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Last Boost

Well I'm sure glad my schoolboard's stuff uses AWS, AI training, and doesn't always have a functioning T&C page.

I'm glad the schoolboard is doing vendor reviews!



Working on a Kubernetes project for the first time in forever, and I forgot how fucking awful this environment was for people shipping their internal scripts as documentation and being like "any other way of cluster management is not supported"

Use Argo? Fuck off
Use kustomize instead of helm? So?
Don't use EKS? Not our problem, the terraform says you do now



@Becky and I are rewatching The Gathering (Babylon 5 pilot) and she doesn't remember a lot of it since she's not seen it in years.

There is a hole in her mind.



A fun and weird tech change is that all teams in movies need to have "A Drone".

A Drone is just useful enough it's impossible to not want. And it exists as an object that's pretty easy for anyone to get (if they have access to TV resources) while feeling higher tech than most people encounter day to day.

So:
Heist team of kids: Drone
Wildlife Survey: Drone
Marines storming a base: Drone
High Tech Bounty Hunters: Drone
Cyberpunk Weirdness: Drone
Humourous Impromptu Team Of Comedy Bros In Trouble: Drone

in reply to silverwizard

It's also very funny how much there will be a team member who has "Owns A Drone" as their special power


Accidentally filled my zpool - and then realized I'd not pruned snapshots in a couple of years (oops), so now I have over a TB free of my 6TB pool.

Oops



A weird bit of the LLM future is that the people using LLMs are only credulous dupes who think they are useful. This means we only see times when they are good, or times when they are so bad even credulous dupes can see it's wrong.

This leads to a dangerous narrative that LLMs aren't wrong in smaller less obvious ways. People say to factcheck - but they don't often know what the contours of that are.



Wait - why is tiktok lying that Trump is the solution to the ban? Diddn't he cause the ban? What the fuuuuuuuck


How the heck to I send rendered HTML to a unix pipe?!

I know I can use w3m/lynx/elinks - but I want to take a "screenshot" and send it to a unix pipe. Is this a thing anyone supports? Do I have to pull out a text mode rendering engine and make a weird curl wrapper?

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Trying to talk to devs about questions like "What kind of string is this? What kind of thing has handled it"

I am constantly surprised how much people don't know about what a data type is

in reply to Hypolite Petovan

@Hypolite Petovan I KNOW RIGHT

This stuff is so important and so thorny!

Also - I feel for you, this madness is wonderful, isn't it

in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard The diff of shame. It's used to set environment variables for the application and, ugh.


I am watching The Mandolorian season 2, and it feels like the fight scenes haven't been directed

Has anyone else noticed this?

Just there's no sense of flow or reason in action. There's a bunch of cool moments, but no flow if more than 2 people are present



There are two kinds of TTRPG game

-Playing to Fuck Around
-Playing to Find Out



The amount of ink spilled by Hachydermians about #Fedipact being an overreaction should be interrogated. We should all think about how giving fascists the benefit of the doubt is fucking stupid.


Hello Hachyderm! Thank you for your patience as we gathered the necessary data to write our announcement blog post regarding Threads.

The short version: Hachyderm has defederated from Threads.

Specifically, this is due to Threads changing their moderation policies and moderator guidance (see press cycle) to be in direct conflict with Hachyderm.

For the data and explainer, please see our announcement blog post:

community.hachyderm.io/blog/20…


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in reply to silverwizard

@hachyderm I feel like anyone who ever wants to run a Fedi instance of any flavor, must both read and subscribe to the Parable of the Nazi Bar, and demonstrate comprehension of the paradox of tolerance.



Please Please Please - if you don't have a good reason

NEVER SEND ME A VIDEO OR SCREENSHOT of your terminal.

Copy/paste the text. BAAAH

in reply to silverwizard

Bwahaha!

I remember being asked to migrate the Linux documentation for the Windows-centric MSP that had acquired a former employer.

I spent a fair amount of time making sure all was correct, well formatted and had plenty of examples.

It came back to me with the comment that there were no screenshots.

So you want terminal screenshots as documentation for command-based processes?

Of course I maliciously complied :D

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Kicou

@Kicou Fuck - I hate it. That's so annoying.

