Hi, I'm Thomas. Back in 2005 or so I've practically invented in-browser animations with HTML elements.
PLEASE DO NOT ANIMATE USER INTERFACE ELEMENTS FOR NO REASON.
Do not animate icons, change positions of buttons, do "fun liquid glass animations"; definitely under no circumstances move in or fade in whole blocks of text (unless your design goal is that you want people looking at your website to become nauseous).
Only use animation when it's helpful to the user—for example, when they need to pay extra attention to something because there's a risk of data loss or to pass the time while showing that something is going on when there's a process which takes a bit longer.
I would like to get two 10x10x200cm wooden beams and cut them diagonally to get four very long wedges that I can use to raise my mattress base.
Is that doable or insane? And if doable, and if you're in #Berlin or #Germany, is it something I can ask Bauhaus or the like to do for me (in which…
One of the things that made organizing a lot easier with the GDC was a thing called "GDC in a box." It was a zip file with all kinds of resources. There was a directory structure, templates for all kinds of things like meetings and paperwork you had to file (for legal reasons) and "read me" files.
We had all kinds of support. There were people you could talk to who had been there. There were people you could call to walk through legal paperwork (taxes). Centralized orgs are vulnerable and easy to infiltrate. They're easy for states to shut down. But there are benefits to org structures.
I think it's possible to have the type of support we had with the GDC, but without the politics of an org (even the IWW). I hope this most recent essay has some of the same properties. I hope that it makes building something new, something no one has really imagined before, easier.
This whole project is something a bit different. It's a collective vision and collective project, from the ground up. Some of it has felt like a brain dump, just getting things that have been swimming around in my head down somewhere. But I hope this feels more like an invitation.
Everything thus far written is all useless unless people do things with it. Only from that point does it become a thing that lives, a thing with its own consciousness that can't be controlled by any individual human.
Tech billionaire cultists want to bring a new era of humanity with AGI. That is definitely not possible with LLMs, and may not be possible at all. But there is a super intelligence that is possible, though it's been constrained by capitalism: collective human intelligence.
The grand vision of the tech dystopians is that of the ultimate slave that can then enslave all humans on their behalf. I think we can build a humanity that can liberate itself from their grasp, crush their vision, and build for itself a world in which people will never be enslaved again. Not only do I think it's possible, I think it's necessary. I think there are only two choices: collective liberation or death.
And that's what I plan to write about next time to wrap this whole project up. Today things often feel impossible. But people talked about the Middle Ages as though they were the end of the world, and then everything changed in unimaginable ways. Everything can, and will, change again.
"The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."
I have started playing this weekend the game Metro Exodus and it is pretty cool and... crudel. I like it. But I feel like I will need to read or watch something stupid or "happy" to warm up my heart after playing this game, and I've read that the books are even more crudel.
#metro #metroexodus
Wrt to a certain article going around today:
I think if your parents are abusive and/or say or do certain abominable things and you don’t cut them off, there’s something wrong with you.
Which would make perfect sense being raised by people that were abusive to you.
Gotta break the cycle. If you don’t do it for yourself, think about how it affects people you love like your partner or children.
Is laparoscopic surgery for buildings a thing?
Like a steerable borescope with a manipulator that you can attach a tool to or something to squeeze into a tight spot and perform a repair in an otherwise inaccessible location.
All people suggesting that Art.5 NATO offers stronger protection then Art. 42.7 TEU should check how the procedures work around Art.5, the NATO has to decide that it is applicable , there is no automatism or something like that, well described in this scenario.
https://www.amazon.nl/If-Russia-Wins-Alas…
Is USB Loader GX and Wiiflow really this bad or am I doing something wrong? Are Go Vacation, Wii Sports Resort and Wii Fit Plus supposed to work?
The only games that worked through it for me were Mario Galaxy 2 and Mario Sunshine…
(vWii/Wii U, games on a SD Card)
@… is something not working for you on 15.0-RELEASE or STABLE?
(15.1 is not yet officially scheduled.)
Today in the drizzle I stopped by the Living Library, a beautiful native plant garden near SF's Balboa Park at the San Jose/Seneca intersection. Highly recommend a visit to see some #ceanothus in bloom and California poppies and island mallows beginning to, and much more.
