µblog - archive for 2024-05 🏳️‍🌈

Worst enemy in Elden Ring? It’s a split between the effing Pages and those bearded Albinaurics that wanna suck your face. I hate all of them with a passion.

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🔗 Wikipedia: 486958 Arrokoth

Now this is a seriously cool space rock.

It used to be called “Ultima Thule”, which was quietly discarded for “Arrokoth” which is seriously metal. The reason for the name change is not noted on Wikipedia, and I don’t know if it was because the term was used by a notorious Swedish white power band.

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Content warning: community specific nit-picking.

Yesterday’s post was inspired by this amazing lobste.rs thread. To me, it shows that we have definitely reached the apex or plateau of the current “AI”/LLM hype.

Consider the situation: a quintessential nerd product (a terminal emulator for the Mac) announces ChatGPT integration, and the reaction is overwhelmingly negative. The few voices not in opposition are reduced to arguing

• it’s an opt-in feature, and I’m not going to enable it anyway
• people are being mean to the developer and are unreasonably anti-LLM

There’s not a semblance of a 50/50 split between supporters and detractors. The supporters are fighting a rear-guard action.

Personally, the first reaction I had when I saw the news was visceral distaste. It lessened somewhat when I read more about feature, but it’s still going to be a big entry in the con section if and when I decide to change my terminal emulator¹.

Another thing specific to lobste.rs is that feature is explicitly tied to ChatGPT², a product from OpenAI, which is a start-up which receives most of its funding from Microsoft. In the normal case, anything connected to MSFT usually elicits distaste on the site, but there’s a weird exception for OpenAI, even though their technology presumably powers the newly announced Microsoft laptops which have been panned as privacy nightmares.

¹as an aside, the only flag I submitted to a comment was in a subthread where users of the default Terminal.app were being called effectively morons.

²to be fair you can hook in other LLMs.

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Just got a rejection email from an employer with such an egregious incorrect subject line grammar in it that I’m kinda relieved.

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We’ve reached the stage of the AI hype cycle where the ai-brained promptfondlers are reduced to tone-policing their opponents, because everyone hates AI now.

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🔗 McSweeney’s: What Your Favorite ’90s Band Says About the Kind of Bored Suburban Mom You Are Today

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Headed into the Big City for a night out, figured I’d take a walk through the central parts to recharge on humanity. Almost too many humans though, and a lot of them were Swifties. Maybe I need to get out a bit more.

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🔗 RealVNC is dropping its “Home” plan and barely noting its free “Lite” option

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It’s true that make isn’t ideal as a task runner, but people will still use it as one. Why? Because despite nerds scolding people not to do so, it’s still preferable to rolling your own shell scripts when you want to run tasks.

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This year’s Eurovision is a bit of a bore but I’m kinda touched that the Serbian jury gave their 12 points to Croatia.

Le Royaume-Uni, nul points

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I think some weird-ass interaction is happening in Google search because my wikipedia links are being presented as se.wikipedia.org, not sv.wikipedia.org. “se” is, as everyone knows, the ISO code for Northern Sámi[1].

[1] I did not know this

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🔗🇬🇧 Last Tango in Halifax

BBC dramedy about two OAPs who meet again after their respective spouses pass away. They each have a daughter with various issues. Recommended for the acting.

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Now that a couple of credible forks have been revealed, defenders of the Nix status quo are pivoting from their previous airy statements of “if you don’t like it, fork it!” to rampant tone-policing and complaints of duplicitous behavior, because work on the forks began before the open letter was published.

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🔗 Everyone hates Workday

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🔗🇸🇪🎬 Den sista resan

Ena halvan av TV-duon Filip & Fredrik oroas av att hans pappa tappat livsgnistan och mer eller mindre tvingar ner åldringen in en nästan lika gammal Renault 4 och kör ner till Frankrike. Det är en rörande film om livets troisième âge som inte riktigt blev som planerat.

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