robotics. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…4unj Anyway, Scheme is obviously cool, but my brain runs on Perl and so mine's in Perl. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…4unj Yes, Gary, I know that. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts So hey, Fediverse. I did a thing that's just the minutest possible first step of a plan I first dreamed up in 1996. It's an implementation of Douglas Hofstadter's parallel terraced scan in preparation for a lot more work in that direction. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…2whg - my immediate assumption is that a lot of people may be saying they attended even though they didn't. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…e4ry They basically got here as soon as there was Caribbean dirt to be ants in. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…8u43 It's probably also worth noting that it's not true that it's been "nearly 200 years since" a storm of this size has struck Jamaica. A storm of this size has never struck Jamaica in the nearly 200 years of weather records, which is not the same thing - and her phrasing minimizes the enormity of the catastrophe. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…8kg5 It's not unlikely, as Srdja Popovic (of Belgrade) writes in Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…39ss I will give each of the seven a boop from you, as I see them successively over the course of the day. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…39ss Title: Sleep like nobody's watching. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…args *That's* what I've been doing wrong. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…r5mx - Newsom is only just barely liberal, on some days, having shown his willingness to throw trans people under the bulldozer he's using to eliminate the homeless - and yet I love this entire campaign so much. At least he's not *entirely* useless. I wish more people would follow suit. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…args @nprofile…gd2c "ChatGPT admits..." is already wrong, yeah. And it's not getting better. I saw an article the other day by somebody warning about the psychologically harmful effects of chat AI, and it was all "ChatGPT explains that it is trained to exploit weaknesses" ... no. It's harmful enough, sure, but it's not trained to exploit weaknesses, no matter what you got it to "admit". npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…qz4x You know, this has bugged me about the Share-to-FB button on my phone for probably two years now. Stories, of course, are *stupid*, and I only want to post photos to News, which is my actual, you know, friends. But when I go to do the post, the *menu items move around* from week to week, in the hope of tricking me into posting a Story instead. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts My son's workplace is in need of a short-term Linux/AWS expert of 8+ years (for bureaucratic reasons) to do a migration of an Ubuntu instance from one workspace to another, basically as soon as possible. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…3wy7 Why must you be so hostile, man? I never hurt you. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…ekkm This is *exactly* the experience I had five years ago as a professional translator when the entire industry decided it was time to start running everything through machine translation and then paying translators half as much to "MT post-edit". npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…args There's nothing like a good scientific "YOU TAKE THAT BACK" npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…args I've been interested in that for a long time. Planned obsolescence is one of the many cancers besetting our society. Makes perfect sense from a corporate capitalist evolutionary standpoint, but it's solving for the wrong variables. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…args That's "long-term design". npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts Well, hey! The power is out again! npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…4tpe To my great surprise, I find I can't joke about this. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…4tpe It'll never catch on. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @nprofile…nz6l We're pretty good at music. When we look across the valley or up at the night sky we yearn to go there just to see what it looks like. When a kitten shows up, we start feeding it and treating it as part of the family. Dogs like us, too. npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts I saw another post about translation being a harbinger for AI impact on skilled labor. Things haven't *completely* dried up, but life does suck, and for much the same reason the oligarchy wants to replicate for everybody else: it's cheaper to pay a bot to do a completely shitty job with the understanding that your fellow real people will never complain about the quality than it is to pay a human to do a professional job that, in the end, nobody (who counts) cares about anyway. #capitalism #ai npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @npub1zdp…vqv8 That is a refreshingly positive take and I really appreciate having seen it. Thanks! npub1ltsfw8dfq2myhsy2x5kpg8h2tuy44aul4437qwhhjcmzz28maeesk6a8ql Michael Roberts @npub1g8e…qdqf - nice, thanks! I'd been meaning to figure this stuff out.