If historians object that Trump is not a copy of Mussolini or Hitler or Franco, the reply is yes—but so what? Trump is building something new on old principles. He is showing us in real time what 21st-century American fascism looks like.
...
Americans who support liberal democracy need to recognize what we’re dealing with in order to cope with it, and to recognize something, one must name it. Trump has revealed himself, and we must name what we see.
Years ago, I started saying "have a great day" and "I love you" every morning to my kids when sending them off to preschool or school. I did it because I had a realization there's a possibility, however remote, this morning could be the last time I say something to them, and I wanted it to be something good.
I can't imagine the heartache the parents feel who sent their kids off to school, preschool, or even college, to never see them again.
@… In Play on the AppleTV I can’t seem to get Nebula videos to open the Nebula app. Nothing happens when I press a video. Works fine on macOS and iOS. Is this something you can fix or is this a Nebula issue (e.g. no URL scheme on the TV?).
A: "I don't understand how you're so relaxed when you don't hear from the kids. Everyone in my family is like, 'msg me right when you get home!'"
me: "Ah, [13yo] is fine. He went home and is 100% watching videos when he's not supposed to be, hoping we forgot about him so that he can get away w/ as much screen time as he can. If he were stuck on the subway or something, he'd have messaged. Actually, I'd be more worried if he DID message.&qu…
"Am I real or just a dream? Am I something that you need or just an image of me?"
#NowPlaying
Anybody ever hear anything from the young man who started #thereslife? Seems he was in Europe somewhere and headed to the US to study, or something like that. I signed up sometime in the early days and was glad to see @… take it up when he decided to let it go.
@…
Love your pod guys, really has taught me so much about Crypto. Please set up a Patreon or something so we can contribute. Keep up the great work!
Several of you have asked for something you can do to help Minneapolis. I have something concrete:
Here is a fundraiser for families at Seward Montessori, a Minneapolis public elementary school. Many families in the neighborhood are sheltering at home, and unable to work and/or get groceries. Parents at the school have organized this fundraiser to help out.
I know the graphic is a bit generic and doesn’t say much, but don’t worry: I can vouch for this fundraiser. It’s vetted, and it’s needed.
https://givebutter.com/famshelpingfams
I'm afraid that's all I wanted help with
It's surprisingly hard to find a changelog or release history for `apt` itself.
I just wanted to find out when apt 1.1 has been released but the usual search terms all result in links to "how to get changelog for a package using apt" or similar.
At last I just searched for "apt 1.1" and found an article from 2015 showcasing the features of apt 1.1.
I guess, the real solution would have been something like `apt-get changelog apt` or similarly silly :-…
After reading Matt Shumer's warning about what AI will do to knowledge workers https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/something-big-happening-matt-shumer-so5he/ I thought: Is anyone demanding a "just transition" for them, or is that only for the energy tr…
Summary of the recent optimization work in ngscopeclient (not counting core/driver stuff, just filters)
I'm now making a pass through the entire filter library in alphabetical order removing some deprecated APIs, adding error reporting, and doing trivial GPU optimizations where I find them but not spending more than a few hours on a filter unless it's something like the CDR or eye that is really critical.
None of these are what I would consider "done". I'm f…
While helping my mum with something recently, I've noticed that her #GMail started featuring a banner that she ran out of space, and mails will stop arriving in less than a month. As expected, she never even noticed it. On the other hand, I had two thoughts about it.
Firstly, of course, #Google are shameless assholes (Microsoft's even worse, as I boosted at some point before). Mom's new phone came with Google Photos preinstalled in place of vendor's gallery, and of course it automatically started making backups of her photos and movies in the "cloud", or as I'd like to call it, to pedophiles. The photos finally filled up the free space, and Google started doing everything to convince her to buy more space. I honestly doubt she'd be able to figure out that she needed to turn these backups off and wipe them; if anything, I suspect she'd just start hopelessly removing photos from the phone, which might not have helped at all.
Secondly, it's that if such a thing happened to me, I probably wouldn't even know, because I'm reading my mail via a mail client. So I wouldn't ever have seen their banner. Well, unless they also send a mail about it, and my mom missed it among all the spam.
#GAFAM
When asking someone to do something it's important to be clear about everything you are asking them to do, and when you are asking them to do it, up front.
