Garoo

Not me asking ChatGPT for the Linux command to wipe a whole drive 🙈

(I know just enough to understand the command once it's given. Or I think I do…)

Ooh, Star Citizen has a tutorial now. With gamepad button prompts, too. They are broken, of course — you have to press RB + RB to interact with stuff. Oh well, there’s always next year.

Oh nooo Bethesda is responding to negative Starfield reviews on Steam 😱💀

They’re going at it with the absolute worst angle — you’re wrong to feel this way! — and the responses sound suspiciously GPT-like. How in the world did anyone think this would be a good idea 🤦🏻‍♂️

I’m getting so good at Really Bad Chess!

@chrisisgr8@tech.lgbt

people who don’t understand computers 🤝 people who do understand computers

“sometimes computers just break for no reason”

Haven’t seen this mentioned here, but it’s huge if it works (and it very well could): TikTok letting users customize their feed through a GPT bot.

They can’t run your feed through GPT, so this must just be accessing internal parameters and setting up rules, but it’s quite clear that users won’t pore through a complicated UI to customize their socials, whereas just *telling* the app what they want… this could be one of the smartest corporate GPT uses so far.

It shouldn’t make that much of a difference to my mental load to open the to-do list and see a ranking of the 20 highest-priority tasks, instead of a two-column page that scrolls down for six full screens, filled with items competing for attention with color coding.

It shouldn’t make that much of a difference, if I didn’t have ADHD.

Meant to do it for a while, and I’ve finally reorganized my tasks list along two axes: how urgent it is, and how difficult or annoying it will be. That way I can either list them by most urgent, or easiest wins. I already feel so much lighter and more organized!

I’m not saying I’ve completed any task since I did that yesterday, but! So organized! And also it counts as a task in itself, so.

@jsq@mastodon.social

It’s ironic, because the iPhone notch and “dynamic island” are so thoughtfully designed with zero compromises regarding the functionality of iOS. In fact, they actually provide a better user experience.

Yet on the Mac, how the notch interacts with macOS is laughably incompetent. It is shockingly lazy regarding attention to detail, and outright disruptive to the user experience.

Critics of foldables: I would simple die if I had to use a phone with a creased screen.

Google: Oh yeah? And what if regular phones had bumps too now, huh?

I tried Plex a couple times and bounced off — in no small part because I didn’t like how much data collection it involved — but, wow, adding something like this after thirteen years of operation and making it opt-out, it’s just… amazing 😲

I can’t even see a clear profit motive here, just the most astonishing cluelessness.

Plex Users Fear New Feature Will Leak Porn Habits to Their Friends and Family

"I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff," a user said of Plex’s Week in Review email and Discover Together feature.

@olivvybee@beehive.gay

I don’t need “ai” in my terminal, I’m perfectly capable of typing something that looks plausible but does something completely unexpected myself thanks

Oddly blunt and honest phrasing in Game Informer ’s tracking banner. Someone involved must have had *opinions* about cookies.

@algowatching@social.nkb.fr

🇫🇷 The French welfare agency uses an algorithm to detect potential fraudsters. Every month, it ranks the households of 32 million people, including 13 million children, with a “risk score”.

For the first time, @LaQuadrature obtained its source code and could run it.

The criteria that increase the risk score are
- being poor,
- living in a poor neighborhood,
- being a single mother,
- being unemployed,
- having a disability.

Notation des allocataires : l’indécence des pratiques de la CAF désormais indéniable

Après plus d’un an de mobilisation contre les pratiques de notation des allocataires de la CAF au côté des collectifs Stop Contrôles et Changer de Cap, et après avoir détaillé le fonctionnement de l’algorithme de la CAF et son cadre politique, nous publions aujourd’hui le code source de cet algorith

@gamingonlinux@mastodon.social

People and SEO Spam like this are ruining the internet. Fuck this shite.

@Lapfelix@mastodon.social

TIL the camera module on iPhones isn't a square but a vertical rectangle

Oh, and there’s a multiplayer update that lets you see slices of other players 🫨

I Added Multiplayer to My 4D Game! (4D Miner Devlog #3)

Access the latest features by becoming a 4D HyperSupporter on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/MashpoeOfficial 4D Miner Discord: https://discord.gg/pMtZa6AVy…

“I made Minecraft, but it’s 4D.” My poor, poor brain. Seriously though, very interesting, and absurdly well made, although it’s lacking a degree of freedom — translation through the fourth axis, in addition to rotation.

I Made Minecraft, but It’s 4D

Play the Demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1941640/4D_Miner/Official 4D Miner Discord: https://discord.gg/pMtZa6AVy2Official Subreddit: https://reddit…

I’m five years late on this but I never saw any clear explanation of what RTX actually did (as in the original use of that brand, raytracing), and I’ve had a sudden illumination: was it mostly just that they added an optimized temporal denoising module? 😮

DLSS 3.5 - Better Pathtracing for Free

This video is a paid promotion for Nvidia. In it, I investigate Ray Reconstruction - which is DLSS 3.5’s trick to preserve more information from path-traced …

Since I’m never booting up that game again: All 10 secret alternate universes in Starfield. The ideas are all fun. And the dialogue is underdeveloped, what else is new.

