µblog - archive for 2023-09 🏳️‍🌈

You know we’re in a tech hiring downturn when the only entry to a “who’s hiring” post is a Russian company.

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Thank god lobste.rs banned ExTwitter links so I don’t have to flag as offtopic a tweetpost from Lex Fridman where he chats with Mark fucking Zuckerman, clad in “photorealistic avatars”. Both are so robotic so the feat is less impressive than it sounds.

HN of course laps it up.

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Tempted to make a “Stop doing GNU” copypasta meme. “Mankind was not made to program in elisp”

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Jag har dragit mig för att läsa första delen av Åke Ohlmarks memoarer. Titeln är ”I paradiset” och boken handlar om hans barndom. Här kan väl inte finnas så många av de ilskna tirader som gjort honom till ett av den svenska rättshaveristikens största namn, tänkte jag.

– 🇸🇪🐦🧵 David Nessle

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🔗🇸🇪 Nagorno-Karabach: Fördjupning (ui.se)

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An hackernews is sooo close to getting it…

There is a danger though if certain types of sites are more likely to block GPTBot than others, because that would end up skewing the data set that it trains off, which could have longer term impacts on all the content generated with it. If all the good quality sites block it and the sites full of AI generated junk don’t, then that sounds like a downward spiral.

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John W. Campbell Jr. – cryptofascist

[Moorcock said that] Campbell’s Stories and its writers were “wild-eyed paternalists to a man, fierce anti-socialists” with “[stories] full of crew-cut wisecracking, cigar-chewing, competent guys (like Campbell’s image of himself)”, who had success because their “work reflected the deep-seated conservatism of the majority of their readers, who saw a Bolshevik menace in every union meeting”. He viewed Campbell as turning the magazine into a vessel for right-wing politics, “by the early 1950s … a crypto-fascist deeply philistine magazine pretending to intellectualism and offering idealistic kids an ‘alternative’ that was, of course, no alternative at all”.

Bester commented: “[my conversation with Campbell] reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science-fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles.”

– 🆆 John W. Campbell: Assessment by peers

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📺🇬🇧 Better

Good UK crime drama, with great characters and actors as usual.

Extra credit for having a The The track as closing theme.

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🇸🇪 TV4-appen på Samsung-TV är verkligen riktigt usel.

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🔗 Amazing footage of liquified mud (quick clay) in Norway in 1978 (narration in Norwegian)

🆆 Quick clay.

Via Cornubot

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🇸🇪🎭 En midsommarnattsdröm

En föreställning från Scenkonst Sörmland. Shakespeares pjäs är översatt till 1939 i Sörmland. Bra humoristiska inslag men med bråddjupt allvar.

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Learning a lot about hydraulic ram maintenance and repair from a nice young Australian man on Youtube. I hope he’s not a Nazi.

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Broke: thinking about the Roman Empire every 10 minutes.

Woke: thinking about the Byzantine Empire every 10 minutes.

Bespoke: they’re the same thing, fool.

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Aside from chat history, persistent notifications, multi-line comments, editing and media support, what have the later gen alternatives to IRC ever done for us?

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Yanks on weekend plans: rattle off more stuff than I can do at work in a month, “you know, just taking it easy”.

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“Halt! It’s the GDPR Police! Drop that unencrypted PII now!!”

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Some IT consultant is trying the hoary old trick of advertising using puzzles, but in this case they’re using Tengwar, and the idea of spending my working days with Tolkien nerds is not the selling point they imagine it to be.

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Had my first run-in with the hell of node/npm versioning when I had to update pagefind. Not very enjoyable.

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Anyone know why Donostia-San Sebastian is such a popular destination for Australians?

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🔗 Liquid Bewitchment: Gin Drinking in England, 1700–1850

So in this almost empty gin palace
Through a two-way looking glass
You see your Alice

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🔗 David Golumbia (R.I.P.): The Great White Robot God - Artificial General Intelligence and White Supremacy

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No wonder the US will never get the metric system as nerds believe “kilo-” means 1,024 bytes…

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Much like orthodox Marxism-Leninism, the Austrian School describes economics by how it should be, not how it actually is.

– me

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Link aggregator site freakout after Mozilla discovers that EULAs for cars are a privacy nightmare. Dudes, you’re rolling around in a highly visible chunk of metal with a unique, machine-readable identifier, and you’re legally required to be an insured party to operate it. Your privacy is already in tatters.

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car worship, an anecdote

At my first year at uni in the early 90s, we had a course in the “History of Science and Technology”, which was pass/fail, and you just had to attend a certain number of lectures. I found it quite interesting but most of my fellow students were there for the engineering courses and didn’t really like the softer side of the course.

One day, the lecturer made the mistake of stating what is now obvious, that increasing the number of lanes on a highway does not reduce congestion in the medium term - it just increases traffic. Stockholm was in the throes of a debate regarding a road traffic expansion project, and many of my fellow students were from the more affluent suburbs that this project was meant to serve.

Man, if people were sleepy before, they weren’t now. Spotty kids just out of high school and who probably didn’t have a driver’s license could vehemently recite the pro-highway arguments down the smallest talking point. Any restrictions in the free flow of automobiles was seen as rank heresy. And we weren’t even studying civil engineering, so where they’d picked up the prediliction of hugging cement (betongkramare) was beyond me.

Anyway, just thought about that for some reason. ⛐

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🔗🆆 Carian language

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Struck by the cognitive dissonance of lobste.rs, on the one hand people are demanding they be able to root their phones to resurrect old hardware, on the other they are raging against a proposed EU regulation that would enforce software updates for older devices.

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🔗🚀📚 I re-read William Gibson 5 years ago and blogged about it

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adventures in anchoring

Part of the design of this blog is having a flow of posts, ordered by month. Within each month there are days, and there can be multiple entries per day. As the ideal is that a post can be just a sentence, or a word, having the traditional format of one page == one post, surrounded by a ton of side fluff like titles, navigation etc. felt excessive.

So the model is one big page, with entries identified by HTML anchors.

The anchor targets (id) were originally part of the <article> element, which makes semantic sense. However, these anchors don’t work in text mode browser (specifically w3m).

I stumbled upon the W3C validator, and it stated that an article element has to have a title. In a fit of pique I added a semantically null empty <h3> element, and attached the anchor to it. This turns out to enable nav in w3m. but added a lot of extra whitespace.

In the end I figured I didn’t want to have an empty h3 tag so I replaced it with a <p> with an anchor. This seems to work ok so I’ll go with it from now.

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