@VoxDei@qoto.org
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

VoxDei

@VoxDei@qoto.org

Software Engineer, Trade Unionist, Gamer, Geek, Dad. Lives in Devon

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pluralistic, to random
@pluralistic@mamot.fr avatar

I have been a published writer since I was 17, and never in all those years have I encountered worse editorial suggestions than the automated ones generated by Microsoft Office365.

Makes Clippy look like EB White.

VoxDei,
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@pluralistic But but but AI! Copilot! It's the Future of Everything! AI AI AI AI Buy our stuff pleeeeeeease!!!

drandrewv2, to random
@drandrewv2@freeradical.zone avatar

You. Absolute. Bastards.

If anyone knows of a crowdfunder to support this man’s legal challenge, I would like to contribute to it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-69016539

VoxDei,
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@Jethrotombs @drandrewv2 I was looking for that too, thank you! Was bizarre to me that the BBC mentioned his lawyers were crowdfunding but didn't provide a link.

VoxDei,
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@drandrewv2 @Jethrotombs Yeah, I wondered if it might be that. Kind of felt like it was a relevant link to something mentioned in the story though and therefore reporting it was apolitical.

(I'm aware that the government doesn't think this way and therefore the BBC can't either. ;-) )

garius, to random
@garius@mastodon.me.uk avatar

Rebranding myself as an eco-friendly alternative to ChatGPT.

Ask me a question and I'll mansplain an answer to you, while consuming much less water and energy.

VoxDei,
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@garius You have to make sure you make half of it up though. Otherwise you're not doing it right.

VoxDei, to windows
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

My PC has just told me that it can't run Windows 11, but that Windows 10 will be out of support from October 2025. I have news for you Microsoft, I don't have a spare £1k (or even half that) for a new gaming rig just because you don't like mine. It'll be Linux for me if you force me.

drandrewv2, to random
@drandrewv2@freeradical.zone avatar

Reader: I finished; I left the job.

Now I’ve got a week off to gather myself a bit, but I’ve been bat-signalled back to my native trade union: home with my fellow nerds, and among the shades of my literal ancestors… and at SUCH a time for union-building & intelligence!

VoxDei,
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@drandrewv2 Glad to have you back then! And I'm techy rather than sciencey these days, but you know where I am if I can be useful. :-)

VoxDei,
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@drandrewv2 You're back to Prospect? Yay if so, I'm still a member, though no longer at an employer who recognises them.

drandrewv2, to random
@drandrewv2@freeradical.zone avatar

Unite (the union) is lobbying Labour to row back on pledge of no new North Sea oil & gas licenses…

Genuinely interested to hear what people think of this…

I trained in climate science, and now work for a union (formerly and soon to be back in an energy sector union), so I have very strong and possibly conflicting views on the subject!

Tell me your wildest thoughts on workers’ protections in the energy transition. You probably can’t shock me…
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/17/union-urges-labour-not-to-ban-new-north-sea-licences-without-plan-for-jobs

VoxDei,
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@drandrewv2 The bottom line is, it has to happen. The alternative is either unacceptable or it's a fatalistic "We're all screwed anyway so why should we sacrifice?"

That being the case, the people who we're asking to make the sacrifice (the oil and gas industry workers) deserve support from the rest of us. I don't know what shape that takes, but we definitely owe it to them.

VoxDei, to random
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@astrelion @dungeons You're famous. 😂

https://www.pcgamer.com/yet-another-reason-to-ditch-musks-twitter-you-can-play-a-crowdsourced-dungeons-and-dragons-campaign-over-on-mastodon/

drandrewv2, to random
@drandrewv2@freeradical.zone avatar

Sigh.

Deeper sigh.

Yes, buy better if you can. Waste less if you can. Buy less as a consequence.

But watch where you point your sanctimony.

Patrick Grant is gunning for the businesses taking advantage, but risks a ricochet onto people who really don’t have as much choice as some moralists imagine.

If you only have £20 to buy shoes, you have no choice but to buy something cheap, even if it’s almost disposable.

As usual, the ‘good’ choices are the preserve of wealth.
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/article/2024/may/18/is-this-what-people-wear-now-sewing-bee-host-criticises-ms-jumpers-and-socks

VoxDei,
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@drandrewv2 Oh, someone beat me to it. Well, great minds!

VoxDei,
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@drandrewv2 Terry Pratchett said this best.

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and <i>would still have wet feet.</i>"

VoxDei, to Russia
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

The Russians can do what they like in sorting out how their rebellion goes. Mostly it's a question of which unpleasant dictator is in control. If Putin wins, presumably little changes other than that Russia has spent a load of resources fighting itself.

There are two questions I care about, if Prigozhin wins:

  1. Would he continue the war in Ukraine? He's already said the pretext was false, so maybe less likely than Putin?

  2. If he does, is he more or less likely than Putin to escalate to a direct confrontation with NATO?

I want the Russians out of Ukraine and I want not to have a nuclear war in the process. I'm rooting for whichever side makes that more likely.

VoxDei, to uk
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

I live in Devon. I am under a hosepipe ban. My supplier (South West Water) is very kindly suggesting some "easy wins" for me to save water, like taking less time in the shower, or using my washing machine less. It reckons that this way my household could save 12 litres per person per day, for a total of 48 litres saved per day, or about 18,000 litres per year. Sounds like a lot, right?

