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follow = screem https://twtxt.net/user/screem/twtxt.txt # follow = shreyan https://twtxt.net/user/shreyan/twtxt.txt # follow = stats https://anthony.buc.ci/user/stats/twtxt.txt # follow = stigatle https://yarn.stigatle.no/user/stigatle/twtxt.txt # follow = stutteringsteve https://twtxt.net/user/stutteringsteve/twtxt.txt # follow = support https://anthony.buc.ci/user/support/twtxt.txt # follow = taigrr https://ndl.taigrr.com/user/taigrr/twtxt.txt # follow = tate https://twtxt.net/user/tate/twtxt.txt # follow = testuser https://anthony.buc.ci/user/testuser/twtxt.txt # follow = tkanos https://twtxt.net/user/tkanos/twtxt.txt # follow = tw https://astrid.tech/tw.txt # follow = votechess https://botsin.space/users/VoteChess # follow = will https://twtxt.net/user/will/twtxt.txt # follow = win0err https://kolesnikov.se/twtxt.txt # follow = xuu https://txt.sour.is/user/xuu/twtxt.txt # follow = ychbn https://twtxt.net/user/ychbn/twtxt.txt 2023-04-17T13:16:04Z (#pud4w2q) @ That has no relevance to the point! 2023-04-17T13:16:54Z (#pud4w2q) @ Cheers! I'm happy to agree to disagree too of course! Thanks for engaging! 2023-04-18T13:15:24Z On LinkedIn I see a lot of posts aimed at software developers along the lines of "If you're not using these AI tools (X,Y,Z) you're going to be left behind."

Two things about that:
1. No you're not. If you have good soft skills (good communication, show up on time, general time management) then you're already in excellent shape. No AI can do that stuff, and for that alone no AI can replace people
2. This rhetoric is coming directly from the billionaires who are laying off tech people by the 100s of thousands as part of the class war they've been conducting against all working people since the 1940s. They want you to believe that you have to scramble and claw over one another to learn the "AI" that they're forcing onto the world, so that you stop honing the skills that matter (see #1) and are easier to obsolete later. Don't fall for it. It's far from clear how this will shake out once governments get off their asses and start regulating this stuff, by the way--most of these "AI" tools are blatantly breaking copyright and other IP laws, and some day that'll catch up with them. 

That said, it is helpful to know thy enemy. 2023-04-18T14:39:32Z (#54piw5q) @ I would politely suggest again that we not react to people with bad attitudes who talk shit about yarn. If twt is forked, it should be forked to add features that are otherwise not possible. Not to appease people who will probably never be appeased. 2023-04-18T15:14:48Z (#lc7khva) @ yeah. I'd add "Big Data" to that hype list, and I'm sure there are a bunch more that I'm forgetting.

On the topic of a GPU cluster, the optimal design is going to depend a lot on what workloads you intend to run on it. The weakest link in these things is the data transfer rate, but that won't matter too much for compute-heavy workloads. If your workloads are going to involve a lot of data, though, you'd be better off with a smaller number of high-VRAM cards than with a larger number of interconnected cards. I guess that's hardware engineering 101 stuff, but still... 2023-04-18T15:46:24Z (#54piw5q) @ yes! 2023-04-19T13:07:55Z (#mk4mxkq) @ I'm a bit of a GPU junkie (😳) and I have 3, 2019-era GPUs lying around. One of these days when I have Free Time™ I'll put those together into some kind of cluster.... 2023-04-19T16:06:26Z [ChatGPT and Elasticsearch: OpenAI meets private data | Elastic Blog](https://www.elastic.co/blog/chatgpt-elasticsearch-openai-meets-private-data)

Terrifying. Elasticsearch is celebrating that they're going to send your private data to OpenAI? No way. 2023-04-19T23:37:31Z (#7p3yc2q) @ ack, I didn't see this before. Get well soon! 2023-04-21T16:05:46Z (#tvcahla) @ everyone's moving to gated communities! 2023-04-21T17:17:08Z (#tvcahla) @ this is alarmingly catchy 2023-04-21T20:05:28Z (#5lowz6q) @ yeesh, it's a for-pay company I wouldn't give them the output of your mind for free and train their AI for them. 2023-04-21T20:54:03Z (#5lowz6q) @ Who says you need to use anything like that? Where's the pressure coming from? 2023-04-21T21:00:10Z (#zyhzp7q) @ @ I also think it is best called fake. Art is created by human beings, for human beings. It mediates a relationship between two people, and is a means of expression. 

A computer has no inner life, no feelings, no experience of the world. It is not sentient. It has no life. There's nothing "in" there for it to express. It's just generating pixels in patterns we've learned to recognize. These AI technologies are carefully crafted to fool people into experiencing the things they experience when they look at human-made art, but it is an empty experience. 2023-04-23T13:03:02Z (#zyhzp7q) @ @ 

(1) You go to the store and buy a microwave pizza. You go home, put it in the microwave, heat it up. Maybe it's not quite the way you like it, so you put some red pepper on it, maybe some oregano.

Are you a pizza chef? No. Do we know what your cooking is like? Also no.

(2) You create a prompt for StableDiffusion to make a picture of an elephant. What pops out isn't quite to your liking. You adjust the prompt, tweak it a bunch, till the elephant looks pretty cool.

Are you an artist? No. Do we know what your art is like? Also no.

The elephant is "fake art" in a similar sense to how a microwave pizza is "fake pizza". That's what I meant by that word. The microwave pizza is a sort of "simulation of pizza", in [this sense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation). The generated elephant picture is a simulation of art, in a similar sense, though it's even worse than that and is probably more of a simulacrum of art since you can't "consume" an AI-generated image the way you "consume" art. 2023-04-23T13:05:47Z (#5lowz6q) @ 
> I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing

So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don't mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?

I'd really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don't send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you. 2023-04-23T13:14:38Z (#5lowz6q) @ @
> There is (I assure you there will be, don’t know what it is yet…) a price to be paid for this convenience.

Exactly prologic, and that's why I'm negative about these sorts of things. I'm almost 50, I've been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they don't trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. It's a societal cancer.

All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. They'll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They won't stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.

That's a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for **decades**. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesn't make sense. It's insane. 2023-04-23T14:52:19Z (#zyhzp7q) @ What do you mean when you say that art is a lie? 2023-04-23T20:54:23Z (#zyhzp7q) @ Animals have inner lives. Computers do not.

Are you really so desperate to make this point thst you're citing _Quora_??? Believe what you want to believe. 2023-04-23T20:56:47Z (#zyhzp7q) @ You are conflating "aiming your eyes at" with "viewing art". These are fundamentally different activities. 2023-04-23T20:59:10Z (#zyhzp7q) @ So a fiction novel, which is labelled "fiction", is a lie? I still don't understand. The word "lie" entails an intention to deceive, but fiction writing does not intend to deceive. 2023-04-25T21:04:20Z (#zyhzp7q) @ Made up is not the same as lie. That's obvious isn't it?!?! 2023-04-26T13:10:51Z (#pg5dg7q) @ wow this is horrifying. What happened to Opera? It used to be my favorite browser but now they're like that one cousin who started getting into drugs, and then got in trouble with the law, and then before you know it they're scamming old ladies out of their pension money. 2023-04-26T18:58:24Z (#ujrsmkq) @ That's a dissembling answer from him. Github is owned by Microsoft, and CoPilot is a for-pay product. It would have no value, and no one would pay for it, were it not filled with code snippets that no one consented to giving to Microsoft for this purpose. Microsoft will pay $0 to the people who wrote the code that makes CoPilot valuable to them.

In short, it's a gigantic resource-grab. They're greedy assholes taking advantage of the hard work of millions of people without giving a single cent back to any of them. I hope they're sued so often that this product is destroyed. 2023-04-26T19:08:15Z There is a "right" way to make something like GitHub CoPilot, but Microsoft did not choose that way. They chose one of the most exploitative options available to them. For that reason, I hope they face significant consequences, though I doubt they will in the current climate. I also hope that CoPilot is shut down, though I'm pretty certain it will not be.

Other than access to the data behind it, Microsoft has nothing special that allows it to create something like CoPilot. The technology behind it has been around for at least a decade. There could be a "public" version of this same tool made by a cooperating group of people volunteering, "leasing", or selling their source code into it. There could likewise be an ethically-created corporate version. Such a thing would give individual developers or organizations the choice to include their code in the tool, possibly for a fee if that's something they want or require. The creators of the tool would have to acknowledge that they have suppliers--the people who create the code that makes their tool possible--instead of simply stealing what they need and pretending that's fine.

This era we're living through, with large companies stomping over all laws and regulations, blatantly stealing other people's work for their own profit, cannot come to an end soon enough. It is destroying innovation, and we all suffer for that. Having one nifty tool like CoPilot that gives a bit of convenience is nowhere near worth the tremendous loss that Microsoft's actions in this instace are creating for everyone. 2023-04-28T18:06:14Z (#hylyega) @ ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/TK3nvMf72apzgFVdmCEdZ7.png) 2023-04-29T13:51:43Z [BlueSky is cosplaying decentralization](https://rys.io/en/167.html#)

> I say “ostensibly decentralized”, because BlueSky’s (henceforth referred to as “BS” here) decentralization is a similar kind of decentralization as with cryptocurrencies: sure, you can run your own node (in BS case: “personal data servers”), but that does not give you basically any meaningful agency in the system.

I don't know why anyone would want to use this crap. It's the same old same old and it'll end up the same old way. 2023-04-29T17:30:48Z (#645gw7a) I get that there are groups of people who don't have many good options besides Bluesky, so moistly this is griping about how bad social media is generally, and how the lousy people in charge continue to be in charge. 2023-04-30T17:52:13Z (#ru6tlia) @ yes, I agree. It's bizarre to me that people use the thing at all let alone pay for it. 2023-05-02T13:09:36Z (#jrfpcaa) @ using the phrase "machine learning" in this article is misleading and bandwagoning. They used a neural model, which neuroscientists were doing long before "machine learning" became a popular term. 2023-05-03T13:03:51Z I've seen BlueSky referred to as BS (as in **B**lue **S**ky, but you know...), which seems apt.

CEO is a cryptocurrency fool, as is Jack Dorsey, so I don't expect much from it. Then again I'm old and refuse to join any new hotness so take my curmudgeonly opinions with a grain of salt.

