Today’s odd thought -
All of the wasted power used by billions of 3V electronics powered by 5V USB with cheap linear regulators…
Avec un jour de retard, cette collection de photos colorisées de l’histoire trans et queer à travers le siècle dernier 😍
Coloring the Past
Colorizing queer and trans history
What fascinates me about author_is_elon is that Musk found out about it immediately *after* open-sourcing the code. I mean, obviously we knew the company is dysfunctional, but to that point? it's rather impressive.
I really want to know — did someone who hates Elon, and managed to avoid all the previous purges, handle the upload to GitHub? Or did they have no idea what was in there? Or did they try to warn him but he never listened? All equally possible, all equally egregious.
Dont feel bad to buy someone’s entire discography on Bandcamp for $10. This is more than they will ever get from all streaming services combined.
Autodesk sending emails to explain that signing into Fusion 360 will now involve a roundtrip to the web browser, and explicitly citing as the first advantage of the new flow that it “will provide users the ability to use their own password managers.”
Figured, we complain enough about big companies handling passwords poorly, it’s worth commending one that does the right thing. (When I saw the email I fully expected bad news, Autodesk isn’t exactly at the forefront of good UX in general.)
@ampersine CEO to public : times are hard we have to raise prices
CEO to shareholders : lmao we’re doing a stock buyback and raising prices 2000% this is fucking awesome inflation is such a great excuse
Public : u know we can hear u right
@danielpunkass@mastodon.social
I just remembered that Twitter owns a bunch of patents. This leads me to believe that Elon Musk now owns the patent for "Pull to Refresh." Horrifying. In retrospect, that "Innovator's Patent Agreement" they came up with was brilliant, though I'm sure Musk wouldn't hesitate to challenge it.
Twitter granted patent on pull-to-refresh, promises to only use it defensively
Can the Innovator’s Patent Agreement bring peace to the patent wars?
@EmpireofDirt@universeodon.com
I don’t put projects on the back burner.
I put them under the floorboards, where the ever-present beating of their hearts drives me slowly to madness.
Oh, full-color 3D printing has come a long way, hasn’t it. I remember when they first started printing color figurines and everything looked pale and blurry.
Is this one of the best 3dbenchies ever created? - Mimaki Europe
I discovered that Mimaki was capable of printing with not only a wider spectrum of RGB colours, but even translucent colours!
3D Printing Materials Spotlight: High Definition Full Color
In making a 3D model, the designer conceptualizes, creates, and advances forth to imagine and manipulate these objects in 3D. Initially, 3D design is centered around forming precise structures, moving them, rotating, and scaling, in an effort to perfect… #fullcolor3dprint #highdefinitionfullcolor
There’s no air conditioning in the post-apocalypse
r/thelastofus - PC weird new glitches, the characters get wet during a cutscene for no reason
3,853 votes and 295 comments so far on Reddit
Considering that stability is pretty important, and also 3D printers can get pretty bulky and cumbersome — why does nobody design them to be wall-mounted?
(I’m not awake enough yet to decide if this is a genius or stupid idea. But I guess for starters the question doesn’t make sense in the U.S. where movies taught me that walls are made of cardboard.)
“Wavelength plans to make money selling pro features, including, perhaps, a version of Wavelength for organizations” is clearly the new bullshit line you feed your prospective investors so they’ll let you burn money with no rational hope of ever making it back. A fully E2E group chat app that will “never” have ads, and gives you and your friends free access to ChatGPT? That business model makes just as much sense as crypto.
But, hey, the app *does* look nice.
Ian Betteridge (@ianbetteridge@mastodon.me.uk)
Oh look a new interesting group chat app (and yes you can find me on there) https://daringfireball.net/2023/03/wavelength
so, @settinger designed and printed a comic sans typewriter ball so we’re testing it on my IBM selectric this afternoon and it totally does work!
I’m super proud of my new desk, too. It’s just a cantilevered slab of wood bolted lengthwise to the top of an old 2x2 Expedit (that I had previously put on casters) and it’s the most comfortable I’ve been in years.
