µblog - archive for 2023-07 🏳️‍🌈

So presumably Twitter Blue is gonna be X Blue now, just to reinforce the porn feeling.

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20 years after Spolsky’s explainer about Unicode, “developers” are still edgily going online telling me it’s too complicated and that ASCII should be enough for everyone.

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

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🔗🐦🦞 The social network formerly known as Twitter banned from lobste.rs

[…] the quality of links submitted to Twitter has noticeably declined in the last year. This has been frustrating and prompted a lot of removed stories, but never quite worth banning a site over.

A few days ago Twitter’s owner overruled their Trust and Safety team to restore a user who posted CSAM, which I guess answered that open question [whether Twitter/X tolerates CSAM content]. Linking to a site with an infamous and growing problem with CSAM has become unacceptably dangerous to this site.

I’m banning the domains twitter.com and x.com (the in-progress rebrand). Because of Twitter’s CSAM problem, please also don’t link to Twitter via Nitter, Thread Reader App, or other alternative frontends.

Update, Wed 02 August 2023: Reddit r/law also bans Twitter links

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🇸🇪 alla fransmän i Springfloden säsong 2 tilltalar varandra med tu och det stör mig något oerhört.

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Tried applying styling via XSLT to my Atom feed, couldn’t get it to work, realized it’s not 2005 anymore and went on to do more productive things.

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Nix is the new Arch by the way.

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Twitter going dark mode only will confuse so many boomers 🤣

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📺🇸🇪 Springfloden SE01 (2016)

Precis som i SF finns det hårdhetsgrader i kriminaldraman, och ett där svensk polis skickar en fd. kriminell på hemligt uppdrag till Costa Rica, där han dödar 2 personer i självförsvar, tillhör definitivt den mjukare delen av skalan.

Serien kan också ses som en inlaga i debatten om nya Slussen, då den ursprungliga anläggningen presenteras som ett tillhåll för hemlösa, tiggare samt grovt kriminella.

Skådespeleri och scenografi tillhör SVT-toppklass men manus är rent kolportage.

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Today marks the 80th anniversary of the start of Operation GOMORRAH, the 10-day Anglo-American campaign of day and night bombing of Hamburg. It’s an anniversary that ought to be remembered and mostly won’t be. A thread.

–🐦🧵@Alan_Allport

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To understand Musk’s renewed obsession with X and focus on financial services, you REALLY need to understand the X/Confinity merger that became PayPal.

And, particularly, the Peter Thiel-led coup that kicked Musk out as CEO/Chief Strategist.

Here’s how that happened. 1/🧵

–🐘@garius@mastodon.me.uk

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The parallels between Felon Husk and Andrew Lee of Freenode infamy grow stronger day by day.

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“Did Rome fall due to dysgenics?” - buncha racists just asking questions

Before this gets too much attention, let’s take a closer look. TLDR: this paper is total bullshit, and the authors are dangerous pseudo-intellectuals (at best).

I’ll start with the science: a short thread (trying to avoid being sued): 🧵

– 🐦@WilliamBarrie

Also

Longer response to this forthcoming, but in the meantime, let me just say as someone who works on the population genetics of Ancient Rome and the applicability of polygenic scores to ancient DNA data this study isn’t scientifically sound - and it’s full of dog whistles.

– 🐦@mootspoints

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🔗 The Fasces: Ancient Rome’s Most Dangerous Political Symbol

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🔗 Optimizing UTC → Unix Time Conversion For Size And Speed

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🔗🇸🇪 bokrecension på huvudbloggen: De kapabla av Klas Ekman

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Musk stans 3 months ago: “LOL, tooting sounds so dumb!”

Musk stans today: “tweets are now xeets.”

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I’m on record describing substack as a toxic brand but the people who performatively complain about its subscription popup and use of JS are grinding my gears even harder. Don’t make me root for the fascist enabling network ffs.

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Video submissions to lobste.rs have always been a bit of a pain, but they’re made even more insufferable now when half a dozen competing LLM summarizing “solutions” appear in the comments.

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The fediverse is great because it allows communities to forge their own paths, free of corporate overlords. However, these overlords are replaced by småpåvar¹ who are very eager to tell you you’re not running your piece of the fediverse in the Right Way™.

Fuck ’em.

¹ transl. “little popes”

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Wish I’d screenshotted the HN who misread Ursula K. LeGuin’s memory of interacting with Philip K. Dick as “disrespect” and vowed to stop consuming more of her “content”.

Here’s the blogspam item that was discussed: When Ursula K. Le Guin & Philip K. Dick Went to High School Together.

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This is a heartwarming story about a man and his dog rescued after 3 months drifting at sea, but if you have the slightest interest in SF you gotta wonder if there wasn’t another human or 2 on the boat when they set off.

