“I'm not interested in debating whether it's transformative or destructive. I'm not interested in your hot takes on consciousness or job displacement or copyright law. I've already spent my allocated lifetime bandwidth on this topic. It's zero now.”

https://blainsmith.com/articles/i-dont-care/

Fuck, the “Circle With Me” cover slaps too, and I love the original. ($KID2 used to fall asleep to Courtney LaPlante’s live take of that song: https://youtu.be/LUiL0qsNg9w?si=YAPgq0zV-UG_ys8p )

I’m loving all these Maphra covers, but the “Doomed” video in particular has been on repeat: https://youtu.be/r6L-GUOAhGo?si=vDv8gnZTqdd1m3zs

@kajer yeah I have resorted to fully powering off the monitor and then turning it on after whatever magical length of time “feels right,” and maybe 25% of the time I can force it to show the firmware interface, which is technically more than 0% of the time lol

Meanwhile the Omen just… works. Shoutout to HP I guess

I’d also like to extend a hearty “fuck you” to whoever wrote the firmware Philips used in the controller for my monitor, because it’s impossible to use if you need to do anything BIOS or UEFI or apparently 9front-related due to the most aggressive auto-sleep behavior I’ve ever seen and can’t be disabled.

Kept thinking 9front or my Pi were broken, then I switched the HDMI cable to my HP Omen, and ta-da! Should that have made a difference? I don’t think so! But it did, and based on my experience with tinkering with various BSDs and Linux distros, this monitor’s refusal to care about output from UEFI / BIOS is a consistent problem. So I have to keep the other monitor around to access pre-OS consoles or settings.

😤

I’m attempting to use Zig on OpenBSD-current. I have to perform seemingly every action, from viewing zig build —help to actually building a project, as root. This hasn’t been a problem with make, the uxn assembler, etc. What do I need to do to make this easier?

(I am using zig-0.15.2 from the package repo; maybe I should be using the latest snapshot? I saw there were some OpenBSD-related changes made not that long ago but I figured the version available from ports would either work out of the box or give me instructions for making it work.)

#OpenBSD #Zig

From here to the end of the day: no social, no checking The Guardian, no other known downers like Hacker News or Lobsters.

Instead: continuing to read “The Creative Act,” starting “Klara and the Sun,” slapping CachyOS on a gaming setup, trying to get 9Front to boot on my Pi 4, moving my body, and taking care of my immediate responsibilities while loudly singing a medley of songs released between the early ‘70s and some time this year.

The repeated lesson here is that a company, organization, computer program, or person who uses the privacy, environmental, and trust disaster sold as "generative AI" for one thing, can no longer be trusted for any thing. If it is tolerated for one thing, it will eventually be used for all things. If a program adds an optional "AI"-branded feature you *have* to stop using that program completely, because if (when) the company feels the use metrics are too low they will stop making it optional.

If the computer is a prosthetic (and it is) then this means we legitimately have to be careful about what software we run, because we are deciding what to make part of our selves, part of our minds

Any journalists want to write an article about all the environmental costs of the more than 10,000 Starlinks that are now in orbit? All I'm seeing are breathless articles mindlessly worshiping That Awful Billionaire for crossing the 10,000 satellite mark.

Every single one of those will come down in an uncontrolled reentry. That's a lot of metal in the atmosphere, and a lot of dice-rolling to see if any more pieces will make it to the ground.

SpaceX is truly awful.

“When you strip the humanities out of the people who build technology, you do not get more efficient engineering. You get engineering that has lost its sense of purpose, its awareness of consequence, and its ability to see the people on the other side of the screen.”

https://blainsmith.com/essays/humanities-in-the-machine/

I suspect most people outside of the UK won't have heard about the post office scandal, but it seems highly relevant to learn about now (given *waves* this):

For over 15 years, the software post offices in the UK had to use contained severe bugs, particular in accounting, that everyone at Fujitsu/horizon and the post blissfully ignored. Over 900 (!!!) postmasters were sentenced for alleged theft and fraud, some went to jail, some committed suicide. All because the software was shit and everyone who could do something about it didn't care and swept it under the rug.

Everything, including how it was uncovered, about this seems bizarre and Kafkaesque, but we better prepare for it to happen more often.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal

https://types.pl/@pigworker/116211919028571818

the entire video game industry rested on the Nintendo Entertainment System for an entire decade, a computer with 2 kilobytes of RAM when price-competitive home computers had megabytes.

the macbook neo is not a good choice if you are a competitive Valorant or a Cyberpunk 2077 streamer with a million dollars of annual brand deal revenue on the line. but it is going to change what "gaming" *is* for the actual public where game studios make their money.

sigh https://floss.social/@supertux/116231698030996807

I know 100% that people will argue with me over this, but I miss when movies were professionally lit, when actors were intentionally blocked, and when more than teal, orange and beige were allowed to be on the screen. The medium has something to do with it--film made a lot of these things fundamentally necessary--but I think it's more complex than just that. The last few years' movies are just not pleasant to look at, with very few exceptions, and the change occurred sometime around 2015.

Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good…

https://craigmod.com/essays/software_bonkers/

@lhp this might be our best bet https://www.symbos.org/

Effectively all relevant code I have ever written depends, either directly or indirectly, on projects that have adopted LLMs. And those are hard to replace dependencies, like font drawing or the kernel itself. The laptop I am typing this on probably already has LLM generated code on it, without my knowledge or consent.

I am effectively forced to unwillingly support rent-seeking fascists with every line of code I write, every time I turn on my computer, even if I don't use any of it directly.

@lhp you’re gonna have to use an old version of a BSD, because harfbuzz is everywhere, and unfortunately the BSDs also ship LLVM/Clang which I believe has the “you blocked Claude” mark of death on GitHub.

Honestly I’m too tired—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually—to find out.