Increasingly I'm asked to do something, I look at my schedule and other commitments and agree to the ask, and then weeks later am informed that "as part of X (what I agreed to) everyone is expected to do Y (something time consuming that wasn't mentioned before)" or "we need you to provide X (something necessary the day of the event) a week in advance (when there was no indication of this early deadline at the initial ask)".
This means that the calculations someone made regarding whether they could participate are based an incomplete understanding of what is required. That's not fair and it either results in forcing the participant to deprioritize something else or makes them push back on something they never agreed to and potentially withdraw.
Is this the disturbed view of AI / BigTech optimists, or does he have a point?
"Something Big Is Happening"
#ai
Don't know who this guy is, but I would love someone else's take on what he is saying here. I can't decide if this is utterly apocalyptic, or a guy who is just up to his eyeballs in the Kool-Aid.
Context: was sent to me by a financial advisor friend
https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-ha
Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
JENNA: Why indeed?
[Whispers something to Raiker]
[Raiker slaps her across the face]
RAIKER: You'll come round! I can be VERY persuasive!
[Avon takes a note from his top pocket]
[Jenna walks back to Vila, Avon & Nova]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/102/78
I guess in the age of AI journalism, boring things like fact checking or citing people with their words and not something else aren't valued any more...
https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/116065340523529645
When our potus was not a suspected child rapist/murderer, US was secure for ~80 years with Greenland under Denmark’s protection.
Now our potus is a suspected child rapist/murderer, so Greenland is suddenly in danger of something from russia or china? Hmm.
#USpol #Greenland
The best description of Brown University, from Bess Kalb. (And to be clear, the heirs and star's kids are invariably also in that carton.)
https://besskalb.substack.com/p/brown-america
Ok, first, I’m genuinely curious about this. Honestly, I’m not trolling. I toyed briefly with some version of *nix years ago (maybe 20 or so) but didn’t get it, or it didn’t get me, or something, and I’ve been content to let Apple do all the heavy lifting for me and my computers. That said, can someone explain to me why there are so many versions, or implementations of it? What’s the point of that? Feel free to
The Media Can't Stop Propping Up Elon Musk's Phony Supergenius Engineer Mythology
By Karl Bode
"CEO said a thing!" journalism is now utterly pervasive, and includes parroting billionaire and CEO claims with a total disregard for whether or not anything being said is actually true.
Despite the fact Musk has increasingly shown himself to be a conspiratorial white supremacist with a head full of room temperature butterscotch, the U.S. press is demonstratively un…
project idea (possibly using AI): record a take of songs from old sheet music books
Starting with something like the Grange book of sheet music below and record them ... Apparently the music can get to midi via Play Score 2, and other programs can could sing the lyrics.
or better yet, if anyone wants to perform the songs and upload them to the archive, you could link it into a review of the book.
'the focus on creating is just the little capitalist devil sitting on our shoulders telling us to produce more.
...
the most radical act today is to just make something. Especially if you are not good at it or if it’s a bit of a struggle. Draw if you’re not good at it. Play the piano even though you’re not great. Make something just for the fun of being in this world, touching it, being in it. Becoming you. Let this radicalize you a bit.
Fuck creation. Love making.'<…
This general category of question from @… is something I wonder about a lot. For many/most human beings, hearing good information and even •knowing• it to be true just doesn’t seem to outweigh having bad information in one’s face over and over.
I know there will a Mastodonian urge to reply with “well ••I•• never succumb to that” or “Here’s how I avoid that,” and…good for you, I guess? (Also, really?) But not the question. The question is how we communicate to people who •are• succumbing.
1/ https://soc.mod-12.com/@griotspeak/116076433717237685
Hello from the Pacific Northwest during a major rain event, distinguished by a more or less complete absence of any actual freaking light or color. So here’s something I snapped a couple days ago, by way of eye therapy.
#Photography
@… is `ArgumentError: UTF-16 string byte length (51) is not a multiple of 2` something that should be handled in my PR or in TruffleRuby?
ArgumentError is semantically off but I vaguely remember that it was some encoding performance stuff or so?
It would be nice if it would act like the other Rubies though 😄
Maybe some art you made or something interesting you read about or just a dad joke.
⚠️ 🚨 Warning: do not use @FactoryAI ‼️
They are unable to handle any support.
