Rich Lafferty

@rich.lafferty.ca

1105 Followers 875 Following

Disaster prevention chihuahua. Reliability at PagerDuty. Living on unceded land in Punamue'katikt, Mi'kma'ki (Dartmouth, NS). May all beings be free from suffering. He/him. also hachyderm.io/@mendel. formerly @mendel on twitter. www.lafferty.ca

A bottle of Atlantick Tick Attack. The label looks kind of like a beach, sand beige at the top, through surf teal, to ocean blue., but it's also printed so that the "sand" is the sky, and the "ocean" is mountains and forests getting fainter in the distance
A collage of movie posters with the text "Describe your favorite movie as boring as possible".
The place where a video would be, but it says "An error occurred while loading the video. Please try again."
Sluggo from Nancy, floating in midair contentedly, saying "No". There are zero rocks on the ground. The speech bubble is cut off slightly by the top of the frame. It was between this and B. Kliban "Chickens".
a Sun Enterprise 450 server in pedestal format. it's about the size of an end table or a small filing cabinet.
screenshot of an email which reads "Please enter the following code to log back into your Instacart account: 420 4 69".
Candice and I on our wedding day, July 8, 2006. Candice is wearing a strapless wedding dress and has dangly earrings and a necklace with pearls spaced along a chain, and is holding a tight bouquet of orange and pink flowers. I'm wearing a charcoal suit with a matching boutonnière.
a facebook marketplace ad for a pretty ugly straw and leather hat, which reads "$60 - Cobwoy Hat - Halifax, NS"
Peggy's Cove, showing the lighthouse on its exposed rock base in the centre of the frame, and with the relatively new observation deck (and some Adirondack chairs) in the foreground. The sun is setting just out of frame to the right, and the horizon is blue to yellow to orange to purple, with a few purple cirrus clouds opposite where the sun is setting.
a bottle of Aberlour A’Bunadh scotch. “A’Bunadh” is probably not pronounced “a bunny” but it is in THIS house buddy
on a thermocell bug repeller, from right to left: eye, check mark, sun, arrow. the arrow points to a clear window on the body of the thermocell
screenshot of the top of an Alphasignal newsletter. Below the title image, it has a three-sentence summary of the content: "Hey, Anthropic had a big week. Claude Fable 5 is back after a 19-day security timeout, and Claude Science just launched in beta. Two very different stories, same underlying theme. The real signal: Anthropic is quietly moving from model company to vertical platform company. Science for researchers, Code for engineers, tighter safety rails for governments. That's a product suite, not a chatbot. Meanwhile, a 35B model just beat trillion-parameter giants on agent tasks. Bigger is no longer the only game." Then a brief author bio, followed by a *very* tight summary of the items in the newsletter, including read time: --- Summary Read time: 6 min 47 sec Top News ▸ Anthropic brings Claude Fable 5 back globally with tighter cybersecurity blocks Lambda ▸ How to push Model FLOPS Utilization past 60% Top News ▸ Anthropic launches Claude Science app with 60+ research databases and live code Wispr Flow ▸ Voice-First Prompting for Devs Top Model ▸ NVIDIA splits a 30B model in two to generate text 2.42x faster with 98.7% quality Signals 1. Nous Research ships Hermes Agent v0.18.0 with new judgment capabilities 2. Presented by Viktor: Take the 4th off. Viktor, the AI employee, keeps the work moving across 3,000+ tools. Start now with $100 in credits 3. LangBot ships open-source platform to deploy AI bots across Slack, Discord, and WeChat 4. New 35B model beats trillion-parameter giants on long-horizon agent tasks 5. LiquidAI refreshes its tiny 450M vision-language model with stronger real-world performance 6. GitHub releases spec-kit, an open-source tool that structures AI coding before any code is written ---- AI smell? Yes. Useful? Also yes.
a tiny tortoiseshell cat hunkered down wearing a soft Elizabethan collar with a space theme print. She has resting tortie face. You can't quite see her surgery site in this picture but the left side of her face doesn't have the same floofiness as the right side.
a facebook screenshot of a cannon firing as part of the 21-gun salute at the Halifax Citadel for Canada Day the smoke from the cannon is clearly a dick and balls, including a distinct head
A tweet by Jay Chanoine from Aug 30, 2020. The tweet reads "Christians, WTF. You get all up in arms about losing Easter to chocolate bunnies and The True Meaning of Christmas... THE BIBLE LITERALLY TELLS YOU JULY FIRST IS SKA DAY AND WE'VE NEVER ONCE CELEBRATED THIS." And then there is a screenshot of Numbers 29:1 from the Bible, which reads "On the first day of the seventh month hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work. It is a day for you to sound the trumpets."
