David Baer @david@arktos.social

@irina I'm not confident enough in my C skills to trust I don't have a lurking buffer overrun, so I have it locked down to ignore presence subscription requests from other servers--it's not worth getting pwned. But if you're on XMPP, contact me (xmpp:david@amyanddavid.net) and I'll put you in touch. 😀

@irina It now wags its tail (or, alternatively spins) if you call it a good dog, or a good boy.

@irina Still working on it. Right now it chooses at random from: "Woof!", "Aroof!", "Ruff ruff", "Yip!", and "Grrrr."

I amused myself last night by writing an XMPP bot in C that impersonates a golden retriever puppy. My daughter likes it, at least.

Hooray for capitalism: Goldman Sachs says gene therapy "carries tremendous value for patients and society," but is nonetheless a risky business proposition, because there's no money in to be made in curing disease.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html

"No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law" - U.S. Constitution Art. I, sec. 9

Emergency powers are established by law, of course, but the whole point of these is to allow the executive to deal with emergent situations that Congress doesn't have time to deliberate on. In this case, Congress DID deliberate, and said no to the wall. That should be dispositive.

What the...? Has anybody else gotten spam messages with a 'text/calendar' attachment? I shudder to think what would happen if I opened the message in Outlook.

5 am robocall was on schedule. Kids' school is cancelled due to "anticipated" weather. Right now there's nothing falling, and nothing on the ground.

Onion headline: "Lazy Poor Person Has Never Earned Passive Income From Stock Dividends A Day In His Life"

https://local.theonion.com/lazy-poor-person-has-never-earned-passive-income-from-s-1832537497?utm_campaign=SF&utm_source=Twitter&utm_content=Main&utm_medium=SocialMarketing

Eldest child's school sends out notice of snow days via 5 am robocall. It's all but guaranteed this is going to happen tomorrow morning, and I'm already steeling myself. 😬

I've always thought of the relationship between body and spirit/soul as being like the relationship between paper/ink and literature. Basic physical matter can be arranged to express something that transcends the physical.

Eldest child: What do you want to be when you grow up?
Youngest child: A bad guy in a suit.
Me: So, a hedge fund manager, then?

@claudiom Enjoy! I prefer not to spend my evening shouting at my TV.

@mike Everybody has their own idea of what makes a "good" password. Autogenerated passwords like these work pretty well for me. After a couple of days, they're in my muscle memory. (I have a hard time writing them down if I'm not at a keyboard, though.)

@mike Take your pick...

Never saw this coming. 🙄

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1091192400003952640

Can't decide whether this is a Russian troll pretending to be an African American Schultz supporter, or a satirist pretending to be a Russian troll pretending to be... you get the idea.