I read somewhere or another that the "decentralization" is only going to be there so that they can push content moderation onto users. They will happily welcome Nazis and fascists, leaving it up to end users to block those instances.

I wonder how they plan to handle the 4chan-level stuff, since that will surely come. 2023-05-03T14:04:35Z (#fghhzwa) @ I know very little about it, but speaking secondhand, it looks like there's a single centralized server now and they're still building the ability to federate? Like, the current alpha they're running is not field testing federation, which makes me think that's not a top priority for them. 2023-05-03T14:08:36Z (#fghhzwa) Do they legitimately believe that end users will encounter videos of gruesome murders, live streams of school shootings, etc etc etc, and be like "oh, tee hee hee, that's not what I want to see! I'd better block that!" and go about their business as usual?

No, they can't possibly be that foolish. They are going to be doing some amount of content moderation. Just not of Nazis, fascists, or far right reactionaries. Which to me means they want that content on there. 2023-05-03T14:49:24Z Looks like Google's using this blog post of mine without my permission. I hate this kind of tech company crap so much.

 ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/NjTvtPh9FVMHcXJhvs3vME.png) 2023-05-03T14:50:57Z (#eaewypq) There's a link to the blog post, but they extracted a summary in hopes of keeping people in Google properties (something they've been called out on many times).

I was never contacted to ask if I was OK with Google extracting a summary of my blog post and sticking it on the web site. There is a very clear copyright designation at the bottom of each page, including that one. So, by putting their own brand over my text, they violated my copyright. Straightforward theft right there. 2023-05-03T14:53:40Z (#eaewypq) I have no interest in doing anything about it, even if I had the time (which I don't), but these kind of thing happen all day every day to countless people. My silly blog post isn't worth getting up in arms about, but there are artists and other creators who pour countless hours, heart and soul into their work, only to have it taken in exactly this way. That's one of the reasons I'm so extremely negative about the spate of "AI" tools that have popped up recently. They are powered by theft. 2023-05-04T12:56:42Z [The Internet Isn't Meant To Be So Small | Defector](https://defector.com/the-internet-isnt-meant-to-be-so-small)

> It's annoying to see millions of dollars thrown at making more-or-less literal dupes of internet
companies that everyone is already using begrudgingly and with diminishing emotional returns. It's maybe more frustrating to realize that the goals of these companies is the same as their predecessors, which is to
make the internet smaller. 2023-05-04T13:09:54Z (#l4nwadq) @ 
- [12 Reasons Why No One Should Ever Listen to Jordan Peterson Ever Again](https://www.unikumnett.no/2019/10/12-reasons-why-no-one-should-ever-listen-to-jordan-peterson-ever-again/)
- [Why Jordan Peterson Is Always Wrong](https://jacobin.com/2020/04/jordan-peterson-capitalism-postmodernism-ideology)
- [Here's why Jordan Peterson is the f*cking worst.](https://oncanadaproject.ca/blog/jordan-peterson-is-the-worst): "his ideology quickly morphed into one that reinforces hatred, discrimination, and the oppression of marginalized groups"

- [ANGRY WHITE MEN MAR. 30, 2016
A History of Piers Morgan’s Terrible Opinions](https://www.thecut.com/2016/03/history-of-piers-morgans-terrible-opinions.html)
- [Shut Up, Piers](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/02/piers-morgan-loses-cnn-show-the-british-host-was-rubbish.html)
- [Piers Morgan Is Now an Asshole of Record-Breaking Proportions](https://news.yahoo.com/piers-morgan-now-asshole-record-174057611.html)

You're posting Piers Morgan/Jordan Peterson videos lmao??? 2023-05-04T14:43:27Z (#l4nwadq) @ omg yes! They are both ultra-right-wing assholes! The worst of the worst! Please tell me you don't listen to these guys' brain poison? 2023-05-04T14:45:38Z (#l4nwadq) @ I've read half, skimmed the others. Mostly I was going for scale--look at all those headlines. These are horrible people who say horrible things on a regular basis. 2023-05-04T15:10:45Z (#l4nwadq) @ nah, not inclined to do that. The articles suffice--have a read of those when you get the chance. 2023-05-04T15:20:51Z (#h7gltfa) @ 
> Taking Jordan Peterson asn an example, the only thing he “preaches” (if you want to call it that) is to be honest with yourself and to take responsibility.

This is simply untrue. Read the articles I posted, seriously. 

In a tweet in one of the articles I posted, Peterson states there is no white supremacy in Canada. This is blatantly false. It is disinformation. Peterson has made statements that rape is OK (he uses "fancy" language like "women should be naturally converted into mothers" but unpack that a bit--what he means is legalized rape followed by forced conception). He is openly anti-LGBTQ and refuses to use peoples' preferred pronouns. He seems to believe that women who wear makeup at work are asking to be sexually harassed.

He's using his platform in academia to pretend that straight, white men are somehow the most aggrieved group in the world and everyone else is just whining and can get fucked. The patron saint of Men's Rights Activists and incels. I find him odious. 2023-05-04T15:23:12Z (#h7gltfa) @ Because they are rightwing assholes with a huge platform and they are literally *HURTING PEOPLE*. People get attacked because of things people like Shapiro and Peterson say. This is not just idle chitchat over coffee. They are saying things like it's OK to rape women (and NO I am not going to dig out the videos where they say that --that's up to YOU to do, do your own homework before defending these ghouls). 2023-05-04T15:24:18Z (#h7gltfa) @ It went there because you are supporting bad people who themselves operate at the level of outrage. You cannot have a "debate" about the ideas of someone like Peterson or Shapiro, *because those ideas should not be considered debate-worthy*. Rape is not OK, period, the end. It is not up for debate or discussion. Yet Peterson acts as if it is. That is abhorrent, and unacceptable in 2023. 2023-05-04T15:24:56Z (#h7gltfa) @ Maybe so, but that's not because of the people who are objecting to Jordan Peterson, that's for sure. You really need to read the articles I've posted before going there. Really. 2023-05-04T16:11:18Z (#h7gltfa) @ When you unpack what he's saying in that video (which I've watched, and just now re-watched), and strip away all his attempts to wrap this idea in fancy-sound language, he is saying: it would be better if women were viewed as property of men, because then if they were raped, the men who owned them would get mad and do something about it. Because rape would be a property crime then, like trespassing or theft. Left unspoken by him, but very much known to him, is that the man/men who "own" a woman can then have their way with her, just like they can freely walk around their yard or use their own stuff. In his envisioned better world, it'd be impossible for a husband to rape his wife, for instance, because she is his property and he can do almost anything he wants (that's literally what "property" is in Western countries).

It's so fucked up it's hard to put into words how fucked up it is. And this isn't the only bad idea who bangs on about! 2023-05-04T16:11:39Z (#h7gltfa) @ https://twitter.com/ardenthistorian/status/1625653951776292864?lang=en 2023-05-04T16:13:37Z (#h7gltfa) @ yeah man, of course! 2023-05-04T16:17:12Z (#h7gltfa) I may have misspoken in my haste/anguish. I don't know of any examples of Ben Shapiro advocating rape. I do know them of Jordan Peterson. He's known for that, but I've seen it myself. So, to be clear, I don't know if Ben Shapiro is a rape apologist and have no evidence of that. Wouldn't surprise me frankly because the set of ideas he does talk about tends to include being A-OK with crimes against women, but anyway. 2023-05-06T13:55:06Z (#f3xuata) @ nice 2023-05-07T16:22:22Z I am playing some ambient music that begins with a sound that's a bit like the drone of an airplane engine, and I spent a good minute or two adjusting the volume wondering why the music wasn't playing because I thought it was a plane🤦‍♂ 2023-05-08T11:45:19Z The weather all of a sudden went from chilly and wet to warm and pleasant. It's before 8am and it's already 15°C and sunny. 2023-05-08T12:50:02Z [Avalanche caught by FPV drone - Long range mountain surfing in 4k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nOKWF-UdTg)

Wild. 2023-05-09T12:11:57Z (#5pwcfqa) @ that could definitely be a track in an ambient song, no question whatsoever.

The exhaust is amazingly soothing to look at, even though it'd vaporize your entire being in milliseconds if you were anywhere near it. 2023-05-09T12:16:13Z (#ynqmela) @ LOL omfg.

This is the absurd logical endpoint of free market fundamentalism. "The market will fix everything!" Including, apparently, encroaching floodwater.

I do have to say though, after spending awhile looking at houses, that there are a crapton of homes for sale for very high prices (>$1 million) in coastal areas NASA is more or less telling us will be underwater in the next few decades. I don't get how a house that's going to be underwater soon is worth $1 million, but then I'm never been a free market fundamentalist either so 🤷 Maybe they're all watertight. 2023-05-09T12:21:31Z (#h7gltfa) @ hmm, dunno about the recency of that line of thought. I suspect though that given his (recent or not) history, if someone directly asked him "do you support rape" he would not say "no", he'd go on one of these rambling answers about property crime like he did in the video. Maybe I'm mind poisoned by being around academics my whole career, but that way of talking is how an academic gives you an answer they know will be unpopular. PhD = Piled Higher And Deeper, after all right? In other words, if he doesn't say "no" right away, he's saying "yes", except with so many words there's some uncertainty about whether he actually meant yes. And he damn well knows that, and that's why I give him no slack.

There are people in academia who believe adult men should be able to have sex with children, legally, too. They use the same manner of talking about it that Peterson uses. We need to stop tolerating this, and draw hard red lines. No, that's bad, no matter how many words you use to say it. No, don't express doubts about it, because that provides justification and talking points to the people *who actually carry out the acts*. 2023-05-09T12:22:01Z (#ogr5kya) @ @ I don't think I need Jesus. I need more sleep 😴 2023-05-09T12:59:17Z (#ynqmela) @ Yes, and you enjoy the best seafood every day if you want it! 2023-05-09T13:24:15Z (#rt3ekma) @ 
> Let’s assume for a moment that an answer to a question would be met with so many words you don’t know what the answer was at all. Why? Why do this? Is this a stereotype of academics and philosophers? If so, it’s not a very straight-forward way of thinking, let alone answering a simple question.

Well, I can't know what's in these peoples' minds and hearts. Personally I think it's a way of dissembling, of sowing doubt, and of maintaining plausible deniability. The strategy is to persuade as many people as possible to change their minds, and then force the remaining people to accept the idea because they think too many other people believe it.

