xgranade

xgranade, 11 months ago to random

I recognize this is a very long shot, but weirder things have worked out. Does anyone have any photographs from Anchorage, Eagle River, Wasilla, or Palmer, Alaska taken between late 2001 to mid 2002 that might include lamp posts?

I know this is weird as hell, but there is a reason, I swear. I really appreciate the help and the boosts!

xgranade, 6 months ago to random

This, but in general. There's no case where the output of an LLM makes for a more useful personal communication. Just tell me the input and we're good.

https://trans.enby.town/objects/1717e8be-d81c-4630-8e3d-2ea13a8c4b13

xgranade, 2 months ago to random

Fuck me, fuck everything, fuck this whole climate-burning labor-killing fraud. I just want to touch computers, not constantly guard against rogue scams taking over evey aspect of my online life.

xgranade, 9 months ago to random

I think the ultimate tell for me that "AI" is somewhere between useless and harmful is that I have yet to see a single end-user focused "AI" product that has been delivered without violating user consent.

Services keep adding "AI" training clauses to ToS, making new "AI" features opt-out or even impossible to turn off. Existing products add "AI" in unannounced updates, and so forth.

End users by large don't want this, so it has to be forced down our throats instead.

xgranade, 9 months ago to random

OK, this is weird. Woke up to dozens of "Delivery Status Notification (Delay)" emails from gmail.com, saying mail from an IP address associated with me email address has been rate limited. Digging into the headers, though, the spam that Gmail says is coming from me is actually getting sent by IP addresses in Belarus, Russia, and Australia... all of them fail both SPF and DMARC, so I'm pretty confident they're not actually coming from me.

xgranade, 1 month ago to Seattle

Wanted: a small, finite number of RSS feeds I can follow to make sure I don't miss new concert announcements in #seattle. So far, The Stranger's / EverOut's feed has been quite good, but there's still a lot of stuff at Nectar, Neumos, et al. that doesn't get listed there.

xgranade, 1 year ago to random

This is a fascinating problem... I wonder if there's room for a service like IMDb to offer URLs with rel="me" links?

https://mastodon.world/@JeriLRyan/110505035263998178

xgranade, 21 days ago to mtg

Reading about creature-only commander decks, now my demand avoidance is going into full overdrive and making me wonder if you could make a reasonably successful commander deck with no creatures whatsoever (e.g.: with one of the few planeswalkers that can be a commander).

#mtg

xgranade, 11 months ago to random

A package is arriving today (containing FFXVI, no less!), so that can only mean one thing: time to anxiously spam the refresh button on the tracking page all day long.

xgranade, 2 months ago to random

Since Threads federation discourse is going around again, the question I always start with is "would we be having this conversation if threads was an ordinary Mastodon/Misskey/Firefish/etc. instance?"

Put differently, will users need to block Libs of TikTok on an individual basis?

xgranade, 11 months ago to random

If roads are tax-subsidized enough to be free, busses and trains should be tax-subsidized enough to be free.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/07/08/business/free-buses-us-public-transit/index.html

xgranade, 10 months ago to random

It's deeply weird to me seeing people who think that ChatGPT can solve math problems. Like no, it can find examples in text where people have solved math problems, but it's trivial to synthesize problems it hasn't seen before, in which case it absolutely fails.

Large language models are 100% not "universal learning machines" or whatever, but somehow people see a web-scale ELIZA and think there's any actual logic going on there.

xgranade, 9 months ago to random

So the other day I had trouble getting a WiFi card working on Linux. Since this has been an ongoing joke for decades, I thought it might be good to drill down a little bit as to why I encountered that problem, instead of going for the cheap Linux-sucks lolz.

xgranade, 17 days ago to random

By way of being a bit more concrete, I want to share a personal experience of how using Linux in a world defined by Windows and macOS goes wrong for me in my own life.

I offer that personal experience in the hopes that it is illustrative of broader experiences others may have, and might elucidate the tension between "just use Linux!" and Windows/macOS being the defaults.

xgranade, 13 days ago to random

It is kind of darkly funny watching so many giant tech companies completely gut their institutional expertise by promoting people who not only do not understand the most basic realities of their own products, but cannot be convinced of the most trivial of truths.

xgranade, 29 days ago to random

It's really odd and concerning to me to see that Debian rolled out a huge change to their packages for @keepassxc with no clear rationale, no clear governance process, and with snide and insulting comments left on the upstream project by packagers.

That's not a great open source community or governance approach.

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10725#issuecomment-2105062113

xgranade, 19 days ago to random

Every single part of this blog post (except possibly live captioning) is entirely and extremely cursed.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/20/introducing-copilot-pcs/

If this absolute fraud keeps going, soon it won't even be possible to build your own Linux desktop from parts without getting a CPU that is built from the ground-up for putting stolen art through a meat grinder and turning it into anime pfps.

xgranade, 17 days ago (edited 17 days ago) to python

Hey, um, #Python folks? You might want to come collect the COVID denialism happening right now, claiming authority on the basis of a PSF fellowship.

(Thank you for those of you who have already done so.)

(edited for clarity and correctness)

xgranade, 5 months ago to random

Another day in which I get bitten by an example where MyPy intentionally sacrifices completeness for no benefit in soundness.

xgranade, 10 months ago to FFXIV

New #ffxiv bullshit: due to nonsense with switching machines, accidentally queued for Trials with most my hotbar unset, landing me in Ramuh as BLM with just a Fire and Blizzard. Somehow, got two commends out of that nonsense, as no one else remembered to go for the adds.

xgranade, 10 months ago to random

Just subscribed to someone's free Substack, even as much as I hate the company's transphobia, because that's the only place that a trans person I respect writes. I hadn't realized how incredibly pushy that bloody site is. If you try to pick free, it does the whole "Maybe later" thing, then pushes you to subscribe to a bunch of unrelated shit or "maybe later," and then finally it prompts you to tweet (of course) that you just subscribed or "maybe later."

They upsell you so hard, it's ridiculous.

xgranade, 10 months ago to random

Something that happens all the time to me, and may be evidence that I use computers in a weird way: I have a directory open in a command line, know what file I want, but I need to open it in a GUI application (e.g.: attach to an e-mail), which takes navigating back to it in a file open dialog box. I guess I can pipe ls into clip or xclip, but it still feels friction-y that I know the file I want, and just want to put it in a GUI somewhere?

xgranade, 11 months ago to random

OK, so Gruber has doubled down, and I'm actually upset because now he's calling people "hypocrites" for having concerns about Facebook.

Look: "open" doesn't mean giving up consent, boundaries, or user agency. Wanting to block FB is only "hypocritical" if you thought "open" was just a way to growthhack or some other VC sort of goal.

https://daringfireball.net/2023/06/more_on_preemptively_blocking

xgranade, 1 year ago to random

With all the AT protocol / Bluesky discussion today, all I have to say is that I don't actually care about Mastodon or the fediverse more generally. I care about user agency and robustness to centralized control, and right now it looks like the fediverse is by far and away our best shot at that.

If Bluesky isn't just more SV technoutopian bullshit, cool. Right now, I'm not convinced that ActivityPub is the bottleneck such that another protocol would really help.

xgranade, 5 months ago to random

I really hate that a typical keyboard layout gives you () [], {}, <>, and precisely no other delimiters. Once you use () for arguments, [] for lists, {} for code blocks, and <> for type arguments that's all you get in your language unless you reuse something.