friendica.exon.name


Reload Bar, Nuku'alofa, Tonga

If there's a kind of cringe porn I can enjoy, the Horizon scandal is it. I'm seeing a bunch of little crimes and sorta-kinda engineering all stacking up to produce catastrophes. Looking forward to the definitive pop-tech-history full-length book.

BBC News: 'Damaging' testimony withheld from pregnant postmistress trial (By Nalini Sivathasan and Lorna Acquah)


Weird to recognise myself in the first part of a "history of" video 🧓 So glad to see 春游 only going from strength to strength!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0O9UDQKpH_c

#china #music

YouTube: History of Chun You Festival(春游历史短片)

Music Feed reshared this.




Author:

Perrin pressed forward through the beech woodlands. Where an oak or a larch broke through the tree cover he enjoyed the cool breeze. At a creek he could pick a few hawthorne berries. But as he rested under an old willow, he wondered if he could reach the pine forest before nightfall.

My brain:

Dude is in trees. There are trees and also trees and trees. There was wind. At a water he ate tree fruit. He sat under a tree. He wants to get out of the trees and into different trees.


Heard someone seriously mention "the 30s" for the first time just now. I've been looking forward to the end of our long millennial linguistic nightmare for decades, and finally victory is in sight.

I'm very excited by the recent movement to build #transitous, a single #publictransport routing API based on public GTFS feeds. But this coverage map from transit.land is a shocker. That is, I assure you, not an accurate representation of the world's public transport. There are all kinds of wrong directions you can travel in if this is your starting point.

@tagesschau reported for two and a half minutes about this chart without mentioning the C-word once. #CoronaIsNotOver
The best part was the owner of a tiny electronics factory complaining that at one point almost half her staff were out sick at the same time. What on earth could cause that?

I've never had any accountancy training. But at one point zaomengshe.com needed financial reports, and I said "How hard can it be? I'll write some Python scripts." So the one thing I do know about accountancy, is that it is FUCKING HARD with financial partners who are incapable of attaching unique IDs to transactions. Which is all of them.

That's why, although I barely dare to say it, I kinda have some sympathy for Fujitsu here.

#PostOfficeScandal #Accounting


Woah! I did not expect this to go through at all. I had fully expected to begin the process of giving up my existing citizenships this year.


https://ard.social/users/tagesschau/statuses/111781537631783164



Bundestag entscheidet über schnellere Einbürgerungen

Ausländerinnen und Ausländer sollen schneller die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit erhalten können, aber nur unter Bedingungen. Über die Pläne der Ampelkoalition stimmt heute der Bundestag ab. Die Kernpunkte der Reform im Überblick.

➡️ https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/bundestag-staatsangehoerigkeitsrecht-einbuergerungen-100.html?at_medium=mastodon&at_campaign=tagesschau.de

#Bundestag #Staatsangehörigkeit



The Wandering Shop: Charlie Stross (@cstross@wandering.shop)


This seems like the perfect chance to pitch my phone OS based on neoliberal orthodoxy. Instead of calling malloc() like godless communists, apps bid for memory in an on-device currency. And not just memory! CPU time, network connectivity, storage. Programs can trade off space/time performance based on the device's current market conditions. As the consumer, you can mint as much currency as you like, and allocate it to apps according to how much you value their use. Preorders will open soon, as soon as I get my Bahamas bank account set up.
(Not a reply because I believe Charlie has blocked me. And this post isn't likely to do me any favours either.)


Wordpress ActivityPub plugin 2.0.0! FWIW, Bidirectional Comment Federation is the last piece I personally was waiting for to declare this thing "feature complete". It means instead of a discussion on your blog and another discussion on social media, there's now a single conversation. Congratulations @Matthias Pfefferle !
Matthias Pfefferle mastodon (AP)
@henrik subfolders are always tricky and you have to tweak some things, but it should work: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/#what%20if%20you%20are%20running%20your%20blog%20in%20a%20subdirectory%3F
oh DANG the new hotness got even hotter [downloads]

Debugging DNS logs on a laptop is like exploring the crawlspace under civilisation's house. I was perfectly happy not knowing those things were down there. Now I'm gonna have nightmares.

Interesting quote from Google's #gemini team:

"LLMs also struggle with tasks requiring high-level reasoning abilities like causal understanding, logical deduction, and counterfactual reasoning even though they achieve impressive performance on exam benchmarks."

Which is another way of saying LLMs are the exact opposite of critical thinking. That could be a useful shorthand. "Is critical thinking important in this task?" "Yes" ⇒ "LLM-free zone".

https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/06/google_gemini_ai/

reshared this

"Ford’s methods were so influential that they became known simply as Fordism (something that Google and Facebook still haven’t achieved.)"

I dearly hope "Googlism" becomes a term for something you keep vague when telling people you have a doctor's appointment.

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/11/08/silicon-valley-is-the-detroit-of-the-future/



October cold is the worst kind of cold because you're constantly thinking about how much worse it'll get.