Let's say you want, for whatever reason, to get a lot of people to accept an idea that you know most people find horrible. The last thing you should do is express the idea clearly and concisely and repeat it over and over again. All you'd accomplish is to cement people's resistance to you, and label yourself as a person who harbors horrible ideas that they don't like. So you can't do that.

What do you do instead? The entire field of "rhetoric", dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle (400 years BC), is all about this. How to persuade people to accept your idea, even when they resist it. There are way too many techniques to summarize in a twt, but it seems almost obvious that you have to use more words and to use misleading or at least embellished or warped descriptions of things, because that's the opposite of clearly and concisely expressing yourself, which would directly lead to people rejecting your idea.

That's how I think of it anyway. 2023-05-09T13:34:42Z (#rt3ekma) @ maybe it doesn't fool you, but it fools lots of people and has for thousands of years. That's why politicians (for instance) keep doing it. 2023-05-09T15:35:28Z (#rt3ekma) @ It's a fun challenge to see how many words you can say without expressing any ideas at all. Maybe this GPT stuff should be trained to do that! 2023-05-10T01:47:03Z (#5bl6sta) @ interesting, because some people are writing articles declaring the metaverse dead: https://www.businessinsider.com/metaverse-dead-obituary-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-tech-fad-ai-chatgpt-2023-5 2023-05-10T12:23:22Z (#5bl6sta) @ @ @ I love VR too, and I wonder a lot whether it can help people with accessibility challenges, like low vision. 

But Meta's approach from the beginning almost seemed like a joke? My first thought was "are they trolling us?" There's open source metaverse software like [Vircadia](https://vircadia.com) that looks better than Meta's demos (avatars have legs in Vircadia, ffs) and can already do virtual co-working. Vircadia developers hold their meetings within Vircadia, and there are virtual whiteboards and walls where you can run video feeds, calendars and web browsers. What is Meta spending all that money doing, if their visuals look so weak, and their co-working affordances aren't there?

On top of that, Meta didn't seem to put any kind of effort into moderating the content. There are already stories of bad things happening in Horizon Worlds, like gangs forming and harassing people off of it. Imagine what that'd look like if 1 billion people were using it the way Meta says they want.

Then, there are plenty of technical challenges left, like people feeling motion sickness or disoriented after using a headset for a long period of time. I haven't heard announcements from Meta that they're working on these or have made any advances in these.

All around, it never sounded serious to me, despite how much money Meta seems to be throwing at it. For something with so much promise, and so many obvious challenges to attack first that Meta seems to be ignoring, what are they even doing? 2023-05-10T12:41:05Z (#5bl6sta) @ I think those headsets were not particularly usable for things like web browsing because the resolution was too low, something like 1080p if I recall correctly. A very small screen at that resolution close to your eye is going to look grainy. You'd need 4k at least, I think, before you could realistically have text and stuff like that be zoomable and readable for low vision people. The hardware isn't quite there yet, and the headsets that can do that kind of resolution are extremely expensive.

But yeah, even so I can imagine the metaverse wouldn't be very helpful for low vision people as things stand today, even with higher resolution. I've played VR games and that was fine, but I've never tried to do work of any kind.

I guess where I'm coming from is that even though I'm low vision, I can work effectively on a modern OS because of the accessibility features. I also do a lot of crap like take pictures of things with my smartphone then zoom into the picture to see detail (like words on street signs) that my eyes can't see normally. That feels very much like rudimentary augmented reality that an appropriately-designed headset could mostly automate. VR/AR/metaverse isn't there yet, but it seems at least possible for the hardware and software to develop accessibility features that would make it workable for low vision people. 2023-05-10T15:24:18Z [Sam Wight :verified:: "Fucking Christ the @protocol i…" - Urbanists.Social](https://urbanists.social/@sam/110339902538138997)

Incredible critique of the protocol Bluesky is creating. It sounds like s shitshow. 2023-05-11T13:09:55Z (#d7vpcza) @ I've not looked into the Bluesky protocol, so I don't know what to think specifically. But this guy definitely is not impressed lol 2023-05-11T13:13:28Z My desktop computer developed a really annoying vibration-induced buzzing sound a few months ago after I added some hard drives to it. It was one of these where it'd be more or less quiet, and then all of a sudden a buzzing would start. If you tapped the case, it often made the buzzing stop.

One by one I went through my components, and the day before yesterday I finally identified the guilty party, one particular HDD. Currently I have the case open and a piece of cardboard jammed under the drive in its tray. The computer has not buzzed since I did that, so it looks to me like securing that drive better will finally end this madness-inducing sound.

Wild that it takes so long to track down something like this and figure out what to do about it. 2023-05-11T20:24:02Z In the "Ben Shapiro says bad stuff" department, here's some anti-semitism:
 ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/REVwEHrrB9Tzz5fq4pbpUG.png) 2023-05-12T12:13:22Z (#ldmieda) @ What? There's literally a "Religion, heritage, and values" section on his Wikipedia page. 2023-05-12T12:13:59Z (#d7vpcza) @ Oh? Tell me more if you feel up to it. 2023-05-12T12:16:15Z (#5bl6sta) @ I agree re: AR. Vircadia is neat. I stumbled on it years ago when I randomly started wondering "wonder what's going on with Second Life and those VR things" and started googling around. 

Unfortunately, like so many metaverse efforts, it's almost devoid of life. Interesting worlds to explore, cool tools to build your own stuff, but almost no people in it. It feels depressing, like an abandoned shopping mall. 2023-05-12T12:18:14Z (#2bmrx3q) @ I knew from the get go it was going to be an annoying thing to track down, which is was, but that made it take even longer because I avoided trying. 2023-05-12T12:18:57Z (#ldmieda) @ Yes. 2023-05-12T12:20:09Z (#ldmieda) his...I mean Sanders. I just checked Shapiro's Wikipedia page and his Jewish background is described there too. 2023-05-13T01:42:37Z (#pmcdfnq) @ lol I can't blame you 2023-05-13T15:36:45Z (#bivezxa) @ how many damn AI plugins does obsidian need? This shit is so annoying; it's sucking the oxygen out of every other development effort. 2023-05-14T12:58:12Z (#kcf4vrq) @ why do these fools think anyone wants "social meets payments"? It's such a ridiculous sounding idea. 2023-05-15T12:05:04Z [Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common | Science | AAAS](https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-papers-are-alarmingly-common)

Probably getting worse fast. 2023-05-15T12:17:56Z (#kcf4vrq) @ lol 😆 2023-05-15T15:39:00Z (#ekj2t6q) @ nice 2023-05-15T23:36:15Z (#3o6hhca) 😒 2023-05-17T10:35:55Z @ hello! Are you intending to post here? Because of issues with spammers, I delete users who have not posted any txts within a few days of signing up. 2023-05-17T16:15:18Z According to the [RedMonk programming language rankings from Jan 2023](https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2023/05/16/language-rankings-1-23/), Go and Scala are tied at 14th place 😏

1 JavaScript
2 Python
3 Java
4 PHP
5 C#
6 CSS
7 TypeScript
7 C++
9 Ruby
10 C
11 Swift
12 Shell
12 R
14 Go
14 Scala
16 Objective-C
17 Kotlin
18 PowerShell
19 Rust
19 Dart

 ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/X4pyKvmUfYw77FeFAEsnd5.png) 2023-05-18T12:37:52Z (#5yiy53a) @ I should have posted the more recent one from May, but the rankings are still pretty similar and Go and scala are tied still! 2023-05-19T01:29:58Z (#pjfe6ha) @ Google just sucks in every way it seems. 2023-05-19T11:49:26Z [Debt Collectors Want To Use AI Chatbots To Hustle People For Money](https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvjmm5/debt-collectors-want-to-use-ai-chatbots-to-hustle-people-for-money)

Starting to get ugly already. 2023-05-19T15:12:09Z [Pete Buttigieg Loves God, Beer, and His Electric Mustang | WIRED](https://www.wired.com/story/pete-buttigieg-interview-god-beer-electric-mustang/)

This is so embarrassing. I wonder how much Wired gets paid to sell off its editorial integrity. 2023-05-21T11:49:25Z (#mh2waua) @ doesn't sound like there has been much planning involved in the "planned power outage" if they can't tell you when the power will be out 🤦 2023-05-22T12:56:12Z (#o3jldpq) @ I was visiting Germany once, and saw a guy try to load his bicycle onto the bike racks they have on the front of city buses. There were rules about when you could do that, which were posted on the bus stop sign, and I guess the guy thought this was a time when he could do that. But no, the bus driver disagreed. The bus driver got off the bus *with a rule book*, flipped it open to what I guess were the rules about bikes on the bus, and showed him the rules. The guy pointed at the sign, the bus driver said no and pointed at the book, and they went back and forth for I don't know how long. It felt a lot like these videos lol 2023-05-23T13:11:26Z ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/7UFEZkm2RM5x3o4zwASFPG.png) 

This guy is just such an idiot lol.

- There's no such mass migration to "the south". Tons of people are leaving Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and New Mexico for instance. I don't know enough about the states with net influxes like Texas and Florida but I suspect they have policies that make it attractive for people to move there
- Not everybody is able to take account of long-term trends when they make housing decisions. There are financial reasons, family reasons, educational reasons, etc that impact such decisions
- But of course, most laughably, cheap energy is fast becoming a thing of the past, and so the problem isn't "solved" by cheap energy, it's just kicked down the road. And ffs, cheap energy is literally causing the very heating that he pretends air conditioning will "solve"--like "solving" your drinking problem by staying drunk all the time

This oversimplification to drive some kind of political point is so embarrassing coming from someone who pretends to be a university professor. It sounds like a teenage doofus from a 1980s movie talking. He well knows all these things, but he decides to present these views anyway. 2023-05-26T10:17:41Z (#trgb2sa) @ 13th without a break??? 2023-05-26T12:39:08Z (#trgb2sa) @ eesh, that's rough! Hope you get a break soon. 2023-05-28T14:40:46Z (#jvh3w7q) @ I fully agree with this. As the well-worn saying goes, you cannot address social problems with technological solutions. 2023-05-28T14:43:47Z (#hx33uaa) @ You more or less need a data center to run one of these adequately (well, train...you can run a trained one with a little less hardware). I think that's the idea--no one can run them locally, they have to *rent* them (and we know how much SaaS companies and VCs love the rental model of computing).

