evilstevie @evilstevie@mastod1.ddns.net

Working on a project which splits into 100 equal parts, so I have this constant tally of how far through I am. It's quite weird. Not usually doing anything quite so quantifiable.

Anyhow. 20%.

Have a Snout Snuffler family snapshot to celebrate.

#sillyScribbles #photography #googlyEyes #silly #cute #seaShell

Excellent cake execution, no notes, ship it

Ambiguity. Just after dawn in the Pennines. A combination of light and space and landscape when everything is fluid and uncertain.
#mastoart #photography #moorland #peninnes #foto

- She said she was running out of shells, aye?

- She did.

- So has she stopped posting them?

- She has not.

#sillyScribbles #photography #seaShell #silly

how carbon credits work 👇

Brain: I'm disappointed in you

Me: Why?

Brain: You know why. You had one of your silly little people do the chicken dance.

Me: Yeah, but it's just a bit of fun.

Brain: It's the CHICKEN dance.

Me:

Brain: Well?

Me: I can't draw chickens.

Brain: You don't usually let that stop you.

Me: Oh FFS.

#sillyScribbles #animation #dance #chickens #silly

NASA stated that the Ingenuity helicopter has officially taken its last flight. 72 out of 5 planned flights is pretty darn good.

I saw this online somewhere and I just had to recreate it. This is my coding happy place.

Eat the paste thats for horses

When I was a smartass computer nerd in the 80s and 90s, an eternal theme was friends and family sheepishly asking me for tech support help, and me slowly, patiently explaining to them that computers aren't scary, they're actually predictable, they won't explode or erase your data (unless you really make an effort), and they operate by simple (if somewhat arcane) rules. Edit > Cut, then click, then Edit > Paste. Save As. Use tabs, not spaces. Stuff like that. Maybe not easy, but simple, or at least consistent and learnable.

But that's not true anymore.

User interfaces lag. Text lies. Buttons don't click. Buttons don't even look like buttons! Panels pop up and obscure your workspace and you can't move or remove them -- a tiny floating x and a few horizontal lines is all you get. Mobile and web apps lose your draft text, refresh at whim, silently swallow errors, mysteriously move shit around when you're not looking, hide menus, bury options, don't respect or don't remember your chosen settings. Doing the same thing gives different results. The carefully researched PARC principles of human-computer interaction -- feedback, discoverabilty, affordances, consistency, personalization -- all that fundamental Don Norman shit -- have been completely discarded.

My tech support calls now are about me sadly explaining there's nothing I can do. Computers suck now. They run on superstition, not science. It's a real tragedy for humanity and I have no idea how to fix it.

#HCI #UX #UI #okdoomer

What's happening at Microsoft, I think:

- Reality is everything is way too complex
- lots of MS things ship in risky configurations
- nobody (including Microsoft) can figure out how to scale securing it
- everything is way too expensive

Microsoft’s two biggest commercial security risks are ransomware groups, and /itself/.

They've gone from saying attackers think in graphs to getting attackers to live on the Microsoft Graph, which has allowed them to monetise their cloud security failures.

Has anyone ever tried telling you that the perfect bath mat doesn't exist?

Probably not, because that would be a really weird thing to say.

But anyway, I've created the perfect bath mat.
https://www.redbubble.com/i/bath-mat/Low-Quality-Bath-Mat-by-LowQualityFacts/154631604.FZTEY?utm_source=rb-native-app&utm_campaign=share-product&utm_medium=android

Good afternoon Mastodon. It's the weekend and I have just had the Laziest Morning Ever and hadn't realised quite how much I needed that.

I have attempted to represent my resulting mood with a small, slightly shiny, slightly lopsided stone.

#sillyScribbles #photography #cute #silly #stone

An adjunct professor for computer security found some odd stuff her students turned in:

https://labs.ripe.net/author/kathleen_moriarty/the-llm-misinformation-problem-i-was-not-expecting/

It was not the students' use of a #ChatBot that was the problem, but they were using material found on the internet that *itself* was created by a hallucinating ChatBot and published without verification!

This is a type of model collapse we will be dealing with not just at universities in the near future.

#AcademicChatter #AcademicIntegrity #ChatGPT

Happy to take suggestions for new dance moves btw. They may be unrecognisable if they make it into the animation (there is a 60 frame limit, no bending at the waist and no limb joints!) but if I can find an example I'll give a sparkly dancer adaptation a bash.

And on that note I need to thank @teapot_ben for mentioning the chicken dance in passing last week and inspiring dancer 34 🐔

All responsibility remains my own though. No blaming please 😆

It's the weekend, and that means it's time to do the chicken dance. Oh aye.

Thirty-four weeks, thirty-four dancers, and never let it be said I don't know a good dance when I see one.

*ahem*

Have an excellent weekend, if you possibly can 😊

#FridaySparklyDancers #sillyScribbles #animation #dance #silly #drawing

My current bout of fatigue must be beginning to subside if the puns have started coming out again