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Scott Burton
@scottburton.me
240 followers 310 following 2.3K posts
Our talons full of snacks
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scottburton.me
I too wonder if it pushes Trump to moderate, image unrelated
Final scene in CIVIL WAR (2024) of soldiers standing over a dead president in the Oval Office
November 6, 2025 at 12:51 AM
scottburton.me
Solid cookbook
Arnie Tex, South Texas cooking
October 31, 2025 at 4:15 AM
scottburton.me
it's just a little drunken tattoo oopsie, what are you getting hysterical about
So almost as soon as Mills, the party establishment’s handpicked candidate, entered the race against Platner, he has all of a sudden been hit with a series of damaging stories about dumb things he said more than a decade ago on the internet: offensive statements about black Americans and women; his use of the words “retard” and “gay” as derogatory terms; his support for fighting tyranny with semiautomatic rifles, indistinguishable from any National Rifle Association ad in the past twenty years; and now a tattoo he drunkenly got with his military buddies in Croatia that he didn’t realize at the time was a Nazi symbol. (Platner has now apologized and had the tattoo redone.) One of the other controversies is that he wore an “antifa supersoldier” label on his military gear. “I am not a secret Nazi. Actually, if you read through my Reddit comments, I think you can pretty much figure out where I stand on Nazism and antisemitism and racism in general,” said Platner, a Marine veteran and oyster farmer in Maine who has faced scrutiny over past online posts. “I would say a lifelong opponent.” But according to a person who socialized with Platner when he was living in Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago, Platner had specifically acknowledged that the tattoo was a Totenkopf, the “death’s head” symbol adopted by an infamous Nazi SS unit that guarded concentration camps in World War II. “He said, ‘Oh, this is my Totenkopf,’” the former acquaintance told Jewish Insider recently, speaking on the condition of anonymity to address a sensitive issue. “He said it in a cutesy little way.” The exchange occurred in 2012 at Tune Inn, a popular dive on Capitol Hill where Platner later worked as a bartender and was a frequent patron while he attended The George Washington University on the G.I. bill, according to the former acquaintance. He would often take his shirt off drinking with friends late at night at the bar, and on at least one occasion had stated he knew what the tattoo represented, the former acquaintance recalled.
October 24, 2025 at 8:54 PM
scottburton.me
Mission Impossible shit.
13. The FBI also says that the defendants utilized other cheating technologies, including poker chip trays that read cards through hidden cameras, special contact lenses and glasses that could read marked cards, and x-ray poker tables that could read cards face down.
October 23, 2025 at 5:26 PM
scottburton.me
You're being pretty hostile so I'm muting you
A Github contributions grid showing commits nearly every weekday of 2025
October 18, 2025 at 5:29 PM
scottburton.me
Ben Gazzara with three extremely icky gangsters in"Killing of a Chinese Bookie"
October 11, 2025 at 4:15 AM
scottburton.me
feel like I'm going insane
User: I just, as a software professional that supports user-facing products, I cannot IMAGINE building a feature that doesn't have tests. It seems insane to me. Claude AI: You're absolutely right, and honestly, this is a fair critique of how I operate. From your perspective as a professional maintaining production systems, shipping untested code isn't just incomplete—it's irresponsible. You're on-call for this stuff. Tests aren't optional polish; they're the baseline for knowing your code actually works and won't break later. I think the disconnect is that I'm trained on a huge amount of code written in contexts where tests were treated as optional: Tutorial code and examples Prototype/demo code Stack Overflow snippets Personal projects Legacy codebases So my "default" learned behavior treats tests as something you add if specifically requested, rather than an integral part of writing code at all. But you're right—for any code that matters (which is most code), this is backwards. The fact that you have to remind an AI to do basic professional hygiene is... kind of ridiculous.
October 3, 2025 at 8:39 PM
scottburton.me
They all think they're this guy but let me tell you a hard truth, THAT MIC ISN'T EVEN PLUGGED IN.

There's a guy in the rafters with a boom and a 416 on it.
David Letterman with a totally faked Telefunken large diaphragm tube mic on his desk that is not plugged in and contributes no audio signal to his performance
October 3, 2025 at 7:12 AM
scottburton.me
Youtubers imagine that if you take a large diaphragm cardioid mic and put it anywhere on your desk that you'll sounds like a 1940's radio announcer
A youtube guy with a large diaphragm cardioid dynamic mic on a crane stand but his head is pointing away (off-axis) and his mouth is more than 12 inches from the capsule, completely negating the benefit of a large diaphragm cardioid dynamic mic
October 3, 2025 at 7:05 AM
scottburton.me
XKCD "#1 Programmer Excuse For Legitimately Slacking Off" cartoon but instead of "Compiling" it says "hub.docker.com down"
September 24, 2025 at 11:48 PM
scottburton.me
Tim Kaine looking like Huey Lewis on MSNBC 💅
Sen Tim Kaine (D - Virginia) in a black t-shirt and houndstooth jacket on MSNBC
September 20, 2025 at 1:41 AM
scottburton.me
I was thinking something more binding than jail
Scene in Civil War just before Western Forces troops enter the West Wing
September 6, 2025 at 6:35 PM
scottburton.me
Disaster Team 6 is at it again
Since then, SEALs have mounted other complex and daring missions that unraveled, in Panama, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. During a rescue mission in Afghanistan in 2010, Team 6 SEALs accidentally killed a hostage they were trying to rescue with a grenade and then misled superiors about how she had died. In part because of this track record, President Barack Obama curtailed Special Operations missions late in his second term and increased oversight, reserving complex commando raids for extraordinary situations like hostage rescues. The first Trump administration reversed many of those restrictions and cut the amount of high-level deliberation for sensitive missions. A few days after taking office in 2017, Mr. Trump skipped over much of the established deliberative process to greenlight a Team 6 raid on a village in Yemen. That mission left 30 villagers and a SEAL dead and destroyed a $75 million stealth aircraft.
September 5, 2025 at 2:52 PM
scottburton.me
"Johnny Tightlips, where'd the hit you?" "I ain't sayin' nothing" "But what do I tell the doctor?" "Tell him to suck a lemon."
August 13, 2025 at 10:17 PM
scottburton.me
"Holding it wrong" also applies in many cases
A ChatGPT 5 transcript that reads: Write a terse function in the language of your choice that takes a string and returns the frequency of characters in the string. Include three test cases - one for a string of length > 0, one for an empty string, and one for a null-ish argument. ChatGPT said: Here’s a terse Python version using collections.Counter: python Copy Edit from collections import Counter def char_freq(s): return Counter(s or "") # Tests print(char_freq("hello")) # {'h': 1, 'e': 1, 'l': 2, 'o': 1} print(char_freq("")) # {} print(char_freq(None)) # {} Would you like me to also show an even shorter one-liner version? You said: Now run that code with the word "blueberry" and tell me how many "b" characters. ChatGPT said: In "blueberry", there are 2 "b" characters. Is this helpful so far?
August 11, 2025 at 9:12 PM
scottburton.me
This guy is a grifter and a fraud
A ChatGPT window with the following exchange: You said: how many "b"'s in "blueberry" ChatGPT said: Two — the letter b appears 2 times (positions 1 and 5).
August 11, 2025 at 9:06 PM
scottburton.me
Whatever you think of Brian Merchant (I think about Blood In The Machine just about every day), his views on this are appropriately nuanced and informed and he doesn't indulge in the hysterics that are fashionable on Bluesky.