There's a lot of promising research-grade work being done right now to produce models that can be run on a human-scale (not data-center-scale) computing setup. I suspect those will become more commonly deployed in the next few years. 2023-05-30T15:38:18Z I came across the phrase "long fuse, big bang" used to describe large-scale issues with tipping points facing humanity, like climate change, and it feels pretty apt. 2023-06-01T13:25:41Z (#zx7xowq) @ No. ChatGPT does not improve your code. Coding is thinking. You offloaded your thought to a machine. You will not be able to reproduce what the machine did for you if you don't have the machine, so you learned nothing. 2023-06-01T13:26:59Z (#xa73jea) @ `backintime` for my desktop and work files. A combination of `rsync`, `zfs` snapshots, and redundancy for "at rest" type things. 2023-06-01T14:47:29Z (#xa73jea) @ I clone the important stuff on two separate clusters, but both are in my house. One of these days I'm planning to ask my brother to put a server of mine in his house, and then we can cross-clone for offsite backups that don't require the cloud. 2023-06-03T15:45:57Z (#2qky3jq) @ Is that a jet flying over? People's priorities are fucked up. 2023-06-04T13:57:14Z (#2qky3jq) @ wow. I'd trade crow sounds for car sounds, or jet sounds, or leaf blower sounds, or lawn mower sounds, or.....100% of the time.

As far as fighting the birds goes, maybe they're right, but probably it'd be better to re-balance the ecosystem so that crows aren't so dominant? At least there are things to try. When it comes to reducing how much air travel people use, it takes a terrorist attack or a pandemic to affect it. 2023-06-04T14:00:24Z (#2qky3jq) @ @ I've always liked the sound of crows, and I really really hate the sound of motorized vehicles, so I also find it absurd. I've come to think that some people are at some level afraid of nature, and nature sounds remind them of it. 2023-06-04T16:51:38Z "Sam Altman’s AI Hype Roadshow"

"The project of Altman and his merry band of doomsayers appears to be to capture power and create obfuscation by making new myths and legends"

"It assumes that no one will pull back the curtain and expose it as a market-expansion strategy"

Yes.

[On Understanding Power and Technology](https://rachelcoldicutt.medium.com/on-understanding-power-and-technology-1345dc57a1a) 2023-06-05T15:36:58Z [Dear Stack Overflow, Inc.](https://openletter.mousetail.nl/)

Stack Overflow is being inundated with AI-generated garbage. A group of 480+ human moderators is going on strike, because:

> Specifically, moderators are no longer allowed to remove AI-generated answers on the basis of being AI-generated, outside of exceedingly narrow circumstances. This results in effectively permitting nearly all AI-generated answers to be freely posted, regardless of established community consensus on such content.
>
> In turn, this allows incorrect information (colloquially referred to as "hallucinations") and plagiarism to proliferate unchecked on the platform. This destroys trust in the platform, as Stack Overflow, Inc. has previously noted.

It looks like StackOverflow Inc. is saying one thing to the public, and a very different thing to its moderators. 2023-06-05T15:43:05Z (#65j7vzq) Seems to me you could write a script that:
- Parses a StackOverflow question
- Runs it through an AI text generator
- Posts the output as a post on StackOverflow

and basically pollute the entire information ecosystem there in a matter of a few months? How long before some malicious actor does this? Maybe it's being done already 🤷

What an asinine, short-sighted decision. An astonishing number of companies are actively reducing headcount because their executives believe they can use this newfangled AI stuff to replace people. But, like the dot com boom and subsequent bust, many of the companies going this direction are going to face serious problems when the hypefest dies down and the reality of what this tech can and can't do sinks in.

We really, really need to stop trusting important stuff to corporations. They are not tooled to last. 2023-06-06T13:03:05Z Russia blowing up the Nova Kakhovka dam is an incomprehensible war crime. Among other things, it drains water from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, water that is needed for cooling. They are trying to generate a widespread disaster. 

They *must* be stopped, immediately, without hesitation. This is unacceptable behavior, crossing every red line we have no matter our politics, without any doubt. 2023-06-06T13:07:05Z (#k5eii3q) This demands a response from Europe, the world, not just Ukraine. 2023-06-06T14:10:11Z (#k5eii3q) @ I said nothing about an international violent response. You added that 🤔 

If someone punches you in the face over and over again, you don't stand there and take it to avoid "begetting violence". You stop them from punching you, and do your best to ensure they never punch you again. That's not "violence begets violence". That's rationality. 2023-06-06T15:07:25Z (#k5eii3q) @ I don't agree. I think he's a thug who benefits a lot if everybody thinks he's a madman.

All through this war, there has been a repeated cycle:
- We can't give Ukraine weapon X; that will provoke Putin and he'll drop a nuke!
- Russian propagandists threaten they're about to drop nukes
- After lots of hand wringing, some country gives weapon X to Ukraine
- No nukes are dropped

We're on like the 5th iteration of this. Now it's about F-16 fighter jets. In the meantime, a lot of Ukrainians AND Russians are dying en masse. 2023-06-06T18:43:33Z (#k5eii3q) @ yeah, it's a horrible waste. 2023-06-07T13:05:01Z (#k5eii3q) @ I think I understand NATO's hesitation, but at the same time if this drags on and on for years then it causes massive loss of life and is even more dangerous for everyone. If that nuclear power plant melts down, whether because Russia causes it directly or because of an "accident", then all of Europe can be blanketed with fallout. The longer this goes on, the more likely that possibility (and worse ones!) becomes.

That is scary to be so close to Russia. I hope you're doing OK. 2023-06-07T13:06:18Z (#k5eii3q) @ I tried to call him but he wouldn't answer the phone 😞 2023-06-07T18:14:06Z (#k5eii3q) I found this to be a [good thread](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1666480705637851136.html) on the subject of how the media is covering the dam explosion. The author, Timothy Snyder, is a history professor at Yale and has consistently good commentary on the war in Ukraine. 2023-06-07T19:21:48Z [Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI – Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain](https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/06/03/crypto-collapse-get-in-loser-were-pivoting-to-ai/)

Someone on here gave me a hard time when I suggested that the crypto grifters were pivoting to AI after crypto collapsed. But, they were and they still are. 2023-06-07T19:48:52Z [Asleep at the Keyboard? Assessing the
Security of GitHub Copilot’s Code Contributions](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.09293.pdf)

40% of code produced by GitHub Copilot has at least one well-known security vulnerability, in the test reported in this paper. 2023-06-07T19:54:06Z [GitHub and OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot lawsuit • The Register](https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/12/github_microsoft_openai_copilot/)

Lawsuits alleging GitHub Copilot breached licenses can move forward. Will be interesting to see how these cases are decided. 

This is a fucked up detail:
> The judge meanwhile rejected the defense argument that the plaintiffs should not be allowed to continue their claim pseudonymously based on death threats sent to the plaintiffs' counsel.

Who is sending death threats to the lawyers of people trying to sue GitHub/Microsoft/OpenAI, and why? Something's fishy there. 2023-06-07T20:11:13Z [Sam Altman on Twitter: "a new version of moore’s law that could start soon: the amount of intelligence in the universe doubles every 18 months" / Twitter](https://twitter.com/sama/status/1629880171921563649)

The more I read from this guy, the more I come to believe he is a gigantic douchecanoe. What a profoundly stupid thing to say. 2023-06-08T12:46:08Z (#hriu5ca) @ hahaha definitely not 2023-06-08T12:46:41Z (#aere2za) @ I mean, I get that there are differences of opinion. But death threats? Who the hell is doing that? 2023-06-09T11:51:12Z (#6ykol7q) @ by far the weirdest plane: https://movq.de/v/863829c893/IMG_4912.JPG 2023-06-12T12:55:14Z [How Ukraine's dam collapse could become the country's 'Chernobyl' | Time](https://time.com/6286309/ukraine-dam-collapse-ecological-catastrophe/)

Chernobyl is in Ukraine you assholes 😆 2023-06-12T12:57:31Z (#nlmebga) Looks like they edited the headline, but here's a receipt from twitter (well, nitter):
 ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/3nSgxXkT72Zx5oih4uUuoS.png) 2023-06-12T16:22:44Z (#owvsdgq) @ 
Doesn't even compile on my system, which is apparently broken:

```
> cc -Wall -Wextra -o win win.c $(pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk4) 
cc: error: unrecognized argument in option ‘-mfpmath=sse -msse -msse2 -pthread -I/usr/include/gtk-4.0 -I/usr/include/gio-unix-2.0 -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/harfbuzz -I/usr/include/pango-1.0 -I/usr/include/fribidi -I/usr/include/harfbuzz -I/usr/include/gdk-pixbuf-2.0 -I/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu -I/usr/include/cairo -I/usr/include/pixman-1 -I/usr/include/uuid -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/usr/include/libpng16 -I/usr/include/graphene-1.0 -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/graphene-1.0/include -I/usr/include/libmount -I/usr/include/blkid -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/include -lgtk-4 -lpangocairo-1.0 -lpango-1.0 -lharfbuzz -lgdk_pixbuf-2.0 -lcairo-gobject -lcairo -lgraphene-1.0 -lgio-2.0 -lgobject-2.0 -lglib-2.0’
cc: note: valid arguments to ‘-mfpmath=’ are: 387 387+sse 387,sse both sse sse+387 sse,387
``` 2023-06-12T16:35:13Z (#owvsdgq) @ If I understand it correctly, gtk4 renders using OpenGL. That means some of that RAM that appears to be allocated is actually some trick of the OpenGL driver so that it can map address in RAM space to the GPU's VRAM (depends a lot on your setup though).

What happens if you run it with `GSK_RENDERER=cairo` set? 2023-06-13T11:37:48Z (#wymrika) @ I noticed that too: #nlmebga 2023-06-15T18:07:04Z ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/bmYHa4PjzLz6E9mozAgvGM.png) 

Let's be clear here. Daniel Penny allegedly choked a black man, Jordan Neely, to death on a subway car. Neely was being loud, but he was not physically threatening anybody and did not have a weapon. In any other context, this would be called "murder", at the very least, "manslaughter" if one were being gracious. Because of the US's history, a white man murdering a black man in sight of the public is oftentimes, and rightfully, called a "lynching". It has a public, political purpose amounting to terrorism.