"We're migrating the company wiki, as part of the cleanup all pages without an edit in the last 6 months will be archived."

-- real thing said by a free-roaming employee not wearing a Hannibal Lecter muzzle.

"If you'd like a page not to be archived, please add a 'noarchive' label to it" he added, the struggling kittens splashing water over his wrists.

Timgad, Algeria

Constantine, Algeria.

Huge news if true. This would be a worrying escalation that could throw the whole region into chaos, with implications for the supply chain worldwide. #bbc https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-66887236

BBC News: Giggles on the sofa! Pigeon CCTV has BBC hosts in tears

#bbc

Ow ow ow my eyes! Sadly, much as I'd like to blame this on ChatGPT, I'm betting a human is responsible.


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/arts/ai-chatgpt-curators-museums.html

The New York Times: Museum Curators Evaluate A.I. Threat by Giving It the Reins (Zachary Small)


I was lucky to get a 50% scholarship to Herbivore School.

I would definitely have gone with the headline "Repair company lobbies for law change to permit expanding business into commercial machinery." Sometimes clickbait tactics are used for good, not evil. #ifixit https://youtu.be/2uCpY3tFTIA

YouTube: Why McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken and How To Fix Them

IXI reshared this.

Thought I'd check in and, whaddayaknow, still there.

My reaction when Naomi Wu went offline was basically "that's a shame, but you're probably right not to make a big fuss or fight this." Guess I misinterpreted that.

"Literally the only thing that was keeping me online for the past few years was they were worried it would make China look bad if they cracked down on me. Now that they know that I could be dead in a ditch tomorrow and no one would give a shit or say a word I’m 1000x less safe here."

https://www.hackingbutlegal.com/naomi-wu-and-the-silence-that-speaks-volumes/

#China


How can airlines justify forbidding "skiplagging"?


I bumped into the name "Horatio Alger Association" but decided I couldn't be bothered following up. Slacktivist puts it in context:

Hard work and clean living were never enough for the street urchins and matchstick boys in his books. The ones who achieved success only managed to do so because they were assisted by older, wealthy, unmarried men who took those boys off the streets and into their homes.
If you think there might be a creepy subtext to that, you’re wrong. It’s not a subtext at all.


https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2023/08/11/ragged-dick/

slacktivist: Ragged Dick (Fred Clark)


Oops, maps.me finally went away. It used to be a good app, it worked offline and almost all the screen was map. They gradually cluttered the screen with more and more junk, and now you can't download more than ten regional maps, not enough even for a whole country. It's now useless as an application for, like, viewing maps.

Are there any free apps for viewing OSM offline any more? #openstreetmap

Tobia Alberti mastodon (AP)
There’s also OsmAnd, if you’re looking for more advanced features/customisation 🙂
I tried OsmAnd. It says "You can download 6 maps for free", which is the reason I dumped maps.me in the first place. It's also far too willing to interpret my zooms as rotates, which meant I was constantly having to tap the compass icon to reset things to sanity.
rohden akkoma (AP)
And there is of course
#OsmAnd~
Global Mobile Map Viewing & Navigation for Offline and Online OSM Maps
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.osmand.plus/

Meat Lego Gnosticism put on a good show, but anything after the first two albums is unlistenable. https://crookedtimber.org/2023/08/09/mary-harrington-on-the-family/

Crooked Timber: Mary Harrington on the Family


I see. We're going with "x-en" are we? "Du x-st". "Sie hatte ge-x-t". This is how it's gonna work?


https://ard.social/users/tagesschau/statuses/110800392909844182

Does anyone know a good place to go for a coffee?

This MS Teams parody account I follow never fails to disappoint. If you love kafkacapitalist cyberhorror with a surreal twist, you can't do much better. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/announcing-the-new-maybelline-beauty-app-in-microsoft-teams/ba-p/3877999

TECHCOMMUNITY.MICROSOFT.COM: Announcing the New Maybelline Beauty App in Microsoft Teams



#SixthTone: Amid Twitter Chaos, Japanese Illustrators Flock to Weibo – And Welcomed With Open Arms


Been too long since I've been in touch with the music scene in Chengdu. So good to hear something new from 开山刀! #ElectronicMusic #ChineseArt #Trance

YouTube: Kaishandao - Return to Warp Room (Official Music Video)


Thanks @Charlie Owen for the tip to get a MH-Z19. I now know that the CO2 levels in here are AAAHH FUCK AAAAHH.

PyPI: mh-z19


Is There Any Twinge of Regret Among the Anti-Abortion Justices?


First thought was, Betteridge's law says "no".

Second thought, I bet the final paragraph says "no".

Final paragraph:

So no, I don’t think the Dobbs justices are sorry...


The great thing about the NYT is that it's so digestible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/opinion/abortion-supreme-court-dobbs.html

The New York Times: Opinion | Is There Any Twinge of Regret Among the Anti-Abortion Justices? (Linda Greenhouse)

newer older