Rose

Times New Roman is wayyyy too classy for Trump Administration. They should switch to Comic Sans MS.

…Oh no, I’m re-heating font jokes that people older than me found funny decades ago. What has this present political climate reduced us to?

“We’re building the Eschaton Immanentising Machine, from the famous theological treatise ‘Don’t Immanentise the Eschaton’”

(Also, using LLMs sounds a lot less efficient than the exhaustive search described in The Nine Billion Names of God)

One of my recent software projects has an “ignore” list feature, but I guess I have to update the terminology to “include/exclude” if that means chuds will stay away.

Heh, I’m getting back to physical media, and this big 4K TV is literally the first time ever where I’ve actually constantly noticed that DVDs might get a bit pixely.

(And even so, I usually blame not so great digitisation. Some transfers of old obscure titles were really sloppy, you really didn’t need a great TV to see the problems. Original was a black and white movie, the DVD was a bunch of grey mush.)

Funny thing, over here, OSM actually got weird rural stuff for a couple of rural towns I visited frequently about a year before Google Maps (and other proprietary services) was usable there. I think it had to do with some open-data drop from the government.

And seeing the services grow side by side also kind of gave away what their priorities were. Google: putting the local businesses and services on the map. OSM: document every single cool and convenient foot and bike trail.

I’m fed up with the streaming services, so I’m getting back to my big pile of DVDs and Blu-Ray discs.

I was randomly reminded of the “BD-Live” thing that I tried long ago. One of the most janky joyless things I had ever seen. Some marketing person had decided to do a marketing thing for movie promos and trailers and had forgotten that the thing was to be visited by actual people.

This sounds like it was cooked up by the same people. Looks like marketing people building a Thing.

Like I said, the AI companies are not on the same side. The AI companies in the fight for their own selfish reasons. They’re eventually just going to make the copyright situation even more byzantine. They also make the copyright reform/abolition people look bad.

It’s like if I say I’m an Anarchist and then I have to constantly say “well actually I don’t advocate for looting and vandalism nonsense, those dipshits don’t know shit about Anarchism”. Do you know how hard it is to advocate for more reasonable copyright policy reflecting modern times, when the current big crisis in the mind of artists and creators are the dipshit companies blatantly violating the law?

I used to use Reddit, and I remember when collectible avatars were introduced.

The experience paraphrased:

“Hey, click here to claim a free collectible avatar!” *open in new tab* “Here it is! However, you first need to set up crypto wallet—” *close tab*

AI companies are not on the side of copyright reform or abolition. They just want an exception for themselves. They very much believe in trade secrets. They probably want copyright to eventually cover the current grey areas so that they can stop pretending they give a damn about open models.

It’s not unreasonable to demand AI companies to play by the same rules as everyone else.

Lemmy (and Piefed) have avatars and bio, and Piefed also has the custom fields thing that Mastodon has, but not all clients show this stuff. Voyager is probably the best Lemmy/Piefed client that basically has no support for profile details.

One of the things that bug me about Fediverse is that the amount of profile features varies so much between the services and it’s kinda inconsistent too.

Oh good, the current profile management is a little bit clunky. Having the option to launch random profiles wherever and whenever would be nice.

Astrum makes space stuff videos? I dunno, been a while.

Fireship makes videos about programming. Has series about “(Programming language/Framework) explained in 100 seconds”, for example. I think people are complaining that the channel is slipping into AI dudebroery.

Hoog is a history/explainer type channel, I think.

Oh yes. The Great pathlib. The Blessed pathlib. Hallowed be it and all it does.

I’m a Ruby girl. A couple of years ago I was super worried about my decision to finally start learning Python seriously. But once I ran into pathlib, I knew for sure that everything will be fine. Take an everyday headache problem. Solve it forever. Boom. This is how standard libraries should be designed.

In the 1980s, home computers were sold like this:

“Look at these awesome games, kids! And as for your parents, uh… well, you could use the computers to… uh… I dunno… keep track of the contents of the fridge? Yeah, let’s go with that.”

Nobody ever did that. Not then, not now.

Don’t buy a smart fridge, it’s a scam

Limiting the power mod reach is a good thing, but still, this will break Reddit. Ordinary users will not be lining up to step in as small time moderators. Especially if Reddit Inc is going to remove them if they do anything they don’t like.

Reddit Inc will just go “what the hell, we’ll throw more AI shit in the Automoderator. It’s not like it’ll do worse than the current arbitrary quagmire of moderation rules - or maybe it will be, who can tell the difference anyway”.

A lot of people are filming in 6K or 8K, but only because it gives them more editing leeway when the final video is delivered in 4K.

Being a “thinker” isn’t exactly a high bar. A fish can do it (depending on the definition). I mean I suppose I can think, but I wouldn’t brag about it.

I was born in '79. I know a lot of 1980s/1990s stuff that’s floating in popular consciousness right now is fictional romanticised bullshit, because it’s based on romaticised fiction made in that era.

For example, I knew most kids didn’t hang out at The Mall. I was a kid. We didn’t have a goddamn mall. American movies and TV showed kids hanging out at The Mall. Maybe hanging out at the Mall was an aspirational thing. Or something.

It’s a thing that happened for some people but it’s not the entire truth about the era. It’s not just that people tend to remember the good bits, they tend to remember the good bits that happened to someone else.

There’s a reason why nobody makes AI slop about the Finnish 1990s banking crisis and its wide systemic repercussions felt to this day. Edit: Sorry if none of this makes sense, just ate something other than cheap potatoes for the first time in a week

Yup, Fallout Wiki has a pretty crazy history. I don’t remember if they were originally a Fandom wiki, but at some point they definitely went “well, we don’t want to go with Fandom, we’ll go with Curse wiki host instead.” Then Fandom bought Curse wikis and put all of them under Fandom banner anyway.

The independent Fallout Wiki is basically where the actual community is right now, the Fandom wiki is just there to confuse passers-by with their high search engine rank. Fandom has the policy that the community can fork a wiki and go elsewhere, but they will not close down the Fandom wiki, so good luck with your search rankings.

“Hmm. I wonder. I was thinking of dancing trees. Now I’m wondering what’s next. Screaming trees. Yeah. That’s got to be the answer. Screaming trees.” - private notes by Hans Reiser, filesystem designer and a convicted murderer

(OK, that’s a fake quote. This one is real:)

“Trees have their roots pointing up. And if you cut a tree apart, you get a forest. No, I’m not drunk.” - one of my computer science profs, on data structures