sinbad

baldur, 2 days ago to random

“Distracted”

https://lmnt.me/blog/distracted.html

> This industry used to sell solutions. Now it sells nothing, disguised as possibility.

dougbinks, 4 days ago to random

A good reason to use colour rather than color in your code is that colour has the same number of letters as both albedo and normal so you can align your code better.

GossiTheDog, 5 days ago to random

Google search thinks you should use glue to stick together a pizza as its AI is trained on Reddit, where 11 years ago a user called “fucksmith” posted suggesting it was a good idea.

MysticBearPaw, 5 days ago to random

"Grandpa! Grandpa! Tell us again when blogs were printed on shiny paper filled with colorful ads that were not more relevant." Well, kids, those were called magazines and they sometimes had contests offering prizes like these back in the year 2000. #ThrowbackThurday #gamer #goodies

sinbad, 5 days ago to DuckDuckGo

And just to add an extra rancid cherry on top this morning, #duckduckgo isn't working this morning. Site is accessible but search results don't work, I guess MS has been updating the Bing API or something and ruining that too.

toxi, 6 days ago to random

Some thoughts about current state/trajectory of tech/software/ethics:

For ~30 years, I've been using, building and sharing open tools around algorithmic, generative & evolutionary design techniques, procedural generation, genetic algorithms/programming, machine learning... The incentives and potentials I saw (and still see!) in these areas/approaches are entirely orthogonal to what is called "generative AI" these days (saving that for a future post) and more importantly contrary to how that tech is being used...

Like many others, I'm desperately trying to keep a positive & balanced mind (also in terms of my own practice as an indie developer/researcher & artist), but I think it says a lot (in multiple ways) about the current state of tech/software/ethics, if the people/voices most critical and outspoken about the current/recent trajectories & decisions are (yet again[1]) the actual practitioners/experts of the field, often with decades of experiences... At the very least the issues raised should give some pause to people in politics/policy, academia/education, media and finance, i.e. all groups with much more direct control & responsibility, yet which are relatively silent in terms of critical voices/reflections and instead largely keep boosting and jumping on the AI hype train... I think I understand (though not agree with) many (self-serving) drivers of this "ignorance", but I've never seen this level of widespread uncritical technology adoption before in my life, especially the bewildering amount of willful ignorance of people who are (or should be) more informed, their active downplaying and rationalisations of multiple glaring systematic train wrecks (aka "jackpot") coming our way (are already here!), incl. climate, water, human rights violations, disinformation, politics/democracy, surveillance, unemployment, health/healthcare etc., and on a different level, pretty important issues like loss of "personal computing", of access (and accessibility!) and individual control of computing & information resources — all of which are massively accelerated by this in(s)ane drive for AI-generated profits...

What's the point of the above named societal institutions if none of them actually want to critically engage with these developments, before their window of opportunity closes?

(Sorry in advance, just a braindump, not gonna be able to reply to comments in the next few days...)

[1] Everyone Is a Luddite Now: https://www.wired.com/story/everyone-is-a-luddite-now/

distractal, 7 days ago to random

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/microsofts-new-recall-feature-will-record-everything-you-do-on-your-pc/?comments=1&comments-page=1

What in the fresh hell

hk, 11 days ago to random

"Twitter has stopped working on Firefox!"

baldur, 16 days ago to random

One of the things that the Stack Overflow brouhaha demonstrates is that it doesn’t matter if a service was founded by people trusted by the community (Atwood and Spolsky) and was broadly community-led. If it’s a VC-funded startup, they will sell out their users at some point.

eniko, 16 days ago to random

For my birthday, I'd really like it if my beloved fedi could spread word far and wide of Kitsune Tails. It's a platformer with a heartwarming story featuring queer main characters and personal discoveries in classic SMB3 style. You can find trailer, screenshots, and wishlist links here: https://kitsunegames.com/kitsunetails

It's coming out this year and the team and I have been working hard on it for several years now. Most of the team is queer in some form so by boosting you'd not only be making me happy on my birthday, but supporting a bunch of queer creators making queer art as well

yuzu kitsune tails, a purple haired fox girl, picks up samurai armor in a tower that's rapidly filling with lava. she jumps away from the rising lava and sticks her spear in the wall, doing a dashing twirl to get on top of it. she walks off the spear and into a new scene, fighting a ghost fox with armor and spear. it stabs and she jumps over, but is caught by a follow up stab. the ghost fox over extends and its ghostly powers wane, giving yuzu a chance to bop on its head

nixCraft, 18 days ago to random

¯_(ツ)_/¯

ben, 22 days ago to random

Stack Overflow announced that they are partnering with OpenAI, so I tried to delete my highest-rated answers.

Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community.

So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message.

Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days.

Diff view of a stack overflow question showing it being changed from the original text to a protest message, then being changed back again by a mod. Protest text reads: Why does OpenAI get to profit from our work? I have removed this question in protest of Stack Overflow's decision to partner with OpenAI. This move steals the labour of everyone who contributed to Stack Overflow with no way to opt-out. OpenAI has a history of flooding the web with inaccurate information and have explicitly stated that they will never pay creators for their work.

mshaw, 22 days ago to random

I think the mistake a lot of people make with so-called AI is in assuming it's an innovation analogous to like, the internet or automobiles, when really a better point of comparison would be DDT or radium toothpaste

selzero, 23 days ago to VintageOSes

Did you used to make computer games using STOS or AMOS?

I tried but I was too young to afford the resources I needed and ended up using copies pirated from friends. Even so it was a much better experience than the other development environments I was using at the time.

#RetroGame #AtariST #Amiga #Atari #Commodore #RetroComputing

AMOS The development environment for Amiga game programming.

andrew, 24 days ago to random

The best part about the London mayoral election? That the massively racist party (Britain First) are so unpopular that they were beaten by a man with a bin on his head (Count Binface).

jimray, 2 months ago to random

Me, an idiot: “So, kids, by setting the thermostat a little lower and eating less meat, we’re doing our part to make the world more sustainable”

VCs, very smart: “We just raised $100 billion dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of three petrostates to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer. It uses as much power and water as Guatemala and the primary use case is for management consultants to autogenerate powerpoints for justifying mass layoffs.”

sinbad, 5 months ago to random

You probably all already know this, but since I only got around to installing it relatively recently - I’m slow to take on new sw, maybe you too - PowerToys is fantastic & everyone on Win should use it. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/#current-powertoy-utilities

All those QoL things you wish Windows had are here; window layouting, easy access to accented characters like macOS, file quick look like macOS, Alt+Space quick launch like ma…

Look it takes a lot of stuff from macOS before Apple became like they are now. This is good