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I understand it's really easy to build a lil' car out of a disposable camera using the motors for film winding or whatever - but I've never done it. I've looked for guides on how to do it - but I mostly find the dumb like "here's a tazer from a camera" instructions.

silverwizard reshared this.


The first #ProhibitionOrcs tale is now free everywhere. Bootlegging over the Detroit River! Elves that need a punch in the face! Orcs at breakfast! Frozen feet and hot lead!

Yes, this is a shameless teaser to try to get you to buy the duology. But if you hate the story, you won't like the books. If you like the story, readers assure me they get better.

Grab it from:

My store: tiltedwindmillpress.com/producโ€ฆ

Google: play.google.com/store/books/deโ€ฆ

Kobo: kobo.com/us/en/ebook/spilled-mโ€ฆ

Apple: books.apple.com/us/book/id1037โ€ฆ

Amazon US amzn.to/43x4EK3 - UK amzn.to/3qibGnC - AU amzn.to/3MFLo6l - CA amzn.to/45BuMp1 - DE amzn.to/3qj5JH8

(Edited to add: If you choose to buy the duology from my store, you'll get a bonus exclusive cookbook of orcish recipes! Real recipes, that regular people have cooked, eaten, and mostly survived.)

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Michael Lucas

Why does your name sound familiar? *checks book list on Amazon* Oh, you wrote "git commit murder" which I got at PenguiCon this year but haven't read yet. Now I need to bump that book up higher in my reading pile.


Apparently since the release of ChatGPT our emails from our sales people are getting blocked for being spam.

Almost like writing weird generic spam instead of an email gets your domain blocked

in reply to silverwizard

are we talking about general emails (like direct communication with customers and prospects), or marketing campaign/mailing lists?

If the latter, you may consider using a service that is dedicated to this type of messaging (Sengrid, Mailchimp, whatever). It will have its own DKIM signature and a different origin (of course present in SPF records), and would make human, hand-crafted artisan messages written with love less likely to be blocked by a blanket RBL listing.

If the former, then maybe you don't need salespeople after all. Just an OpenAI API subscription and a couple of scripts.

in reply to Kicou

@Kicou This is emails directly to prospects - rather than like, a mail blast...

So yes, fire 'em all


in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard @uzayran Reminds me of the ongoing US screenwriters' strike that may well end up catastrophically like this.
in reply to Hypolite Petovan

@Hypolite Petovan at least the writer's strike is about the studios acknowledging they are gonna go:
make AI write useless script
hire writer as an *editor* and violate guild rules but try to be a dick on a technicality where Draft 0 was by AI


FUCK OFF
Hotel wifi being slow isn't an outage
Not giving me access but telling me to do it isn't delegation

*breathes*

in reply to silverwizard

Sean, we want to see more leadership from you! But you 100% cannot have admin access to our email.

You can control the MX record, have control over the users, have the ability to read everything, just not the Admin keyword. Meaning you have to bug the CEO whenever something changes, and boy will he get mad at you for bugging him.


Bob Jonkman reshared this.


Successfully wrote an awk script to make user invitations way easier - pretty excited - awk has always eluded me as a skill and I want to get better at it
in reply to silverwizard Bob Jonkman reshared this.

Have not listened to it but looks good hackerpublicradio.org/series.pโ€ฆ @bobjonkman
in reply to ghostdancer

Wow! An entire #HackerPublicRadio series on #AWK. I'm sure I've heard some of these already, but I'll see if I can add just the series to @AntennaPod and decrease even more my copious amounts of free time for listening ๐Ÿ˜‰

And, of course, repeat my so-far unkept promise to contribute an episode or two. I hear @hpr is running low on episodes again.

@silverwizard

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Bob Jonkman Bob Jonkman reshared this.

@bobjonkman @ghostdancer @AntennaPod @hpr In my case discovering #AWK was an introduction to the "Unix Way". I found a version to run on the OpenVMS system I was administering in the 1980's or later, and it made life so much easier. Handling data from the student records system (to make accounts for them) was so much easier than writing compiled programs!
in reply to Dave Morriss Bob Jonkman reshared this.

@Dave Morriss @ghostdancer @Hacker Public Radio @AntennaPod @Bob Jonkman AWK always feels like an arcane thing to me - it's something my dad has implemented three times on three systems - and so it's kinda always been a mythical tool. But so has KornShell and that's also my default shell.
in reply to silverwizard

@perloid @ghostdancer @hpr @AntennaPod @bobjonkman I used awk in my hardware detection script, but I had to look up how to use it and then experiment a bit... Sed and awk are both a bit mystical to us 'desktop users.' :) But still super handy for hacking together things.

Bob Jonkman reshared this.


silverwizard reshared this.


