Dan McKinley

@mcfunley

Leading expert

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Dan McKinley@mcfunley· 12d

Three panel Simpsons comic from Bart of Darkness.
Marge to Lisa: "Hmm, Maybe we should spend more time with Steve. He's becoming isolated and weird."
Bart playing stratego in the dark: "I can't tell the dogs to work! Only the deacon does that!"

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· 29d

Real estate people when legal letterhead enters the chat

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Jun 19

This dude somehow botched bribing the famously corrupt James Traficant

November 2002: Sentenced to 15 months' probation and fined $150,000 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to bribe U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr. regarding the aerospace company.

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· May 5

Really missed my calling

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· May 4

Slay the Spire streamer jorbs presenting a powerpoint presentation in which he is losing his mind about tier lists

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Mar 31

Hear me out what if there were security that weren’t theater, jobs other than shampoo cop, and agendas other than neoliberal

Screenshot of Vox Today Explained podcast episode called “Should we privatize TSA?”

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Mar 20

seems strong

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Mar 20

snakebite haters HATE him

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Mar 10

Stopped at 32 creative AI+'s but I could have had at least 128. Is heatsinks even in the game? smh

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Jan 30

Finally getting some scholarly attention

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Jan 25

Longtime observers know how insane it is that these stories are neck and neck

A story on HN about ICE racing up behind a story about DOOM being ported to a pair of earbuds

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Jan 21

The recent Meta layoffs came up and I remembered that I wrote this whole email about the Severance goat people that incidentally, totally called it

There was some discussion on your last episode about whether the goat room was too far out there. I think that your relative lack of familiarity with biggish company jobs might be showing here, although of course I’m overjoyed for you both that you have apparently never had to deal with people like this in real life.

I worked at a well known tech company a few years ago where there was an entire team of networking guys who were much bigger freaks than the goat herders. They communicated in idioglossia. They had lost contact with what the rest of the company was even for like a decade prior. They routinely brought the publicly-visible product down intentionally for their own obscure reasons. They sent only their most polished emissary to communicate with outsiders, a la Gwendolyn Christie. Nobody really understood a word he said.

Product initiatives at tech companies like this can absolutely be as disconnected from reality as the goats. Half of Meta is currently working on a virtual reality project which is absolutely doomed. Its original sponsor lost interest in it years ago, but left it lavishly funded. Who knows what it looks like now, but we can be sure that the user experience lacks legs (literally and figuratively). In another year or two they’ll lay off thousands of people who have been up to this, and those people will be as shocked by this absolutely obvious outcome as the goat people would be.

For every example like that, there’s a copycat team at every competitor trying to do the same thing to avoid being left behind. But those teams have only the mandate of trying to imagine what the Meta VR team might be up to and copying it. Well you can just imagine how fucked up those scenes are. Every company has a boring thing that generates revenue, and everyone else is tending goats.

Anyway, strong work on the podcast but I think Severance should be interpreted as cutting satire at least as much as a mystery box.

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Jan 9

A dominant factor is going to be health care: we pay much more for it and the quality is worse. The answer varies by age. A $100K check at age 65 or older is a windfall, since even in America you won't pay that much in premiums before you qualify for Medicare.

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Jan 9

After seeing this I was curious: morality aside, what should a rational consumer accept to join a dysfunctional fascist empire? www.reuters.com/world/europe...

Jan 8 (Reuters) - U.S. officials have discussed sending lump sum payments to Greenlanders as part of a bid to convince them to secede from Denmark and potentially join the United States, according to four sources familiar with the matter.
While the exact dollar figure and logistics of any payment are unclear, U.S. officials, including White House aides, have discussed figures ranging from $10,000 to $100,000 per person, said two of the sources, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Dec 22

One nice thing about AI backlash is the backpressure it exerts on this phenomenon mcfunley.com/the-guerilla...

"All of which is to say that once you work someplace, your cool factor has a brief half-life. Did they hire you to do ML? Sorry, they need 'AI' now, and they are going to hire someone else on a really fantastic, different white horse for this."

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Dec 22

folks

A Slack message saying "a lott ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what have yous." Slack is showing a translation option, offering to translate this extremely English sentence "from Italian" in a move that can only be described as racist against Italians

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Dec 12

(per @themountaingoats.bsky.social) there should be more songs in the Euripides cinematic universe

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Dec 5

This actually worked lol

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Dec 3

Since winning runs take the longest there's some skew towards Watcher, because Watcher is by far the easiest. I started playing in strict rotation back in May or June and rapidly got good enough at Watcher that it's dominating things now, and maybe I should do something else.

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Nov 28

An old four panel functional programming wonk meme reworded to replace the “profunctor optics” punchline with “English”

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Oct 1

Decided to start getting quant about Slay the Spire

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Sep 25

AI generated graph of a probability distribution of the probable culprit species

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Sep 25

New model benchmark proposal

Screenshot of a GPT5 session where I am asking it to identify what took a dump in my pool. I have given it a photo.

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Aug 24

Everyone at courage trying to get cream cheese out of a little plastic ramekin with a hunk of torn bagel

Homer squeezing orange juice with his face

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Aug 23

The person behind me on this flight reached up into my space and wordlessly closed my shade. (I am already in a fight with the right wing conspiracy theorist in front of me and can’t multitask.)

A closed plane window shade, my headrest visible clearly behind it

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Aug 11

Tapping the sign

Photo of the Grand Canyon from a plane, one of the coolest things on Earth. Visible to me and maybe two other people on the entire plane who do not have their SHADES DOWN

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Aug 5

We are so back

An entry on Hacker News for an article called “Build Your Own Lisp.” In 2005 the whole site was just this article posted 1000 times

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Jul 29

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Jul 11

Doc Brown jumps out of the Delorean and frantically tells 16 year old me that we’ve got to stop Yngwie Malmsteen’s workout supplement company from using AI generated labels before GuitarTok finds out and starts dragging him

Screencap of Yngwie Malmsteen supplement bottles with gibberish labels that look like “Rospotticg” and “Ericy Worrout”

Dan McKinley@mcfunley· Jul 4

Classic BCG stuff here