iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 21h

GitHub is so awful these days. Simple features no longer work.

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I'm co-chairing NSDI '28. Does anyone have a keynote speaker to suggest? #nsdi28

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

All week, I've had to toggle auto-merge off and on to get a PR to go to the merge queue. WTF Github.

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

USPS allows me to provide an online signature allowing them to deliver packages to me without a physical signature for an entire year, but I have to log in to Informed Delivery again after just an hour or two. How does this make sense.

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

I gave up and called the Waste Management Oakland phone number again and got a human who could help me--if I emailed in a copy of the grant deed. I did, but she says that their email server is slow, so she'll call me back (she claims) when it finally arrives.

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

To all maker of web apps and websites: If your website only works with Chrome, tell me. Don't waste my time trying to use it with Firefox.

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

Is it normal to have to provide a copy of the deed to your house to sign up for garbage collection service?

Dear Ben,

Thank you for contacting WM. I appreciate your patience with your request to set up the service. I apologize for the back and forth of the emails.

As per the area guideline, service are setup in the property owner's name. To very this please reply to this email which attached copy of the Sale Deed showing you as the owner, so we can setup the new service in your name.

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USA @usamailbox.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

#Nature #ART by Anna & the Willow. The Huntress of Skipton Castle Woods #SkiptonCastle in #NorthYorkshire, #England.

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

So apparently with USPS Informed Delivery, if you move from one address to another, you have to create a new account with a new username for the new place you live. Bizarre.

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Ricky Davila @therickydavila.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Governor Newsom has announced that California will be imposing a 100% tax on any payments that are received from the orange felon’s criminal pay off slush fund. That’s my Governor. 💙👊

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

I don't think I've ever written a function to reverse a linked list.

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

The employees of this RenFest are wearing shirts that say "I've Been Kighted—Golden Goblin Productions". I had a conversation: Me: Is that an inside joke? Them: yeah Me: So what does "kighted" mean? Them: what? Me: It says "kighted", what does that mean? Them: it's a typo, we're goblins

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

I only had half a cup of jasmine rice left so I mixed it 50:50 with arborio rice and cooked it the same way I do jasmine and... it turned out fine?!

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

I'm pretty sure that a regular pthreads program can pthread_exit() the initial thread and the others will carry on, but Rust terminates the whole program when the initial thread exits. The latter behavior feels kind of odd to me.

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

Am I the only one who accumulates a bunch of tabs in a browser window until there's an annoying number, then closes all of them en masse?

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

@edzitron.com Probably someone pointed this out already but 1 MW is a thousandth of 1 GW (not a hundredth).

Take, for example, American Tower Corporation’s edge data center in Raleigh, North Carolina, which I’ll mention a little later. This is a 1MW facility — or one-hundredth the size of a gigawatt facility — occupying 4000 sq ft of real estate at first and expanding to 16,000 if ATC actually gets it up to 4MW. That’s about two-and-a-bit times larger than the typical American home. And, from ground-breaking to ribbon-cutting, it took eleven months to complete. And that’s not including all the other necessary time-consuming bits, like finding land, securing permits, and so on.

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Moira Donegan @moiradonegan.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Unironically this was perfect comms strategy.

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#1 text-overflow: ellipsis; hater @nekotachi.bsky.social · 01/05/2026

my genuine advice for using Rust effectively is very close to the joke of "doctor, it hurts when i do this!" "well stop doing that!" 90% of the time the thing you're losing (like being able to easily throw together a doubly linked list implementation) wasn't worth that much anyways.

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The Liberal BoJack @thelibbojack.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

Anyone else dreading America’s 250th birthday knowing Trump and his idiot administration are going to make it a trashy shitshow?

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

Google's new "partner ad settings" do not work.

A webpage titled "Google partner ad settings" that is otherwise a blank skeleton.