Starfield - All 10 Secret Alternate Universes (NG+ Alternate Timelines)

Starfield All 10 Secret Alternate Universes (NG+ Alternate Timelines)After beating the game and going into unity, you have a 15% chance to spawn in a unique …

I’d forgotten the dark times of the $800 Mac mini

BasicAppleGuy (@BasicAppleGuy@mastodon.social)

Attached: 1 image Mac mini pricing across time. Yearly Mac mini base price (blue) compared with $499 base starting price when adjusted for inflation from 2005 (yellow).

#LastRepost is “just” a three-dimensional diaphragm but the pictures are still mind-bending

Edit: for some reason I thought the effect might be less impressive in proper motion but, nope, there's a video and it looks 🤯

Slide-glide cyclides

3D printing files: https://www.printables.com/model/651714-slide-glide-cyclidesMathologer video: https://youtu.be/5q_sfXY-va8Andrew Kepert’s playlist on lune…

@henryseg@mathstodon.xyz

Slide-glide cyclides - a design discovered by Andrew Kepert when investigating ways to “see” why the area of a sphere is four times the area of a disk of the same radius. I added the gears and the base. Full video:

Slide-glide cyclides

3D printing files: https://www.printables.com/model/651714-slide-glide-cyclidesMathologer video: https://youtu.be/5q_sfXY-va8Andrew Kepert’s playlist on lune…

They offer 1GB of free backup storage and hope “to evolve from an app into a digital cooperative in which you can pay to become a member,” all of which translates to “we got some investors and managed to invent a quixotic business model to sell them,” which would normally be bad news, but the app is open-source and locally hosted so… if the investors force them to change their tune, someone will just fork it 🤷

Ooh! AnyType is out! An open-source Notion clone, with no servers, that stores your data locally, encrypted, and syncs to your devices over wifi. From what I see in the tutorial videos (in Docs / Use Cases), the UI looks miraculously very well designed.

There’s an emphasis on creating custom object types that reminds me of Capacities, only with a lot more flexibility — as far as I can tell, you can use AnyType as a straight Notion replacement.

anytype — the everything app

for those who celebrate trust & autonomy.

@carnage4life@mas.to

This is a great example of how our minds are terrible at assessing risk because here it’s the same in both cases (until you get to the last platform).

@jack@berlin.social

“The [automatic machine/artificial intelligence] is not frightening because of any danger that it may achieve autonomous control over humanity… Its real danger is the quite different one that such machines, though helpless by themselves, may be used by a human being or a block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the human race.”
— #NorbertWiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950

@pseudonym@mastodon.online

Hey @web3isgreat think I found you a Christmas present.

#nft #DnD

TIL that photovoltaic cells have their contacts and wiring in the front, that it’s an issue, and that moving them to the back is/was a hard problem. I don’t have the energy to read more about this tonight so I’ll just pass it along.

@carnage4life@mas.to

I’m reminded of the naivety of early social media engineers assuming that if you connect the whole world then we’d live happily ever after. Instead we now know it’s just a thankless job fighting hate speech, election meddling, COVID misinformation, cyber bullying, etc.

The AI people are actively ignoring thinking through the harms LLMs can and are causing today to focus on fantasies inspired by books and movies they saw as kids.

@sdw@mastodon.social

I am still a bit upset that we’ve gone from cute robot vacuums to AI replacing artists instead of a larger, cuter robot that does more household chores

@helvetica@mastodon.gamedev.place

looking for something to do?

we made a thanksgiving print and play mini-puzzlebook

download it here:

p.s. if you solve it, you’ll get access to puzzmo!

Puzzmo is the (new) place for thoughtful puzzles

Access to Puzzmo is coming soon for everyone.

@nixCraft@mastodon.social

I know you guys like funny or weird source code comments. Here are interesting comments in the source code of SQLite

github.com

How long has Instagram had the main feed peppered with “Follow” buttons? My brain just registered them for the first time (but it simultaneously remembers having seen them there for a while) and now I understand why I sometimes have to unfollow accounts I don’t remember adding 🤦🏻‍♂️

Goddamn engagement metrics 😡

Ooh I need these 😍

I just endured an audiobook about a space-faring human civilization in which the author describes some people as having “a drawling Martian accent” or some such.

All character voices were bad, but there was one in particular that seemed completely inexplicable until, several hours in, I realized the character was named Mark Wu, and the narrator had chosen to do a (slightly reined-in) Asian accent caricature.

And, sure, the book’s from 1994, but even then… oh, no… it was recorded in 2023 💀

@lucylikeayourface@tech.lgbt

Excuse me what the shit is this?
This is horrifying

Cw surveillance

I remember the migration from Notion to Craft as being rather painless.