Boosting this. Vote to stop privatizing Ontario healthcare:
The Ontario Health Coalition is holding a community-run referendum on the province's plan to privatize many aspects of Ontario's public healthcare system.
You can vote online now until tomorrow at midnight.

publichospitalvote.ca/vote/pleโ€ฆ

You can also vote at one of nearly one thousand voting stations across the province, including the following locations and times in Toronto-Danforth tomorrow:
โ€ข The Redwood Theatre at 1300 Gerrard St E from from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.
โ€ข The Gerrard/Ashdale Toronto Public Library branch at 1432 Gerrard St. E from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
โ€ข MPP Peter Tabuns constituency office from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
โ€ข Phin Park at the corner of Condor and Baird from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
โ€ข Eastminster United Church at 310 Danforth Ave from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
โ€ข Quince Flowers at 660 Queen St. E from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Our public healthcare system is crucial for the wellbeing of ourselves, our loved ones and our communities. Please vote online now or at one of the above stations tomorrow.

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Come into work after a week's vacation. Find a message from myself:
"Terraform is completely broken. redis subnets are b0rked in production"

I curse the person who setup our redis and immediately begin to ask the musical question "Can we make a change to our environment without destroying and replacing it"

Unknown parent

@Rivetgeek Was it at least from someone else? Or nope - just plain ol' "Sounds like a job for post-vacation me"?
Unknown parent

@Rivetgeek Oh I love giving tasks to "once we get all the shit fixed"

Since - you know - that's the far off future where it will never happen


christian mock reshared this.


Hey #zfs people

if I have a pool I want to view when I can't mount it - any way to view files? (Read only root so mountpoints can't create)

#ZFS
in reply to silverwizard

can you creat a ramdisk and mount that somewhere, then create the required hierarchy in the mounted ramdisk fs? Or maybe mounting a tmpfs filesystem is an option.
in reply to Mike Gerdts

@Mike Gerdts That... is the right idea, if I can find a mount

I feel like this is probably freebsd inside baseball though



Setup a solar irrigation system off a new rain barrel so that my son can do some plant automation (watched a kids show about farm robots)

Started moving from a bank to a credit union (got accounts - just need to slowly fill them)

Made a tiramisu

Damn good birthday

Unknown parent

@Troy the Gardener yeah - my parents gave me the pump for my birthday but they seem, reasonably, priced


Merry #BSDCan Go Home Day to all who celebrate

I masked aggressively enough to lack a hangover today, so there's that, but I still forced people to try to talk to me to fix documentation





Here comes the ice man
He's trying to freeze the crew
He's not a nice man
His touch will turn you blue

youtube.com/watch?v=uLnCKBYRBjโ€ฆ


silverwizard reshared this.


to those of you who suggest i let the bodies hit the floor, four things, here we go now:

  • nothing wrong with me
  • nothing wrong with me
  • nothing wrong with me
  • nothing wrong with me


I should start a hosted email service in order to more easily get my own email delivered better



Apparently I can't report someone who is using Mastodon, because I am not using Mastodon.

I can't even just go over to their mastodon page and report them.

Reporting logistics is hard - but there's gotta be a better way

in reply to Hypolite Petovan

@Hypolite Petovan @Jonathan Lamothe I feel like this is more a mastodon problem
If I go to your Friendica instance, I see my own login and stuff and can do basic interactions


I wish the software industry wasn't just such fucking *marks*.

It feels like we as a culture are just basically idiots with no attention span or no sense of history.

"This very good company amazon has hosting for us, I bet that's not trying to replicate the Cisco model where they sell you a billion courses and you get locked in forever fucking your career"

"I bet this Peter Thiel fellow is really good and this generation's AI hype is probably different than the last four. I do know that Palantir and Paypal are renowned for how friendly and usable they are"



What are the obvious and easy replacements for Miro? I'm sure they exist - Miro just is a product designed for destroying CPUs AFAICT
in reply to silverwizard

Yeah, Mural or LucidSpark are probably where you want to star - at least those are the ones that our internal folks like (don't get me started on the feature overlap...)

silverwizard reshared this.


The #HTTP 418 response is in the 4xx client error section, meaning it's YOUR fault that I'm a teapot.

I'm not mad, just disappointed. You really should have tried harder.

#http

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silverwizard reshared this.


I often say that a good prank needs meat on it.

Here's the BSDCan 2019 Charity Auction, where I pulled perhaps the best prank of my life. I would feel bad for Bob, except, you know, Bob.

youtube.com/watch?v=Dlt_H99xGCโ€ฆ

This prank had a second part, given at the end of mwl.io/archives/4772 .

At this year's @bsdcan, we will auction off rare copies of the exclusive Beck and Provost Editions of "Terrapin Sky Tango."

reshared this

in reply to Adam

@adamsdesk
Most past years are on youtube.

This year will be streamed live, and on youtube. Plus IRC for discussion and feeding questions back to speakers.

@Adam
in reply to Michael Lucas

Oh okay, thanks. I didn't see this before. I assume BSDCan's official channel is youtube.com/@BsdcanOrg

Unknown parent

Hypolite Petovan
@Gabriele Svelto Well you made a false generalization in your very first reply so why do you expect to be treated with politeness when you then double down?
Unknown parent

Hypolite Petovan

@Gabriele Svelto I really don't have to explain anything to you, especially not something you framed in bad faith. Obviously we don't have the same values, and you can't talk anyone out of their values, the same way I probably cant talk to you into growing some.