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The Liberal BoJack @thelibbojack.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

The people claiming they regret voting for Trump will be right back voting Republican this November and in 2028

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

John McWhorter's NYT article today says: > The “s” in “island” was added because the Latin word was “insula” I didn't realize that the words "island" and "peninsula" were related, but now it seems evident that the "pen" prefix must be the same one in "penultimate". It's almost an island!

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

CS papers used to be printed for publication and collected proceedings were given to conference-goers and mailed to subscribers. This is hardly the case anymore. The 2-column PDF-based format for papers assumes this usage, and it's relatively hard to read on a screen. It's overdue for replacement.

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Sonia Silva ❤️ @vallygirl.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Every single day, Trump does something that would have ended any other presidency.

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Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

my conspiracy theory is wall street is doing everything it can to keep everything from collapsing until dems take the house and senate so they can blame the implosion on them

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

My electric teakettle has 0.5L marked on it as minimum and 1.7L as maximum. That makes sense. It also has 1.2L marked on it. What is special about 1.2L?

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Classic Brian @classicbrian.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Pet rent is such a scam. Often on top of a non-refundable pet deposit. On top of a maybe-refundable normal deposit, which covers the same things as the pet deposit.

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

What if all these "orbiting data center" proposals are really elaborate tax and fraud havens? Who collects taxes on revenues that are collected 1000 miles above international waters? Who prosecutes Ponzi schemes that are perpetrated there?

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cowboycat13.bsky.social @cowboycat13.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Dear America, Please stop saying that Donald Trump is the Leader of the Free World. He is not. We have Zero Respect for Him. Signed The Free World.

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Patty Farley 🐦🍀🇺🇸 @patty003.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Our country can't move forward until Trump is impeached.

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Elizabeth Warren @warren.senate.gov · 15/04/2026

Wouldn't it be nice if you could say goodbye to TurboTax and file your taxes for free, online, and directly with the IRS? I have a bill to get that done.

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Jorge A. Caballero, MD @datadrivenmd.social · 16/04/2026

I pay every penny I owe in taxes, but I must say that this year really felt like a gut-punch on account of all the illegal shit that the federal government is doing with our hard-earned money

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

In #Rust, `struct S<T>` yields a compiler error, but `fn f<T>() {}` does not even yield a warning. Why not? #rustlang

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Brad Lander @bradlander.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

It’s not a ceasefire if the killing continues on one side. Mass atrocities are being carried out by Netanyahu in Lebanon with U.S. backing. (1/3)

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

A common #rust mistake I see is using `//` (plain comment) instead of `///` (doc comment). It doesn't seem like rustc or clippy knows to warn about this, which seems weird. #rustlang

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Commit messages are important, why doesn't GitHub allow commenting on them in PRs?

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David Darmofal @daviddarmofal.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

We shouldn't all be forced to live in this episode of The Twilight Zone constantly. This is no way to live.

media.tenor.com

a young boy in a striped shirt is pointing his finger

ALT: a young boy in a striped shirt is pointing his finger

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

Through a series of coincidences I now possess three mini bottles of Scotch that were stored in a drawer at Donald Knuth's house from 2018 until today.

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

I always thought the whole "Great Satan" thing was just hyperbole.

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George Takei @georgetakei.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Rep. Ted Lieu isn't backing down.

Screenshot of a tweet by Rep. Ted Lieu stating that U.S. military law prohibits war crimes, including strikes on civilian infrastructure that cause disproportionate harm. The tweet warns that service members must disobey illegal orders and could face prosecution by a future administration if they commit war crimes.

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Ben Pfaff @benpfaff.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Jury duty again, ugh. What I really hate about jury duty is how they just waste your time with it. You show up just to sit around and then go home. How about not doing that?

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Rob Dunson, Collateral Beautician @wormsgreenrealm.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Just think it’s dumb af to have to go to work when the President of the United States says shit like that

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Mr. Beat @iammrbeat.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

For the humanity's sake, this must be a TACO Tuesday.

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