I recently had to send a video to a support chat - rather than copy/paste them the error message. The video was of the error message.


in reply to silverwizard

Sometimes, systemd adds features, which are not embraced uniformly across the entire Linux distro ecosystems. Hopefully this is one of them...

ALSO luckily there are a few non systemd linux distros still hopping.

in reply to trashHeap

@trashHeap @vascorsd Yeah, and yeah. I am very glad I switched to OpenBSD as my daily driver before this all kicked off. But Linux is still valuable in a bunch of places and .... gaaaaaaaah


My son wants me to read all the dialogue in Star Dew Valley and give each character a unique voice. Guh

in reply to silverwizard

between ClassDojo doing AI collection, and School Days not having a proper privacy policy, I wonder if @404 Media has ever looked into the shady School Records Management industry


Edit:
corp.school-day.com/en/privacy… looks like School Day fixed their privacy policy so it exists now



One day I will find a designer at Drata, and I will either shake them, or buy them beers until they explain to me HOW THE FUCK their product design ended up there.

"We don't support multiple tabs, but we also wont let you filter messages across multiple viewings of the same list"



systemd startup and shutdown events that block on network connect and disconnect are a curse




My church is the kind of church where people test their home made life sized BB8 models after the service to make sure the magnets hold the head on when the body is rolling.

I am still somehow the local DNS and email expert

these skills are considered lost art, and are way too young to have that distinction

in reply to silverwizard

I started back in 1992 or thereabouts, working for a company that made a Microsoft Office software suite for UNIX (and later Linux) systems, so we had a couple of everything floating around plus a large suite of Sun Microsystems kit for infrastructure. I kept being in places where I did a little of everything until I moved to a global pharma company in 2007, at which point UNIX had been long dead and IT was increasingly specialized and I was servers with occasional storage.


marthawells.dreamwidth.org/649…

These kinds of articles are starting to make me itch.

Computers *are not people*. Computers *are not like people*.

Stories need to be able to grapple with computers as computers, and readers understand computers as computers. If you, as a writer, want to write about people and slavery, the time to call computers just like slaves is past, unless you lampshade and highlight it hard. It is now the writer's responsibility. Computers are part of our lives, and they are not slaves they are tools. And anthropomorphizing them is the dangerous action.

Getting angry because your audience sees computers as tools not people is annoying, because a very large problem in our society is that people see computers as people not tools.

AMS reshared this.

in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard I agree with the sentiment and I would refine the conclusion further: a very large problem in our current society is that people see computers as responsibility-proof people, not tools which design can be criticized.

1970s science-fiction authors couldn’t know better because the technology in their books had to be entirely made-up. It is telling for me that we got to human likeness in chatbots way before we enacted any sort of global computing law that Isaac Asimov envisioned for robots.

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
in reply to Hypolite Petovan

@Hypolite Petovan yes! We waffle around computers. They're tools so we can't punish them, but they're independent so their users can't be held responsible.

We need to stop treating computers as special and magical, and viewing them as human suuuuuuuuuucks.




Boxing day dinner
Dessert is served

A google employee, an amazon employee, an openai employee, and a venture capitalist are standing by the dessert table, talking about running GPT on the Boston Dynamics Spot robots and how cool it would be

Needless to say, I got dessert late and had to text my wife I was in hiding



My child wanted to listen to Black Jack Justice instead of Christmas Carols

So - good choice kid


in reply to silverwizard

...and a par-tri-idge in a pear tree!

silverwizard reshared this.




If Luigi wrote words on his bullets, doesn't that mean that those bullets are speech?

Please help, I don't understand US law, but bribes are speech? Why aren't words in any medium?

in reply to silverwizard

"Speech"
- sometimes it's words; once thought to be powerful, they are surprisingly impotent because any rando can spout nonsense
- sometimes it's not baking a cake because you don't like who might eat it
- sometimes it's not paying for certain kinds of healthcare for your employees because you think your sky friend wouldn't like it
- sometimes it's bribes; this is a very powerful form of speech in US politics. mostly used by the wealthy.
- sometimes it's lead; even more powerful than money; the government thinks it should be the only one to use speech of such finality


Last night I made pong in Scratch for my 5yo. This morning we modded it together, we made a colour selector for the paddles and made you able to move the goals.

