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brainwane

@harihareswara.net
816 followers 80 following 1.4K posts

Sumana Harihareswara. New York City woman who reads scifi, improves open source software, and does stand-up comedy. harihareswara.net ; also @brainwane@social.coop on Mastodon.

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Reposted by brainwane
Julia Evans @b0rk.jvns.ca · 11h
also (genuinely) please reply to this post with your opinions about what the docs should explain even if you have never read the Git documentation thinking about writing little more help pages so we can say like "see `git help <topic>`" for more advice in tricky situtations
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Julia Evans @b0rk.jvns.ca · 11h
i'm working on some more updates to the official Git documentation so uh what is one concept you wish the docs explained more clearly? right now I'm working on merge conflicts which I'm pretty excited about
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 14h
If you are planning to vote in NYC and want to check your registration, you can do so here: amiregistered.vote.nyc
amiregistered.vote.nyc
Registered Voter Search
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Naomi Kritzer @naomikritzer.bsky.social · 14h
I am genuinely always happy these days to see a friend posting about their colonoscopy prep because the number of people I know who've been told to come back in less than ten years bc of polyps found and removed is extremely high.
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toilet bones @toiletbones.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Found the email I sent when I got accidentally added to the faculty listserv of an orthopedic surgery clinic and nobody would remove me so I sent this email to all faculty/staff/med students and they removed me almost immediately
Hello Bone Colleagues, 
I have invented a new type of ankle and I'm very excited to show it to you. Early raccoon trials suggest a 60% increase in scurrying speed and dramatic increases in fine motor banditry. I know we are not supposed to create super raccoons, but I think you'll change your mind and professional ethics when you see how cute they are. I believe we are on the cusp of a new era in advanced human scurrying because if medical science has taught me anything, it's that improvements in raccoons correspond 1:1 to improvements in humans. 