I’m not even sure if it would work with a modern Kallax instead, considering how much lighter they are — or how much less wood there is to bolt the top into — so forget about making this an actual Ikea hack.
So as I said yesterday I’ve reorganized my home office so I could plug the MacBook into the 28-inch 4K display that until now I only used for gaming on my PC, and, uh… I have no idea why I inflicted this on myself the past five years, just working on the laptop screen, nor how I managed to ever achieve anything.
I guess I spent more time in coworking spaces, and cat-sitting for friends, back Before the Covid Era, but, still, working like this was borderline masochism and/or self-delusion.
Damn I want one
And the three different upgrade tiers for owners of the previous generation are such a fantastic way to take care of their customer base. I don’t think anyone else does this? (Not sure why anyone would want to upgrade without getting the new print head, but I assume that’s for people who have already customized it all to hell and back.)
Original Prusa MK4 - always perfect first layer, 32bit board, Nextruder, Input shaper - SHIPPING NOW
Buy the MK4 - https://www.prusa3d.com/product/original-prusa-mk4-2/Read more about it - https://blog.prusa3d.com/announcing-original-prusa-mk4_76585/The stat…
David Friedman suspects that someone used an AI chat bot to write one of the finalist captions for the New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest. “They’re not looking for the exit, they’re looking for meaning.”
Did A.I. write this New Yorker cartoon caption contest finalist?
I make the case that it did.
Press once to skip to next track
Press twice to go back to previous track
Press then hold to raise volume
Press twice then hold to lower volume
Press twice, pause, then a third time to toggle mute
Press the morse code for SOS to dial 911
We’ve managed to get function keys and computer ports back but somehow Apple still thinks making people execute secret knock patterns is good UX.
iPhone 15 Pro Rumored to Feature Multi-Use Action Button Instead of Mute Switch
iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max models are rumored to feature a customizable Action button like the Apple Watch Ultra, according to a MacRumors…
My wife says that any time someone proposes doing anything with an ML model, you should replace “AI” in the proposal with “trained weasels” and if it still sounds like a good idea you can go ahead with it.
The idea that you could call “foreign adversary” the country that manufactures everything you consume — and, more relevant to the matter at hand, every single computing device you use — is so fucking wild.
Yogthos (@yogthos@mas.to)
Attached: 3 images Under the new Restrict Act ("ban TikTok act") VPN users face 20 years in jail and a $1mio fine if they evade US internet censorship. Compared to this, the great firewall of china looks like a picket fence. https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686/text?s=1&r=15
Oh. There goes any motivation I had to finish Breath of the Wild. (Yeah, my bad for buying it in 2023. Nintendo being Nintendo, it wasn't even at a discounted price 🤦🏻♂️)
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom â Mr. Aonuma Gameplay Demonstration
Get an introduction to Linkâs new abilities in this gameplay demonstration of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom presented by series producer, Eiji Ao…
I was fully resigned to macOS 13.3 not bringing any improvement to Stage Manager, but it looks like they just might have touched up the code a bit. Moving windows between the laptop and external screens used to be completely unworkable (possibly because my displays aren’t arranged simply one on top of the other) and from a quick test it seems actually usable now.
Guess I’m gonna reorganize my entire desk so I can finally make use of the external screen.
(Yes I still like Stage Manager on Mac.)
It’s amusing to me that star trek imagined a world where an AI faces social rejection because he’s rational, fact based, literal, fiercely/dogmatically moral, and struggles with social nuance. But here in reality we invented AIs that have no concept of truth, give zero fucks about accuracy, have no rationality, and can’t do math, but match vibes and tone nearly perfectly.
The first artificial person will not be an autistic science officer. It’ll be an extremely allistic salesbro or politician.
Merci à la Préfecture de police de Paris de confirmer que la france n’est pas un état de droit mais un pays où le pouvoir exécutif agit de manière arbitraire au mépris des lois.