He's now making sprites and adding code. He's not able to read and refusing help, so he's mostly throwing things to the right, but he's getting there!



In the new year I wanna feel safe working from the coffee shop. But that means feeling safe without an N95, and that isn't gonna happen, is it?
in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard I've found the library to be a good option to work from when I just want to get out of the apartment. No need to remove the mask.
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

@Jonathan Lamothe Part of the issue is just that I don't like sitting there for 8 hours in a mask - but that's not a terrible plan

The library near me is pretty small though - but I should think thoughts



My son has a much loved audiobook that he listens to every night. But. One of the line reads in it scared him sometimes, and he sometimes fears to listen because he's worried about it.

We talked, and we're experimenting with a version of the story where the line is said in my voice, I opened the file, cut out the scary line, said it instead in my voice, and left the rest of the audiobook intact.

Talk to me again about DRM.

in reply to silverwizard

As an audiobook author, I would have no reservations about someone doing these things. I would much rather my efforts be enjoyed, even if they needed a bit of custom editing.
in reply to Mister Spinalzo

@Mister Spinalzo yeah! I 100% paid for the book for my son to enjoy! The line reading was great! But sometimes the line read of "a dragon surprises the main character" is too scarey for an anxious 5yo!

Thanks for writting books it's important work!

in reply to silverwizard

My mom reminded me she kitbashed some VHS tapes for me when I was scared of movies, and yeah! That's way harder core!



Quick, someone give the police force a billion in OT to shake the bushes at a local park! We need 4000 posts about how supporting OpenAI in these times is unthinkable!


I was just talking to a colleague about the AI bubble. These companies are in so deep they can't tell the truth. They are all lying about the efficacy, costs to consumers and most importantly how & when this tech works or doesn't.

Is there enough money on the line to kill over?

There's likely a trillion bucks of valuations across the industry. Billions in sunk costs, billions in c suite remuneration, billions in VC mgmt costs.

RIP Suchir

mercurynews.com/2024/12/13/ope…

#OpenAI #AI #VC #SuchirBalaji


in reply to silverwizard

this is not to claim that there isn't differences between the two killings. I just hate hypocrites

in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard Dec 24th 6pm, I just lost Whamageddon, at the restaurant we’re having Christmas Eve dinner, thanks to an assist from my partner.

I was so close!



Played WiiU games and Mario DDR for the gamecube and ate tacos with the kids

This is what I want to live for



The hardest problem in Web Infrastructure is accepting that your webapp will only receive a few dozen to hundred requests per second

in reply to silverwizard

I did some work on porting miller's work on the risc-v userspace over to 9front, the toolchain works well enough to compile all of /sys/src (at least at the time of its writing). There was some work on a qemu targeted kernel but people lost steam and we never got it booting to userspace.

If you want to check out the userspace parts you can find it here: shithub.us/moody/riscv/HEAD/in…

in reply to moody

@moody I probably don't have the C for this, but I wanna! I am gonna look and then mostly get lost.

I should buy DevTerm R01s for some Plan9 devs...


Unknown parent

@Allen that definitely is a shocking connnection!

My kids are young, but I've been talking to them about shorts since they were 3

Unknown parent

@Allen My older son picked a lock before he turned 2. My younger son built his own computer (with help from mom) at 3.

I basically am going to accidentally make the stars of a heist show, and I'm ok with that.

But honestly, kids love to learn everything. And we all know enough to be a friend and mentor to a kid. Don't sell yourself short for raising awesome kids. The kids may be alright, but parenting is hard work, and doing it *matters*



Remember when Boeing was assassinating whistleblowers?

Why is no one up in arms about that? We have more important assassins to be chasing.

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in reply to benda

@benda I am not a fan of murder as a solution! But like, there's a reason why it's happening! We're not... stopping it

And fuck - people need to stop being hypocrites where we don't show *horror* that people killing people in masses, but get upset because one murderer got vigilante justice

in reply to silverwizard

yeah people just dont discuss sociological problems seriously. and the propaganda works. i genuinely believe people aren't talking about the boeing assassinations and they are talking about this ceo, because the media presented one as a non-story and the other as 3 day long headline grabbing news.