Do not get fooled by their paid YouTube influencers.
Don't expect any help if something does not work.
Here's another "support from hell" story:
https://
I got so excited about a device I am building that I started designing the enclosure before I even wired up the circuit to see if it's something I want to use.
To be fair this is my enclosure library so 90% of the work is already done and it's just making a few adjustments.
I guess I figure I'll build the device and then test it... if I don't like it or use it I'll find some else it can do. (Or see if others want one.)
Pixelfed or Instagram? Something tells me this #poll will get people talking, boost and let me know where you stand!
#Fediverse #Mastodon
Local community groups? Busting their asses, but they live and die on volunteer support. Legal system? Too slow, too compromised. City, county, state elected officials? Grasping for something they can do. Local police? Useless or worse than useless, of course.
BUT…all the above are formed by, shaped by, and constrained by popular sentiment. An active, defiant citizenry changes how all these institutions behave. Police know, politicians know, and yes, even judges know: they can only stray so far from what people will tolerate.
This active resistance? Hell yeah, it matters. It’s the short-term •and• the long-term.
What happened in Gramzow is just awful, and I really hope they can remove all the oil
There something interesting linguistically, though. They're all using “die PCK Schwedt,” which sounds odd. Apparently, “PCK” has lost the property of being an acronym for “das Petrol-Chemische Kombinat” but turned into a modifier or even only arbitrary first part of the name “die Raffinerie.” Similar as people use “der Radio” or “der Fernseh” skipping “apparat.”
so, i have something important to say. on 9th of December 2025, i woke up to someone who stalked me for eight years being inside my home, finding my address through means that are still not fully clear.
i know that several people reading this have in the past supported her (knowingly or not) or tried to "help" her after they learned of the stalking.
𝐟𝐮𝐜𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐩. your goodwill (or sometimes spinelessness) is being exploited. all you're doing is adding to the harm do…
Working on improving error reporting in ngscopeclient rather than having filters simply silently produce no output, or log to stdout, when something goes wrong.
Here's my current WIP: the block that has problems displays a warning icon and summary title up top, then you can mouse over it to see more detailed error information.
Thoughts? Anything I should change before I start working on adding this sort of feedback to more filter blocks?
This will never happen. It’s LIGHT YEARS more likely to happen, like, IRL or in other media. But now somewhere in season 2 of #HeatedRivalry I want Shane, or maybe Ilya, to say to the other, getting ready to leave or something, “Saddle up, cowboy! We got bad things to do!”
1/2
"this that makes it necessary for the United States to do something to avoid the civilizational and democratic disaster that is unfolding in Europe." — @…
I'm REALLY going to take issue with this. Yes, it's true that Europe faces challenges. But it is not Europe which faces civilizational or democratic disaster. This is classic pr…
I love that so many Americans turned out to not just protest policies that hit personally,
but to rally in support of democracy writ large.
For many, it was their first time taking this kind of action,
and they were doing it in a way that expressed optimism and possibility rather than giving in to anger or despair
Interesting fact:
Why do "vibe coders" put such a premium on stating how they don't even check the code or how it's all from the LLM? Like, if "AI" was just a tool, you'd be building all kinds of stuff but would you need to mostly talk about how you "built it just with AI"? It does at least hint at something weird going on here.
"I’m not talking about the sort of hope where you just sit on your hands and wait for God to do something at the end of time. We’re still obligated to do whatever we can, as a measure of our hope and reliance on God."
—Prof. Kathryn Tanner in an interview in the new issue of Reflections h…
BLUETTI just dropped something big at CES 2026: a road trip charger that runs on your alternator and solar, plus power stations made from bio-circular plastics that slash CO2 emissions.
The Charger 2 solves slow-charging headaches with universal compatibility and bi-directional power. Meanwhile, their new Elite series brings sustainable materials to high-density energy storage.
There's a real sense of expectation in this photo by @…. Like something is about to happen, or has just happened. Like a surrealist liminal space.
I'd noticed on apps with Client side decoration that if they blocked on something they were much more of a pain - you can't move the window like you could when they had a window manager driven title bar. This is much more of a pain than not redrawing or responding for a few seconds.
I'm seeing it in Thunderbird's matrix client as it's syncing.
