Rose

To me, Larry Sanger always struck me more as an Ideas Guy. Specifically, the kind of an Ideas Guy who didn’t always have the best ideas. He keeps dissing Wikipedia, but just look at the absolute trainwrecks his supposedly better other projects turned out.

Fun reminder: Most natural swamps aren’t actually toxic. Until some human-made toxic spills which complicate things.

Really puts the DC “Swamp” in perspective, huh. What are they doing over there, I wonder

Frankly, I’m not feeling it.

Long ago, Commodore trademark was just slapped on random junk.

It was my hope that when the Commodore trademark was recently acquired by folks who genuinely care about Commodore history, this sort of things would not happen again.

Makes me a bit apprehensive.

Soooooo… which is going to ultimately turn out to be more effective way of detecting guns: AI systems, or dowsing? Both are gonna suck, be wholly inadequate for the purpose, and be giant wastes of public money - but obviously, but I’ve gonna admit, AI at least as mild possibility of being better than random chance. In optimal conditions. Maybe.

(You may be thinking “pfffft, surely people wouldn’t be stupid enough use dowsing rods to detect weapons, that’s just so clearly stupid”, but they did, and this “solution” was sold to them by slick conmen. …Sounds familiarrrr???)

Part of me wants to go “well you’re on a public venue, what the hell did you expect?”

But anyone wearing Zuck Glasses should be shot at from the orbit from the EU Anti-Douchebaggotry Satellite, or something. That’s a special exception to public photography laws that I approve of!

Many seemingly invincible businesses empires have collapsed on some beautiful ordinary day when people just said “you know, we can’t pay for this, this is not the price we can pay - we would want to keep doing this, but the price clearly outweighs any benefits to us”.

Is this really a good time for the US to potentially violate the Treaty of Tripoli and risk the rise of piracy against US vessels in the Mediterranean / Middle East region?

Motherf-

🤦🏻‍♀️

I started writing a clock app of my own because the Windows 11 clock app didn’t have a proper analog mode and it’s pretty useless. (Windows 3 clock app had analog mode, why not Windows 11?)

Some time ago I was ranting that instead of adding an analog mode, Microsoft will probably just pointlessly add Copilot to the clock app.

…Don’t blame me! I was just pointing out the obvious direction Microsoft is going for, whether we like it or not!

Aaaaanyway. This summer’s project is to figure out how the hell the Godot layout system works so I can make the layout responsive and I can release 1.1.

I use the YouTube TV app.

If I see ad breaks that are longer than ~20 seconds, I just back out and try again (if I’m just starting to watch a video) or go to history and resume (if in progress). YouTube can try to show another godawful long ad, but I’ll just back out again and again until they stop being stupid.

Protip: Number may go bigger, but I’m not changing this behaviour.

I hope the advertisers demand meticulous statistics, and are asking YouTube why so many users balked after 1 second.

Actually over the Easter holidays, my tablet was having horrible time with YouTube (the Android app is absolute garbage and doesn’t like old devices, and by old I mean 5 years) and sometimes ads made the YouTube app go suck mud and the tablet needed to be rebooted (!!!) before it worked again. So I watched YouTube on my laptop instead. With uBlock. Silence. Beautiful silence.

Well, we’re barely in the era where people can safely say “MPEG-1 is definitely out of patents and we’re pretty damn confident Layer III (MP3) is too”. Patents expire on the day they’ll be set to expire, but unfortunately, patent lawyers hired by big companies don’t expire that easily.

Of course Trump wants to reopen Alcatraz.

It is famously a prison where the worst criminals went. And just as famously, a prisoner escaped, never to be seen again.

He’s just planning ahead. Personal plans. They’re not particularly good plans, they’re not cunning plans - in fact, they’re pretty stupid plans, to be perfectly honest.

My first thought was Power Automate, the same thing is probably pretty easily doable with it.

American police forces have never really considered the optics, have they? Or sociopolitical implications? Yeah, these are not in their vocabulary. (I don’t know if the word “vocabulary” is in their vocabulary, it has too many syllables.)

Anyway, you need to think about the optics and sociopolitical implications before you rush headlong and grab a dick. This is common sense. Not to these officers, though, apparently.

Fun thing, I just booted up an old computer. Started right up. It had Ubuntu 11.10 on it.

Now, I obviously didn’t connect the thing to the Internet. Updates would have probably failed hard. Not because it’s missing over a decade of updates so there might be some complications on that front, but because it’s a Pentium III with Definitely Not Even a Gigabyte of memory. (Oh and a Nvidia GeForce 2 MX. I’m pretty sure that’s not supported by… any driver any more.)

Finnish computer culture magazine Skrolli decided to move away from Google apps to a non-American solution. They evaluated Onlyoffice, but backed down when they found out that the company behind Onlyoffice is connected to Russia. You know, Russian control does put a little bit of a hamper on a plan of supposedly using sovereign open source EU software, yes.

…I’m not surprised that there are also other legal shenanigans going on.

Very often, I was like “I don’t think I need to watch this shuttle launch, they might have to scrub it” and then they’d actually launch and I was was like “damn, I should have watched that shuttle launch”.

So I was like “naaah, I don’t think I need to watch this launch, they might scrub it” and now it looks like they’ve launched and I was like “shit, I fell for that again, I’m really stupid”

Everything about this news makes me wish I could shout “oh for crying out loud, will you just shut up, you deeply deeply weird man” at Trump’s face. Unfortunately, I live on the other side of the world and I have other worries to deal with.

There are no reliable automated LLM output detectors. Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to sell you snake oil (or is unwittingly helping someone to sell snake oil to someone else, I guess).

I was about to link to that, and specifically the stuff that now seems to have been moved to Signs of AI writing.

I thought that was a very interesting read, because it’s so much better than the usual AI ragebait that led to people getting pilloried over the fact that they actually know how to use em dashes. You can’t detect LLM use just by the fact that someone uses em dashes. It’s a complicated stylistic issue that usually boils down to “well, you know what ChatGPT output looks like when you see it”.

It’s moments like these that make me think about the state of the world and my part in it. I may just be a random loser on the Internet, but I do know a lot more shit that some of the biggest multi-quad-spillion-dollar CEOs, apparently.

For example, it’s an old fact that tech CEOs know jack shit about measuring productivity, even when they’re obsessed with it. Yeah. One more example.