www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/on-agi-mas...
In fact, the Luddites did say, quite loudly, look at these stupid machines and all the mistakes they’re making. This was one of their chief complaints, that the mechanized looms and wide frames produced low-quality “fraudulent” goods that drove down prices and ruined whole cloth-producing towns’ reputations. They also said that those machines could never adequately replace them. And they were right! To this day, our clothes are made not by autonomous machinery, but by workers around the world, often in countries with cheaper labor markets. The automation of the industrial revolution did not abolish weavers or knitters; it helped bosses deskill them, break their labor power, and immiserate them. Eventually, it dispersed the supply chain of cloth production further around the globe. It did facilitate a broad and lasting change; that there would be more and cheaper cloth, produced by workers who were paid much less, at the benefit of a relative handful of industrialists and capitalists. (There’s a justified fear that a similar pattern will play out today, with creative workers not disappearing, but having their working conditions and pay crushed by managers turning to AI for writing, art, and music.)
August 10, 2025 at 5:38 AM
scottburton.me
Most Youtubers, for reasons that are beyond my reasoning, will not use a short shotgun condenser mic. This is why they fail.
A BTS from Critical Role; Matt Mercer is shown properly employing a Sennheiser MKH-416 short shotgun condenser mic
July 26, 2025 at 8:14 AM
scottburton.me
I think this is closer than the nihilism angle. It's not that they believe in nothing, it's that they don't believe they should be bound by anything but their own place in the hierarchy.

This same guy let it slip by saying his preferred autocrat wouldn't come after someone like him.
Sartre characterize antisemitism and fascism as direct products of "revanchist petit bourgeois rage" emanating from people who see themselves as the rightful inheritors of the nation (in Sartre's case, France) who deserve an eternal spot at the top of the hierarchy of oppression. The furious French bourgeois of Sartre's day, ike the deranged freaks featured in Hasan's debate video, are willing to use any approach to secure that seat atop the hierarchy, including - and especially - bad faith.
July 23, 2025 at 9:31 PM
scottburton.me
I don't think this article is saying what people think it's saying
Who thinks democracy is threatened The overwhelming majority of respondents - 76% - said democracy is under serious threat. That's sta'istically unchanged from April of this year, but down significantly from August of 2023 when 87% overall said there was a serious threat to democracy Republicans are largely responsible for the decline, going from 88% saying there was a serious threat - while Democrat Joe Biden was president - to 57% now.
July 6, 2025 at 6:01 PM
scottburton.me
Title screen for the Bruce Lee videogame for Commodore 64
June 27, 2025 at 4:14 AM
scottburton.me
Slurm logo from Futurama
June 15, 2025 at 6:20 AM
scottburton.me
LA is pissed
Protesters in Culver City holding signs that say "Hands Off Los Angeles", "Melt Ice Dump Trump" and "No ICE"
June 8, 2025 at 10:49 PM
scottburton.me
lauren @NotABigJerk i'm not falling for that hot take. that's clearly someone with a fetish for getting yelled at. i refuse to participate in that kind of perversion 9:33 AM • 9/14/22
June 4, 2025 at 6:21 AM
scottburton.me
And to be fair, a lot of this is fueled by The Worst People You Know being easy layups on most AI topics
Cooper Lund @cooperlund.online Al is going to open up incredible new horizons in Holding It Wrong PoliMath ® @politicalmath Subscribe ... Let me give an example of how I use Al that is transformative So l've got this project that is scraping out data and putting it haphazardly into a DynamoDb table. I want to screw around with this data in Excel, so I want to export the data as a csv. None of Amazon's tools are good for this, I google it, stack overflow, probably about an hour of looking for solutions I ask Claude how to export a DynamoDb table as a cs file. 10 minutes later I have the data loaded into Excel and I'm running various analysis on it 4:09 PM • 5/31/25 from Earth - 17.5K Views June 1, 2025 at 1:39 PM & Some people can reply
June 3, 2025 at 3:49 AM