Kurt Frock

Attitudes are contagious. Mine might kill you. [Z73.0]

[Kurt Frock @ThingfulNeeds]

Angeheftete Tweets sind wirklich großer Mist.

[Kurt Frock @ThingfulNeeds]

@spicydll @slash1sol It is "Turing", not "Turning".
Thanks for outlining the direct equivalence of grammar, regexp and DFA. Too few people seem to know about that.
(Or "Chomsky hierarchy" and equivalent grammars/automata to each class.)

[Kurt Frock @ThingfulNeeds]

@kmcnam1 Sorry, I can't.
It lacks even basic fappability.

[Kurt Frock @ThingfulNeeds]

"All of out JS developers have been laid off, no JS skill is left, so we need to use AI to debug and implement new features for the customer."

My. That'll go great.
No issues here.
None.

[Kurt Frock @ThingfulNeeds]

@hthieblot https://t.co/FVfNXQMMBS
https://t.co/5uhjU2pyNQ

[Bennie🕊️ @Bennieeexyz]

A customer at the library asked me a question I wasn't prepared for.

Customer: Excuse me.

Customer: Why does this machine require flesh?

Me: ...what?

Customer: This machine.

Customer: I am touching it, but it does not work.

Customer: Is because... flesh?

At this point I was trying very hard to figure out whether I had accidentally wandered into a horror movie.

Then she held up her hands.

She was wearing gloves.

Me: Oh!

Me: The touchscreen.

Me: Right.

Me: Yeah, it probably can't detect your fingers through the gloves.

Customer: Ah.

Customer: Okay.

Customer: Sorry to bother.

Me: No, no.

Me: That's the best thing I've heard all week.

She laughed.

The machine worked.

And I thought that was the end of it.

It was not.

Now whenever one of our library computers stops working, someone inevitably says:

Staff: It requires flesh.

Staff: The machine must be fed.

Another staff member: Who's volunteering?

So thanks to one perfectly innocent question, our library now sounds like a cult every time the self-checkout freezes.

[Kurt Frock @ThingfulNeeds]

@Kashimori3 @Be_like_legend Neurodivergent - in contrast to Neurotypical (NT).

[Kurt Frock @ThingfulNeeds]

@chaeynz_ ...und riecht gut.

[Kurt Frock @ThingfulNeeds]

@chaeynz_ @ostgecko Alerting wär' noch nice.
Ohne ist Monitoring "eher nur so begrenzt" nützlich.

[Kurt Frock @ThingfulNeeds]

@runaway_vol Mmmmhhhh! Lecker!
Das MUSS ich nach"backen".
XD

[Kurt Frock @ThingfulNeeds]

@MarigatouDesu @YuOminae42 Ich mach' auch immer mindestens 10%. Wenn der Betrag dann zu doof ist, runde ich noch auf.

[Sir Escanor (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘚𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳) @EscanorReloaded]

CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.
Two problems, actually.

One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.

Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.

You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.

The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.
The AI just invoices you for the outage.

And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.

To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.

You didn’t hire a replacement.
You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.

Enjoy.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[MerleTrains 🏳️‍⚧️ @MerleTrains]

Eine Arbeitsstunde ist ein Arbit
(1/8 Arbyte)

[Estel62.bsky.social @EstelCooper]

@MykhailoRohoza

[kelly @kellytheboss7]

ADHD: The “Quick Online Purchase”

8:00 PM — I need a new pillow.

8:09 PM — I’m comparing memory foam densities.

8:44 PM — A Reddit thread convinces me cooling gel is a scam invented by Big Bedding.

9:30 PM — I’m researching sleep posture across different civilizations.

10:15 PM — Ancient Egyptians apparently used wooden headrests. Horrifying.

11:02 PM — I take a sleep quality quiz with 73 questions.

11:48 PM — I decide I can survive with my current pillow a little longer.

[Jum @JesterJum]

Not to sound geriatric but...you know what i miss?

Turning something on and it just works.

No account setup. No app download. No QR code. No "sign in to continue".

Just plug it in and it does the thing its supposed to do.

[Kurt Frock @ThingfulNeeds]

@chaeynz_ You sell when your (pre-defined) exit criteria are met.
Ideally put in a follow-up limit-order straight after buying.

Or - if you want to ride it and risk-max, you sell when you sell.

[Tuta @TutaPrivacy]

Don’t call it age verification. Call it centralised personal data collection. And understand that it serves surveillance, not safety for children.