I’m moving all my data back to Notion (because I’ve had reliability issues with Craft, while Notion’s performance improved) and it’s a fucking nightmare. I basically have to do each page manually AND some images are TIFF 🤦

(Craft has this weird structure where folders and pages are completely different entities, which would be fine if it didn’t affect export, but a page and *all* its subpages end up in a single MD file 😡)

Assassin’s Creed VR reportedly has some of the most extensive comfort settings ever, all the way to a fixed virtual nose in the corner of the screen — has anyone done that before? I didn’t think I’d even consider trying this game, but I guess now I’m just waiting for it to come to PC.

Did another roundup of bring-your-own-key ChatGPT apps for Mac (because ADHD meds help you focus, but not necessarily on the right thing). Boy, are some of them ridiculously priced for what’s just UI glue over an API.

I’m quite sore that Raycast seems to have removed functionality from the free, user-contributed ChatGPT plugin in order to add value to their paid offering.

This is not an AI story. This is a “how is it fucking possible that the largest health insurance company in the country can deny people coverage without any further justification than ‘computer says no’ — and they built the computer themselves” story.

@cstross@wandering.shop

Oh wow, Techdirt digs the dirt on Dilbert Stark’s lawsuit against Media Matters. And they don’t think much of it!

” … kudos to Elon. This really takes stupid SLAPP suits to incredible new levels. I didn’t think you’d be able to find a lawyer who would file a lawsuit so stupid, that makes you look this ridiculous, but you did it.”

Congrats To Elon Musk: I Didn’t Think You Had It In You To File A Lawsuit This Stupid. But, You Crazy Bastard, You Did It!

So, yesterday we covered Elon Musk’s ridiculous censorial threat to sue Media Matters “the split second the court opens on Monday.” Of course, as we noted, you can file lawsuits 24/7. And yet, as t…

@remixtures@tldr.nettime.org

RT @danielahanley
The public should know which companies have secret and discriminatory deals with Apple and Google to obtain preferential pricing and terms on their app stores.

Google admits Spotify pays no Play Store fees because of a secret deal | TechCrunch

Google during a testimony in the Epic vs Google trial said that a deal with Spotify allows the audio company to completely bypass Play Store fees.

@GeoDon@mapstodon.space

Map of the entire Internet on this day, 54 years ago.
Nov 21, 1969.
#GISchat

I can’t help but feel like my 2018 iPad Pro losing charge while locked has been a very sudden change, too sudden for it to just be battery degradation 🤔

(Background App Refresh is off. The Battery Usage chart doesn't show anything suspect.)

We’ve been told for a whole year that ChatGPT’s secret sauce was extensive fine-tuning with “reinforcement learning from human feedback,” involving a lot of back-and-forth with testers (some of them underpaid Kenyans), and that made it much better than any competitor — which it was.

Now it turns out that the chatbot went from idea to launch in a couple of weeks, in a panic over Anthropic preparing to launch its own product? How is that even possible? 🙃

@ben@mastodon.bentasker.co.uk

Cheeky fuckers.

#Youtube have deployed Javascript that delays video load if the user is using #Firefox

old.reddit.com

So this is a thing you can buy for fifteen to twenty-five euros 😶

And, you know, if you wanted to make an anti-war diorama, you'd certainly need something like that, so it's hard to criticize them for selling this kit. Until you scroll down to “two American soldiers giving a Snickers bar to Afghan children” and “two American soldiers negotiating with a Vietnamese pimp" on the manufacturer's page.

Instagram’s recommendation engine has suddenly decided that I’m French so I should be watching French videos (even though 80% of the content I’ve ever engaged with was in English, and my devices are set to English); I guess I should be thankful for the effort to make me use the app less.

I remember reading recently that TikTok’s algorithm is also heavily localized, and that’s just one more reason this format is extremely not for me.

@Digitalyn@mastodon.xyz

Now I’m offended.

@signalapp@mastodon.world

Signal is a nonprofit. But what does this mean in practice? Today we do something most tech co’s avoid: talk money. What does it cost for Signal to play in a lane dominated by billion $ corporations, while rejecting the surveillance business model?

signal.org

I’ve dreamed for ages of a developer offering extensive mod support for an immersive open-world city, and CDPR is gonna do it… for The Witcher instead of Cyberpunk 2077 😡

I get it, Geralt has many fans. But imagine what kind of content modders could offer in a generic futuristic world that isn't tied to a fixed, well-defined protagonist. (And, yes, the 2.0 version of the game is now good enough to warrant this.)

CDPR Working On Free Witcher 3 Mod Editor To Allow Players To ‘Create Your Own Experiences’

It is aiming to release the mod editor next year and it will only be coming to PC.

Oh, the Spongebob add-on for Powerwash Simulator isn’t free 😒

Nice try, but I've never really watched the show and there are enough new free bonus jobs to satisfy my itch for listening to an audiobook today.

@AlSweigart@mastodon.social

Insanity is trying the same thing over and over again while expecting different results.

Programming is doing this because it's the standard way to uncover intermittent bugs.