@xgranade@wandering.shop
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xgranade

@xgranade@wandering.shop

Sometimes I write intimate eschatologies or words about technology and math. Sometimes I make things by burning them with light or squeezing them through a small, hot tube. Sometimes I push water with a stick while sitting in a tiny boat.

If you're looking for my business account, go check out https://social.dual-space.solutions/@cgranade!

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

xgranade, to random
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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, to random
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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,
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Have you considered typewriter?

  • Never uploads your work to someone else's cloud.
  • Works during power outages.
  • No subscription needed. Buy once and it's yours!
  • No microdots!
  • True zero-latency wysiwyg writing!
  • Won't plagiarize your work!
xgranade, to random
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Today's Cat and Girl is essential (and heartbreaking) reading for anyone who is still on the fence about the proliferation of "AI," and its catastrophic effects on art, artists, and artistic labor.

https://catandgirl.com/4000-of-my-closest-friends/

xgranade, to random
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It kind of sucks that "adult toy" is a euphemism for "sex toy." Like sure, those are all well and good, but what about poseable figures that break if you look at them the wrong way, or gunpla, or ESP32-C6 dev boards, or completely impractical computers that beg to be called cyberdecks, or 3D printers, or infrared cameras, or overly fancy drones, or record players and vinyl albums, or anything that still has a floppy drive in 2024?

xgranade, to random
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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, to random
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Baby shoes, never worn [Sponsored link]

xgranade, to random
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I've said it before, but goodness I can't wait for this "AI" bubble to burst. We are quite overdue for another AI winter.

xgranade, to random
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There's been a lot of spilled pixels, but I guess all-in-all, I just want the Internet — the Web, especially — back. I want "app" to mean "application," not "platform." I want links, not embeds. I want writing, art, and code to flourish, not "content." I want 10 MB on my janky little ISP to call my own, not "cloud-scale." I want to copy and paste my own stuff, not "export" it. I want one-off cgi-bin weirdnesses, not monolithic frameworks.

xgranade, to random
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Can I just say how refreshing it is to see a social media network failing in the way it's designed to? mastodon.social is struggling under the weight of massive amounts of spam today, and many other instances are able to temporarily defederate to help mitigate the impact of that.

Redundancy and resiliency built into the fediverse network is, well, working.

xgranade, to random
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Please remember to CW or at least hashtag shit today with #uspol.

I admit that I've not always been the best about it personally, but when there's an absolute flood of news like today, it's all the more important to help people filter that out and control how they engage with (if at all!) that news.

xgranade, to random
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This table is very funny to me for some reason.

https://flatt.tech/research/posts/batbadbut-you-cant-securely-execute-commands-on-windows/#fnref:2

xgranade, to random
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Ar some point, I feel like I should reflect and write down my reflections on what goes wrong with conflating "tech should be accessible" and "tech should be easy to use," and especially on who gets to define "easy" in the first place.

xgranade,
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The short version is that I think it can be good in some cases to expose hard problems that are actually intrinsically hard, rather than undermining user autonomy by making those choices for them and in ways that are not to their benefit.

xgranade, to random
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Optimism is a political value, and one that's highly contextual at that. Being optimistic in the face of overwhelming opposition is a form of radical progressiveism, but being optimistic about a proposed technology or policy by ignoring the potential or likely harm is a form of reactionary conservatism.

It behooves us to be responsibly optimistic, rather than either naive or defeatist.

xgranade, to random
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One more thought on MS Recall.

"Users" are an abstraction, and it's simply not true that they map 1:1 or even many:1 onto people. Families do sometimes, in practice, share logins on family computers.

Saying storage is user-local doesn't fully work given that the "user" abstraction doesn't neatly map onto the way people use computers in practice.

xgranade,
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Trust me, as a neurodiverse nerd for whom suboptimality causes an almost physical itching sensation, I get it. It's tempting to put abstractions and "ideal" behaviors above actual observed behavior.

With something like Recall, that could get queer kids killed by outing them to their families.

xgranade, to random
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An only slightly sarcastic proposal: these road-tank style pickup trucks should not be classified as passenger vehicles, and should require active CDL certifications to drive.

Need one to haul shit around for your business? Great! There's a licensing framework for that!

xgranade, to random
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Hot take that I only partially believe, but that is made unnecessarily inflammatory for the sake of social media brevity:

Nearly every bad thing in tech traces back to that the tech sector is one of the first to grow in post-Reagan disruption of labor rights and antitrust regulations, such that it is uniquely concentrated in a few unaccountable effective monopolies.

xgranade, to random
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I wish the society that I lived in could find it in itself to fund and support anything that isn't extractive.

(This is a toot about xz and OSS in general. This is a toot about weird art. This is a toot about public transit. This is a toot about decentralized social media. This is a toot about local investigative journalism. This is a toot about LLMs slurping up the whole commons.)

xgranade, to random
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Google Maps is now pushing generative AI features. Our Chromecast's idle screen has been changed to push AI-plagiarized images. It's getting more and more difficult to just not consent to this scam.

xgranade, to random
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I get I'm a baby trans in most ways, having started transitioning only about four years ago. Ever since then, though, I've felt very visible as being a trans woman --- before, I was an accomplished researcher in quantum computing, even collaborating in the design of the first fully adaptive quantum language.

After, though? It suddenly felt like people saw being trans as the most important thing about me.

If you're an ally this TDoV, see the trans people around you in their totalities.

xgranade, to random
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Underappreciated forms of radical action:

  • Taking up the space you deserve and require.
  • Eating something because it tastes good.
  • Taking a walk, bike ride, bus ride, or even car trip to watch a sunset or sunrise.
  • Loving being alive.

If you're told you shouldn't exist or are inherently threatening, even participation in a broken society can be a form of intentional defiance.

It's obviously not sufficient, but it's still important.

xgranade, to random
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That xz backdoor is just absolutely wild. What the fuck.

xgranade,
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I feel like this is another very painful reminder of the difference between the commons and a supply chain.

xgranade, to random
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I am personally not reassured that Recall is currently local and currently enabled only on some Snapdragon processors. It's still a bad direction to go, and one that makes Windows users in general far less safe, even if only by normalizing that this kind of product can and should exist.

xgranade,
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I remember when Windows 10 mail was local only, before a Windows Update made it cloud-only. I remember Edge didn't have built-in ads, before an update put ads everywhere. I remember when the My Documents folder was local-only by default, until a new version of OneDrive pushed it all to the cloud by default.

History suggests that this kind of product is too often a wedge to justify more abuse of personal information in the future.

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