veronica

tjdraper, 19 days ago to random

Any company right now: You want some AI?

Me: Not particularly, thanks

Company: Got it, here's a big huge heaping helping of AI

Me: No thank you please

Company: Make job go fast, do vroom vroom on your career:

Me: I don't really…

Company: We put AI IN YOUR FREAKING MOUSE DRIVERS CAN YOU BELIEVE IT

Me: Kinda but not really

Company: Here's AI tools for your software engineering

Me: These are really obtrusive and in my w…

COMPANY: YOU WILL LOVE OUR AI

Me: …

veronica, 11 months ago to philosophy

I was looking through my collection of old GIFs, and found this gem. I had named the file "Life.gif" 😁

No idea where I got it from.

#Life #Gif #Distraction #Procrastinating

An animation of a bunch of little things going wrong: - A soda can getting stuck in the machine - Spoon sliding into soup - Basketball rolling around the edge of the basket - Dart hitting just outside the bullseye - Toast with jam falling upside down - Hammer hitting nail, and bending it - Fried egg with the yolk splitting - Dominoes falling in an arc, with one missing the next - A waiting room TV with a screen saver - Minigolf ball rolling around the edge of the hole - Download stuck at 99% - Pinball machine with ball falling exactly in the middle - A gas pump going to 49.98 then 50.01 - A rocket fuse burning, and then going out

veronica, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to Norway

Meanwhile, in Norway.

Photo: Adrian Smith / NRK

#Meanwhile #Norway #Snow #Winter

veronica, 8 months ago to tech

My new hand crafted VFD display desk clock finally arrived from Kyiv this weekend, and it looks really cool!

CC @ruari

Edit: Link to the shop https://www.etsy.com/no-en/shop/KirovNixie

#Nixie #HandCrafted #Retro #Tech #Etsy

veronica, 1 year ago to random

The divergence between Danish and Norwegian has a lot of little funny subtleties. I was just reading a Danish article referring to a national crime unit called "Nationale enhed for Særlig Kriminalitet (NSK)"

The word "særlig" is rather informal in Norwegian and often has the implied meaning of "yeah, right" in English.

Therefore, that name reads to me as something like:

The National Crime Unit for You Did What Now?

Which I find both reasonable and hilarious 😆

#Danish #Norwegian #Language

veronica, 3 months ago to discworld

“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to those who think they’ve found it.”

– Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

#Discworld #TerryPrachett #Quotes

veronica, 20 days ago to ai

A quick reminder that humans have not yet invented AI. It's an imitation puffed up by marketing. They've dressed up a parrot as Agent Smith.

#AI #LLM #Tech

veronica, 8 months ago to StarTrek

Seems that today is #SevenOfNineDay, so yay for all #StarTrek fans on here.

Also, 💖 to one of the coolest characters in Trek, and to @JeriLRyan 😊

veronica, 4 months ago to ads

Being interrupted by ads is far more likely to make me start avoiding a product or brand than actually buying their stuff because I start to associate them with being annoyed.

Clearly my reaction is not common enough to make ads unprofitable. It would be nice if it were.

Now that streaming services are re-introducing or forcing ads (like YouTube), I'm cancelling in return.

#Ads #Marketing #Streaming

veronica, 3 months ago to science

Nice. Our own little local "death star", Mimas has apparently been hiding an ocean.

"That's not a moon!"

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00345-9

#Science #Astronomy #Space #Saturn #Mimas #Nature

veronica, 8 days ago to stackoverflow

Well, fuck you Stack Overflow. I deleted my answers and have now deleted all my accounts.

#StackOverflow #AI #LLM

veronica, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to StarTrek

One of my favourite fun facts from Star Trek Deep Space Nine is that Morn, the guy that always sits in Quark's bar, was named after Norm from Cheers. 😁

Another fun fact about Morn is that the prosthetic piece that makes up the head does allow the actor to speak, but the character was never given a spoken line in the entire seven seasons of the show. 1/2

#StarTrek #DS9 #Morn #FunFact #SciFi

veronica, 9 months ago to internet

Way to miss the point, Wired.

