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Garrett Wollman

@gwollman.bsky.social

550 followers 330 following 5.1K posts

@garrett_wollman from the Bad Place @[email protected] I make the network go, and stop, and go again at @csail.mit.edu. Not actually a colander full of beans. He/him (or they/them).

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · Apr 6

I gave up on trying to run my own feed generator and switched to a third-party service, so unfortunately all my old skating feeds have been deleted. New feeds published on my profile for #WorldFigure, #WorldSynchro, #EuroFigure, #GPFigure, and #JGPFigure, plus a feed that's all of those together.

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 2h

Strange how much stuff varies by location — you'd think the medical science and public health needs would be pretty universal.

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 2h

Existed? I'm not sure. I remember anti-ERA radio ads in the late 1970s saying that the ERA would pave the way for lesbians to marry, but I was in the first grade and didn't get the point. I realized *I* was queer in 1992 when I read Diane Duane's THE DOOR INTO FIRE after buying it used for $1.

Reposted by Garrett Wollman

Doctora Malka Older @older.bsky.social · 5h

power to be quoted and amplified in the media any time they feel like speaking

Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 5h

And the danger of that wealth is amplified by the power we've allllowed it to buy.

Power to influence elections.
Power to mold institutions.
Power to move markets.
Power to manipulate media.
Power to punish anyone who tries to challenge or question their power.

Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 1d

The 400 richest Americans are now worth a record $6.6 trillion.

The entire bottom 50% of America is worth just $4.2 trillion.

Read that back.

When 400 people control more wealth than half a country’s population, we have a very serious problem.

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 2h

Wow, that's awful. Shingles vaccine here is recommended at 50 — I had it a year ago when I was 51, 100% paid for by insurance.

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 12h

Mimetic fiction is a colossal bore.

Rachel Feder @rachelfeder.bsky.social · 1d

Tell me your most unhinged literary opinion, as a little treat

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 12h

That's why they hire professionals for that job.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 12h

When they say "10 is the worst pain you can imagine" the right answer is not "I have a pretty active imagination, what do you really mean?"

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 14h

(If we're going to rag on Asimov I'd at least point out his F&SF essay "What Truck?" in which he does the same for the authors of the pre-Tsiolkovsky era not getting space travel, despite the physics being Right There.)

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 14h

But in the somewhat more SFnal side of things, how many writers of near-future SF in the 80s and 90s envisioned clunky JCL-style command lines would still be with us in 2100? Or that we'd replace printing on paper with devices that emitted single-text e-ink "plaques"? Phones changed everything.

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 14h

Even a lot of (contemporary primary world) fantasy can feel dated. I have a lot of appreciation for @diane.dianeduane.com doing the needful and doing a full continuity edit of the Young Wizards to make them more approachable to people who are kids now rather than 1983 — but it's a lot of work!

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 14h

For recipe writers in this century it must be a challenge to suggest varieties knowing that fashions change so quickly now and an old reliable variety may become hard to find while a cookbook is still in print.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 14h

Just eating out of hand, however, it's definitely nothing special. Sweet, slightly floral, neither tart nor particularly crunchy. Don't think I would disagree with your review of the parent variety ("pear" and "honey").

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 14h

@adapples.bsky.social Had the last of the Jonastar today. All the others went into a pie. People were complimentary about the pie, said that they liked how the apple slices held together.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 15h

Thinking I probably shouldn't do the BOM cost on this one, with 13 oz of chocolate, half a pound of butter, and a half-dozen eggs it's going to be a lot.

Reposted by Garrett Wollman

Justin Solomon @justinmsolomon.bsky.social · 16h

When prompted to translate text, ChatGPT (in this case version 4o) also fixes a math mistake without telling the user it did so. This might feel like a feature but to me it illustrates a serious flaw: People using AI tools as "intermediaries" might not have their text faithfully translated.

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 19h

And I retract what I said earlier: I found the ES3 specification, and it doesn't have any normative references for RegExp, it just attempts to describe a subset of Perl 5's semantics. (Did libpcre already exist in 1999?) It's even worse than the contemporary POSIX specification.

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 20h

Chocolate Five-Spice Flourless Cake. Doesn't look like anything special but it will be a few hours before it's depanned and plated.

A brown cake in a ten-inch pan cooling on a wire rack. The top of the cake — which will be the bottom when inverted for serving — shows broken bubbles at the surface and a slight depression just left of center. Recipe by Ming Tsai.

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 20h

When you're in Perl regexps, well, I'll give Larry credit for having come up with a simpler syntax, but it *is* confusing to have an escape sequence that means the same thing both inside and outside of a character class expression.

Reposted by Garrett Wollman

Elf M. Sternberg @elfsternberg.bsky.social · 20h

Today, the Republican Administration, as expected, honored an infamous rapist and pedophile: "Our Nation honors the legendary Christopher Columbus — the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth [sic]."

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 21h

Probably the ECMA standard is just referencing one of the (several) existing standards for how regular expressions are interpreted. (POSIX has one but it's hopelessly confusing. I'm pretty sure there are at least two others, because the great thing about standards…)

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 21h

That's obviously correct, since no metacharacters have special meaning in a character class expression other than - (when not first), ] (when not first), \, and [. Not even sure where any confusion could arise.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 21h

There's a gluten-free eater at work who will appreciate this. Usually I don't do gluten-free so he can't have most of the stuff I bring in to give away. It's supposed to be served with whipped cream but I feel a bit too lazy to make it fresh in the office, so maybe canned will have to do.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 21h

Today for my baking project I made an old Ming Tsai recipe, Chocolate Five-Spice Flourless Cake. The recipe was from his @wgbh.org TV show many years ago, but thankfully I printed it out because the original was lost at some point during a web site redesign.

Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 23h

I have stuck with various styles of Levis for decades, although I get very frustrated by their inconsistent sizing. At least I know I can go to any department store and get the "exact same thing" (although nothing will ever fit exactly the same) without spending an hour in the change room.

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Garrett Wollman @gwollman.bsky.social · 23h

Well, I have at least heard of VanderMeer, although not that title specifically. Complete blank on the rest.