La PP prend chaque jour de nouveaux arrêtés, sans les rendre publics, qui lui permettent de verbaliser arbitrairement dans les rues de ParisLe Syndicat des avocats de france va attaquer ces arrêtés et aider à contester les amendes, mais l’effet dissuasif va jouer.
SAF Paris (@Saf_Paris)
Comment la préfecture de Paris bafoue la liberté de manifester ? Depuis vendredi dernier, des manifestants ou simples opposants à la réforme des retraites reçoivent des amendes pour participation à des manifestations interdites. 1/19
Je m’étais dit que la prochaine fois qu’il y aurait une pénurie nationale de mon traitement pour le TDAH, j’irais acheter du générique à l’étranger et ça ne me reviendrait pas plus cher.
Il y a à nouveau une pénurie nationale. (Pour la deuxième fois en moins d’un an que je le prends.) Ce qui veut dire que j’ai à nouveau un TDAH non traité et que je ne suis pas près de bouger mon cul 🫠
OMG check out these incredible UV-lit puppets 😍
How This Guy Makes Hand Puppets That Move Like Real Creatures | WIRED
Puppeteer Barnaby Dixon takes inanimate objects and turns them into uncannily real characters. Barnaby’s creations have brought joy to millions over the last…
Huh, Notion has programmable buttons now, allowing you to create your own interactive forms and stuff. I can’t imagine any use for these where I wouldn’t just program my own stuff in PHP/MySQL instead, but that’s just me, and it all looks pretty well designed — the whole pivot to databases is beginning to pay off.
Notionâs New Button Feature is a Game-Changer
Here’s everything you need to know about Notion’s new Button block!ð§ ULTIMATE BRAIN (Full Second-Brain Template - use LETSGO2023 at checkout):https://thomas…
I kind of miss when I had to defrag the computer and I could just watch the little animation of how it was all getting less fragmented and pretend that my life was also coming together like that.
Frequent repliers on the fediverse need to learn that they do not have a right to every person’s thoughts at all times, they do not have a right to add their two cents to every thread, and that not every post is an invitation to a debate.
Sometimes we just post things to get them out of our heads. Sometimes we’re just talking to ourselves. Sometimes the only response needed is a nod in passing. And that’s beautiful and very human, too.
It’s been 10 years since I wrote this about blocking people on Twitter. Might be time to do a new version about Mastodon.
Why I Blocked You on Twitter, A Compilation
I’ve blocked a hell of a lot of people over the years and occasionally I’ll make a mental note of why I did it. Here’s the list so far.
It’s interesting — during the development of the Amiga, artists were contracted to come in and draw impressive and demonstrative digital art using versions of the first Amiga drawing program, “Graphicraft,” so early on in its development that file operations had yet to be implemented. The drawings were completed, photographed by Commodore, and then lost to the ether when the system was powered off.
It’s amazing to contemplate, so groundbreaking were some of these works, carried out on a $1,295 consumer-oriented computer in 1985.
One such example is “Four-Byte Burger” by Jack Haeger, here scanned from one of the Amiga 1000’s manual covers.
Note the CRT scanlines in the image … and their orientation.
#Amiga #Mac #vintageAmiga #vintageMac #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #pixelart
"Four-Byte Burger" by Jack Haeger
Drawn on an Amiga 1000 in its VERY early days, using a graphics program that didn’t yet have a save function. Scan here from the Graphicraft manual.
The Hydrogen Sonata (Iain M. Banks) —
I’m gonna miss the Culture and its weirdo Minds more than I’ll ever miss the writer (and never mind the narrator, who is the reason I’m unlikely to ever finish the Witcher series). This one was particularly frustrating in its refusal to bring the story to a point of satisfaction.
Oh, ChatGPT is an OS now, just like that. I bet this is the year Apple regrets investing so much R&D on cars [and mixed reality] and sleeping on AI.
ChatGPT plugins
We’ve implemented initial support for plugins in ChatGPT. Plugins are tools designed specifically for language models with safety as a core principle, and help ChatGPT access up-to-date information, run computations, or use third-party services.