--
[My name]
Chief Bone Inventor
Chair, Department of Foot and Leg Innovation
Lord Mayor, Musculoskeletal Medicine 
Hartford HealthCare,
The Bone & Joint Institute at Hartford Hospital.
189112223058
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Erin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 06/10/2026
Anyway, OUP is a disaster now and I may never get over it. buymeacoffee.com/ayjay/the-la...
buymeacoffee.com
The Last Word on ... all this — ayjay
Post by ayjay
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Julia Evans @b0rk.jvns.ca · 05/10/2026
i'm looking for some Windows users to test a new tutorial about Git for beginners! If you sign up here I'll send you an email next week or so with a link: forms.gle/69NgKWuqtEHU... (non-Windows users welcome too but I have a lot of linux & mac users already :))
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Sigrid Ellis @sigridellis.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I am *extremely cautiously* asking ONLY PEOPLE WHO HAVE EXPERIENCE SEWING LINEN what techniques y'all have used. Prayer? Small sacrifices? (I attempted thread lines, but my vision is not that good.)
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 05/10/2026
ha!
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Colin McMillen @mcmillen.dev · 05/10/2026
🙃
Google AI overview result telling me that I cannot permanently turn off Google AI Overviews
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 05/10/2026
that, and him mentioning casually in another livestream that he likes Drake's music, are IMO noteworthy there are things he's super careful about mentioning/referring to, but those particular third rails he seems to ignore
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 05/10/2026
Relatedly: many people have noticed that Mamdani will talk with *anyone* while pursuing a better NYC, choosing engagement over shunning I haven't noticed anyone commenting on, for example, him using a Harry Potter reference during a livestream
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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
And when you remove the "legal risk" and "planning risk" it all comes back as "political risk" and isn't any more palatable when it does
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Zen Cho @zenaldehyde.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Thanks to @maryrobinettekowal.com for letting me talk about my favourite bit of my historical romance-ish novella JADE YEO on her blog! maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-f... It’s out now from @homewardbooksco.bsky.social, the chicest little book you ever did see 💃🏻
maryrobinettekowal.com
My Favorite Bit: Zen Cho talks about THE PERILOUS LIFE OF JADE YEO
Zen Cho is joining us today to talk about her novel, The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo. Here’s the publisher’s description: A delicious epistolary romp, brimming with social commentary and rife with wi…
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Eleanor Saitta @dymaxion.org · 05/10/2026
Given that the device linking channel has been used for attacks against Signal users, should a user linking a new device be treated as a soft compromise — not undoing safety number verification, but notifying the person messaging, including the modal when they first send a message after the change?
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 03/10/2026
@ericpietras.bsky.social thanks for Sounds in the Dark which is a frequent companion to me as I read or write.
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Jed Hartman @elysdir.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Occurs to me to mention one tiny specific subtype of typo that can be created by digitizing a printed book: The extra hyphen. In most printed books, there are a bunch of hyphenated words at the ends of lines. 1/7
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Erica Fischer @enf.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Well, it appears that I have joined the ranks of the laid-off. Anyone know of anything interesting going on in geo?
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 02/10/2026
my immediate response to this question is "I take the Fifth"
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Michael Meir Saltzman @saltzman.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
For decades I’ve been trying to figure out who I read in a philosophy class that basically centered morality around the idea of building a kind of imaginary chorus of people in your head. Essentially that empathizing with more perspectives always enhances the result
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Victoria Strauss @victoriastrauss.com · 30/09/2026
More Anthropic settlement madness. If you're a co-author on a self-published book, READ THIS THREAD
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Alexei Pepers @apepers.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The schedule for @roguelike.club is up! We’ve got yet another stunning lineup with multiple people who are such a good fit I had assumed they’d spoken already 🤣 Time is fake and it’s just over two weeks until the con so check it out, buy a ticket, come hang out! www.roguelike.club/event2026.html
roguelike.club
Roguelike Celebration - Event 2026
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 01/10/2026
For inspiration, you may be interested in a few things @leonardr.bsky.social did several years ago: www.crummy.com/writing/Load... BGG data analysis including unfilled niches www.crummy.com/features/dad... randomly generated board game names and mechanics descriptions
crummy.com
Loaded Dice
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Osmose @osmose.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
How would you make a farming sim game more interesting without adding a completely different type of game (e.g. dungeon crawler) as a parallel activity to managing the farm?
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bag of moons 🏳️‍🌈 @bagofmoons.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
when i was doing hospice care for my friend, I would serve her little bowls of chex mix with only the bits she liked and make myself a bowl of the rejects and honestly it was a deeply meaningful act for both of us.
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Emilia @lazerwalker.com · 29/09/2026
I also dream for the day I no longer need to keep Special Interest knowledge in my brain of the form "how long different labs take to process certain blood draws", lmao
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C.K. Gill 🕷️😷 @ckgill.blacksky.app · 28/09/2026
Anyone know of a good article to share with a non-tech person about why you don’t want to take medical advice from an LLM?
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 28/09/2026
I wrote the "how to navigate Legistar" guide I wish I'd had years ago when I started doing #NYC policy advocacy, complete with warnings about subtle bugs. Along the way, I point to #CivicTech tools intro.nyc and legislation.support, with explanations of what they can and can't do.
A screenshot of Legistar's page for Int 0078-2026, with red boxes around the file number, name, event history, bill text tab, and Alerts.

https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7861511&GUID=05BA3489-38FD-436D-9B55-B35A46A6CD96&Options=ID%7CText%7C&Search=1429
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Phildini, since young times @phildini.net · 21/09/2026
Hey, does anyone here consider themselves Good™ at #Grafana and wants to spend like half an hour on a call with me helping me be Good™ for the sake of @civic.band ? I'm trying the @glyph.im suggestion of "bug your friends instead of asking AI"
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Wiredferret! @wiredferret.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Heard a story from a friend today, and I think that like Jury Nullification, everyone should know about Constructive Dismissal. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constru...
en.wikipedia.org
Constructive dismissal - Wikipedia
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Wiredferret! @wiredferret.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Dear Bluesky - A million years ago I found a figure on how much it costs the US Army in retraining every time Microsoft changes office. It was a great number, but that bookmark was like three computers ago. Have any of you seen it?
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Dr Katie Twomey @k2mey.eurosky.social · 28/09/2026
This is quite cool. My university is the first organisation in the world to force Microsoft to allow us to turn off copilot summaries in Word 365, after a backlash against it from staff (including, very vocally, me). That cannot have been easy for our heroic IT people so hats very much off to them!
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 28/09/2026
the show uses graphics, etc. that I don't want to miss. So I can't use it the way I used to, because the work it was accompanying requires my eyes. Life is change, all that is solid melts into air, I know, I know. But I miss my little ritual.
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 28/09/2026
I used to have a little weekly weekend ritual: I'd treat myself to listening to the Hell Gate NYC podcast while reorganizing my materials for my outreach table. Now it's usually on video. I appreciate that the producer inserts some "for audio listeners..." explanations. But
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 28/09/2026
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... (but note the correction 1 year later). From pp. 253-255 of "Cop Cop". similar findings: gothamist.com/news/most-ex...
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 28/09/2026
I wrote the "how to navigate Legistar" guide I wish I'd had years ago when I started doing #NYC policy advocacy, complete with warnings about subtle bugs. Along the way, I point to #CivicTech tools intro.nyc and legislation.support, with explanations of what they can and can't do.
A screenshot of Legistar's page for Int 0078-2026, with red boxes around the file number, name, event history, bill text tab, and Alerts.

