One of my devices uses three keys because out of the two local servers I have, they seem to go down every other month, so I need a failover.

It’s obviously enough of a thing to warrant Google to crack down on it in both chrome and YouTube.

If it’s such a small problem, why spend the effort?

Weird. I’ve been thinking a lot about my aphantasia recently.

The closest I can describe what I imagined, was the feeling that those things happened.

For example. That vibe you get when you feel someone is just behind you. You can’t see them, but you know it. If I imagine someone behind me, I get the same uncomfortable feeling and an urge to look behind me.

Not crazy, just sad.

Middle of the day, sitting at our desks working. This middle aged guy who was usually happy as Larry gets up and leaves the office leaving his stuff behind. Not a word said. I just assumed he was getting a coffee or something.

End of the day rolls around, stuff still there. Same thing the next day. Still there the next week.

People start asking what happened to him, but the agency he was working through kept telling us he’s coming back soon.

Over a month later, someone packs up his stuff and puts it in the bin. The guy was never coming back, turns out he went left and ended his own life the day he walked out. Never made it home.

The agency apparently only found out he was dead a few weeks after the incident, then strung us along so they could find a replacement. We terminated their contract and offered the handful of other employees jobs.

———

Another job, we had a new guy start. Very conventionally attractive and he seemed normal enough.

A few weeks later one of the women complained to HR that someone was stalking her. She was getting ‘flattering’ letters, emails, notes etc and they often contained information and photos in/about/around her work. Flattering, but not something she was comfortable with

Few weeks later, we’re told new guy won’t be coming back due to inappropriate behaviour.

Woman had to get a restraining order against the guy. In a twist of irony, she said that if the guy had just talked to her, she would have gone on a date with him in a heartbeat.

You appear to have eaten an Onion OP.

The Civilian is a satire site.

Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

• can the product be resold privately?
• can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
• would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
• would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’

Doesn’t stop them opening up as “Hungry Janet” or something.

Burger King opened as Hungry Jacks in (Queensland?) Australia as “Burger King” already existed. But is also now trading under the “Burger King” brand in some places.

Same volume, just increased length but reduced girth.

Because that’s the way the legal system works.

“Oops, had some harmful/illegal content on there? Nobody was /really/ hurt, or at least, we weren’t directly causing harm. I’ll take it down and eat a small fine.

Vs

“Oh I’m sorry, I’ll take down the 30s clip of your 90s movie. it has caused you 3million in damages? I’m so sorry, here’s some tools that will automate detection and removal of your property. I’m so sorry”

Is “The Algorithm” just “we stuffed all our GPT responses into a Lucene index and look for 80% matches”?

Because that’s what I’d do.

I used to love ‘the cloud’. Rather, a specific slice of it.

I worked almost exclusively on AppEngine, it was simple. You uploaded a zip of your code to appengine and it ran it at near infinite scale. They gave you a queue, a database, a volatile cache, and some other gizmos. It was so simple you’d struggle to fuck it up really.

It was easy, it was simple, and it worked for my clients who had 10 DAU, and my clients who had 5 million DAU. Costs scaled nearly linearly, and for my hobby projects that had 0 DAU, the costs were comparable.

Then something happened and it slowly became complicated. The rest of the GCP cloud crept in and after spending a term with a client who didn’t use “the cloud” I came back to it and had to relearn nearly everything.

Pretty much all of the companies I’ve worked for could be run on early AppEngine. Nobody has needed anything more than it, and I’m confident the only reason they had more was because tech is like water. You need to put it in a bucket or it goes everywhere.

Give me my AppEngine back. It allowed me to focus on my (or my clients) problems. Not the ones that come with the platform.

They were first to market with a decent GPGPU toolkit (CUDA) which built them a pretty sizeable userbase.

Then when competitors caught up, they made it as hard as possible to transition away from their ecosystem.

Like Apple, but worse.

I guess they learned from their Gaming heyday that not controlling the abstraction layer (eg OpenGL, DirectX, etc) means they can’t do lock in.

While suing everyone else that makes shovel handles that work with your shovel heads.

Problem then is, You Still gotta buy a truck to buy and haul your 2nd motorcycle, your 3rd motorcycle, your dirt bike, and your track bike.

Alternate headline:

Companies accept money for a thing that will happen anyway, and will be unable to prove if they say no.

GenAi is unfortunately here, and the technocracy wants you to want it so they can farm you for more and more intimate data to leverage and enforce their technocracy. And the only way they’re going to do it is by keeping the press positive, and feed it more and more data in the hopes it fixes things.

I was expecting some sort of “Ai discovers new bug in 30 year old software”… cool I’m excited.

Then they were talking about how the bug was persistent, and I’m more intrigued “is the bug some weird emergent behaviour corrupting state somewhere?”

Nope, just another example of a shit in shit out data model.

What are the icons for?

I know gnome, and the 3 that have their name in the logo (xfce, sway, tty).

I’m going back to Slackware. Can’t keep up with this shit any more.

Hips that make a Pixar mom jealous.

Come April, NZ will be charging EVs road user charges using the same price-per-kilometre mechanism diesel (diesel not have a fuel levy) vehicles use.

You can (or at least could) put Bravia TVs into “pro mode” and turn off all the shit.