Can we get a SnowRunner 2 that looks like this, please
Unreal Engine 5.2 - Next-Gen Graphics Tech Demo | State of Unreal 2023
At their State of Unreal presentation in 2023, Epic showcased the new features coming to Unreal 5.2. These new features include Substrate, a new method for h…
Robot Lyre ! one our latest projects by @blitzcitydiy build the newest member of your robot band: a robot lyre! The lyre uses a Feather RP2040 running CircuitPython to control servo motors with MIDI.
Yiiiiikes.
Augie Ray (@augieray@mastodon.social)
Oncologists report “patients with rapidly progressing cancers of several types, such as breast cancer and renal cell carcinoma. ‘The trend is getting more and more alarming. We are noticing trends in hematological malignancies, breast cancer, colorectal carcinoma, and pancreatic cancer.’ Patel now fears a “perfect storm” of factors will trigger inflammatory responses, causing cancer to arrive years earlier than normal and making it deadlier once it is diagnosed.” #COVID19 https://www.ajmc.com/view/kashyap-patel-md-sees-link-between-covid-19-and-cancer-progression-calls-for-more-biomarker-testing
shot: Mozilla cuts 250 jobs, says Firefox development will be affected ()
chaser: Mozilla is committing $30M to build Mozilla.ai: A startup building a “trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem” ()
Changing World, Changing Mozilla | The Mozilla Blog
This is a time of change for the internet and for Mozilla. From combatting a lethal virus and battling systemic racism to protecting individual privacy —
Introducing Mozilla.ai: Investing in trustworthy AI | The Mozilla Blog
We’re committing $30M to build Mozilla.ai: A startup — and a community — building a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem. We’re o
Playing with the supposedly GPT3 quality LLaMA and Alpaca models really highlights how there is a quality level beyond which these things become suddenly useful.
The responses from Alpaca are "mostly" sort of there, but unreliable in my experience.
ChatGPT is just so much more confidence inspiring to use, because it is just the other side of the "mostly coherent sentences, but not quite what I wanted" to "more or less what I wanted, most of the time".
Every few years people re-learn the same lesson about Brendan Eich and it would probably be more efficient if they just remembered instead.
Conservatives Aim to Build a Chatbot of Their Own
After criticizing A.I. companies for liberal bias, programmers started envisioning right-wing alternatives, making chatbots a new front in the culture wars.
Oh, no wonder the self-installed Alpaca doesn’t handle context — the model was developed with zero consideration for chat history. Cue every tech publication announcing that OpenAI was screwed because Stanford had accomplished something just as good as ChatGPT without all the investment 🤦
Well, you can still run a GPT-ish model on your computer, and that remains impressive. But without a memory it's not a chatbot; it's just an LLM that responds to a single prompt.
Stanford Alpaca 7B instruction fine tuned LLaMA 7B First Look Interactive Demo
In this video I explain at a high level about Stanford Alpaca 7B. Alpaca 7B, a model fine-tuned from the LLaMA 7B model on 52K instruction-following demons…
I don’t know if LLaMA / Alpaca has a lot less follow-through than ChatGPT or it’s just that specific implementation. Either way, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as much, and feels a lot more like a Markov chain.
Still, a fun experiment, and probably has its uses.
Here’s a version of LLaMA with the Stanford Alpaca fine-tuning (i.e., made to emulate ChatGPT) running easily on Mac and PC.
Since AI is a magnet for bad actors, I’ve set it up in a VM thanks to VirtualBuddy, which was exceptionally painless.
It writes almost as fast on my virtualized M1 Pro as the paid version of ChatGPT. And let me tell you that talking to a terminal with all network interfaces disabled is more than a little unsettling 😳
GitHub - antimatter15/alpaca.cpp: Locally run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM
Locally run an Instruction-Tuned Chat-Style LLM . Contribute to antimatter15/alpaca.cpp development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub - insidegui/VirtualBuddy: Virtualize macOS 12 and later on Apple Silicon
Virtualize macOS 12 and later on Apple Silicon. Contribute to insidegui/VirtualBuddy development by creating an account on GitHub.