Yeah. The thing is, South West Water (in common with the other privatised water companies) lost 90 million litres per day in leaks in the last year for which data are available (https://www.ofwat.gov.uk/publication/leakage-dataset-march-2023/). And even that is likely a significant under-estimate, because it's under investigation by the regulator on suspicion of mis-reporting its leak figures. It has also paid out £112M in dividends to shareholders this week, while kindly putting my bills up, so sorry, we need money for investment to stop dumping all this sewage we're dumping. Illegally.

My little 48 litres is a literal drop in the ocean. Why on Earth would I put myself out when it will make not a blind bit of difference to the water available for general use?

In absolute terms, 18kl per year feels like a lot, granted. But the sheer effrontery of coming to me effectively cap in hand while handing out an actual fortune to their shareholders makes me want to just leave all my taps running.

South-West Water: Take the beam out of your own eye. Fix your flood of leaks before you come asking me to inconvenience myself to save (relatively speaking) drops. You've got the money for it, or at least you did before you gave it to your shareholders. Scum.

VoxDei, to random
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

I did not know this was a thing. Corporations effectively disabling your phone or your washing machine to force you to buy a new one is bad enough. Doing the same with your ears is disgusting. Especially if you didn't advise that this would happen before installation, and marketed it as "forever". Yet another "How do these people sleep at night?" moment.

https://www.sapiens.org/culture/planned-obsolescence-cochlear-implants/

rbreich, to random
@rbreich@masto.ai avatar

4 years ago, an exec for a top PPE producer testified to Congress that in Jan 2020 (as fear of covid began to spread) his firm offered to ramp up production to make 1.7 million N95 masks available to the public per week.

The Trump admin said no.

VoxDei,
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@rbreich I'm no Trump fan, but in this instance I'd offer up us in the UK as a counterexample. We said yes to everyone who was mates with a Tory MP offering to sell us PPE (and ignored those who weren't) and literally ended up with the guy who ran the health secretary's local pub getting a giant government contract. Billions of pounds spent on PPE that was unusable and simply burned.

Needed to take opportunities, yes. But also to have a process that worked.

setebos, to internet
@setebos@mastodon.online avatar

i'm a teapot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_Protocol

VoxDei,
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@setebos Have you seen https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7168 ? ;-)

VoxDei, to climate
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/27/project-2025-dismantle-us-climate-policy-next-republican-president?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

I wonder. At some point, deliberately raising your emissions will be regarded as a crime on a par with genocide. Because it is genocide, it's just slow and the responsibility is shared. I wonder at what point we will see the first threats to declare war if a country wilfully refuses to cut its GHG emissions.

Note that I do not doubt this will happen. Just when and who.

VoxDei, to random
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@drandrewv2 Just to check, have you seen https://a.gup.pe/u/actuallyautistic ? You probably have, but I haven't seen you ping them, so just in case it's useful to you. 🙂

VoxDei, to pcgames
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

Just finished Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It's really nice to see such an unapologetically pro-Trade-Union piece of work in a computer game. And a good computer game as well! I thoroughly recommend it both to those who like good games and those who could use an illustration of what collective action is for and what it can accomplish.

VoxDei, to spiders
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

Ooof. Never argue with an ant colony. Cleaning out a storage box in the garden. One corner has an ant colony in it, partially destroyed by my clearing. Also present: Two 3cm-ish false widow spiders, shiny black. Can't escape the box now the contents have been removed, sides are too smooth.

Left the job and went to have lunch, expecting to need to re-home the spiders. Figured they had plenty of ants to eat. On return, no sign of the smaller spider. The larger has had a disagreement with the ants. It has not ended at all well for the spider.

VoxDei, to ai
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

What we have at the moment isn't AGI and therefore its capacity for genuine harm is (I believe) limited. However, the idea that we seem to be teaching these things to deceive by accident is concerning.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/10/is-ai-lying-to-me-scientists-warn-of-growing-capacity-for-deception?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

VoxDei, to ai
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

Argh... reviewing a colleague's python code, and he's used ChatGPT or Copilot or some other AI "helper" to write a bunch of the code. And it's just got a load of "Why the hell have you done this?" bits. Especially in the unit tests - it really doesn't know how to write pytest tests.

If you don't know what you're doing it looks halfway reasonable, and it kind-of-sort-of works, but... you'd never write that code if you were doing it yourself.

VoxDei, to random
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

@drandrewv2 I feel like this thread will be of interest to you... https://twitter.com/jimrobottom/status/1793727207732613549

VoxDei, to uk
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

I have wanted to see this forever. This is outside Newton Abbot in Devon just before midnight. Doesn't look this dramatic to the naked eye, this is about a 3s exposure with a Google Pixel 7a.

The Aurora Borealis seen facing North-West from a hill outside Newton Abbot. There is a dark tree-lined skyline at the bottom of the image, the aurora fill the sky above. The aurora is red with brighter vertical lines in the centre and towards the top of the image, greenish towards the bottom.

VoxDei, to statistics
@VoxDei@qoto.org avatar

Particularly egregious misuse of stats from the Guardian: "Although more than a third of the women in the study had been sexually inactive during the past month, fewer than half expressed dissatisfaction with their sex lives."

Sooo... 1/3 inactive, >1/3 dissatisfied. And yet the article is trying to suggest it's at the other end of the scale by framing it as "fewer than half" and behaving as if it's surprising?

#stats #statistics #guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/may/13/i-often-say-the-journey-time-is-longer-how-to-make-sex-after-50-work-for-you

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