@prologic@twtxt.net 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.

@prologic@twtxt.net 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).

@prologic@twtxt.net 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.

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.

I’ve seen BlueSky referred to as BS (as in Blue Sky, 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.

College Knowledge
⌘ Read more

**RT by @mind_booster: 🧰 5 changes to fix the EC’s #RightToRepair proposal 🛠️

1️⃣ No contractual overrides
2️⃣ No digital locks
3️⃣ Go beyond just fixing things
4️⃣ Don’t limit who can repair
5️⃣ Broaden the scope of what can be repaired

Blog 👉 https://www.knowledgerights21.org/news-story/still-time-to-repair-the-commission-proposal-on-the-right-to-repair/
Response 👉 https://kr21.info/r2r**
🧰 5 changes to fix the EC’s #RightToRepair proposal 🛠️

1️⃣ No contractual ov … ⌘ Read more

I am going to try to install the twtxt Yellow extension from Søren - https://lien.sus.fr/iaxgN

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

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.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

(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. 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.

Man wakes from 2 year coma to find Gentoo stage 2 install still going
“It cut my total time spent waiting for this Gentoo install to complete by almost half!” ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT and Elasticsearch: OpenAI meets private data | Elastic Blog

Terrifying. Elasticsearch is celebrating that they’re going to send your private data to OpenAI? No way.

Escape Speed
⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net 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…

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.

Sam Whited: Concord and Spring Road Linear Parks
In my earlier review of Rose Garden and Jonquil public parks I mentioned
the Mountain-to-River Trail
(M2R), a mixed-use bicycle
and walking trail that connects the two parks.

The two parks I’m going to review today are also connected by the M2R trail in
addition to the [Concord Road Trail](https://blog.samwhited.com/cate … ⌘ Read more

💭 While some people like to jump between blogging software all the time, or go back to Hugo from a custom one, I don’t really miss Hugo after switching to GoBlog in 2020, but enjoy having my own system quite a bit. Not that Hugo, WordPress, etc. are bad blogging systems, but I really enjoy being able to quickly code a fix without having to research docs, StackOverflow, or the source on GitHub. And when I have an idea for a new feature, it would often not be easy to implement in the existing systems. ⌘ Read more

TestArticle_11Apr23
security patching  going on ⌘ Read more

@chunkimo@twtxt.net lol. go walrus!!

e-scooters go like the clappers

not the greatest idea whilst searching for a job, but fuck it. Now I also feel like going for a walk, so win I guess

Qualifications
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**Now that @JoeSondow’s bot games like @EmojiSnakeGame are no longer going be free to play, I can only hope he will soon have mastodon versions of it running, and I will no longer have a reason to open twitter’s app often.

And no, paying for a verified account is not on the table.**
Now that @JoeSondow’s bot games like @EmojiSnakeGame are no longer going be free to play, I can only hope he will soon have mastod … ⌘ Read more

Dahlias go viral as social media makes these classic blooms cool again
From their humble origins as a cottage garden staple, dahlias are experiencing a resurgence in popularity thanks to the power of social media — and James Bond. ⌘ Read more

Flatten the Planets
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Lymphocytes
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@prologic@twtxt.net it is from the generator. But in the actual go implementation methods are represented with a unsigned short. So 65k is the hard limit in go.

Oof.

Can We Make Bicycles Sustainable Again?
Cycling is the most sustainable form of transportation, but the bicycle is becoming increasingly damaging to the environment. The energy and material used for its production go up while its life expectancy decreases. ⌘ Read more

Nice, the number of GoBlog users is growing! 🤓 The next step is a growing number of GoBlog developers. It would be great to have more people giving advice on how to improve the code. 😅 Any senior Go devs out there? ⌘ Read more

** Accessibility updates **
I’m feeling pretty chuffed! Last week I wrote about my intention to make this website more accessible. My motivations were many-fold, but, primarily, mostly shame. I’ve worked as an accessibility specialist in the past, and now spend a bunch of my days at work looking for ways to make public infrastructure online more accessible. It seemed fitting to at least make sure the little bit I contribute to the web here is also accessible.

I thought it was going t … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I get the worry of privacy. But I think there is some value in the data being collected. Do I think that Russ is up there scheming new ways to discover what packages you use in internal projects for targeting ads?? Probably not.

