Would you approve of a seditious conspiracy to destroy the rightful government of the United States of America? Click here to be added to the list.

It’s okay, everybody relax. I’m here.

Sounds like a good way to hone your horoscope-writing skill.

Paid and freeware but either way non-free, unfortunately.

I mean it’s better than nothing I guess but that is not what I’d call “freely available.” In addition to requiring that you use their shitty online viewer, it appears to require users to sign in to an account even to do that. It’s directly admitted on the website that they make it unusable in this way specifically because they rely on the revenue from selling real access to people who need it.

Sorry, but we can only get so much security by giving up your privacy, now we need the kind of security that can only be bought by giving up your security as well.

Eraserhead

Microwaving is cooking. Vibe coding is to microwaving what staring at the food and pretending you have heat-ray vision is to microwaving.

It’s the game of Go. Also known as baduk, weiqi, igo. It’s a board game known for being pretty old.

Cameras in the house? That is still creepy.

I wouldn’t be willing to disable my vpn for the nyt so thanks for confirming that it wouldn’t have made a difference. It appears that they now block everyone who doesn’t let javascript freely do whatever it wants to fingerprint you or whatever. I’ll not miss them too much.

Mastodon is very bad at fetching replies, if you have a small instance I think you need to add some other software to do that: https://blog.thms.uk/fedifetcher

Your “empirical” sample size of one may be too small to get an accurate reading on the views of contemporary Christianity.

Yep. It sends me to fsf.org. If the link goes here or anywhere else and such things bother you, fix your “referer” settings.

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

Well that’s an interesting development, which people seem to have begun experimenting with in the past few weeks. Of course for the time being I suppose it’s made somewhat easier for the relays by 99% of the users being hosted on the small collection of official bsky.network PDS servers.

Some more discussion of it in which there may be hints as to how atproto people might slowly progress towards reinventing some of the things we take for granted on the fediverse.

If they don’t crawl the entire network then most of the network cannot contact them at all? Which makes it … not really a network. That’s where federation would come in.

Really? I thought there were only two. How are the small ones able to afford the bandwidth to monitor everything from every PDS?

Right… it did take me a minute to remember how the relays work. Well, when there are a few hundred of them we’ll see how it goes.

Hmm, let’s see if I remember the terminology correctly:

Client apps have nothing to do with it, obviously.

Alternate appviews have nothing to do with it, except in that they’d presumably need to work with whatever form of atproto federation exists, if any did.

Alternate relays aren’t federated unless there’s some protocol for routing messages between them — such as ActivityPub.