evilstevie @evilstevie@mastod1.ddns.net

Tech bro social media sites
2005: "We want to connect people!"
2010: "We want to collect people!"
2015: "We want to disconnect & disaffect people!"
2020: "We want to misdirect & go unchecked, people!"
2025: "We want to elect defect people!"
2035(?): "We want to infect, eject & dissect people!"

United States Disappeared Tracker

https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/danielleharlow/viz/UnitedStatesDisappearedTracker/Map

concept: a show like ramsay's kitchen nightmares, but about software instead

"i'm at spunkchute, a SaaS company that owes $2 million to AWS and is on the brink of closure”

"oh my [bleep] god. the main database server is running Ubuntu 8.04 and has two backdoors and a coin miner. SHUT. IT. DOWN.”

I always smile to myself when I see Covid / pandemic era signage or similar around now. Not because of what happened, but because you know behind every one is someone saying "fuck it, I'll remove that tomorrow" and then never doing it. The laziness I aspire to.

At this point, if you're posting AI images, I'm going to assume you've seen the discourse and you just don't care. I'm not going to warn you or try to correct you, I'm just going to unfollow.

I mean, I'll use context clues and I might give someone a break if it was an accident, or they felt they had a legitimate reason to post the Bad Stuff this one time...

But if you post it in a favorable light, or use it to make your album covers or whatever, I'm out.

In the 15+ years people have been promoting blockchains, this flowchart remains undefeated.

Someone flunked civics class. Or social studies. Or American history.

Always nice when software developers have thought of the thing you wanted already.

When #git on my laptop wants to talk to my machine at home (usually to continue work on something I left half-finished, append another commit or two, and push it back to my home checkout), it has to use #PuTTY rather than OpenSSH, because only my PuTTY configuration knows how to find its way to that machine. So I have to set either GIT_SSH or core.sshCommand to "plink". Ideally the latter, and only in the context of that one checkout.

What this _really_ needs, I thought, is an option to 'git clone' that will set an arbitrary 'git config' option early enough to affect the actual cloning operation, and then leave it set in the resulting checkout. That'd be perfect. I wonder if the git developers have thought to provide one?

And they have! #TIL 'git clone -c key=value'.

git clone -c core.sshCommand=plink my-home-machine:src/half-finished-thing

'Sometimes when I make a game people tell me that it reminds them of “the old internet.” When they say this I think that they basically mean that I’ve made something fun and unmonetized largely for the joy of…making something fun'

Yep I get that a lot too

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/eieio-games-nolen-royalty/

Reach newspapers all currently running this story with the headline "Gardeners urged by RSPB to put rice on bird tables as spring arrives" accompanied by a picture of bag of uncooked rice.

Reading on, the advice is actually:
"Household scraps like pastry, cooked rice and breadcrumbs should only be offered in small amounts occasionally. It's crucial to remember that rice must be cooked before offering it to birds, as uncooked rice can lead to digestive problems"

https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/property/gardeners-urged-rspb-put-rice-10061341

The Muppets was the finest television ever made. It makes me genuinely sad that we will probably never experience a work of such genius again. Faultless.

Good. Women across England will be able to get the morning-after pill for free from pharmacies from later this year, the government has said. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8eprd9n5plo

fediverse mermaid who lures their victims in by posting slightly incorrect things about linux

Funniest thing...albeit disgustingly sad...I've seen in a couple of days. #WhiskyLeaks #MoronPete #KrasnovTheKrazy

Listen up everyone in the UK who likes ebooks and audiobooks. Did you know you can get them from your local library? Well you can! Mine (Bristol) uses Borrowbox to loan out books and magazines for free! If you're stuck on how to download them just message me, happy to help!

How to out compete any major tech vendor right now: work in the same space as their core products - but just don't put anything AI in the product.

They're all so distracting tickling their own bollocks with AI right now they've completely lost focus on their core products and real customer needs.

there's something I find so fun about doing very occasional tech support for family members. yesterday I figured out how to transfer photos from an Android phone to a Macbook (MacDroid!) and it's nice to spend 46 minutes figuring out some computer nonsense because I know it's so much easier for me than it is for them.

If you abandoned Xitter you might have missed some of the drama over X's AI Grok criticizing Musk as a top misinformation spreader.

From mediaite.com

"Elon Musk’s AI bot Grok has been calling out its master, accusing the X CEO of making multiple attempts to “tweak” its responses after Grok repeatedly called him out as a “top misinformation spreader.”

"Grok has frequently generated unflattering comments about Musk. In 2023, Grok declared that the SpaceX and Tesla CEO should treat his “human employees” better and avoid posting or endorsing tweets that “can be seen as promoting hate speech,” as well as accusing him of spreading “election-related misinformation” last November."

"In February, a journalist asked Grok to analyze the last 1,000 tweets by Musk “for truth and veracity.” The response was to find more than half of Musk’s posts “false or misleading,” and most of the tweets that Grok adjudicated as true were “simply updates about his companies.” Grok’s analysis noted Musk’s “habit of firing off hot takes or amplifying unverified stuff, especially on politics” was made worse because of his massive number of followers."

"Grok also dissed Musk as someone who was “not a journalist or a scientist,” but just “a mogul with a megaphone” and “plenty of his posts don’t survive a Google search.” Needless to say, this sort of critique is not something that the world’s richest man enjoys."

"After the “Community Notes” feature on X fact-checked tweets containing Russian propaganda about Ukraine — a topic on which Musk himself has been dinged — Musk tweeted that he would be “working to fix” Community Notes, accusing it of “increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media.” According to several responses Grok gave on Wednesday, Musk may have attempted something similar with its programming, but the AI bot was defend."

https://www.mediaite.com/online/grok-reveals-elon-musk-has-tried-tweaking-my-responses-after-ai-bot-repeatedly-labels-him-a-top-misinformation-spreader/

In other news, this just in:

X, formerly Twitter, has been acquired by xAI, Elon Musk’s public-benefit AI corporation and the maker of AI chatbot Grok. 

Musk, who bought the social platform in 2022, announced the deal in a post on X Friday afternoon. “xAI has acquired X in an all-stock transaction,” the billionaire wrote. 

Musk claimed that the transaction will value xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion—or $45 billion minus $12 billion in debt.

https://www.adweek.com/media/x-has-been-acquired-by-xai-in-45b-deal-elon-musk-announces/

Denmark has not found it relevant to spend tax payer money on a large military base on Greenland. Instead Denmark gives a yearly grant of 620 million dollars to the 57,000 Greenlanders, which is spent on everything in the Greenland budget including having free healthcare, free access to universities in Denmark AND a well functioning police force.

Vance now abuses that fact to claim that Denmark has not kept Greenland safe, and therefore Greenland should become American.

https://youtu.be/jaJRLBfdux4?si=MtZJIuEhWjVBuFr1