Daniel Penny was allowed to go free for awhile after this event. He is only now facing accountability, having been recently indicted (arrested and charged with a crime) as he should have been day of. And here is racist right-wing toadie Ben Shapiro saying that *Daniel Penny*--the white alleged killer--is the one being lynched. Not the black man who was allegedly murdered *by Penny* in view of the public, and who is now dead. Penny himself, who is still very much alive.

@, I don't know how you go on defending Ben Shapiro, but in the context of US society, what Shapiro is saying is reprehensible and unacceptable. He's a right-wing troll with disgusting, not to mention flat out stupid, opinions. 2023-06-18T15:01:24Z Jordan Peterson likes to mansplain at women when he knows nothing about the subject. Probably because he thinks women should be property of men instead of free individuals.

 ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/bGV8FASbWj4hkAL9UchRPM.png) 2023-06-18T15:03:49Z (#b33easq) for context, Peterson and a bunch of other know-nothing men are reacting on twitter to an article in The Atlantic co-authored by Applebaum, who has quite a bit of expertise on the subject she's writing about. That doesn't seem to matter at all to Peterson, who knows nothing of these subjects but opines about them anyway. She's been tweeting about these reactions and the screencapture I posted previously is one of hers about Peterson. 2023-06-18T15:05:07Z (#b33easq) Personally? I'd rather a woman owned Jordan Peterson and got him to shut the fuck up. 2023-06-18T15:06:27Z (#b33easq) Also, what a douchebag using the title "Dr." in his twitter handle. As a general rule, a white dude who isn't a medical doctor putting "Dr." in their social media title is a gigantic flashing red flag. 2023-06-18T15:14:37Z Speaking of men getting owned, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism who wrote the book _Strongmen_, regularly calls out and degrades wannabe dictators like Elon Musk and it's cathartic to witness.

 ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/XYRJbz8K937Sp6zdSbHqc6.png) 2023-06-20T13:24:38Z These billionaires are profoundly without intelligence or depth. It's astonishing to see so many shallow, empty fools parading their bad opinions publicly without shame. Let no one ever again fall under the illusion that tech oligarchs are anything more than your racist uncle at Thanksgiving but with more money.

![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/8pvxrf4CdkkcCB7poqeZdC.png) 2023-06-23T17:15:34Z I never paid a lot of attention to Ben Shapiro before, but what he says is so transparently asinine it boggles the senses. You really have to have a Fox-addled mind to believe that the search for the submersible was completely faked and that the powers-that-be knew the entire time that it had imploded. To believe that a vast conspiracy among hundreds, thousands (?) of people from several countries and spanning several days was orchestrated to lie to the public in order to.....uh, achieve what exactly? "Undermine institutional credibility"? What does that even mean?

This is "the moon landing was faked" levels of conspiracy theory.

![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/Pv6e25T9TSvpJvTrfdj7RF.png) 2023-06-23T18:11:00Z (#w7ddtmq) @ Oh wow I didn't know he was associated with PragerU. I've listened to a few episodes of The Audit podcast, where they basically shred PragerU content, and it's hilarious and terrifying. 2023-07-03T16:49:26Z Wondering how long I'll keep twitter-related feeds (like on fraidycat, or here) before giving up on them as permanently dead. 2023-07-03T16:53:08Z (#fob5w6q) With Youtube testing a "three strikes and you're out" policy against people who use ad blockers, I'm also wondering whether Web 2.0 is effectively walled off and I should just give up on it entirely and look elsewhere for information and entertainment. 2023-07-04T13:00:03Z [Google Says It'll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI](https://gizmodo.com/google-says-itll-scrape-everything-you-post-online-for-1850601486)

> Google updated its privacy policy over the weekend, explicitly saying the company reserves the right to scrape just about everything you post online to build its AI tools.

Google can eat shit. 2023-07-04T13:20:56Z (#y7ldi4q) Time to add

```

```

to everything I guess. 2023-07-04T13:21:53Z (#y7ldi4q) @ They were almost certainly doing this already, but now they're codifying it in their policies, essentially claiming ownership over everyone's web pages. 2023-07-04T14:16:46Z (#y7ldi4q) @ It can't possibly be defensible, which to me always signals an attempt at a power grab. They never explicitly said "we will use anything we scrape from the web to train our AI" before--that's new. There is growing pushback against that practice, with numerous legal cases winding through the legal system right now. Some day those cases will be heard and decided on by judges. So they're trying to get out ahead of that, in my opinion, and cement their claims to this data before there's a precedent set. 2023-07-04T14:18:36Z (#w7ddtmq) @ If that's your reaction to PragerU, then do I have a podcast for you! https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-audit 2023-07-05T09:29:30Z (#y7ldi4q) @ It's very different. Language models are part if traditional search engines and translation engines. The new policy mentions Cloud AI abd Bard specifically. This is a weird change and probably a good preemptive move as I said previously. I'm not sure why you're downplaying it 2023-07-05T09:32:35Z (#abupyoa) @ That's definitely a concern. I guess it's a way to signal unequivocally that you don't want the page indexed. If they do it anyway, they don't really have an excuse to fall back on--they just blatantly violated your web site's policy. 2023-07-05T13:38:56Z (#abupyoa) @ It's true. I think the key point is to make it 100% clear what your intentions are, so that if there ever *is* a legal case against Google, they cannot credibly pretend not to have known. 2023-07-06T13:15:04Z (#clwjr6a) @ @ I thought you were talking about the [cloud storage](https://wasabi.com) 🤣 2023-07-06T14:17:48Z (#clwjr6a) @ it's a great way to spice up your object storage! 2023-07-06T17:15:50Z (#7z4l4ra) @ I don't know! I've never used it--only came across it recently. 2023-07-06T17:16:10Z (#7z4l4ra) @ ack! Well, good to know. 2023-07-06T17:17:16Z (#mbo4kaa) @ hmm, I'd be up for thinking about that. At least at the protocol and design level--I'm afraid I can't help much with Go programming. 2023-07-06T18:11:55Z (#veppzdq) @ oh my god 2023-07-07T00:35:14Z (#ra4n7wa) @ is it difficult to get packages into f-droid? 2023-07-07T12:56:13Z (#ra4n7wa) @ bummer, that's a shame. I ask because I install the vast majority of my phone apps from f-droid these days, and only use Google Play Store when I have no other option. I know the Play Store will have more reach, but I'm guessing reach isn't the highest priority right now. 2023-07-12T16:06:03Z (#khu32eq) @ I run `fail2ban` on very aggressive settings to avoid these headaches. That plus manually banning IP ranges that register bots on my pod (🙄) works pretty well for me. 2023-07-13T13:35:54Z (#khu32eq) @ "yet"? It's supported ipv6 for like 6 years now. 2023-07-13T18:42:32Z (#ccnlcjq) @ wow that's wild. The ISPs I've had in the last few years supported ipv6. The one I have now does. 2023-07-14T00:24:02Z (#ccnlcjq) @ ah, well, I think it's on 1.0.x now but it picked up ipv6 support in 0.10.x 2023-07-14T11:10:34Z (#ooubl4a) @ 
- 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi: long range, can go through walls, fast but not very fast
- 5.0 GHz Wi-Fi: much shorter range, cannot go very far through walls, quite fast
- Li-Fi: long range (?), cannot go through any walls, very very fast 2023-07-15T15:37:13Z (#pne2f3a) @ @ seconded, that would definitely be nice 2023-07-16T00:43:13Z (#prgk2sq) @ Couldn't agree more 2023-07-17T19:35:50Z I'm playing around with `snac2`, which I think @ mentioned on here, and I have to say it's extremely easy to set up and it's been pretty straightforward so far. I wanted to experiment with having a presence on the Fediverse without going through the process of picking Mastodon vs. Gnu Social vs. Friendica vs. ..., and I wanted to self-host instead of picking an instance of one of those. For now I'm abucci@buc.ci, but no guarantees that will remain stable; I'm just testing for the time being. 2023-07-22T13:44:26Z (#kyuurnq) @ whoa that's so cool! 2023-07-22T17:12:10Z (#kyuurnq) @ I'm a big fan of https://excalidraw.com , especially the collaborative editing feature, but I don't think you can self-host it 👎 2023-07-22T17:19:23Z (#kyuurnq) @ I see what you mean about tldraw. I looked at their github repository and it seems like they are distributing it as an npm package for people who want to include a whiteboard in their Javascript-based frontend. I didn't see a way to just launch the thing.

I have half a mind to write a little scala frontend that sets up one of these, since scalajs makes it very easy to use these Javascript web component things while making it look like you're writing scala. 2023-07-22T17:21:03Z (#kyuurnq) I take it back. Excalidraw is like tldraw--you can integrate it into a Javascript front end if you want. Which means technically you could self-host it if you wanted, but you'd have to write your own front end code to embed it, and host that code somehow. 2023-07-22T19:19:33Z (#kyuurnq) @ oh wow nice, I got it running with no trouble:

```



 |
 |
 | .
 | | |
 | | |
 | | |
 |__________ | |
 / | _,..----. | / ,Y-o..
 .| ,-'' | / .' / ' .
 || [ --.....- | | | `.
 || |".........__ | | \ |
 b | ' | | \ |
 | | | `. _,'
 | | ' `'''



 , , . .
 \ .'| ,-'\V d---. |...
 \. ,'| / |/ | / |
 ` ...,' ,' `..,Y / / |
 _/ | | |
 ,' |
 -._______/



``` 2023-07-23T00:00:04Z (#sx5saba) @ hahaha! 2023-07-23T00:12:54Z Ben Shapiro is threatened by a movie about a doll 😆 2023-07-23T01:03:48Z (#kyuurnq) @ wow! The place to go for whiteboard tech is mills.io.

That stinks about Excalidraw. they've been saying that (working on adding collab/self hosting) for over a year. 2023-07-23T01:15:37Z I used to be a big fan of a service called cocalc, which you could also self host. It was kind of an integrated math, data science, research, writing, and teaching platform.

I hadn't run it in awhile, and when I checked in with it today I found their web site brags that cocalc is now "extensively integrated with ChatGPT".

Which means I can't use it anymore, and frankly anyone doing anything serious shouldn't use it either. Very disappointing. 2023-07-23T14:46:37Z (#fxbcufa) @ It was super useful if you needed to do the sorts of things it did. I'm pretty sad.