Values are only meaningful if you are making concessions for them. Pointing out that these personal concessions are somehow unwarranted or inconsistent will only get you a cold shoulder.

This entry was edited (11 months ago)

Allen Stenhaus reshared this.


an open source mystery show called Scooby Gnu where everything is Linux when unmasked


Neil Brown reshared this.


How do you tell a sales person "you are unselling me - tell me a price and shut up"

They just - are managing to make me less excited as time goes on - because I know they are *saying* things wrong. I've *used* the product before.



GPT4 for video game NPCs is going to be a nightmare. Just imagine having only flat characters and no ability to trust that quests and hints are real >.<
in reply to silverwizard

That was one of the problems that occurred to me when I read about a Skyrim mod using ChatGPT.

One of the things that astonishes me about this imminent disaster is that people seem oblivious that the main virtue of computing is getting definite answers to specific questions; LLMs will make computers completely useless for their primary purpose.

ign.com/articles/skyrim-mod-usโ€ฆ

in reply to FoolishOwl

Yeah exactly! It feels like we're going into this with the weirdest blindness
It's not that we can't see it it's that some people just like bad things.

Greg Stolze reshared this.


@Greg Stolze So I played Bring Me The Head Of The Comte De Sainte Germaine over the last 1.5 months (one session every other thursday).

And Cloisonnรฉ basically decided to smash her Subaru into Mother Apocolypse in order to protect Joy from her mother, and no one is sure what to do with these emotions.

This is your fault and I think we all love you for it! Thanks so much - that was really good (and for two players a very Feet First intro to UA)

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A coworker asked about keyboards - and then someone else told them to ask me.
I accidentally just wrote a page of text....


My son will randomly decide he wants to make things. And basically has no conception that he can't make things and that's really exciting.

He also made a train out of playdough, and then made a little mini-motor like he'd seen in toys, and opened the playdough train, put the playdough motor in, and said it could go by itself.

Just so proud of how much I've let him understand making.


silverwizard reshared this.


I am once again begging neighborhood organizations to put your family event information on *literally any public website* that isn't Facebook or Twitter.

Both have severely limited capabilities for finding information while signed out (or without an account).

reshared this


in reply to silverwizard

We don't talk about the Old Days of Shitty Social Media much, do we?
in reply to Allan Haverholm

@Allan Haverholm We should always remember the Phaedrus Lesson

The past is always a perfect time - and the good part of it is often a quirk of memory, yeah


silverwizard reshared this.


What I hear when I see people who don't mask forcing people to attend in person:

1. I don't care about disabled people's health.
2. My convenience is more important than your safety.
3. I don't mind if your quality of life continues to worsen due to my actions.
4. I don't believe I can become disabled like you.
5. If I pretend it doesn't exist then I can't get sick. Stop telling me covid exists and I could get sick.

silverwizard reshared this.


in reply to silverwizard

@silverwizard It's funny how there has always been a stigma to be working in the tech department of an established business, as if it was impure.


Listen, I agree with you, but it's a contract with someone and it's flagging my "talk to an attorney" senses. I wont tell you you're right, because it's flagging my "talk to an attorney" senses.


BlueSky is gonna make me defederate .social just to get rid of the "fediverse is bad" takes
Unknown parent

@secretspecter I'd really rather not do it - I should check the contacts table to make sure that I am not affecting more than me...
Unknown parent

@secretspecter My instance used to be a single user vanity instance, but now there's 6 people on it - which is far too many


I suddenly pulled from my memory a conservative making a case for Conservative Freeganism and Dumpstering to me in uni

it ... was coherent and good - but looking back 17 years later - holy shit, I want that back

in reply to silverwizard

Basically it boiled down to
1) Freegansim will allow you to feed people for cheap, and taxes are bad, so if you can feed people with social discards you don't need to raise taxes
2) Feeding yourself for free is an important part of Pulling Yourself Up By Your Bootstaps

And like - sure - the premises are bad - but the actual stuff is... fine?



Welp - my 1yo has learned the fine art of trickery
He's standing at the top of the stairs screaming "Coffee daddy! Coffee!"

He wants me to come upstairs from WFHing


silverwizard reshared this.


in which chatgpt wastes an hour of my life

For a few days I've been emailing back and forth with an agent to schedule an apartment tour. Today we make the 20 minute drive there, and the receptionist says "oh, we don't have any units to show right now."

"But I booked a tour through an agent."
"Who'd you message?"
"Kate"
"Oh, Kate is our bot. Have you heard of ChatGPT?"

This is how I find out they use AI to schedule tours, but the AI doesn't have access to their booking info. We live in hell

in reply to Fenny

in which chatgpt wastes an hour of my life
Confirmed that nowhere in the email chain was it stated that "Kate" is an AI. I don't know if this is against ChatGPT's TOS (or even if ChatGPT is what they use) but this feels Not Ethically Good
in reply to Fenny

re: in which chatgpt wastes an hour of my life
"I'm a software engineer, you've wasted hours of my time, here's the invoice"
โ‡ง