Go has always been driven by usage data. Look at modules. There was need for having repeatable builds so various package tool chains were made and evolved into what we have today. Generics took time and seeing pain points where they would provide value. They weren’t done just so it could be checked off on a box of features. Some languages seem to do that to the extreme.

Whenever changes are made to the language there are extensive searches across public modules for where the change might cause issues or could be improved with the change. The fs embed and strings.Cut come to mind.

I think its good that the language maintainers are using what metrics they have to guide where to focus time and energy. Some of the other languages could use it. So time and effort isn’t wasted in maintaining something that has little impact.

The economics of the “spying” are to improve the product and ecosystem. Is it “spying” when a municipality uses water usage metrics in neighborhoods to forecast need of new water projects? Or is it to discover your shower habits for nefarious reasons?

Please vote no 👎 for the Telemetry in the Go toolchain proposal 🙏 #golang #telemtry #justsayno ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net the rm -rf is basically what go clean -modcache does.
I think you can use another form that will remove just the deps for a specific module. go clean -r

Dumb, an alternative frontend for genius.com written in Go: https://github.com/rramiachraf/dumb

** week notes **
It got a wee bit cold here in Maine this weekend. It was thankfully uneventful for us. We hung around inside and watched it get real cold outside. Our home faired pretty well, too. Honestly pleasantly surprised about that!

We picked this weekend to go all in on potty training — pantsless days, treats, rousing bouts of encouragement sung, and a lot of spot cleaning. Fueled by hubris, I thought we had this potty trainin … ⌘ Read more

Sam Whited: Places to Go
This is a love letter to many places, among them:

• Triple Step Studios,
  
• Smyrna, and Cobb County public libraries and parks,
  
• Sopo Bicycle Co-op and the Austin Yellow Bike Project,
  
• and AtlantaCritical Mass.
  

Dear comra … ⌘ Read more

My code is still a mess, but I’m learning
I taught myself Go (and programming in general) by learning by doing. I learned by making a lot of mistakes and after noticing them, doing the necessary research. My Go code is probably a big mess, but it’s so satisfying, after not touching some code for a while, to do a major rewrite and improve the code with everything I’ve learned since the last time. ⌘ Read more

H3: Instead of C3
[Updated with correct Gemlog link.]

A version of this was posted on on 2023-01-06 but I thought it might
also fit here. Go to my gemlog for somewhat more personal takes and
see what I publish first. IPv6 only!

gemini://gem.hack.org/mc/log/

As long-time readers know I have participated in the Chaos
Communication Congress (C3) in Germany every year since 2008.

Since C3 was cancelled this year I thought I’d arrange a very small
conference of my own. I would at least try to gather some friends and
acquaintances … ⌘ Read more

Delete and restart, change nothing and it works. meh, at least things go zoom now

H3: Instead of C3
A version of this was posted on on 2023-01-06 but I thought it might
also fit here. Go to my gemlog for somewhat more personal takes and
see what I publish first. IPv6 only!

gemini://gem.hack.org/log/

As long-time readers know I have participated in the Chaos
Communication Congress (C3) in Germany every year since 2008.

Since C3 was cancelled this year I thought I’d arrange a very small
conference of my own. I would at least try to gather some friends and
acquaintances in chat and video conference and watch t … ⌘ Read more

@mckinley@twtxt.net very weird things going on for me.. i can see your twt but its not showing up as a reply or fork?

Going to flip to the profile2 branch just for fun. Hang in there while I restart!

I think I’m going to create some boilerplate code for !gestku that isn’t ad-hoc. I think I’m ready for this. Gestkus need less code because of how quickly I want to make them.

oops, going to update to the latest yarnd and restart. Stay tuned!

New GitHub CLI extension tools
Support for GitHub CLI extensions has been expanded with new authorship tools and more ways to discover and install custom commands. Learn how to write powerful extensions in Go and find new commands to install. ⌘ Read more

“(1) we don’t know what is going on in LLMs (2) it’s outlandish to say that LLMs have no understanding of the world” both claims cannot be true

I bought my Galaxy Note 8 five years go today. This is by far the most use I’ve gotten out of one smartphone!

All packed and ready to go to Vienna!

Why I Won’t Go to Restaurants in 2023

Image

I’ve decided after some consideration to not go to restaurants at all in 2023.
You can call this a New Year’s Resolution.
It’ll require at least some sacrifice, pain, annoyance to myself and perhaps others, but I’m going to stick by it and I think it will have a good effect.

Restaurants are a drastically over-used creature comfort of … ⌘ Read more