Yo, wtf did I do to deserve *this*? And yes, I need a haircut and shave, but it's not *that* bad!
audio description rules because even though im completely sighted, sometimes my brain doesn't work right and I can't follow what's happening BUT ALSO it's great for if you wanna watch something but also close your eyes for a bit or try to fall asleep or your head hurts but you still wanna watch an episode of something. they're usually really well done, too
Also, Apple Shortcuts appreciation toot, this’d take forever if I needed to do it manually or if I had to boot my laptop to do it in python or something.
Someone should make something like this for mobile Linux / postmarketOS, it’s cool
Playing a little bit of the new B42 Zomboid last night, I came up with a new feature I need...
Change the auto-updater to skip updating if there are players currently logged in.
It'll check Steam, (or whatever the relative source), for an update and apply those changes once an hour. However for fast-changing servers like Zomboid (during development cycles) and ARK (notably when they "fix" something only to break 3 more things), this can be annoying for users alread…
Battery tech people: do Energizer Ultimate Lithium AA batteries contain any kind of internal protection / fusing mechanism like good 18650s do? Or do they ever fail short or something?
Just pulled four out of a device. Three tested good at 1.5V and the fourth measured absolutely zero. Not like low, no voltage at all.
#GrindayFriday this week is 2022 self titled LP by Seattle grind/powerviolence trio NURSER. They kinda remind me of Mastiff or Napalm or something like that. No frills, just grinding and violence: https://nurserdeath.bandcamp.com/album
@…
At the corporate event everyone is wearing a name tag with your title and the company you work for. Guests are circling each other trying to read the name tag and see if you're interesting enough to talk to. Almost no one is there to simply socialize. They are trying to sell you something, sway your opinion, or add your details to their records for future use. In the background the conference has a software app that allows attendees to track and target each other. The goal is to add as many people as possible to your network, or insert yourself into their contact list. It's rare to make a new friend.
I want to get into bobbin lace, I got a second hand pillow and bobbins and am enjoying surfing youtube, but not sure how to navigate all the tutorials etc.. Anyone with advice for a good book or something, or even better in a similar position and fancy some peer learning?
Extremely satisfying thing with something I started doing recently happened today that I can’t say what it is, but it was, well, very satisfying.
Hope you all also have those small moments of personal or professional satisfaction.
0 days since it turned out that GNU #make does not respect the #jobserver protocol it designed itself in yet another way. Or to put it otherwise, I've wasted my whole morning implemented something that cannot work because it didn't occur to me that GNU make people only set rules without caring to actually follow them.
#Gentoo #Linux
Man, whatever. Go yell at a wall or something.
Excellent words from @…, shared here with permission:
❝My favorite piece of advice for protests has been, “accept side quests”. Sure, you can show up, shout a bit, and go home - there's value in just uncorking some frustration. But don't look past meeting your like-minded neighbors. If you're an introvert, like me, that may induce anxiety just thinking about it. But there's all sorts of easy conversation starters - people spent time on their signs, and chances are they would love to talk about them - how they made them or what they were inspired by. Viola! Now you're talking! Everybody at a protest is looking for something - whether it is a word of encouragement or witty comment, a pointer to a place to go or a thing to join, that something may be you!❞
Just kinda thinking out loud here, don't have a solution or architecture in mind: I really want a better solution for high speed FPGA / ASIC protocol design and debug.
In particular:
1) Using scopehal protocol captures as stimuli for a virtual DUT (i.e. decoded 8b10b of PCIe or something into RTL simulator, pretending to be a SERDES)
Language conversations have become highly performative,
with a fixation on the words people are using,
not why they’re using them
or what they’re reaching for when they deploy language
like “crazy,” “lame,” or the r-word
(currently experiencing a resurgence in popularitythanks to Elon Musk).
The language is a metaphor:
We call something “insane” because that word carries a specific baggage and burden.
But the fact that mental illness is stil…
Series C, Episode 06 - City at the Edge of the World
VILA: Bayban, yes.
BAYBAN: Bayban the Beserker. Bayban the Butcher.
VILA: Bayban the Butcher . . . you're Bayban the Butcher! Oh, no.
