Title is misleading.

Garbage new software doesn’t always rate limit itself to comply with MIDI.

One of my colleagues is a native speaker of a romance language with gendered nouns.

So in English the LLM is ‘him’.

Actually, yeah. That’s a good point.

Something in the back of my mind way making noise while I was writing that out. Thanks for of pointing it out explicitly.

I was thinking of the bit in God Emperor of Dune where the Duncan is outraged at seeing the lesbian fish speakers and Moneo chiding him for it.

It’s a remarkable counter point to his depiction of Baron Harkonnen in Dune.

Technically true. Monarchs aren’t elected.

Fortunately he had a change of heart by the time he got to GEoD.

Brexit 2.0

Once day England might realize it’s the problem.

Derp. Yes. I dropped a “reverse”.

The passive voice, simplistically, makes the object of a clause optional (active voice make the subject optional).

Active: car crashes (into salon)

Passive: salon crashed into (by car)

Your example is swapping the object and subject and changes the meaning.

I reverse Dutch auction it. Every time the estimate is asked for/confirmed/reconfirmed/queried it goes up.

Every time a car hits something it’s described that way, or in a passive voice.

It’s to make the driver/car sound less dangerous.

E.g. “pedestrian dies after collision with car”

This kind of thing about the shit out of doctors. “Oh you need a note for a cold? Have the entire week off.”

It’s the Bad Place

I’m cishet. I have no possible way of fully appreciating what you’re experiencing.

That being said…

Trusting your gut is entirely valid. It’s not ‘chickening out’ it’s just that, for whatever reason, you were not 100% committed. That’s OK. You just were not ready right then and there.

Don’t worry about the surgeon, they’ll be much happier knowing they didn’t operate on someone who changed their mind (per se) once it was too late.

Be strong, be well.

Excess deaths is an interesting statistic, especially compared to other big events.

For example, here in NZ. We had fewer excess deaths during the covid pandemic. We haven’t had and heat waves (yet) to compare with.

How does the French heatwave excess deaths compare to it’s covid excess deaths?

An eclectic collection of random bits of unfinished work jammed together by someone wanting to sell it?

Conservatives: unironically, this.

Security peeps noticed that weirdly named vulnerabilities got more media coverage and more awareness, so they now exploit that rather than rely on the catchy names like CVE-2026-12345

Apparently it’s from a Jasper Carott comedy routine.

“Is Ringo the best drummer in the world?”

“Ringo isn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles!”

(Apocryphal, not actually John Lennon)