David's "Spaget'em" logo from the previous post but with "Get" in the same color as "Em" to make the pun clearer
a VERY large, realistic inflated white goose in a city park
An iPad on a stand showing the Canada/SA world cup game, with a Sonos Roam speaker in front of it like a soundbar and a can of Unfiltered Brewing's DOA poured into an old-school 2 Crows Brewing glass, all on my (unlit) fire table on my back deck
a map showing 60 Bird vehicles (55 scooters, 5 bikes) at the corner of Sackville and South Park St, right by the Garrison Grounds, in Halifax
my halifax bird map showing zero vehicles available near the dartmouth ferry terminal
A wider photo of that Smithsonian exhibit, with the premise clear: "Before cellphones, what did you use?" The wider photo also shows cash, a metro card, a travel guide, a Rolodex, keys, a wallet, a dictionary, several books in different genres, a comic book, a newspaper, a chess set, an iPod, an Uno deck, a fax machine, walkie-talkies, a set of photographic slides, a microscope, an airmail letter, a calculator, a roll of 35mm film, a flashlight, a level, and some things that are too small for me to make out. honestly the stuff in the first picture in the thread tells the story better than the stuff that was only in the full picture
a photo of a 1990s(?) exhibit at the Smithsonian. I can see: an SLR camera with light meter, a pocket camera, a microcassette recorder, a notebook and pen, a disposable camera, a Game Boy Advance, a video camera, a payphone, a Japanese-English dictionary, a tabletop CD player, a kitchen timer, a transparent desk phone, a portable CD player, a pocketwatch(?!), a wrist watch, an Walkman and cassette case, a tape measure, a compass, a Palm Pilot or a GPS maybe, a minidisc player, a binder full of CDs, a Caller ID box, a paper road atlas, and a bulletin board with some event tickets, business cards, a Tower Records logo, a paper boarding pass, and an event poster My guess is that it's "all this is now in your smartphone".
Screenshot of SailGP's Facebook announcement of adjusted start time. "We can confirm day 2 of racing in Halifax has been brought forward to 2pm local time to take advantage of the weather forecast in order to deliver the strongest possible racing conditions for teams, spectators and viewers. All ticket holders will be contacted with further information, and viewers to SailGP.com/watch for updates on their local broadcast."
a wide angle shot from the SailGP grandstand in Halifax, showing some of the crowd, the Northstar Canada boat, and an intimidating shelf of dark gray clouds in the distance
Screenshot from the Waze app, showing about 30 "road closed" signs in a small parking lot
a blue coleman cooler being held together by white duct tape layered on top of grey duct tape . the white tape makes a janky grid, while the grey is more random. there is some black marker under all the tape, and residue from previous tape. the cooler is sitting on a white table or floor with a white wall backdrop, lit from multiple angles like you might light an artwork.
the same sloppy van sketch but a cut and pasted Astro Boy is peeking out of the back window
a shaky hand drawn picture of the back of the van. the word "VAN?" is on the rear window in red. the license place says "Arizona", because all U-Haul vans are registered in Arizona, if you've never noticed that before.
the back of a uhaul cargo van (not a box truck, just a van). it has an ad for uhaul, of course, but at the top of the rear windows are decals that read "Need a Van?" across both doors
a neon yellow bristol board sign with YARD SARD! written on it in black marker, with the letters filled in with colourful dots and stripes. There is a folding city bike parked in front of the sign.
low bike lane curbs, with street art of octopuses from @junekimart
The scene from Inglourious Basterds (leave me alone spellcheck it's fine) where the American gives himself away by indicating "three beers" the American way, instead of the German way that uses the thumb
the corner of our porch light, in which a single wasp has started building a tiny, tiny nest about an inch across.
a very pale green boxy/men's fit t-shirt with a Frog and Toad graphic printed on the front, showing the eponymous amphibians riding their tandem bicycle in the woods.
A map of Bird scooters and bikes in Halifax and Dartmouth around their respective ferry terminals: there are tons of scoots/bikes on the Halifax side, and zero at the Dartmouth ferry terminal.
a whole-ass crow on our Birdfy birdfeeder enjoying some seeds. The whole feeder wobbles on the pole when he moves around. Usually the biggest bird we get is a blue jay, mostly its cardinals and sparrows and chickadees.
