Sarcastic Penguin @extrn@qoto.org

@extrn @nzlemming the real problem is that now no businesses can ever be freehold with technology - they'll always be paying escalating rental costs, and have no mobility because most are voluntarily locking themselves into one supplier's proprietary cloud. Which is dumb. I explain why here: https://davelane.nz/mshostage

Don't Read Off The Screen - Stuart Langrdige "As Days Pass By": https://www.kryogenix.org/days/2022/10/18/don-t-read-off-the-screen/ (Embedded YouTube + transcript)
Simon Willison's endorsement: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/4/dont-read-off-the-screen/

Toot toot! 😊

Since on Mastodon there's a higher chance of non-followers seeing this, I might as well do an #introduction :)

Hi, I'm Arturo, I tinker with #electronics, #pcb, #kicad, #firmware, #opensource, #openhardware

I'm the founder of a company named Solder Party, if you're in the electronics community, you might've seen my stuff. Everything I release is open source, SW and HW.

what you see here are parts of an iranian drone which was allegedly involved in the killing of civilians. the drone was downed some time ago by kurdish security forces.

let's shed some light on states wearing their pretty neutrality cape.

I hate what computers are now, and especially hate what Apple computers are now. Here are comics that were "purchased" but can't be read, and a screen to read them on which works but can't be used,

because Amazon decided to buy the comic vendor and break their app,

and Apple insists we buy a new screen every few years or they will make apps (like unbroken Comixology) break via aggressive SDK depreciation. The new screen isn't better. They just make you pay for it because they can.

Россия потерпела в Харьковской области самое крупное поражение в войне с Украиной. Но, возможно, это еще не конец наступления ВСУ. «Медуза» анализирует ситуацию на фронте

Украинское наступление на юге и востоке Харьковской области за пять дней достигло всех своих целей. Российские войска под угрозой окружения 8 сентября оставили город Балаклею, а 10 сентября — западную часть города Купянска, главной тыловой базы Минобороны РФ в регионе. Также в ночь на 10 сентября Вооруженные силы России (ВС РФ) покинули город Изюм, где размещался штаб всей этой группировки. Вместе с ними оставлены и потеряны в боях десятки сел и поселков, десятки единиц целой и поврежденной техники, тонны боеприпасов. А кроме того — все, чего российская армия с большим трудом добилась с марта 2022 года. Теперь у нее нет возможности начать новое наступление на Донбасс с севера. Ниже — краткая хроника этих событий.

https://meduza.io/feature/2022/09/10/rossiya-poterpela-v-harkovskoy-oblasti-samoe-krupnoe-porazhenie-v-voyne-s-ukrainoy-no-vozmozhno-eto-esche-ne-konets-nastupleniya-vsu

a fun thing to do when someone corrects you is to say "ugh; you're such a pendant"

then watch as they struggle and ultimately fail to resist the urge to say "I think you meant pedant?" then you say "SEE WHAT I MEAN"

Heh, #Mathe-Witze haben schon was 🙂

Best graph this year. Great for finding underused combinations. From https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/vmw0eu/oc_frequency_of_compound_insults_eg_poophead/

.

Emacs legit changed my life. I remember when I first installed it. It was because I wanted to use SLIME with SBCL. Actually no, it was years before that, I wanted to build a simple static generated website. I didn’t have any money to buy a ‘professional’ IDE, and I trusted GNU, so I used Emacs seemed like a good choice.

it was so easy to plug all these things together. it intuitively made sense to me how these three systems should be installed. I never not had Emacs installed on my PC

Before Emacs, I used KDE’s kate.

I have been using EXWM as my X window manager for about 2.5 years now. My Guix PC literally boots up to Emacs buffers, and nothing else after that. That’s all Linux does for my system.

I wanted the Lisp machine of my dreams, and I got it, really. I believe so much in the Lisp tradition and its happy-hearted and open friendliness. This is really well demonstrated in the Land of Lisp book.

But I do acknowledge some of its shortcomings. There is a famous joke that David Moon once said to a grad student: ‘you cannot simply cycle the power on a Lisp Machine without understanding why it crashed’, and then cycled the power, and the machine worked. This is a very big Lisp ‘mood’.

Lisp is often slow, and exhibits a lot of undefined state, sometimes, because it uses a heap and then, as a secondary citizen, the stack.

But I am a Lisp acolyte because I believe in its utopian vision of its brand of automated intelligence. It is my chosen model for computation. It is ambitious and beautiful.

Artifice & Intelligence by Emily Tucker

https://techpolicy.press/artifice-and-intelligence/

Good advice for anyone writing on technology, actually.

"Words matter.

Starting today, the Privacy Center will stop using the terms “artificial intelligence,” “AI,” and “machine learning” in our work to expose and mitigate the harms of digital technologies in the lives of individuals and communities."

[...]

"Corporations have essentially colonized the imaginative space that Turing’s paper asked us to explore. Instead of pursuing the limits of computers’ potential for simulated humanity, the hawkers of “AI” are pursuing the limits of human beings’ potential to be reduced to their calculability."

[...]

"Instead of using the terms “Artificial intelligence, “AI,” and “machine learning,” the Privacy Center will:"

* Be as specific as possible about what the technology in question is and how it works.

* Identify any obstacles to our own understanding of a technology that result from failures of corporate or government transparency.

* Name the corporations responsible for creating and spreading the technological product.

* Attribute agency to the human actors building and using the technology, never to the technology itself.

»I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. Ten seconds, I tell myself, is ten seconds. Time is valuable and ten seconds' worth of it is well worth the investment of a day's happy activity working out a way of saving it»

Douglas Adams, in the 80s

“a medical team … desperately tried to revive a 6-year-old girl in unicorn pajamas who was mortally wounded in Russian shelling.

During the rescue attempt, a doctor in blue medical scrubs, pumping oxygen into the girl, looked directly into the AP video camera capturing the scene.

“Show this to Putin,” he said angrily. “The eyes of this child, and crying doctors.”

Their resuscitation efforts failed, and the girl lay dead on a gurney, her jacket spattered with blood.”

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-kyiv-business-europe-moscow-2e4e1cf784f22b6afbe5a2f936725550