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.

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.

@prologic@twtxt.net 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.

Ignite Realtime Blog: Certificate Manager plugin for Openfire release 1.1.1
The Ignite Realtime community is happy to announce a new release of the Certificate Manager plugin for Openfire.

This plugin allows you to automate TLS certificate management tasks. This is particularly helpful when your certificates are short-lived, like the ones issued by Let’s Encrypt.

This release is a maintenance release. It adds translations. More details are available in the [changelog] … ⌘ Read more

Exploring developer happiness, inclusion, and productivity at GitHub’s Design Conference
As a design organization, we have the opportunity to make a significant impact on designing the platform for all developers. How does the emergence of creative AI impact our work? How can we achieve an inclusive experience for a spectrum of all abilities? What does designing for developer happiness look like? ⌘ Read more

6 ½ hours left for Substack… and Lifetime subs
There are only 6 hours (and change) left. Seriously. You know. Get to the choppa. After that, The Lunduke Journal’s Substack shuts down completely — replaced by the epically nerdy Lunduke.Locals.com. Want these deals — like a Lifetime Subscription? That’s how long you’ve got to jump on it. No matter what, ⌘ Read more

@xuu@txt.sour.is “yet”? It’s supported ipv6 for like 6 years now.

Contact Merge
⌘ Read more

Contact Merge
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Some recent Programming-y and Linux-y comic strips
Like, you know, about Python and compiler warnings and stuff. ⌘ Read more

Pinellas County - Long run: 10.02 miles, 00:11:40 average pace, 01:56:59 duration
rough.

• didn’t get a lot of sleep
  
• didn’t hydrate enough the day prior
  
• hot and humid
  
• just didn’t feel like it
  
• leg didn’t feel right
  #running

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Someone Like You https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2023/07/08/glider-ink.html #freeculture #bookclub

Hot Take: I Don’t Like War Crimes ⌘ Read more

MUNYA announces new album Jardin + shares video for “Un Deux Trois”
MUNYA is back with her biggest track yet, a sick Moroder-inspired banger that sounds a bit like a lost Random Access Memories hit filtered through MUNYA’s dreamy, kaleidoscopic French-pop lens… Continue reading… ⌘ Read more

Wondering how long I’ll keep twitter-related feeds (like on fraidycat, or here) before giving up on them as permanently dead.

If you are going to compare iPhone with android you can’t just throw out bargan bin android phones.. Should compare within the same price points like the Pixel, Galaxy, Pine, or OnePlus models.

Veggie ‘oversupply’ sees 70pc price drop on some produce, farmers struggle to recoup costs
Due to an unusually warm winter in northern Australia, an oversupply of fresh produce like capsicums and tomatoes is leading to fears that farmers’ costs for growing vegetables will soon outweigh their return. ⌘ Read more

Overcoming challenges for a better phone: My frustrating upgrade experience
Although my old smartphone is still in perfect condition, I have made the decision to upgrade to a new model: from a Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite to a Samsung Galaxy A54. Despite its current functionality, I opted to make the switch now, with the hope that the trade-in value will remain higher compared to what it would likely be in a year when it will likely decrease. And the A54 was on sale. ⌘ Read more

Punjabi citrus growers access information in own language for the first time
Translating agricultural information into different languages is a game changer for people like Navjot Singh’s parents who never hear it directly from the source. ⌘ Read more

Ol Ben sets himself up as an intellectual for the right. He got promoted up with his connections with PragerU. Talks like he is the smartest one in the room. Though his arguments are full of logical fallacies. He is up there with Joe Rogan and the ilk destroying rational though in America.

We Thank the Stack Overflow Community for Ranking Docker the #1 Most-Used Developer Tool
Stack Overflow’s annual 2023 Developer Survey engaged nearly 80,000 developers to learn about their work, the technologies they use, their likes and dislikes, and much, much more. As a company obsessed with serving developers, we’re honored that Stack Overflow’s community ranked Docker the #1 most-desired and #1 most-used developer tool. Since our inclusion in the […] ⌘ Read more

Most of the can run locally have such a small training set they arnt worth it. Are more like the Markov chains from the subreddit simulator days.

