Amikke @Amikke@qoto.org

Being the responsible parents we are, we have Carbon Monoxide alarms in the house, because hey, it’s what you do. Right?

Of course, they have never gone off (knock wood), so you do tend to forget that they exist at all.

Well, yesterday one of those alarms decided that it needed to really remind us that it exists, and that it’s been ten years since we activated it. Because it’s now time to replace it.

Of course, nobody was home - except for the dog. Who is now traumatized by that beeping hell-box that suddenly decided that it was a good idea to tell everybody out of the blue that it needs replacing - at 95dB, just to make sure.

Kidde - I’m sure you could at least start out with just a mild chirp, instead of going full “the bark collar from hell” crazy. No?

That's not rhetorical. I'm really open to the possibility that I'm missing something. It seems like people who have more concerns about privacy and safety have the ability to organize their mastodon instance so it is locked down by default. And they can open up selectively. Yes, it puts more onus on you to make decisions rather than depending on other people to do the right thing. But again, I guess I thought that was the tradeoff people were making intentionally.

Mozilla neglecting its core product for years and losing marketshare while the suits that run it flail around wildly feels really true to its Netscape heritage.

no centralised social network could ever produce "the taliban deleted my account". that's a mastodon special.

Congrats to @collabora for bringing DRM-CI to life!

We badly need a cross-driver CI solution that isn't mailing-lists-based and largely opaque to developers. We need CI that is integrated in the development workflow and that provide guarantees about code quality, not just a service that can be ignored by chance or malice.

It isn't perfect though as it inherits testing methodologies better suited for userspace testing, but kernelCI is no better in this regard ;)

https://floss.social/@collabora/111897664377321026

🇬🇧Consumer-hostile #Whatsapp messenger will soon be interoperable - we #Pirates ensured this via the #DMA. In the coming months, we will be able to switch to better and open messenger services such as Matrix and continue to communicate with our consenting Whatsapp contacts securely and end-to-end encrypted across platforms using the Signal protocol. Wired reports: https://www.wired.com/story/whatsapp-interoperability-messaging/

Facebook Messenger will also become interoperable, possibly iMessage too.
Anonymous use of the participating alternative messenger services remains possible, and Whatsapp only receives data on messages sent across platforms.

Even if Threema and Signal want to stay on the sidelines at first, I am confident that more and more messenger services will join in over time, because interoperability is the future and brings real competition and real freedom of choice!

Feb/8/2024: Google announces Gemini Advanced

Feb/8/2028: Google announces the retirement of Gemini Advanced with one month's notice, as all other AI services are dead or Google found that the ad-supported AI model works better.

Killed by Google adds Gemini Advanced to its webpage.

The end.

A few times I have told the anecdote that the singly most baffling thing I ever saw in a code review — not the most insecure, just the most “how could a real programmer have written this? how could this ever make sense?” thing — was simply a C++ variable “number_of_trucks” … declared as float. Unambiguously referring to real physical trucks in a fleet.

Reader, it’s been over ten years and I am blowing the gods damn whistle. I had edited that story to protect the guilty: the variable was named number_of_planes. It was shipped by a company whose name begins with “B” and rhymes with “GOING out of business.”

The stylish, unknown & extremely rare SEGA AI COMPUTER (1986) promised natural language processing and "artificial intelligence" via its Prolog interpreter.

We're making available today, for the first time ever: system roms, game cards, tapes recordings, scans, photos, MAME driver & more: https://smspower.org/SegaAI