Ever wondered how I create labels with the exact shapes of screw heads?

I use the "Schraubenkiste" font, perfectly designed for this task! Found it a few years ago and it's been super handy.

Grab it for free under the SIL open font license at: http://www.peter-wiegel.de/Schraubenkiste.html

#Font #Label #Organization #StorageBoxes

@firefoxwebdevs
Previous generations of translation engines had different kinds of failure modes — if the system couldn't find a reasonable solution, the outputs would be clearly garbled, giving you pretty solid cues that the transmission was broken. As translation engines have shifted into LLMs, the output has gotten more polished and less useful, because the errors are much harder to spot. As someone who has used machine translation from a fairly small language dozens to hundreds of times a day for almost a decade, this is a genuinely serious problem. I would strongly prefer to see machine translation continue previous lines of development rather than just tossing everything in the blender. It feels like the sentiment now is "well, if we just throw enough compute at it we can fully replace all human translation", as opposed to ceating a tool designed for actual human needs. At the core, that's what all of this is about — this is a technology in search of things it can do, not features designed for the needs of real users. If you go back to designing tools for actual users intended to do specific things in the world in the way most useful for those people, rather than forcing all uses through the Everything Machine, you'll get a much better reaction.
@ausi @Norgg

@hacks4pancakes
I keep meaning to bring cash for tipping to the queer bar and keep forgetting because I only use it when I go to Germany. Also, I hate that I look like an American tourist instead of an EU-resident American tourist in Germany because I can't remember the coins.

@firefoxwebdevs
Is the kill switch on by default? If so, yes, that's opt in. If not, no, that's not opt in, the same as all the other crap you've done. And like, yes, having an actual single switch you don't keep turning back on, if this actually ends up being the case, is better than the current malice, but it's still not opt-in. Saying there are different definitions here is wildly disingenuous. If does not require an explicit user action to turn it on, it's not fucking opt-in. So if you build a kill switch and it's turned off in the default install, then you can say it's opt in.

TIL why Sun Microsystems (Bill Joy and all) bought an office suite company in 1999. 🤨

"In August 1999, Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems[81][82] for US$59.5 million (equivalent to US$112 million in 2024), reportedly because the acquisition was less expensive than licensing Microsoft Office for Sun's 42,000 employees.[83][84]"

😄

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History

And that's how eventually LibreOffice became available for many. 😇

#SunMicrosystems #staroffice #openoffice #libreoffice

@trochee
We're gonna need at least eight more foxes, then.
@gsuberland

@haroonmeer
As a consultant, I can say with authority that it was a terrible idea to let computers get in on the "speaking with authority about something you just read about online 15 (micro) seconds ago" game

@haroonmeer
Oh sure. It's just interesting how often seamlessness as a goal for technology isn't actually a good thing

Philip Morris is now called Altria. The Wikipedia entry has a stunning opening sentence:

@gsuberland
Gonna have to switch to an alternate calendar system for higher annual throughput

i unironically do want “transgender for everybody”

name changes that don’t mess up your credit. hormones and abortion pills over the counter. standards of “looking professional“ that aren’t patriarchal and white-supremacist. hell yeah

you don’t need to *use* transgender but you should be allowed to *have* it

@haroonmeer
I have some concerns about the llm aided translations, as someone who uses translate functions dozens to many hundreds of times a day. With existing translation engines, you could tell when it fucked up the meaning because the translation was garbled. The new systems are much more likely to render things they don't understand coherently, which is much less useful — the are no contextual clues for correctness

@boblord
And btw, the rest of the doc is great, no other notes. Like, it's clearly targeting non-tech companies that are really just starting out, but there are so many of them and almost every guide out there expects too much technical competence and ignores all the issues that actually block or enable progress.

@boblord
Could do worse? Why let the bastards ruin good work

@boblord
Point six on the role of the CEO: ensure that staff have adequate time to complete security work that the organization has decided is necessary. No one else in the company can do that, and it's one of the biggest causes of failed security programs I've seen in the past eight years of helping companies start them.

@arclight
Definitely

@yaxu
The grumbling will continue until money is no longer being lit on fire

it's truly amazing what LLMs can achieve. we now know it's possible to produce an html5 parsing library with nothing but the full source code of an existing html5 parsing library, all the source code of all other open source libraries ever, a meticulously maintained and extremely comprehensive test suite written by somebody else, 5 different models, a megawatt-hour of energy, a swimming pool full of water, and a month of spare time of an extremely senior engineer

@floriann
Ah, I just meant that adware is a thing — think about all the sketchy browser toolbars that folks used to get tricked into installing ten years ago before they got serious about cleaning out the browser extension stores. It's potentially much higher risk (less so now, as extensions have been nerfed), but thinking about this as "just" adware minimizes the problem. I didn't exactly think you were doing that, but I wanted to make sure anyone reading didn't get the wrong idea.