BAYBAN: That's better.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/306/164 B7B4
hey wanna hear something surreal?
when i called 911 [on 9th of December] to report "a stalker being actively in my home right now", the cop on the phone spent like a minute trying to figure out if my ethnicity was "white - british" or "white - other"
lord only knows what they wanted that data for
Is there a term for that thing when you ask someone to send you something because you need a piece of text and then they send you a screen shot and you have to retype the text from the image?
There should be a word or phrase for that.
I sure hope Mamdani does something about NYC's fucked up public school system, because our kids' 2E school just raised tuition to *$105k* per year. This is not an elite prep school or anything fancy, this is just an elementary/middle school that does things for kids on the spectrum that public schools were already supposed to be doing (as dictated by their IEPs).
I made a script for this, but then I thought a webui would be better so I could use it in my phone and stuff
I asked an LLM to generate a python webui to run server-side the script I wrote, and surprisingly it 100% worked first try. I was sure it wouldn’t work at all, but I didn’t touch that code and it works.
I can’t even say I “vibe coded” this bc I didn’t even read the code enough to know its vibes lmao. I’m surprised this even works, and it does work well. What the actual fuck.
Welp, not my favourite way to do things but I wasn’t in the mood to do python and figure out the extra libraries and stuff.
And it works so I’ll just use that. In a hardened systemd service to make sure it doesn’t like accidentally delete my whole system or something.
I don't get people with their "Friday evening out" or "night life" ideas. I mean, what's there to live when it's dark outside? You can live when it's daylight and you can go to a forest or something, but when it's dark, all you can do is either work or sleep.
I would like to go on record to say that I don't hate LLMs. That would be like disowning maths.
I hate how people sell it with promises that are simply lies and urging people to use it for things that it is unsuitable for, with the commercial LLMs how they train models on stolen data, how users talk themselves into believing they're talking to a human or something human-like while deskilling themselves, how institutions and organizations shoehorn it into every fucking thing, the way it is usurping computing resources and increasing prices for personal computing, how the big companies underhandedly continuously threaten everyone with "if we don't invest enough the Terminators will get us" and how it is used for very obvious large-scale financial fraud. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyone know of an Android to-do list application that is
* Completely device local, no network connectivity required or used
* No ads or spyware
* Doesn't time-out tasks even if they sit around for a year uncompleted (looking at you, google calendar)
* Supports recurring maintenance tasks for weekly, monthly, etc. cleaning or something
Open source preferred, but willing to pay a reasonable price if it's out there as a commercial tool
In the closing days of the Biden administration, deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology Anne Neuberger warned,
“China is targeting critical infrastructure in the United States.”
That sounds like the sort of thing the U.S. government might want to do something about.
But apparently not;
On Dec. 3, the Financial Times reported that the Trump administration had
“halted plans to impose sanctions on China’s Ministry of State Security
Every once in a while in a random thread on here, someone unnecessarily pops into the replies and says "block me, I'm pro-slavery!", or "block me, I'm a nazi!", or expresses something similar. I always appreciate how forthcoming they are before I block them.
Obviously they dress up their sentiment in some kind of vague language of respectability or something, but it's usually pretty clear what they're saying.
One way to identify if something is a fad or bubble is if the hypers and the doomers are actually the same people.
Neither are actually talking about the thing.
The hypers ceaselessly tell you that you will look bad if you don’t use the thing.
The doomers spin tales on how it will end your way of life or worse.
They both work to keep the thing in your mind while never actually talking about the thing, in an endless parade of manipulating your emotions.
You know what really sucks about being raised in Polish culture? You learn to always expect criticism and sarcasm.
Someone tells you a compliment? In the best case, you feel uneasy about it. In the worst, you start suspecting it was veiled sarcasm.
Once I've read here a suggestion to compliment strangers. I don't know if I'll ever be able to do that. I'd keep worrying that I may be misunderstood, either as being sarcastic or as expecting something.
#Poland #ActuallyAutistic
In a conversation at this year's
Billionaire's convention
—aka the World Economic Forum
—Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warned that AI will lose public support
unless it's used to "do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries."
"We will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy,
which is a scarce resource,
and use it to generate these tokens,
I give my kids old phones with the assumption that they will get lost in a field or dropped on the subway tracks or left out in the rain or something. The 13yo's on his 3rd phone in ~4 years, so this expectation holds up.