Well, that’s an unfortunate coincidence. If it isn’t a coordinated attack by a state actor trying to maximize the amount of easy surveillance data.
Oops, Windows’ screenshot tool may be saving stuff you cropped out, too
The “acropalypse” hits desktops.
Are you, and I mean it from the bottom of my heart, the absolutely stupidest person in the world, and have to do taxes?
There’s now a complete unvetted anime-themed tax preparation software program on Steam that sucks in all your personal information and hopefully doesn’t do what you know full well it will do?
Tax Heaven 3000 on Steam
Tax Heaven 3000 is a visual novel dating game that actually prepares your 2022 US federal tax return! Romance Iris, a cheerful and easygoing girl who is oddly interested in your personal finances. Maximize your deductions, and charm your way into her heart!
The universal portability of Markdown is certainly nice, but it just seems really sad to me going through life without the ability to color-code your notes.
Oh no I’m this close to spending an entire day migrating all my notes back to Notion instead of being productive.
(I switched to Craft back before Notion sharded their monolithic database and became fast again. Craft looks a lot prettier, but it’s recently become glitchy and I don’t wholly trust it with my data anymore, which is *a bit* of a problem for a personal knowledge manager.)
😩
The Bad Guys (2022) —
I’m not sure why everyone on the internet kept mentioning it in the same breath as The Last Wish — well, there’s a sexy wolf — but it was enjoyable. A big “why?!” to the design of the chief of police, though.
I didn’t even realize DPReview had belonged to Amazon for fifteen years. I spent so many hours reading camera comparisons on this site — and then the iPhone happened. I wonder just how much the page views tanked as the digital camera audience went from enthusiasts to strictly professionals.
Ethan Schoonover (@ethanschoonover@mastodon.social)
On community: Amazon is closing DPReview. The size and impact of the DPReview community is enormous and it’s going to just shut down. Really appalling. Twitter, DPReview, etc… All these vibrant communities that are important to large groups of users that have contributed content for years. These sites are built on the backs of users. I hope we’re learning that corporations will always, ALWAYS screw things up in the end (looks with concern at reddit). **The commons must be public.**
Is this damn shrine the worst motion-control puzzle ever developed or what WHY DOES THE PLATFORM ROTATE ACROSS MORE ANGLES THAN I DO THE CONTROLLER oh no did the fuckers use Euler angles
www.ign.com
Disco Elysium doesn’t have a photo mode, it has a photo-novel mode 💜😂💜
Disco Elysium’s Collage Mode allows you to write new dialogue | Engadget
Disco Elysium, one of the best releases of 2019 and 2021, finally has a dedicated photo mode, but it’s not like the one you find in most games..
I find it wild that neither Microsoft’s Copilot demonstration nor Google’s competing bullshot ever introduced a voice interface. Any request that involves recognizing names or selecting files would be more complicated to handle, but for everything else it should be pretty much trivial at this point — and the presenter outright asking the computer “what are the major trends from this spreadsheet?” instead of typing the question would be one hell of a demo.
Retention will be a key challenge for tech companies as data shows layoffs lead to people quitting as the sense of betrayal by those left behind leads to looking around.
Even if you laid off only “low performers”, a bunch of high performers will decide the company isn’t for them.
@ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz
@hedron I’m thinking of using ChatGPT in my next maths masterclass. I’ll ask it questions, then ask the students to analyse the answers.
In this way I hope to cover some interesting material, increase their ability to spot nonsense, and increase their distrust of so-called “AI systems”.
It would appear that, since 2019, Android has been keeping old data attached when you overwrite a file 🙃 and that’s now been shown to leave recoverable information in screenshots cropped on a Pixel 😵
Reddit - Dive into anything
So this is a bit of a mind-bender: the release of Tetris is closer to the World War II than it is to today. WTAF? (via @migurski)
WW2 Halfway Line (@ww2halfwayline@botsin.space)
38 years and 9 months ago, Tetris is officially released in the Soviet Union on the Electronika 60, closer to World War II than to today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_60
