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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I suspect the American left focused on LGBTQ+ issues because it was a “safe” mission.

    Increasing official tolerance there was no threat to their donors or the wealthy in general. Nobody had to pay more in taxes or submit to meaningful government regulstion to enforce “don’t explicitly fire/assault/refuse to marry someone for being gay/trans”. Arguably those policies could have ecen come out of broader expectations for “stay out of people’s personal lives” rather than making special cutouts and declaring a marginal group.

    Looks impressive, accomplishes very little. Pretty much sums up the Democratic party for the last 50 years.



  • I never realized the tattoos were photoshopped.

    I assumed they used a random stock photo that had a convenient pose to add the shirt onto, that happened to have a tattoo.

    Of course, I also figured using a photo with too much ink would 1) distract from the merchandise and 2) make the stock photo model too recognizable. (Oh, they clearly used Getty #8675309, “Fat White Guy With Mediocre Barbed Wire Tattoo”), but plenty of the pics are identifiable enough to use for a police report.





  • Also on modern firebreathers.

    I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.

    I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.

    I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.



  • We get, for some reason, a huge number of window replacement contractors coming door-to-door. Because I really want to be high-pressure sold $10k worth of low quality glass from the people who are running big enough marhins to put a full page colour ad in the local newspaper every day to go with their 6 hours a day of local TV spots.

    I actually said to one “We’re a Linux household. Not interested in Windows” and slammed the door on them.

    I now realize cocking a rifle would have made the effect even better.


  • They’ve got a guy at work whose job title is basically AI Evangelist. This is terrifying in that it’s a financial tech firm handling twelve figures a year of business-- the last place where people will put up with “plausible bullshit” in their products.

    I grudgingly installed the Copilot plugin, but I’m not sure what it can do for me better than a snippet library.

    I asked it to generate a test suite for a function, as a rudimentary exercise, so it was able to identify “yes, there are n return values, so write n test cases” and “You’re going to actually have to CALL the function under test”, but was unable to figure out how to build the object being fed in to trigger any of those cases; to do so would require grokking much of the code base. I didn’t need to burn half a barrel of oil for that.

    I’d be hesitant to trust it with “summarize this obtuse spec document” when half the time said documents are self-contradictory or downright wrong. Again, plausible bullshit isn’t suitable.

    Maybe the problem is that I’m too close to the specific problem. AI tooling might be better for open-ended or free-association “why not try glue on pizza” type discussions, but when you already know “send exactly 4-7-Q-unicorn emoji in this field or the transaction is converted from USD to KPW” having to coax the machine to come to that conclusion 100% of the time is harder than just doing it yourself.

    I can see the marketing and sales people love it, maybe customer service too, click one button and take one coherent “here’s why it’s broken” sentence and turn it into 500 words of flowery says-nothing prose, but I demand better from my machine overlords.

    Tell me when Stable Diffusion figures out that “Carrying battleaxe” doesn’t mean “katana randomly jutting out from forearms”, maybe at that point AI will be good enough for code.





  • With American comics, it’s not even the shattered continuity, it’s that availability is a mess because some of the franchises are so ancient and collectible.

    If I want to read through One Piece from the 1997 start, my library probably has/can inter-library loan all 105 volumes, or I can go to mainstream retailers and get any I’m missing without a huge fracas.

    If I want to read Batman from the 1940 start, I’d better hope some of the rarer issues come up at auction in the near future AND that I can mortgage my house to afford them.

    I’m amazed they never put out a DVD-ROM collection that’s “Everything Marvel/DC did prior to, say, 1990, as PDF scans” just so mere mortals have a chance to enjoy the experience of completionism.