🔗🇸🇪 Australiensisk man och hans hund räddade efter månader på havet

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LWers ask: “Why was the AI Alignment community so unprepared for this moment?”

Quoting this reply by @swabr in full, because lemmy’s permalinks don’t really work.

Why did the Alignment community not prepare tools and plans for convincing the wider infosphere about AI safety years in advance?

Did you not read HPMOR, the greatest story ever reluctantly told to reach the wider infosphere about rationalism and, by extension, AI alignment????

Why were there no battle plans in the basement of the pentagon that were written for this exact moment?

It’s almost like AGI isn’t a credible threat!

Heck, 20+ years is enough time to educate, train, hire and surgically insert an entire generation of people into key positions in the policy arena specifically to accomplish this one goal like sleeper cell agents. Likely much, much, easier than training highly qualified alignment researchers.

At MIRI, we don’t do things because they are easy. We don’t do things because we are grifters.

Didn’t we pretty much always know it was going to come from one or a few giant companies or research labs? Didn’t we understand how those systems function in the real world? Capitalist incentives, Moats, Regulatory Capture, Mundane utility, and International Coordination problems are not new.

This is how they look at all other problems in the world, and it’s fucking exasperating. Climate change? I would simply implement ‘Capitalist Incentives’. Wealth inequality? Have you tried a ‘Moat’? Racism? It sounds like a job for ‘Regulatory Capture’. Yes, all problems are easily solvable with 200 IQ and buzzwords. All problems except the hardest problem in the world, preventing Skynet from being invented. Ignore all those other problems; someone will ‘Mundane Utility’ them away. For now, we need your tithe; we’re definitely going to use it for ‘International Coordination’, by which I totally don’t mean buying piles of meth and cocaine for our orgies.

Why was it not obvious back then? Why did we not do this? Was this done and I missed it?

We tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!

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🔗 Love’s Work: Lucy Jakub on the works of Hayao Miyazaki

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TIL I learned an Oz 🇦🇺 tablespoon is 20ml, instead of 14.8-15ml like in the rest of the world. 🤯

–🆆Tablespoon

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📺🇦🇺 Lie With Me/With Intent

Aussie thriller about a man, his wife, and their nanny. Is she mentally ill? Is he gaslighting her? Who is sleeping with whom?

Spoilers:

It’s the dude. He’s messing with his wife’s meds to force her to break down mentally, so he can get custody of the kids togehter with the nanny, who he is banging. Why he couldn’t just divorce her is left unsaid (he’s a big-shot lawyer). Why they had to move to Australia for this to work (with the nanny following, even though the couple met in London) is also unclear. Why the wife gets the support of a kindly gay cab driver is unknown, unless the actor is a beloved institution in Oz. The show is produced by the Neighbors team, after all.

Not recommended.

(TV4 streaming)

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🇸🇪 om ni tycker Tilde är uttjatat som namn, testa nykomligarna Cirkumflex, Trema samt Cedilj!

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🔗🇸🇪 Greta Woxén

Sveriges första kvinnliga civilingenjör, hon tog examen från Elektro på KTH 1928.

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🔗🇺🇦 Twitter Blue accounts fuel Ukraine War misinformation

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📺🇬🇧 Happy Valley SE03

I really didn’t think this show would stick the landing, but it did. Kudos. A great end to a great show.

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Literally every argument about AI risk is entirely made up. All the terminology is just fart-huffing. It has the same evidentiary basis as a story about floopflorps on Gavitron9 outcompeting Nuubidons.

–start of 🧵@SwiftOnSecurity

You read some of this stuff and it’s couched in Serious Think and Big Ideas but every plank is entirely contrived cognitive word salad horseshit they had to construct to have anything to stand on. Don’t let anybody hear your bullshit detector going off or you’ll look stupid.

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Today’s the 4th of July
Another June has gone by
And when they light up our town I just think
What a waste of gunpowder and sky.

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🔗 Science Made Stupid

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Glad to see France has taken over Sweden’s role as rightwinger’s Harbinger of the Decline of the West.

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I added search to this site via the convenient Pagefind package. Hat tip: @raymii.

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🔗 Today’s Southern delicacy: pork brains in a can (ALL THE CWs) 🐖🧠

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📺🇬🇧 You & Me

Three-part miniseries about Ben, a single dad of twins. Their mother died tragically shortly after their birth. He is overwhelmed by grief. Can he find happiness with quirky actress Emma? What you you think? But there are some fun twists along the way.

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Sometimes I wonder if part of the tech community just uses the term “decentralized” as a shibboleth, whithout more deeply regarding the term’s meaning.

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🔗🐘 Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?

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In retrospect it was a bad idea for me to pontificate about the failure of the Fediverse the same day Twitter’s owner decided to take a chainsaw to the face.

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