Chuck Milam

I fix things. Mostly computer and security-related things, but the occasional farm thing. Also, toys. I’m always fixing toys. Dad life.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A Mexican restaurant. We had not yet ordered anything, and the food was already arriving.

Chips. Salsa. Unrequested. Free.

I stopped the waiter. "We have not earned these."

"They just come with the table, man."

They come with the TABLE. In my land, hospitality is a debt. Every gift creates an obligation, weighed carefully, returned in the proper season with interest of feeling. Here, the gift arrives before you have even proven you can pay for dinner.

This is not an appetizer. This is a declaration: we trust you. Eat.

I ate with the gravity the moment deserved. And then — I must report this calmly — the basket emptied, and a new one appeared.

"Did we…?"

"Refill," the waiter said. "It's bottomless."

Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.

My friend warned me. "Don't fill up on chips, dude."

Too late. I had accepted three baskets. Honor demanded each one be finished — an unfinished gift is an insult. By the time my actual food arrived, I was a ruined man.

I was not hungry. I was not comfortable. I had been defeated by a courtesy.

Generosity that arrives before the request cannot be repaid. It can only be survived.

I know the rule now. I have made my peace with the basket. One basket. Two at the most.

Who am I deceiving. There is no number of baskets I would refuse. The trust of a nation is in that salsa, and I intend to honor all of it.

[kieran @imkierantiu]

everyone on their way to X/twitter when facebook is down #facebookdown

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney As a Gen Xer of a certain age, I’m pretty much used to this. Every time I think I can get ahead, they move the goalposts.

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney What computers? Joke’s on them, all the components such as hard drives and RAM are already pre-purchased for AI overlords’ use well into the next two years.

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney I have a fraternity brother named Kelly. He’s 6’2”, and built like a tank. This made for some awkward encounters back in the early days of text-only Internet on campus. 😅

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney I think that dude needs more American flags on his Canadian tuxedo.

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney I’m not that great of a biblical scholar, but I believe the book of Exodus has a cautionary tale about this very thing.

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney Bifocals are next.

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney I’m not saying I agree, I’m saying I understand. Those BP meds are no joke. 😅

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney Excuse me as I become enveloped in cobwebs and slowly crumble into dust.

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

This morning, the Copilot premium request multiplier on Claude Opus 4.7 has doubled from what it was yesterday...now at 15x.

YIKES.

Are we all going to be running local GPU farms soon? (Good luck finding that hardware, I know.)

[Javarevisited @javarevisited]

Manager: We lost our best engineer today.

CEO: The one leading payments?

Manager: Yes.

CEO: Did another company offer more money?

Manager: No.

CEO: Then why leave?

Manager: He said he was tired of fixing the same production issues every week.

CEO: That’s part of the job.

Manager: He didn’t mind fixing issues. He minded that nobody wanted to fix the root cause.

CEO: We prioritized speed.

Manager: He wanted quality.

CEO: So he left over that?

Manager: He left because he felt like a firefighter, not an engineer.

Good engineers don’t just want to solve problems.
They want to eliminate them.

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney I usually spot them just as I release the “send” button.

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

Dear @landpride equipment: In exchange for a lifetime discount, I’ll help you with your certificate struggles.

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney In my heart of hearts, I feel my grocery and gas bill.

[Jacob Shamsian ⚖️ @JayShams]

I had no idea Plex was a real company with so many employees. I thought it was just a guy who was really passionate about movie piracy.

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney We have the kid-sized version of these, scored them at a Bismarck, ND restaurant supply store.

[Eric S. Raymond @esrtweet]

Announcing open-adventure release 1.21

Your system package manager probably knows this as 'open-adventure'

Colossal Cave Adventure, the 1995 430-point version.

This is the last descendant of the original 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure worked on by the original authors - Crowther & Woods; it is shipped with their permission and encouragement. It has sometimes been known as Adventure 2.5. The original PDP-10 name 'advent' is used for the built program to avoid collision with the BSD Games version.

New in this release:

Code hardening with ChatGPT 5.2, cppcheck, and pylint.
All text spellchecked.

The crown jewel in my collection of heritage games. The very first adventure game. The very first dungeon crawler. The very first game featuring a map with irregular topology. Progenitor of at least half of all AAA videogames ever written - every gamer should play this at least once.

https://t.co/K46KXxZhc5

[Chuck Milam @chuckmilam]

@KyWhitney “For the children” is often used to justify frameworks that turn safety into a compliance checkbox, creating liability safe harbors for platforms while eroding free, anonymous access. Win for the Super-Citizens [United], not so much for a kid building a Linux box in his basement.