https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=7861511&GUID=05BA3489-38FD-436D-9B55-B35A46A6CD96&Options=ID%7CText%7C&Search=1429
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 28/09/2026
How can it be that till now no one has titled a blog post "Legistar Trek"?! New post on exploring #NYC legislation harihareswara.net/posts/2026/l... , with copious shout-outs to @jehiah.cz #CivicTech
harihareswara.net
Legistar Trek, Or, Exploring New York City Legislation
The other day I was walking with a friend who&#x27;d just been to a meeting with me and who&#x27;s just recently started getting involved in local New York City political advocacy. During that meeting...
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 28/09/2026
copcop.org cites a study of Chicago cop misconduct that similarly says: relatively small networks within the population sustain their own cultures of misconduct and commit a huge proportion of the misconduct within the force overall I could dig it up
copcop.org
Cop Cop: Breaking the Fixed System of American Policing
Discover the &#39;Cop Cop&#39; book, exploring police accountability and civilian oversight in criminal justice reform. Get your copy today!
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Rebecca Williams @rebeccawilliams.info · 28/09/2026
I tried this Signal registration w/ no phone number option 1) it was easy 2) it requires $2.99 payment to reduce scams, you can pay w/ a Google Gift Card (that you can buy in cash) if you took every other precaution (fresh phone/google account/delete logs, wifi only) that's close to a real burner
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 28/09/2026
a quick search does indicate this is the case on the public web; possibly @granicusus.bsky.social can speak to whether there are internal blogs that take on this responsibliity
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Andrea Phillips @andrea.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I got carded to buy creatine at Whole Foods???
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brainwane @harihareswara.net · 28/09/2026
How can it be that till now no one has titled a blog post "Legistar Trek"?! New post on exploring #NYC legislation harihareswara.net/posts/2026/l... , with copious shout-outs to @jehiah.cz #CivicTech
harihareswara.net
Legistar Trek, Or, Exploring New York City Legislation
The other day I was walking with a friend who&#x27;d just been to a meeting with me and who&#x27;s just recently started getting involved in local New York City political advocacy. During that meeting...
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Sarah Andersen @sarahseeandersen.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The image is of a four panel comic.
The first panel shows Sarah, the protagonist, working at a desk. A brain next to her says, "We need to take breaks!"
The second panel zooms in on Sarah's face. She is annoyed. She says, "What if I don't listen to you?"
The third panel shows the brain smiling.
The fourth panel shows the brain reaching towards a lever. The brain says, "I'LL MAKE YOU."
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Today's academic job posting bugaboo: your job posting should list the actual salary range, in numbers (even if it sucks) and the actual teaching load, in numbers (even if it is heavy).
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Justin Duke @jmduke.com · 26/09/2026
the buttondown team is meeting this week to talk about 2027! what are the things that, if we do them, you would go "oh FINALLY_"?
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Kevin Reuning @reuning.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Anyone here have advice on finding rehab facilities? My mom needs more help from her surgery than we realized and we are trying to figure out the best place. This would be for live-in facilities
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Luis Villa @lu.is · 26/09/2026
Welp sat down at this campsite to read and discovered that my Boox had no visible damage from getting slammed in the car door yesterday, but does have a huge dead spot in the screen now. (1) any Boox owners know if the screen is replaceable? (2) anyone have Android e-readers they like?
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Annalee @flowerhorne.com · 26/09/2026
Right so the real trouble with phones is that they can make us think that we're not bored when we are in fact still bored
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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
A sorta odd request. I’m looking for an artistic cartographer or an illustrator to commission to make a cute, useful street map of an actually existing village. Searching the internet produces a bunch of fantasy map specialists and AI slop, which isn’t quite it. Know anyone? (This is paid, ofc.)
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Steen Comer @mediapathic.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Exterior, Night. Oakland. The neighborhood is quiet save for the sounds of the highway. Suddenly, piercing the night, a lonesome cry of “BROOOOOOO!”. Silence settles again over the land.
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