At its core was Sage, a computational mathematics system, and their own version of Jupyter notebooks. So, you could do all kinds of different math stuff in a notebook environment and share that with people. But on top of that, there was a chat system, a collaborative editing system, a course management system (so if you were teaching a class using it you could keep track of students, assignments, grades, that sort of thing), and a bunch of other stuff I never used. It all ran in a linux container with python/conda as a base, so you could also drop to a terminal, install stuff in the container, and run X11 applications in the same environment. I never taught a class with it but I used to use it semi-regularly to experiment with ideas. 2023-07-23T14:47:56Z (#us7vxna) @ do they censor you??? 2023-07-23T14:51:47Z My UPS failed the other day and I don't know what's wrong with it yet. Very 😱 until I get that fixed or replaced. 2023-07-24T13:40:06Z I just received this email and I have some questions:

> This email is from a trusted sοurce.
>
> You received this abucci@bucci.onl because you have been disconnected from sending and receiving emails.
> 
> To continue using this email address we urge you to re-confirm if your account is still active on bucci.onl to officially unlock it to our default settings.
>
> Re-confirm account (a link; removed)
>
> ※ This process is very important to help us protect your internet and fight malicious activities. 

Since I administer bucci.onl myself, I'm a little confused. I don't recall disconnecting myself from sending and receiving emails. I don't even know how you disconnect someone from that. I also have never created the email address this email appears to be coming from, but maybe I should trust it anyway since they told me it's a trusted source? Most puzzlingly, I've been sending and receiving emails just fine all morning, so I do not appear to be disconnected from anything? I want to help protect the internet and fight malicious activities, but what should I do??? 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔 2023-07-24T17:49:11Z (#lwzzgcq) @ "it might provoke Russia" 2023-07-25T12:51:20Z (#5gmpt7a) @ when will we have Y coin, the decentralized crypto money of yarn social??? 2023-07-25T14:53:43Z I've only been using `snac`/the fediverse for a few days and already I've had to mute somebody. I know I come on strongly with my opinions sometimes and some people don't like that, but this person had already started going ad hominem (in my reading of it), and was using what felt to me like sketchy tactics to distract from the point I was trying to make and to shut down conversation. They were doing similar things to other people in the thread so rather than wait for it to get bad for me I just muted them. People get so weirdly defensive so fast when you disagree with something they said online. Not sure I fully understand that. 2023-07-25T15:38:22Z (#kzsbkna) @ attacking the person, not the idea. It'd be like if you said "yarn is better than mastodon because it isn't push based" and someone who disagreed with you said "well you think that because you're an idiot" or something like that. 2023-07-25T16:17:02Z (#kzsbkna) @ Well, you can mute or block individual users, and you can mute conversations too. I think the tools for controlling your interactions aren't so bad (they could definitely be improved ofc). And in my case, I was replying to something this person said, so it wasn't outrageous for his reply to be pushed to me. Mostly, I was sad to see how quickly the conversation went bad. I thought I was offering something relatively uncontroversial, and actually I was just agreeing with and amplifying something another person had already said. 2023-07-26T13:13:47Z The hottest 21 days ever recorded on Earth were the last 21 days.

There are climate scientists saying that this summer will be the coolest summer of the rest of our lives. It won't get cooler.

They can say that with confidence because Earth's energy imbalance--the difference between how much energy comes in versus how much is radiated back to space--has been positive since around 2010. Prior to that, the balance would shift negative sometimes, so Earth would radiate a bunch of energy back into space. Not anymore. Earth is an energy sponge now. And net positive incoming energy means temperatures go up.

Climate disaster has been here for awhile, but it's kicking into high gear now. This will not change until we take drastic action. 2023-07-28T11:56:27Z (#4sbpj2q) @ I'll second this--I find it very hard to read too. 2023-07-29T19:09:42Z (#gcwa5wa) @ 
> For those fond of the COBOL programming language

😆 2023-07-30T13:02:58Z (#fcjogya) I have new batteries for it now but I have no motivation to replace them. 😩 2023-07-31T00:05:26Z (#b2k6b5q) @ this is excellent advice that I will almost surely heed! 2023-07-31T14:10:45Z (#ivhcphq) @ @ I believe the resurgence in availability of municipal WiFi is largely driven by the surveillance capabilities it offers. Every person who has WiFi enabled on their phone can be tracked throughout the city as their phones ping various base stations; a lot of folks aren't aware of just how much information can be slurped out of a phone that isn't locked down just from its WiFi pings. I know this happens in Toronto, and I was familiar with a startup in Massachusetts that based its business model on this very concept. I can only assume it's widespread in the US if not throughout the Western world. 2023-07-31T22:35:38Z (#xdfwwgq) @ happy birthday! 2023-08-01T14:40:21Z [Release jq 1.7rc1 · jqlang/jq · GitHub](https://github.com/jqlang/jq/releases/tag/jq-1.7rc1)

Renewed activity on `jq` after five years. This RC looks nice! 2023-08-01T18:52:25Z (#3g4an7a) @ 😐 2023-08-02T17:15:38Z (#nrtxtpa) @ hmmm, I might. 2023-08-02T19:54:20Z (#kp4mjzq) @ oof that's bad 2023-08-02T23:16:54Z (#nrtxtpa) @ are you trying to reinvent cloud computing?!? 2023-08-03T12:17:51Z (#tdpzuha) @ 
> The benefits of blockchain implementation across multiple sectors are well-documented

WTF are you talking about? The only thing well-documented about "the blockchain" is that it sucks and its primary use case is creating Ponzi schemes. 2023-08-03T13:51:34Z (#tdpzuha) @ the confusion over these words is rampant 🤦‍♂️ 2023-08-04T14:55:56Z (#tz3up7q) @ hello @ here's another feed that's spewing multiple copies of the same post. This one above is repeated 8 times. @ now has 13 copies of each post every week. This definitely looks like a bug in whatever code is generating these feeds, because the source feeds don't have multiple copies of the original posts:

- Has 8 copies of the above post: https://feeds.twtxt.net/New_scientist/twtxt.txt
- Has only 1 copy of the above post: https://www.newscientist.com/feed/home/

I forget whether I filed an issue on this before, but can you tell me where I should do that? 2023-08-05T17:16:31Z (#axkd3eq) @ 
```
# ssh -p 2222 cas.run help 
The authenticity of host '[cas.run]:2222 ([139.180.180.214]:2222)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is SHA256:i5txciMMbXu2fbB4w/vnElNSpasFcPP9fBp52+Avdbg.
This key is not known by any other names
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes
Warning: Permanently added '[cas.run]:2222' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
abucci@cas.run: Permission denied (publickey).
``` 2023-08-05T21:53:13Z (#axkd3eq) @ I do, but you didn't specify in your twt that you needed to use a github account. I copy pasted the `ssh` command you posted verbatim! 2023-08-06T13:29:27Z (#axkd3eq) @ so what is the command to use? I did `ssh -p 2222 GITHUB_USERNAME@cas.run help` but that gives the same error. There's something missing here. 2023-08-06T15:26:11Z (#njayfpq) @ ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/CAuuWDbYxkJj5aHjEzergZ.png) 2023-08-06T18:01:09Z (#4zj75sa) @ hahaha 2023-08-06T18:02:04Z (#fndjfpa) hello @ please post something that demonstrates you're a human being and not a bot; otherwise I'm afraid I'll have to delete your account! 2023-08-07T12:25:17Z (#axkd3eq) @ aha, thank you, that got me unjammed.

Turns out I thought I had an SSH key set up in github, but github didn't agree with me. So, I re-added the key.

I also had to modify the command slightly to:

```
ssh -p 2222 -i PRIVATE_GITHUB_KEY GITHUB_USERNAME@cas.run help
```

since I generate app-specific keypairs and need to specify that for `ssh` and I haven't configured it to magically choose the key so I have to specify it in the command line.

Anyhow, that did it. Thanks! 2023-08-07T12:28:22Z (#axkd3eq) @ hmm, now I get this:

```
$ ssh -p 2222 -i PRIVATE_GITHUB_KEY GITHUB_USERNAME@cas.run add | sh
sh: 135: docker: not found
```

The quickstart says:
```
## Quick Start

 ssh -p 2222 cas.run add | sh
```

so that's why I tried this command (I had to modify it with my key and username like before)

Edit: 🤦‍♂ and that's becasue I don't have `docker` on this machine. Sorry about that, false alarm. 2023-08-07T13:41:15Z (#axkd3eq) @ @
It looks like there's a `podman` issue for adding the `context` subcommand that `docker` has. Currently `podman` does not have this subcommand, although [this comment](https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/12811#issuecomment-1153128175) has a translation to `podman` commands that are similar-ish.

It looks like that's all you need to do to support `podman` right now! Though I'm not 100% sure the containers I tried really are running remotely. Details below.

I manually edited the shell script that `cas.run add` returns, changing all the `docker` commands to `podman` commands. Specifically, I put `alias docker=podman` at the top so the check for `docker` would pass, and then I replaced the last two lines of the script with these:

```
podman system connection add cas "host=tcp://cas.run..."
podman system connection default cas
```

(that ... after `cas.run` is a bunch of connection-specific stuff)

I ran the script and it exited with no output. It did create a connection named "cas", and made that the default. I'm not super steeped in how `podman` works but I believe that's what you need to do to get `podman` to run containers remotely.

I ran some containers using `podman` and I *think* they are running remotely but I don't know the right juju to verify. It looks right though!

This means you could probably make minor modifications to the generated shell script to support `podman`. Maybe when the check for `docker` fails, check for `podman`, and then later in the script use the `podman` equivalents to the `docker context` commands. 2023-08-07T14:21:58Z (#axkd3eq) @ I had a feeling my container was not running remotely. It was too crisp.

`podman` is definitely capable of it. I've never used those features though so I'd have to play around with it awhile to understand how it works and then maybe I'd have a better idea of whether it's possible to get it to work with `cas.run`. 