Meanwhile, the 8yo has the Oneplus 3 That Will Not Die. Battery life's still great, screen's only cracked by the fingerprint reader (not part of the display), I've had to repair the buttons two or three times now.. After almost 3 years, it's gettin…
If you need something and Black Friday is the only time you can afford it or the only time you think it’s worth the price—please go ahead and buy it.
Doubly so if it’s something that helps you for a disability or maybe something that helps you free up time in your life for fun things.
It’s not your fault that we live in a capitalist society.
I don't think I'm ever going to enjoy gifts.
I can get why people would give them to children. After all, children don't have their own budget. However, I'm talking about occasional gifts, not a new toy every second week, because "we must outcompete the other grandparents". But to adults?
Once I've heard that you should gift people with what they won't buy themselves. Well, that's won't work for me. I'm a minimalist. If I don't need something, I don't want to have it. Unnecessary junk is only emotional burden to me.
I can get why you'd enjoy something handmade. But something people bought? If I need something, I can buy it myself, when I need it. And I definitely don't need people to prove to me that they never cared to learn who I am, and just buy whatever they like or whatever is "fashionable"; which usually means exactly the opposite of what I'd prefer (i.e. something minimalistic). Or even worse, I don't need people manipulating me through gifts.
Sweets? Besides my diabetes, I don't really enjoy expensive shit that people generally buy because it's what's advertised. For the money they waste on it, I'd buy three times as much sweets I'd actually enjoy.
Gift cards? Oh yes, "you aren't supposed to give money, so let's just give the equivalent of money that's actually worth less than money". Actual money? And here we reach the true nonsense; we exchange the same amount of money, so it's just pointless gesture. Unless one of us gives less money…
What I'd really like, as a gift? Maybe that people would finally bother accepting me as who I am. The absolute minimum of caring that I hate consumerism, and not fueling it "for me".
#AntiCapitalism #minimalism #ActuallyAutistic
Math people: If I have a bunch of sampled data that I've found a local maximum on, and I want to interpolate the peak location to sub-sample precision, what's a good way to do that?
I know how to interpolate a zero crossing linearly but this is a bit more complex, I feel like I'll probably want to fit a sinc or gaussian or something to the data somehow?
If you reply to me and expect an answer, maybe don't call what I said a "bad faith argument".
What do you want me to say?
"Yes, I posted this to specifically upset you personally even though I didn't actually mean it!"
Or, you know, maybe if it makes you feel angry—figure out why.
Anger is an emotion that just tells you something might be wrong. You should take it as sign to think about why you have the feeling. It might be that there is something the matter with your beliefs or what you're doing.
Random thought: the centralization of authentication to a few big OAuth providers like MS and Google, combined with services that time out your cookies and force relogins every so often, makes phishing people so much easier.
Want someone's account creds? Just pop up something that looks like a ms or google login form, odds are they're so conditioned by login fatigue that they'll automatically type their creds and TOTP token into it.
Thread about gifting (or buying yourself) a telescope and avoiding getting something terrible.
(sorry for Bluesky link but I’m auto-removing posts on Mastodon, this is from last year)
https://bsky.app/profile/thomasfuchs.at/post/3lbx2egm5222k
No high fructose corn syrup.
Just regular corn syrup plus a bit of extra sucrose. Gotta love sketchy marketing.
(A previous formulation had the first two ingredients corn syrup and fructose... I wonder if they got sued or something and changed it to spike with sucrose instead?)
It's funny how "AI" tools are simulteanously marketed as "agents" that can run fully in the background and do stuff but whenever they do something bad it's the user at fault for not supervising the software that doesn't work.
Even when it’s directly used and the user has the chance to review everything—it’s extremely dangerous, especially at tasks it is doing fine like 95% of the time and/or when the bad things are only subtly wrong.
Imagine other tools being like this, like a steering wheel that turns the car 95 out of a 100 times. 2% of the time it steers into the other direction. 3% of the time it steers 5x as much as normally.
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
![me: "Oh man, it's so nice without mom, dad, and [8yo] here. I get as much screen time as I want. Muahahaha" ?
me: 🤨😀
13yo: Please leave a message at the tone
13yo: BOOOP
me: Damn it, I was talking to the machine again. I always do that!](https://mastodon-usw-cache.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/115/902/631/170/310/788/original/a433d9ef0b4a6ad9.png)
