I’m not sure exactly when I started putting jokes in my scientific presentations, but I know why I started. I also know when and why I stopped.

via: https://www.reinvent.science/p/use-humor see: https://isotropic.org/papers/chicken.pdf

I think the advice the author gives is silly. It ignores the human tendency to respond to criticism. Furthermore, the advice they give goes both ways: why are people who don’t need the advice or feel like it doesn’t apply interpreting it in bad faith and so complaining about it to OP?

I now prescribe some actual solutions to this problem as the author describes it. One is to not have your posts leave the context they were written in (e.g. private accounts, insulated networks a la Hometown, or even tag whitelists). Another is to not allow people to comment on your post, or at least make referring to it relatively inconvenient (e.g. the blogosphere), and so just let it sit. A final suggestion is to not post advice at all. This last one ignores the human desire to share with others, and so really reads as “stop using social media.” Ah, well.

Ending the war on poverty will take more than cash transfers

Certain ideas naturally resist being encoded into a given medium of communication; epistemic communities built around that medium therefore fail to appreciate the ideas which that medium cannot successfully communicate.

Or: cybernetics has a medium problem.

via: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2025/08/31/links-for-august-2025/

Problem-solving isn’t always straight forward.

Lots of discussion on Lobsters on how both sides of the analogy are flawed, but I still think there’s a kernel of truth.

via: https://lobste.rs/s/bibyfi/why_developers_question_everything