A street in Toronto with three of the city's iconic ring-and-post bike racks mounted in the sidewalk between the walking area and the road, oriented parallel to the sidewalk/road
Google Maps screenshot of the Island of Montreal. A green arrow points up towards the top of the map and is labeled "actual north", let's call that zero degrees. A red double-ended arrow labeled "North South" is at about 120/300 degrees, and a purple double-ended arrow labeled "east west" is at about 30/225 degrees .
a pink "emergency scene" sign beside the highway, taken from a motorcycle
screenshot of google satellite view showing that this 3-story house is only one room deep, on a lot smaller than the neighbouring houses footprints
a Google Street View screenshot of a sign for "DO Lobster - Quality Seafood & Lobsters" and the word "Lobster" is in the trendy-to-tired font called Lobster
a potted outside fern with a goose head coming out of it
a screenshot of a nextdoor email, showing a "Popular post" with two likes and three comments (very popular, you see) that begins "I've been prohibited by them or Nextdoor, to express my disappointment in..." and then a "see more" link which I did not click
two adult gooses watching over seven tiny, yellow, fluffy BABIESSSSSS
the survey question "Which of the following will have the biggest influence on road safety in the future? Please choose your top 3." but I have checked almost everything: Driver training Road surface conditions affecting vehicle control (e.g. potholes) Condition of pavement markings & signage (e.g. clearly visible, well-maintained) Roadway design improvements (e.g. narrower streets) Traffic calming (e.g. speed humps) Speed limit reductions Pedestrian infrastructure upgrades/additions Cycling infrastructure upgrades/additions Lighting of sidewalks and roads (e.g. street lighting) Traffic control operation improvements (e.g. protected turns, etc.) Accessibility improvements (e.g. accessible pedestrian signals, etc.) Legislation updates Traffic enforcement The features of vehicles themselves (e.g. new technology, maintenance, design, etc.)
An excerpt from an AWS FAQ. The answers are not visible. The questions are: Q: Can I use Apache TinkerPop Gremlin and RDF/SPARQL on the same Neptune instance? Q: How can I migrate from an existing Apache TinkerPop Gremlin application to Amazon Neptune? Q: Do I need to change client drivers to use Amazon Neptune's Gremlin Server? Q: How can I migrate from a triple store with a SPARQL endpoint to Amazon Neptune?
ok we got layers. this is the drake yes/no meme, except instead of drake's face it's a cat's head. in the "no" panel is a nano banana generated image of "longcat, but with a tiger". the tiger is photo-accurate and the editing is very good, but the vibes are off. in the "yes" panel is the original longcat image but I pastede a tiger emoji over the cat's head. it is clearly superior.
screenshot of Air Canada's seat selection page, where standard seats cost $34-39, but preferred seats are only a tiny amount more at $45.
a post from matt dagley asking "anyone still using bluesky" except he has "Made over 50 posts yesterday", "posts over 20 times per day on average", and "no break greater than 2 hrs lately"
a post from matt dagley asking "anyone still using bluesky" except he has "Made over 50 posts yesterday", "posts over 20 times per day on average", and "no break greater than 2 hrs lately"
my coworker's cat that's in their profile pic: a long-haired dilute tortoiseshell with a big beige spot on her face, with dilated pupils looking curiously above the camera. there's also a dog in the background but this is about the cat, man
a slack screenshot, where I say to a coworker, "btw I love your pfp" (profile pic) and they reply "(laughing cat emoji) thank you, yours is pretty awesome as well!". The profile pics are in the next images here
a screenshot of the post I am replying to, on my Discover feed even funnier in that I never use Discover, but this very post reminded me of it
Two stills from the movie "Miss Congeniality" with William Shatner playing a beauty pageant host and Sandra Bullock playing an FBI agent undercover as a contestant. In the first one, during the pageant, Shatner's character asks Bullock's character, "Describe your perfect date." In the second, Bullock answers "That's a tough one. I'd have to say April 25th. Because it's not too hot and not too cold. All you need is a light jacket."
a screenshot of the classic Clickhole article, "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point"
the "rainbow girl/goth girl sisters" meme but with the image flipped so the girl all in black is on the same side of the pic as the gray/black side of the house
the "hey little man how's it going" meme. the second panel is a screenshot of palantir's screed. the "yea" reaction in the fourth panel with an awkward smile is replaced with "jesus christ".
A kid's bike with a red line on the top tube and seat stay. The red line shows that even for a given frame size, kids' bikes tend to have very compact frame than the equivalent adult bike for the same size. This bike happens to be a 24" because it's what I had open but a kids' 26" would probably be the same.
screenshot of part of the bluesky UI, showing the icon they use for lists. it looks like a three-toed paw print (with a big pad and three small circles) at first, but it's actually three little circle-and-body people avatars, one in front, two behind
the cover of a children's book, "Mommy, Why is There a Server in the House? Helping Your Child Understand the Stay-At-Home Server". It was a combined HP/Microsoft marketing thing I think.