yeroc @yeroc@qoto.org

Beloved Apple blog TUAW was shut down in 2015, sold to private equity, then sold to a company in Hong Kong. It recently relaunched as an AI content farm using the stolen identities and bylines of its former human staff. A nightmare:

https://www.404media.co/a-beloved-tech-blog-tuaw-is-now-publishing-ai-articles-under-the-names-of-its-old-human-staff/

Justice #Sotomayor dissent:

“Never in the history of our Republic has a President had reason to believe that he would be #immune from #criminal prosecution if he used the trappings of his office to violate the criminal #law. Moving forward, however, all former Presidents will be cloaked in such #immunity.
…if the occupant of that office misuses official power for personal gain, the criminal law that the rest of us must abide will not provide a backstop. With fear for our #democracy, I dissent."

This week at Config I gave a talk about pixel fonts that I think turned out really well.

It’s called “In defense of an old pixel,” and I don’t think I ever worked harder on a talk before. Check it out here! (25 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDI8ubVZi7w

Mastodon expects you to accurately set the language of your post before posting.

There are real-world accessibility problems if you set it incorrectly, including:

(a) Mastodon's translation feature may not work correctly

(b) when people follow you they can opt-in to only receive posts you send in a particular language. If you mis-label the language of your posts you may be inadvertently spamming your followers.

Earlier this week I had a passenger who tried to bully me.

I was driving the 29 Sunset, and as is normal for me, I was making big enthusiastic stop and transfer announcements. I’m a little atypical for transit operators: I love to make announcements. I draw out the syllables. I sound a little like a WWE announcer crossed with an old time carnival barker. Mostly, people love it. I get lots of compliments and the occasional commendation. I find that making these announcements helps me keep focused on the flow of the route and connects me to my passengers as a person. People recognize my voice, and will sometimes remember me from a different route a year later. But most of all it’s fun, and feels good. I’ll even do it on an empty bus.

So a few months ago we learned that the individual running polyfill.io silently sold the service to an obscure chinese company.

This popular (and well done / very useful) service was created by the Financial Times, who stopped maintaining it and "donated it to the community", meaning that it relied on a few volunteers to continue running it (and on Fastly who provided the hosting for free). 1/7

computers used to scream when you connected them to the internet. this was correct

See also being pulled into a random slack channel with no context…

Funny story: This was my work, patented by my supervisors at my first summer research position. They waited until I was out of the country for a gap year, and never told me they had patented and possibly even sold it.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5479513A/en

The one good thing AI chat bots are good for.

"Hey, chatGPT what is a recipe for banana bread?"
"Here it is with cooking instructions."

"Hey, any search engine what is a recipe for banana bread?"

"Here are 14 links every one of them will be a long story about someone's grandmother, a bunch of pictures, more stories about someone's grandmother, but keep paging down but then page back up because you just skipped past the ingredient list. Okay now that you've found it page down three more times past more copy about the writer's grandmother for the cooking instructions."
____________
#chatGPT

The state of search in 2024:

Google: "We threw away decades of search knowledge and Internet indexing and just made an answer up "

Bing: "Here's 100 tangentially related pages from 2010 that I only included because your query appears in a tag cloud in the website's footer"

DuckDuckGo: "Here are the Bing results, only with ✨privacy✨"

Reddit: (this user has deleted their entire post history using PowerDeleteMyShit. Fuck /u/Spez)

Yahoo: "Oh thank god, someone's actually using our search engine! No, we're not just Bing!" *frantically trying to cover up the giant Bing sticker* "NO DON'T GO TO GOOGLE!!!!"

Yandex: "Here are all of the Russian-owned resources on this topic. Only Russian sources are trustworthy. Everything else is fake ne—I MEAN, misinformation"

Kagi: "We'll give you what Google used to give you for free, for the low low price of $10/month!"

Ask.com: [hoarse screaming and clawing noises can be heard from the ground beneath a headstone that says "Here lies Jeeves: 1996-2006"]

“Politics isn’t about solving problems any more, it’s about exploiting them.”

good line-- grim-- but good line.

from Alastair Campbell about the UK, but applies beyond there.

https://www.ft.com/content/bc19bbf4-2939-489e-a113-e21d5baf356d

(comic) As the years go by https://workchronicles.substack.com/p/comic-as-the-years-go-by

TIL: #LinkedIn shortens urls longer than 26 characters to "make them easier to read"

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a521889/short-urls-in-shared-posts

They actually say that, out loud, in their docs.

Eighty years ago today my namesake died in France. Murdered as a POW by elements of the 12th Panzer Hitlerjugend, probably on the orders of General William Mohnke.

This is the story of that day. https://kiggavik.typepad.com/the_house_other_arctic_mu/2010/06/and-now-you-die.html

Governments continuing to use #Twitter threads to communicate important information during an emergency is certainly a choice.

I wonder if they are aware that users now need an account in order to see more than one post in the thread at a time?

Here's the City of Calgary with a 7-tweet thread on the massive water main break, of which only one tweet is viewable.

#calgary #yyc #alberta #ableg #yyccc #canada #socialmedia

The primary adversary most IT/sec shops are intended to defend against is auditors

How I imagine the user story for every large social media platform adding autoplaying videos that often can't be disabled: as an Instagram user, I want videos in my feed to start playing automatically but muted so that I always miss the first several seconds of audio should I want to hear it.

“Mr. Shatner wept. He was struck not by how much was “up there” but how little. “Everything I had thought was wrong,” Mr. Shatner wrote later. “The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.” He suddenly understood how fragile the home planet was, and he knew it was all we had.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/opinion/elon-musk-spacex-brownsville-texas.html?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into Final Frontier @final-frontier-mike

I learned today, from reading the obituary of Lorne Greene’s son, Charles, that Bonanza was filmed in Incline Village Nevada. Which got me reminiscing about a fellow from there who came up to LaRonge to disappear in the wild. It didn’t go as he had it drawn up.

https://kiggavik.typepad.com/the_house_other_arctic_mu/2006/11/how_not_to_disa.html