@bigiain@aus.social avatar

bigiain

@bigiain@aus.social

Coffee, motorcycles, music, microcontrollers, and Oxford commas. I like to pretend I’m a geek, not a nerd.

Turns out I don't seem to talk much coffee or motorcycles here. (Not entirely sure why? I do motorcycles pretty comprehensively on web forums, but I guess I'm not geeking about coffee much online these days.) And I talk a bit more (Australian) politics than I realised (looking back through my account).

So mostly non-gaming geek stuff, infosec, privacy, music.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

decryption, to random
@decryption@aus.social avatar

warning!!

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bigiain,
@bigiain@aus.social avatar

@decryption >sings>Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me. Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.

bigiain, to random
@bigiain@aus.social avatar

The dreams of the 90s are alive in Sydney

decryption, to random
@decryption@aus.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @decryption While waiting for the image to load I was yelling “Dogcow!” ;-)

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @decryption It’d be just wrong if it wasn’t pixelated.

    JuliusGoat, to random
    @JuliusGoat@mastodon.social avatar

    Isn't it interesting that every killing by every cop is just a single bad apple that should never be thought to spoil the bunch, while every protest by and on behalf of marginalized people must be flawlessly perfect, or all participants deserve the brutality the police exist to deliver to them?

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @StreetDogg @JuliusGoat Reolace “protest” with “police force” in that comment. Holds at least as true that way. And police forces do have hierarchies that could enforce that, unlike protests.

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @StreetDogg @JuliusGoat I don’t think I agree with your assertion that a protest that has assholes show up is a shitty protest. Certainly not in anything like the way that police forces with asshole employees is a shitty police force…

    golgaloth, to random
    @golgaloth@writing.exchange avatar

    "May you have your own Wikipedia entry."
    Ancient curse

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @golgaloth “May you live within Category:Wikipedia notability guidelines.” — Modern curse

    coffeegeek, to coffee
    @coffeegeek@flipboard.social avatar

    Really liking this scale from DiFluid.

    It's the same price as the Acaia Pearl ($150) but IMO, has a lot more functionality and a way, way better (and frequently updated) app.

    Link: ⬇️
    https://amzn.to/3W9LR7k

    cc @coffee

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @ocramius I did some hardware/software consulting a long time back for someone wanting to design/manufacture an espresso focused scale. There’s a bunch of non obvious things to consider. The big one is that load cells create very low level electrical signals and are hence “noisy”, so everyone uses averages over time to get readable weights. Some scales I’ve reviewed take several seconds worth of average readings, which means you always overshoot when measuring an increasing weight - like grounds coming out of a grinder or espresso coming out of a portafilter. There’s also espresso related features like automatically starting a timer as soon as it detects the first drop of espresso, or sounding an alarm when a set yield weight is reached. And logging of dose/yield weights. You can do way better than just another kitchen scale if you try.

    @coffeegeek @coffee

    coffeegeek, to coffee
    @coffeegeek@flipboard.social avatar

    OMFG.

    Option-O has a new consumer-focused grinder coming out. The Lagom Casa. Look freakin' awesome. Up to 65mm conical burrs inside. Monster.

    Link: ⬇️
    https://www.option-o.com/lagom-casa

    cc @espresso @coffee

    Lagom Casa grinder in aluminum and black anodized
    Grinder size of the Lagom Casa

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @RoboticistDuck @coffeegeek @smallerdemon @espresso @coffee Boats: holes in the water surrounded by wood into which you throw money.

    reginasbread, to random
    @reginasbread@homo.promo avatar

    I'm convinced my coffee smells like brussels sprouts. am I dying? which deadly disease has symptoms like this?

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @reginasbread Is it potato flavor maybe? https://garciacoffee.com/coffee-basics-potato-taste-defect/

    lauren, to random
    @lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org avatar

    At least there's a "right to repair" for the Voyager probes.