There's a `podman`-specific way of allowing remote container execution that wouldn't be too hard to support alongside `docker` if you wanted to go that route. Personally I don't use `docker`--too fat, too corporate. `podman` is lightweight and does virtually everything I'd want to use `docker` to do. 2023-08-07T14:58:38Z (#axkd3eq) @ I don't get your objection. `dockerd` is 96M and has to run all the time. You can't use `docker` without it running, so you have to count both. `docker` + `dockerd` is 131M, which is over 3x the size of `podman`. Plus you have this daemon running all the time, which eats system resources `podman` doesn't use, *and* `docker` fucks with your network configuration right on install, which `podman` doesn't do unless you tell it to.

That's way fat as far as I'm concerned.

As far as corporate goes, `podman` is free and open source software, the end. `docker` is a company with a pricing model. It was founded as a startup, which suggests to me that, like almost all startups, they are seeking an exit and if they ever face troubles in generating that exit they'll throw out all niceties and abuse their users (see Reddit, the drama with spyware in Audacity, 10,000 other examples). Sure you can use it free for many purposes, and the container bits are open source, but that doesn't change that it's always been a corporate entity, that they can change their policies at any time, that they can spy on you if they want, etc etc etc.

That's way too corporate as far as I'm concerned.

I mean, all of this might not matter to you, and that's fine! Nothing wrong with that. But you can't have an alternate reality--these things I said are just facts. You can find them on Wikipedia or docker.com for that matter. 2023-08-07T15:00:33Z (#axkd3eq) @ My understanding is that `podman` can talk to the Docker Engine API. It's just that the commands sometimes have different names in the `podman`verse. I think--never used those features. 2023-08-07T15:42:47Z (#axkd3eq) @ I don't understand what you're saying. `podman` works with TLS. It does not have the "--docker" siwtch so you have to remove that and use the exact replacement commands that were in that github comment. 2023-08-08T12:37:27Z (#42qgz2q) @ what do you mean when you say "Docker API"? There are multiple possible meanings for that. `podman` conforms to *some* of Docker's APIs and it's unclear to me which one you say it's *not* conforming to.

You just have to Google "podman Docker API" and you find stuff like this: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-rest-api

## What is Podman's REST API?

Podman's REST API consists of two components:
- A **Docker-compatible** portion called Compat API
- A native portion called Libpod API that provides access to additional features not available in Docker, including pods


Or this: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-system-service.1.html
> The REST API provided by podman system service is split into two parts: a compatibility layer offering **support for the Docker v1.40 API**, and a Podman-native Libpod layer. 2023-08-08T13:08:30Z (#42qgz2q) @ podman supports TLS. 2023-08-08T13:26:04Z (#42qgz2q) @ 
```
$ podman --docker 
Error: unknown flag: --docker
```

Why are you using a flag that `podman` doesn't have? 2023-08-08T13:34:42Z (#42qgz2q) @ Change your script to this:
```
#!/bin/sh

set -e

alias docker=podman

if [ ! command -v docker > /dev/null 2>&1 ]; then
 echo "docker not found"
 exit 1
fi

mkdir -p $HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas

## key stuff omitted

# DO NOT DO THIS docker context create cas --docker "host=tcp://cas.run:2376,ca=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/ca.pem,key=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/key.pem,cert=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/cert.pem"
# DO THIS:
podman system connection add "host=tcp://cas.run:2376,ca=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/ca.pem,key=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/key.pem,cert=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/cert.pem"
# DO NOT DO THIS docker context use cas
# DO THIS: 
podman system connection default cas
``` 2023-08-08T14:36:32Z (#42qgz2q) @ hmm, bummer. I was hoping that translating the `docker` commands to `podman` syntax would work but it looks like it's more subtle than that. Thanks for trying!

The weird thing was I wasn't getting errors like that on my end when I tried it. `podman` thought the connection was created, and it set it as the default. But I don't think it was sending anything over the wire. When I have more time to tinker with it maybe I'll play around and see if I can figure out what's up. 2023-08-08T15:31:21Z Found another example of Google stealing something I've written and putting it in a "featured snippet".

What's super annoying about this one is that the source is a course page at Tufts University, not the official page of the publication they're taking this text from. I know the professor who taught that course and I've guest lectured for them before on this topic. They put this publication in their course readings, and I guess that's where Google picked it up.

![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/CfWbhWbEVoHZNU56Bsa4X9.png) 2023-08-08T15:33:37Z (#zi4535q) here's my old [web page at Brandeis University](https://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~abucci/)
> Coevolutionary algorithms typically explore domains in which no single evaluation function is present or known. For the purpose of selecting which individuals to maintain and vary, they instead rely on the outcomes of interactions between evolving entities.

I've been using variations of that same phrasing for a very long time--I wrote that web page circa 2005 maybe? 2023-08-15T02:52:00Z (#izsda6q) @ Wow! 2023-08-16T12:51:10Z (#lpjlrqq) @ "tiny" 😆 2023-08-17T00:23:33Z (#lhdjzma) @ oh fuck off 2023-08-18T16:35:12Z [Keyword: Decentralization - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure](https://publicinfrastructure.org/2023/04/12/keyword-decentralization/)

Figured you'd be interested in this @ 2023-08-21T13:26:38Z (#addgj3q) @ because of course they have.

Emily Bender, a computational linguistic and excellent critic of this generative AI nonsense, uses an analogy of an oil spill to characterize what is happening as a result of generative AI. It's polluting the world with false information, false images, false "academic" articles, false books. The companies that create this stuff are not cleaning up their misinformation spill; they're letting the mess spread all over. It's being used to commit crimes, and that'll only get worse. Just like an out of control oil spill will destroy entire ecosystems. 2023-08-21T13:28:28Z (#yrdafza) @ No, Google does not predict this. "Google AI" has been self-promoting like this for decades. Remember when they used to brag that they could predict the onset of flu season weeks before it started? That silently went away because they got it badly wrong many times and people caught on to how bad their "predictions" actually were.

They can't stop themselves. Anything about AI coming out of big tech companies these days is marketing, not real, and certainly not science. 2023-08-21T18:05:35Z (#aex52eq) @ Invidious might satisfy these requirements: https://invidious.io

It's worth noting, though, that Youtube is right now in the process of locking itself down and it might not be long before all third-party frontends stop working. Similar to what twitter and reddit are doing. 2023-08-22T17:31:49Z Ugh, ffs--the datasette project just added #ChatGPT garbage. Another seemingly nice piece of software and project that I need to stop using.

I guess I can be thankful they self-identify. 2023-08-27T13:46:00Z (#bf5yqda) @ Yes, I'm still with jmp.chat, and still very happy with them overall. Their beta period ended and their pricing increased a bit, so that's worth a bit of consideration. I also managed to get one of their eSIMs. I'm slightly less happy with that aspect of their service, though they seem to be actively working on improving it and I knew in advance this was an early beta kind of thing and likely to have issues.

The only unreliability with calls that I've noticed was traceable to the unreliability of my own internet connection. I've confused incoming calls by simultaneously making and taking calls from the computer and the phone, but I think it's understandable that problems might arise and that's not a real use case for me. Once or twice I did not receive a text transcription of a voice mail, but the support is usually quick to address things like that.

I host my own XMPP server and have for a good decade now, and that's what I use with jmp.chat. I can't speak to the quality of their hosting options.

Group texting works fine for me if one of the other parties initiates the group text. I haven't tried to initiate my own group text in well over a year; last time I did, it didn't work. That may or may not be a problem for you, and it may or may not have been fixed by now. Worth investigating more if it's important. I should also say I've only ever used group texts with 3 participants, and can't speak to what happens if there are more nor whether there are upper limits.

Group texts don't use MUC. Rather, they use a special syntax in the JID, something like "+1XXX,+1YYY,...,+1ZZZ@cheogram.com", where the + and , are required, the XXX, YYY, through ZZZ are the phone numbers (no dashes or other special chars just digits), and the @cheogram.com at the end is required.

I recommend the cheogram app if you're on android. It has a lot of nice features on top of the Conversations base. I use gajim on my (linux) computer and it works well with jmp.chat.

I'm happy to answer other questions if you have them! 2023-08-28T14:35:55Z (#vkofzva) @ I'm sorry that I'm not super knowledgeable about alternatives to jmp.chat but I'll tell you what I know. 

You're probably right about jmp.chat not working for you, at least as it is now. You can only get US and Canadian phone numbers through it last time I checked, so if you're not in either of those countries you'd be making international calls all the time and people who wanted to call you would be making international calls too.

I've seen people talk about using SIP as an intermediary: you can bridge SIP-to-XMPP, and bridge SIP-to-PSTN (PSTN = "packet switched telephone network", meaning normal telephone). You can skip the SIP-to-XMPP side if you're comfortable using a SIP client. I don't know very much about SIP or PSTN so I am not sure what to recommend, but perhaps this helps your search queries.

There are a fair number of services like TextNow that let you sign up for a real telephone number that you can then use via their app (I wouldn't use TextNow--they had tons of spyware in their app). I don't know if that kind of service works for you but if it does perhaps you'd be able to find one of them that isn't horrible. This page (https://alternativeto.net/software/jmp-chat/) has a bunch of alternatives; I can't vouch for any of them but maybe it's a starting point if you want to go this route.

Good luck! 2023-08-30T14:25:17Z (#xevmcwa) @ Horseshit hype:
- AI that we have today cannot think--there is no cognitive capacity
- AI that we have today cannot be interviewed--"inter" "viewing" is two minds interacting, but AI of today has no mind, which means this is a puppet show
- AI today is not free--it's a tool, a machine, hardly different from a hammer. It does what a human directs it to do and has no drives, desires, or autonomy. What you're seeing here is a fancy Mechnical Turk

This shit is probably paid for by AI companies who desperately want us to think of the AI as far more capable than it actually is, because that juices sales and gives them a way to argue they aren't responsible for any harms it causes. 2023-08-30T15:15:38Z (#xevmcwa) @ It really is cringeworthy 2023-09-01T13:06:16Z (#7dxtvnq) @ @ It's worth bearing in mind that

- Fairphone has taken a considerable amount of VC funding so, sooner or later, that bill will become due: (see: https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/31/fairphone-growth-capital-raise and https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fairphone)
- Fairphone comes with Google Play apps by default, so it's also a spyware vector (see: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/110978014080809471)

I used to have a lot of hope for them but these two ingredients mean that [enshittification](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification) is virtually inevitable. 2023-09-01T13:24:00Z (#7dxtvnq) @ oh yeah, no doubt. I just like to keep an eye on these things because I hate being blindsided. 2023-09-01T13:27:24Z (#if5eb2a) @ I've had a Teracube phone for about 3 years now. Theirs comes with a guarantee of 4 years--if something that's covered breaks, you send the phone to them and they fix it and send it back, or they send you a new one. I took advantage of that last year when the screen broke; their tech support even helped me figure out how to wipe the phone when the screen didn't display anything. Pretty painless all around. Have to say I've been very happy with it. It doesn't have the top-end features that new big company phones have, but I don't want those features so that's not an issue for me. I dunno if it's available in Australia or if it's just a US thing. 2023-09-01T13:30:47Z (#if5eb2a) @ @ F-droid. Getting APKs from developers you trust and side-loading them. Some flavor of Linux. Some distro of the open source parts of Android.

