Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@qoto.org

@lauren I must assume worthwhile blogs may only syndicate on snark. ;)

@lauren I bet someone broke the very-solid-but-not-always-enforced rule "Thou Shalt Add New Fields And Values Only At The End of Existing Protobuffer Messages And Enums."

(... or possibly the equally-important "Thou Shalt Never Reuse A Decommissioned Field ID or Enum Value")

@lauren I really love everything about this video, including the part where dialtone used to sound like the wail of demons straight from hell.

#dalle #stablediffusion

Discussions of AI-generated art that try to cut the tech off at the knees by invoking copyright regarding training the generators on artists' work without their consent are fine, but short-sighted and won't stop the economic shift.

If these tools prove valuable for generating sufficiently-novel, sufficiently-controllable input, advertising companies and entertainment companies *will* pay fifty artists for their labor to generate the seed data to create fifty million images.

These technologies, should they prove viable, will become a permanent tool in the toolbox.

@lauren I would ballpark such a project as 60% likely to outlive Google+.

@lauren I predict that in the short run, such things on Mastodon will look more like waves of de-federation. With few (no?) admins in the space paying to devote resources to moderation, moderation will instead look like failure to control content followed by de-fed of those who have had enough.

On the other hand, this platform is unlikely to attract ad money so the incentive to regulate at all will be low for awhile.

There is something shabby-luxurious about traveling by Amtrak along the Eastern US that is incredibly endearing to me. Just the whole vibe of "Yes, we know it looks nothing like the brochure, but damnit we're trying."

And given the option of flying somewhere or taking the train somewhere, if the difference in travel time is a matter of a few hours, I'll take the train every time. Planes are too distracting, and the tray table is way too small. Besides, 50/50 odds that for the price of a coach plane ticket, I get an entire roomette to myself.

I get so much code written on a train.

@jleedev There's no wrong way to spell a Regis.

@rob Hm. This is an excellent source but I have some concerns with that date.

The Civil War saw many things that were understood to be state rights and responsibilities stripped away at, not ironically, the barrel of a gun (followed of course by constitutional amendments clarifying the result of that use of force). Our author may have been undertaking the work of stabilizing a new legal ground out of quicksand that had just been formed by a massive upheaval of the original understanding of state and private liberty. Not to say their interpretation was wrong, only that their interpretation may have been working under a new framework that did not apply (or was meaningless given the old power balance) prior to 1865.

On its own I accept your analysis of its meaning, but I feel I should go hunting for a pre-1860s source that would confirm that, say, in a case where a state tried to bar ownership of arms, any authority beyond an explicit call out for freedom of arms ownership in the state's Constitution was used to deny the state that authority to infringe.

(The right place to start that hunt, is, of course, the citations of the source you provided! Darn it Rob, I already have *so much* reading to do!) ;)

@lauren Amazing.

I have a love-hate relationship with the idea of the holographic displays in the new Star Treks---they look great, and I can imagine they would be a beautiful way to provide an interface for fundamentally three-dimensional data, such as spatial position.

But then they go interacting with them physically, and it takes a suspension of disbelief on par with the automatic opening doors to assume that the interfaces don't just get massive input noise every time the ship takes a hit and people have to wave their hands around to brace against the impact. I believe it'll be a good long while before tactile interfaces go away in machinery designed for flight controls in vehicles that withstand turbulence---I see the glass panels in SpaceX's capsules, and they give me pause. No idea how they are supposed to operate if the capsule is shaking heavily on reentry, for example.

(But there was one bit in a recent episode of Star Trek Prodigy that I loved: using the tactile holographic projector to overlay older generation controls on top of the post-next-gen-era holo panels so that operators familiar with the old system could use them. I remember a similar concept was mentioned in the Next Generation technical manual that the glass panels could run older versions of the interface in special circumstances, and it was fun to watch a similar idea used on-screen).

@lauren And worse, even when you encounter grammatical inconsistency like this---the kind that was set an Apple UX engineer's hair on fire---you can't correct it because in general these tools never evolved a machine-readable data-channel separate from the human readable data-channel, so now if you change it you risk breaking somebody's regexes.

There's plenty to hate and love about Microsoft, but separating error codes from error messages was very smart.

@manlius @tiago @lmrocha @estebanmoro @hirokisayama @PessoaBrain This is probably expected. The number of people in the world who want to be users vastly outstrips the number who want to be admins. We see this pattern play out repeatedly in myriad services.

@lauren I knew the promises of "safe, clean Krell energy" were too good to be true!

@jeanthoensen Why are they giving out awards for Ask Me Anything threads? ;)

@peter_ravn retrograde orbit, interesting. I hadn't actually looked at the mission profile... That would let them see more of the lunar surface at a given distance, which makes sense if the goal of close approach is primarily observational.