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @lauren “I’m sorry, you need to return your Voyager probe to your closest JohnDeere/Apple repair facility.”

    bigiain, to random
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    Idea: A browser plugin that scrapes my Spotify recently played page, looking for tracks with fewer than 1000 streams, and hunts for the artist website looking for donation links or Patreon pages - so I can send them money to make up for what Spotify is stealing.

    https://mixmag.net/read/spotify-has-officially-demontised-all-tracks-under-1-000-streams-news

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @Sibbo I propose a xz style subversion of the code or a dependency, to ensure ffmpeg runs poorly on Windows and Azure.

    CindyWeinstein, to animals
    @CindyWeinstein@zirk.us avatar

    Attention !

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @davenicolette @CindyWeinstein Be very careful there, if you do that across state lines it becomes a federal case…

    cstross, to random
    @cstross@wandering.shop avatar

    Raspberry Pi is planning a London IPO, but its CEO expects “no change” in focus

    — Yeah, right.

    I am looking forward to my Raspberry Pi 7 which will arrive with Windows 11 pre-installed, cost a mere £25, and use the bottom 25% of the desktop for streaming ads (while snooping on my every keystroke). Because this is how enshittification proceeds …

    https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/raspberry-pi-is-preparing-for-an-ipo-in-london-for-likely-more-than-500m/

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @cstross And it comes with a SIM card so the camera and microphone feeds are sent to police surveillance 24x7 even when there’s no network connection. And there’s no way to switch that off.

    decryption, to random
    @decryption@aus.social avatar

    deleted_by_author

    •
    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @decryption
    “The Best Minds of My Generation Are Thinking About How To Make People Click Ads.” — Jeff Hammerbacher

    https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/

    evacide, to random
    @evacide@hachyderm.io avatar

    Oh look, it's another company that's very excited about building the Torment Nexus: https://www.404media.co/cmg-cox-media-actually-listening-to-phones-smartspeakers-for-ads-marketing/

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @evacide CMG Local Solutions have redirected the "Active Listening" page on their website and in their nav menus to their homepage, presumably to hide this now it's become known wider than they'd like.

    Luckily: https://web.archive.org/web/20231012202312/https://www.cmglocalsolutions.com/cmg-active-listening

    "It's True. Your Devices Are Listening to You."

    "Is this legal? YES- it is TOTALLY legal for phones and devices to listen to you. That's because consumers USUALLY give consent " (capitalised emphasis mine)

    timbray, to random
    @timbray@cosocial.ca avatar

    Hear me out: Murderbot is coming to the screen. In the books, the “feed” is a big part of all the conversations. So for the show, they should have a scrolling text pane somewhere on the screen showing the feed including MB’s private grouching. Next level: have the main shot be MB’s PoV with all sorts of apparatus and read-outs and multiple little drone-view screens and so on.

    cough @marthawells cough

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @timbray @marthawells I'm quietly hoping for entire episodes which turn out to be something like episode 237 of The Rise And Fall Of Sanctuary Moon or episode 126 of Worldhoppers. Would entire spinoff series for each of Murderbot and ART's favourite shows be too much to hope for???

    gregeganSF, to random
    @gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz avatar

    Automated sludge at its finest:
    “FunSearch: Making new discoveries in mathematical sciences utilizing Massive Language Fashions”

    (Stumbled on thanks to hundreds of similar spam link-backs on Terry Tao’s blog, https://terrytao.wordpress.com.)

    https://techtrendz.org/funsearch-making-new-discoveries-in-mathematical-sciences-utilizing-massive-language-fashions/

    Also:

    “Google DeepMind used a big language mannequin to find new math”

    https://enjbs.com/google-deepmind-used-a-big-language-mannequin-to-find-new-math/

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @SnoopJ @gregeganSF @mcc The academic fraud detective community call those "tortured phrases". And you don't need ChatGPT to do that, lazy but motivated journal spammers and paper mills have been doing that for decades with a thesaurus and search/replaces.