Meta's metric is "engagement" and "time spent". I don't think anyone disputes that these algorithms increase these.

The argument isn't even necessarily that algorithmic timelines are fundamentally bad, but that what they do, for the sake of profit, is unhealthy.

Personally, I wouldn't mind a view on here with a selection of what I missed since last time, of the stuff I follow.

#Meta #Facebook #Algorithm #Timeline #SocialMedia #Research

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-just-proved-people-hate-chronological-feeds/

veronica, 9 months ago to IT

I have a naming convention for my Linux computers. Laptops and desktops are named after TV characters I like, and my servers are named after Greek goddesses.

My new desktop PC, where I'm posting this from, has been named Ahsoka. 😊

The old one was named Aeryn, and my laptops are named Leia (mine) and Xena (this one is from work).

In the past, I've also used Leela, Rey, Ripley, Seven, Arya, and Trinity. A lot of them were work computers.

#Computers #Names #Linux #TV #SciFi

veronica, 11 months ago to programming

The new GitHub code browser is a really nice improvement. When documentation is insufficient, or I need more details, I often look at a library's source code. Often, I've cloned it in order to look at it properly locally, but the new code browser makes that almost always unnecessary.

#Code #Programming #GitHub

veronica, 10 months ago to threads

A highlight of today's news cycle has been reading about how Meta/Threads fear the EU privacy laws and therefore stay away due to "regulatory uncertainty", or as it is better know: sensible protection against corporate exploitation.

Working as intended!

#Threads #SocialMedia #Fediverse

veronica, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago) to StarTrek

Latest Blogpost:

With the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, I just had to write a post about the new era of Trek. It's about more than just this episode, but I spend some time on comparing it to similar episodes too. 😊

https://berglyd.net/blog/2023/06/star-trek-snw-is-really-good-trek/

Note: Replies to this toot can be loaded under the blog post.

#StarTrek #StrangeNewWorlds #SciFi #Blog

veronica, 4 months ago to movies

Someone needs to make a bromantic comedy titled "Love, Well Actually".

#Movies #Film

veronica, 10 months ago to Quotes

"There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime."

– Terry Pratchett (Discworld, Thief of Time)

#Quotes #TerryPratchett #Discworld

veronica, 3 months ago to web

"Just install this addon" is not a solution to privacy issues on the web. It's a temporary fix, or a workaround, but not a solution. The real solution is regulation, and enforcement of it.

#Web #Privacy #GDPR #DSA

veronica, 1 month ago to opensource

The people who do the translation work for my open source app are awesome. I pushed new translation files just a few hours ago, and new notifications for completed translations have been popping in one by one.

#OpenSource #i18n

veronica, 9 months ago to python

Ok, so #Topaz Video AI has a pretty horrible user interface, with very limited options, but you can export the actual #ffmpeg command needed to run the AI model.

I spent a few hours last night writing a #Python script to loop over a bunch of episodes from my #StarTrek DS9 DVDs and generate 20 second samples at full HD #upscale using ffmpeg directly.

The samples look pretty good actually, so I'm gonna try and run through the first season to test properly.

DVD on the left, HD on the right.

veronica, 20 days ago to discworld

"Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone."

― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

Happy birthday Terry!

#Discworld #Quotes #TerryPratchett

veronica, 11 months ago to opensource

Question for developers releasing on Windows.

Is there an affordable way to sign installers for Windows for an open source project?

The code signing certificates I've seen all cost significantly more than the rate of donations to my project, but the friction unsigned installers cause is significant for the users.

#OpenSource #Code #Windows

veronica, 19 days ago to programming

Over the last three weeks I've been tinkering with adding a footnotes feature to @novelwriter. It was non-trivial, as I had to come up with a syntax for it, make the indexer handle it, and add build support into HTML, markdown and Open Document. The latter took a fair bit of tinkering too.

But it is done, and merged! The final diff was +2,181 −1,338. Quite a lot, although I took the opportunity to clean up and extend some tests. Coverage's now at 99.61% 😁

#Programming #Python #Sunday