There is one called orca that seems promising that will be released as OSS soon. Its running at comparable numbers to OpenAI 3.5.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dt_UNg7Mchg&feature=share9

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.

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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.

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@prx@si3t.ch I like this idea but usually I am living in a terminal or Emacs.

Looks like they edited the headline, but here’s a receipt from twitter (well, nitter):

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JMP: JMP is Launched and Out of Beta
JMP has been in beta for over six years, and today we are finally launching! With feedback and testing from thousands of users, our team has made improvements to billing, phone network compatibility, and also helped develop the Cheogram Android app which provides a smooth onboarding process, good Android integration, and phone-like UX for users of that platform. There is still a long road ahead of us, but with so much behind us we’re comfortable saying JMP is ready for la … ⌘ Read more

It’s sweet and crunchy like an apple. So why aren’t more Australians eating persimmons?
A Queensland orchard is celebrating a record persimmon crop, but few Australians have ever tasted the fruit. Growers like Rod and Jeanette Dalton are trying to change that. ⌘ Read more

Why this expert says we’ll always drink, even when we know it’s harmful for us
Australians aren’t drinking like we used to. Yet, despite parallels to tobacco use, some experts say alcohol’s history and place in society mean it’ll remain indefinitely. ⌘ Read more

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no 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.

The Apple Vision Pro: designed to make you less happy
Creepy. Dystopian. And more than a little like a drug dealer. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net 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.

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.

Dear Stack Overflow, Inc.

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.

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter May 2023
Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again! This issue covers the month of May 2023.
Many thanks to all our readers and all contributors!

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or help these projects! Interested in supporting the Newsletter team? Read more [at the … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de 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.

Pinellas County Running: 10.04 miles, 00:10:16 average pace, 01:43:07 duration
goal was 10 miles (furthest since injury) at an easy pace. didn’t pay attention to the watch and felt like i nailed it.
#running

vDSL2 sucks NBN sucks Copper sucks
It is continues to amaze me how NBN continues to operate. With over $50B AUD of taxpayer funds later (See NBN Project costs) folks like me that live in the suburbs continue to have less than ideal quality.

As of this post, I’m sitting on a vDSL2+ connection, with a Fibre to the Node backhaul, delivered by ~450m of Copper cable (last mi … ⌘ Read more

❤️ 🎶: Just Like a Dream by BEN

Pink is the new orange with consumers hungry for photo-worthy new citrus varieties
New varieties of citrus like cara cara navels and blood oranges are growing in popularity, but farmers say supermarkets need to stock more to grow demand. ⌘ Read more

I don’t really like the term “gatekeeping”, especially when it’s used to describe the general concept of a barrier to entry. The term “gatekeeping” implies to me a “gatekeeper”–a person A who is trying to control if person B can interact with person C. It implies active discrimination, perhaps even bigotry, when in reality the barrier might be a passive issue such as scarcity or inherent complexity. “Gatekeeping” seems an intentionally- and needlessly-charged term.

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.

I’d like to garbage-collect some symbols in the math I’m currently writing, help

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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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de 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

@prologic@twtxt.net 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 🤦

rain rain

2023-05-20 12:26

everyone’s asleep and the pitter-patter of rain can be heard on the window. i
keep forgetting to write here, but at least i’m still writing. i’m a little
exhausted and sleepy, but it’s been a long time since i’ve had some alone time
to just write, so that’s what i’m doing.

i’m writing this in vim, like usual, but i recently turned of syntax
highlighting for things, and it’s kind of nice and relaxing. some of the bright
colors can be jarring, but that could also be fixed by disabling bold … ⌘ Read more

Funny Programming Pictures Part XXXIII
I feel like mocking CSS and Agile today… ⌘ Read more

Inside GitHub: Working with the LLMs behind GitHub Copilot
Developers behind GitHub Copilot discuss what it was like to work with OpenAI’s large language model and how it informed the development of Copilot as we know it today. ⌘ Read more

People who like this sort of thing will find this to be the sort of thing they like