    "According to Cabanac, he couldn’t understand why researchers in several articles were using phrases like “Colossal Information” instead of “Big Data” or “Haze Figuring” instead of “Cloud Computing” and began to search for those kinds of expressions in various databases.

    Cabanac went on to find some 860 papers that featured one or more of these tortured phrases, and that 31 of those phrases were published in a single journal: Microprocessors and Microsystems." -- https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2021/08/10/using-tortured-phrases-to-spot-problematic-papers/

    gabek, to random

    I respond to VCs about Owncast pretty often, and I’ve never been super transparent about it. So here’s a response I just sent.

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @gabek “Lets circle back later. I’ll leverage available stakeholder bandwidth to see if there’s a deliverable we can re synergise as a zero sum pivot to move the needle and ensure there’s no cash left on the table.” @darkcisum

    atomicpoet, to random

    I now understand why people use fenced code blocks in Markdown. It’s because if you don’t, people will think they’re seeing code as a result of an error in their webpage rendering.

    This possibility never occurred to me until someone complained that a post of mine was “unreadable”. They thought they weren’t supposed to see the HTML.

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @atomicpoet This is the oldest archived copy of my personal website from over 20 years ago. I got many many confused complaints about my web server config. https://web.archive.org/web/20011102031149/http://www.mightymedia.com.au/~bigiain/

    bigiain, to random
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    il pleure. In Marrickville. Now listening to:

    “When Debussy died on March the 25, 1918 in Paris, it was being bombarded by the Germans, and it was raining.” — Art of Noise.

    bigiain, to random
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    NSW Police considering using "extraordinary powers" for the clearly serious crime of <checks notes> "a form not being submitted within the required time frame".

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-13/nsw-sydney-rally-extraordinary-powers-weekend-rally/102972746

    ACAB

    bigiain, to random
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    So apparently my Youtube Premium paid account can no longer see the YouTube homepage unless I switch watch history on.

    Now wondering how much I really want to be paying them $12 per month.

    ajsadauskas, to startup
    @ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

    Hi, we're a tech startup run by libertarian Silicon Valley tech bros.

    We're not a newspaper, we're a content portal.
    We're not a taxi service, we're a ride sharing app.
    We're not a pay TV service, we're a streaming platform.
    We're not a department store, we're an e-commerce marketplace.
    We're not a financial services firm, we're crypto.
    We're not a space agency, we're a group of visionaries who are totally going to Mars next year.
    We're not a copywriting and graphic design agency, we're a large language model generative AI platform.

    Oh sure, we compete against those established businesses. We basically provide the same goods and services.

    But we're totally not those things. At least from a legal and PR standpoint.

    And that means all the laws and regulations that have built up over the decades around those industries don't apply to us.

    Things like consumer protections, privacy protections, minimum wage laws, local content requirements, safety regulations, environmental protections... They totally don't apply to us.

    Even copyright laws — as long as we're talking about everyone else's intellectual property.

    We're going to move fast and break things — and then externalise the costs of the things we break.

    We've also raised several billion in VC funding, and we'll sell our products below cost — even give them away for free for a time — until we run our competition out of the market.

    Once we have a near monopoly, we'll enshitify the hell out of our service and jack up prices.

    You won't believe what you agreed to in our terms of service agreement.

    We may also be secretly hoarding your personal information. We know who you are, we know where you work, we know where you live. But you can trust us.

    By the time the regulators and the general public catch on to what we're doing, we will have well and truly moved on to our next grift.

    By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!

    @technology

    bigiain,
    @bigiain@aus.social avatar

    @ajsadauskas @technology "By the way, don't forget to check out our latest innovation. It's the Uber of toothpaste!"

    From: noreply@tøøther.com
    Subject: Account closure

    Dear User,

    You have been rated 3 stars or lower by our toothbrushing partners in the last 14 days. For this reason we are closing your Tøøther account and revoking your toothpaste access. This decision is final and there is no appeal process.

    Best regards,

    Tøøther Trust And Safety Team.

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