Elucidating

Elucidating, 7 days ago to random

The only thing I miss about X is getting to talk to people younger than 35.

Elucidating, 11 days ago to random

It's genuinely wild to me that folks sincerely believe that they should get YouTube for free. It does not cost $0 to run a video hosting website, as anyone with a peertube instances will tell you.

Elucidating, 11 days ago to random

Even among knowledge work, there are a ton of bullshit jobs.

Elucidating, 11 days ago to random

It's kinda heartening to see that a lot of the major tech news outlets are not giving AI stuff special treatment. In fact, they're being so honest that VCs and C*O's of very grifty AI companies are complaining and swearing off the press because they're being so utterly crucified in the review scene.

Elucidating, 17 days ago to random

I was talking to @ireneista and I realized I don't talk about #roguelike games enough.

By far the most unique rogue like I enjoy is Chronicles of Stampadia. It's an amazing project, a pen and paper daily rogue like. You can print it and play it on a plane or at an off the grid camp, as you would a crossword. Incredibly rewarding and the source is open.

https://github.com/kesiev/stampadia

Elucidating, 20 days ago to random

One thing that really bothers me about the "AI is an environmental nightmare" line is that any indictment of scaled AI is an indictment of cloud computing and irresponsibly located/powered data centers as a whole. The problems we see with water consumption, power use, and urban noise/air/light pollution existed and grew rapidly before LLMs and even before crypto.

But it's only for AI that we now see this widely deployed. Weird how many folks in software only want to talk about it in one frame

Elucidating, 20 days ago to random

While I'm being grouchy I wish I could demand my money back from Remarkable for their scam of a product.

Elucidating, 21 days ago to random

I am extremely skeptical of these "no inner voice" and "no internal reflection" studies, iih. They really reek of survey hacking.

Elucidating, 21 days ago to random

The ongoing sizzling of seething you hear from folks who are still not over the fact Torvalds doesn't think crypto is very good? Priceless.

Elucidating, 30 days ago to random

@danilo On that thing about money and family relationships, it makes me think what a massive divide there is in our various communities between "losing those relationships left me broken and alone" and "it was literally the best thing that could have happened / saved my life."

This is one of those bigger utterly irreconcilable differences.

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

I'm reading the interview of a hyper regressive anti trans person who runs the anti-trans bathroom line in Utah. They're mad they're getting so much obscene feedback, and they didn't want to run the service, and they oh... Want a more effective way to "protect women and girls" from the "menace" of trans people.

Gosh that German quisling who was so into protecting this agency on the grounds "they're just civil servants they probably don't even wanna do it" sure looks smart now. 🙄

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

Did you know Scott Siskind and the EAs have started their own Prager U style project called "Rational Animations"?

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

It's quite frustrating how folks can simultaneously say, "We should follow the science" but also "I don't care if Dunning Kruger is debunked, it's a useful tool to describe people."

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

Idk, folks. If you hate Adobe's use of AI so much maybe show them that by not using their products?

I'm not saying you can't also talk about how it makes you mad. But it is weird how you keep jamming your hand in the machine that makes you mad by chewing on your hand.

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

The problem with Google is not the search. It's the ad model of the Internet and their monopoly over that.

This, of course, indicts capitalism. So we won't talk about it

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

So is Mastodon like, worse than Hacker News for hammering sites now?

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

So of course Tesla's infamously erratic operations are getting more erratic over time. Now the supercharger network that was going to become the new mandated standard is now unstaffed and "only growing where critical".

But they've managed to get every other vendor to incur the cost of adopting their under-documented connector and data standard. Essentially hamstringing EV growth in many parts of the US.

And we said: it is bad to put Tesla in charge of this. I wish more folks listened.

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

Biz Stone is not a great person, and I say that from brief personal experience.

But uh... He's not exactly dangerous or irrelevant. I'd need to see the charter of the new nonprofit to see how dangerous his presence actually is.

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

The extremely strange thing about how Twitter and a decade of walled garden Internet has shaped people's brains is that I see people talking about how they want to "convert" other users to other activitypub experiences "better" than Mastodon.

Stop doing this. It's conquest brain. You're thinking like a VC. The point here is that all these systems can co-exist and organically compete. Stop trying to force things. You will only be the bad guy doing that.

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

Python's GvvR wrote a blog post on why multi-line lambdas aren't around in 2006. (ref: https://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=147358) It has aged like milk, and looks impossibly ridiculous in light of modern languages. But it also points out: A lot of "Pythonicity" isn't Pythonic because the community has decided it is. It's "Pythonic" because GvvR had control of the project and its purse strings, and he didn't like it.

Which is fine, for small projects. For Python in 2024, it's pretty outrageous.

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

Years ago, I had a pair of really nice Nikon camera bodies and some stellar lenses, but they were stolen out of my office (along with several laptops).

I was so busy with work and with being a new father, I put it out of my head. I used a very old Panasonic G1 body until it finally broke down after being abused as my streaming camera for years (yes, we hacked the firmware).

Now, I don't have a nice camera body and I find myself really wishing I had one.

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

Real estate is too expensive for even great restaurants to get started with. So they moved to serving out of trucks to get their business of the ground.

Real estate is too expensive for even great bookstores to keep going with, so they ... WE NEED MORE BOOKMOBILES!

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

Just a reminder in case folks forgot. A tiktok ban that isn't a sweeping social media practice reform is just racism and sinophobia.

Facebook has provably done much worse things, to Americans and American minors, than TikTok has been accused of doing.

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

I'm disappointed in the 404 media editors for allowing that GPU rental article to go to press. It's a bad and manipulative article designed to generate clicks with a bait headline, and part of the reason people trust 404 more than the average tech news site is that they don't often do that.

If they're gonna do that just because it's gasp fodder from the audience, we know where that road goes and it's not towards success.

Elucidating, 1 month ago to random

@danilo Hey, relevant to our interests.

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/