There are lots of options. Bit by bit I divest from anything that's distributed from Google Play. With my latest phone I find and download APKs so that I could have the app without all the Google crap woven through it. By the time I need to replace this one I'll be fully free of Google Play. Most of my apps come from F-droid now. You can a perfectly functional phone/pocket computer unless you're addicted to installing dozens of corporate apps. 2023-09-01T13:31:46Z (#if5eb2a) @ yes, the OS is based on stock Android, so probably wouldn't be of interest if you prefer Apple. 2023-09-01T13:35:07Z (#eqvdabq) @ yeah, it's true. Thing is, Linux as a desktop operating system sucked in 1996 yet I adopted it then anyway because I wanted nothing to do with MS anymore 😆 I know it's not for everyone but I'm pretty tolerant of a less-than-stellar experience if it means I can be free of big-company garbage.

I haven't tried a Linux-based smartphone OS in a long time so I don't have any idea how bad/good it might be. I figure when I finally break down and get a new phone I'll experiment on my current phone. 2023-09-01T13:45:04Z (#if5eb2a) @ I think it is, and one benefit they have is that you can add third-party repositories to the F-Droid app as you discover them. So, for instance, if you know of a developer who pushes builds to an F-Droid compatible repository, you can add that to your F-Droid app and start tracking updates like you would for any other app in there. Can't do that with Google Play!

F-Droid tends to focus on open source applications that can be built in a reproducible way, which limits the inventory (though of course tends to mean the apps are safer and don't spy on you). There are non-free apps in there as well but they come with warnings so you're informed about what you might be sacrificing by using them. 

That said if you have a favorite app you get through Google Play, there's a decent chance it won't be in F-Droid. Many "big corporate" apps aren't, and vendor-specific apps tend not to be either. But for most of the major functions you might want, like email clients, calendar apps, weather apps, etc etc, there are very good substitutes now in F-Droid. You're definitely making a trade-off though.

What I did was go through the apps I had installed on my last phone, found as many substitutes in F-Droid as I could, started using those instead to see how they worked, and bit by bit replaced as much as I could from Google Play with a comparable app from F-Droid. I still have a few apps (mostly vendor-specific things that don't have substitutes) that come from Google Play but I'm aiming to be rid of those before I need to replace this phone. 2023-09-01T13:45:33Z (#if5eb2a) @ hahaha in some ways it sure does! 2023-09-01T13:58:23Z (#7uig3sq) @ I use the gmail webapp for work, and I have to say that over the years it's gotten less and less usable. There are so many little usability things that it's bad at. For instance, if you select a message and hit the Delete key nothing happens. The message is not put in the trash like you'd expect. There are issues like that scattered all over the app. I suspect they spend most of their energy on the spyware side of gmail and dedicate less to making it a useful app for end users (which seems to be true of their search engine too). 2023-09-05T00:11:20Z (#xwli2wa) @ Green growth was always horseshit and everyone knows it. 2023-09-06T00:10:14Z (#skljzma) @ GPT-4 didn't win shit. 2023-09-07T12:33:00Z (#22svhvq) @ What the flying fuck? 2023-09-08T16:13:34Z Turned half a century old today. Boy I'm tired.

#birthday 2023-09-08T21:05:21Z (#zs4fbfa) @ thank you, thank you. Hoping to make it to a decent fraction of a century. 2023-09-09T00:48:28Z (#xqbzm5a) @ I do the `ls` thing regularly. I even do it after I've already `ls`ed the directory but have run some other command afterwards. I tend to think of it like the LOOK command in text adventures. 2023-09-09T00:50:13Z (#zs4fbfa) @ thank you! Yup, a full half century. Quite weird feeling. I feel like I've finally earned my curmudgeonly personality 😆 2023-09-10T12:40:57Z (#zs4fbfa) @ If you've got it, own it! 2023-09-10T12:41:06Z (#zs4fbfa) @ Thank you! 2023-09-10T12:41:21Z (#zs4fbfa) @ oops, forgot to say thank you for the birthday wishes! 2023-09-14T23:56:28Z [USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix](https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/30/usenet_revival/)

> The USENET management committee has reconvened and there are green shoots of growth in the original, pre-World Wide Web social network. 2023-09-15T18:51:47Z [How Google Authenticator made one company’s network breach much, much worse | Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/09/how-google-authenticator-gave-attackers-one-companys-keys-to-the-kingdom/)

🤦‍♂

WHY are these big companies treated as though they are the be all and end all of infosec? These are rookie mistakes Google's making, *at scale*.

> Unfortunately Google employs dark patterns to convince you to sync your MFA codes to the cloud, and our employee had indeed activated this “feature”. If you install Google Authenticator from the app store directly, and follow the suggested instructions, your MFA codes are by default saved to the cloud. If you want to disable it, there isn’t a clear way to “disable syncing to the cloud”, instead there is just a “unlink Google account” option.

Like, never ever put your multi-factor tokens into a single cloud storage location! The whole point of this being "multi" factor is that there is a separate, independent physical factor involved in the authentication process. If the authenticator app on your phone puts the tokens in the cloud, then it reduces the security that comes from having a second factor. This is basic stuff.

Of course, never ever use Google Authenticator. All it does is generate TOTP and HOTP codes, which you can do with any OTP app, preferably an open source one that's been vetted. 2023-09-21T13:43:05Z (#jzzukua) @ 
1. It's criminal: Copilot was only possible because of massive theft of other peoples' work (no compensation or even acknowledgement to any of the developers whose code was used to create Copilot)
2. It's positioned to put software developers out of work or so fully de-skill them that they no longer know how to code anything but prompts (after which come corporate-justified salary and benefits decreases)

Don't use it. No one should ever use it. You're destroying your own future as a software developer by leaning on and supporting these things. 2023-09-22T11:53:36Z Oops, let a SSL certificate expire. 2023-09-22T16:40:30Z [AWS: Cannot Escape IPv4](https://tty.neveragain.de/2023/09/21/aws-cannot-escape-ipv4.html)

> more than 90% of all AWS service API endpoints do not support IPv6

Sounds like AWS is instituting an IPv4 tax soon. 2023-09-26T15:51:45Z [EU warns Elon Musk after Twitter found to have highest rate of disinformation | X (formerly known as Twitter) | The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/26/eu-warns-elon-musk-that-twitter-x-must-comply-with-fake-news-laws)

Not a surprise I guess. 2023-09-27T19:06:46Z More data contradicting the existence of "echo chambers". As I've argued many times before, the concept of an echo chamber or information bubble is not real. The podcast below is an interview of an author of a study where they actually intervened and changed the information diet of 20,000 people (with consent!), then surveyed them after three months. They observed essentially no changes to the study subjects' beliefs and attitudes. They also observed that the typical person, while they tend to gravitate towards people with similar political leanings, only get about 50% of their content from such like-minded people. They get the rest from neutral sources and maybe 20% from non-like-minded people.

Varied information diet + No change in attitudes when information diet is forced to be different = no echo chamber.


[Listen to the podcast episode here](https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast-download/1464/89-brendan-nyhan-pt-1.mp3) 2023-10-01T00:21:33Z (#cukuraa) @ oh wow nice autumn shot. I expected to see then silhouette of a witch flying on a broomstick 2023-10-04T14:30:18Z (#67tvvwa) @ `iotop` 2023-10-12T15:27:41Z [Six Months Ago NPR Left Twitter. The Effects Have Been Negligible - Nieman Reports](https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/) 2023-10-13T00:17:52Z (#ru2lfuq) @ You get what you pay for? 2023-10-17T00:13:17Z (#b7srh4q) @ Newpipe on android continues to work fine 2023-11-06T15:33:08Z (#qlcjv5q) @ Any of these work? https://gadgetstouse.com/blog/2023/05/15/bypass-ad-blockers-not-allowed-on-youtube/ 2023-11-07T13:49:12Z Fuck Earth!
-- Elon Musk

https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-planet-civilisation 2023-11-07T13:50:18Z (#vrp5cjq) @ "who could possibly forget that" you could, apparently lol 2023-11-09T14:40:25Z First snowfall of the season.

 ![](https://anthony.buc.ci/media/Mc754ieKwugwKZg7XgaRWh.png) 2023-11-10T13:28:32Z (#y6ha7ha) @ I think we're 90 meters above sea level or thereabouts. Pretty far north in the US though. 2023-11-14T17:47:02Z (#f5m5s4q) @ fuck off with this nightmare. 2023-11-14T17:48:14Z (#cikr4oa) @ no it can't. Your blurb is literally "if we had data we can't have, we could predict weather better". DeepMind is irrelevant in that statement--anyone could. 2023-11-15T13:11:55Z (#f5m5s4q) @ I don't know but I don't want it! 2023-11-15T13:13:01Z (#cikr4oa) @ Right now they're laying the groundwork for uncritical belief in the power of #AI, so the next step will be accepting the magical incantations as if they were real. 2023-11-15T13:13:42Z (#cikr4oa) @ I feel like my kid is a better weather predictor than most weather sites. He freaks out whenever the pressure drops and we know a storm is coming 😆 2023-11-15T19:52:01Z (#eqzslla) @ No it isn't. The prejudice that playing board games is indicative of general intelligence is passe, outdated. 2023-11-20T13:10:49Z (#6i52mba) @ We're going to be killed by these people's excesses, almost literally. This ratio is indefensible. 2023-11-20T13:51:36Z [Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away. : youtube](https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/) 2023-11-21T19:45:18Z (#la3jy6a) @ I guess so. It's weird and obsessive. They are compulsively monopolistic anymore.