What comes to mind is The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, a maritime adventure novel for children, which is, I believe, the first “real” book (as in, not those short kids books you can finish in an hour) I ever read by myself. I picked that for a book report in school, where the assignment was to write like a mini summary for our favorite books. Me, not having read much at that point except for those kids books, which I didn’t want to do, went to the bookstore and just idly browsed around, and for some reason that book caught my attention because of the title (it’s called “Salz im Haar” [Salt in my Hair] in the German translation) and the badass cover art of the edition I own has, so I picked that and ended up really liking it.

Ever since I’ve been a sucker for maritime fantasy.

That book also got me into reading more in general. I’m a huge fantasy nerd, so other books that will always warm me up inside are the first fantasy novels I read: Lord of the Rings, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle.

Yeah. I ran without an account for the longest time (and used alternative frontends like Freetube, Invidious, yt-dlp, etc.) but I caved and made one just so I could curate my feed.

I wish YouTube would ban this shit wholesale, but it’s Google and of course they won’t.

Aside: I’ve been hammering “Don’t recommend this channel” on every video that remotely smells like AI slop for a while and so far that seems to keep the feed fairly clean.

Which AI models, though? Your synthetic text extruder LLMs that can’t accurately surpass humans at anything unless you train them specifically to do that and which are kinda shite even then unless you look at it exactly the right way? Or that fabled brain simulation AI that doesn’t even exist?

Instead, he prefers to describe future AI systems as a “country of geniuses in a data center,” […] [and] that such systems would need to be “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields.”

Ah, “future” AI systems. As in the ones we haven’t built yet, don’t know how to build, and don’t even know whether we can build them. But let’s just feed more shit into Habsburg GPT in the meantime, maybe one will magically pop out.

Good news, everyone: critihype is canceled until the next tweet.

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1881258443669172470#m

9:13 of Coffeezilla having an existential crisis.

Oh well. Nothing screams healthy business like force-feeding your product to every customer who can’t hammer the conveniently hidden opt-out button fast enough. I’m sure Gemini is doing great.

Filen does photos too, so you could consolidate 2 and 3 into one. I went and bought 500 GB lifetime storage on their Black Friday offer. Let’s see if they stick around. So far the experience has been smooth.

And if you mention mailbox.org, let me throw Posteo.com into the mix. Basically the same offer, but where mailbox presents itself a bit more business-like, Posteo seems to market itself towards individuals. I moved my mails there and are quite happy with it, but you have to roll encryption yourself. No auto solutions like Proton or Tuta.

Bryan Lunduke

Holy shit, the Linux Action Show guy? I remember listening to that podcast occasionally fifteen years ago and found it quite entertaining.

I had no idea he was even still around, let alone going techfash.

[The] SEO space, an industry known for making the web better.

end_me_now.jpg

At some point in the last years, playing games on Linux turned from fiddling three hours with a Wine config to maybe get an hour of 30fps before the next crash into a legit better experience than Windows that works out of the box in most cases. That did sell a lot of people on giving it a try.

I guess it happened when Valve went all-in on Proton. And Microsoft first adding ads into Windows and now forcing their autoplag on everyone helped a bit, too.

That reads like some bullshit you’d find on r/iamverysmart on Reddit.

Maybe side effects of all the substances he uses to become the Übermensch.

I’ve been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and “making fun” of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I don’t remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.

It was always “we don’t censor speech but don’t be an asshole” with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen even the worst places say, “we explicitly allow hate speech, go ahead”.

Holy fucking shitballs.

The worst bit is, the devs who aren’t like this are basically forced to comply anyway. Whenever I justify a delay in some release with that testing/bugfixing takes time, I get slapped with release it anyway, you can patch it later, and although I am lucky to be in a privileged position where I can fight this for some amount of time, every young programmer who comes into a job with a good mindset is not and has to bend over or face shit like negative performance reviews because they’re too slow.

This is so fucking infuriating. I don’t want to release shit software, I want to make sure the stuff I ship works. Back when patching meant you had to ship a physical medium to a non-trivial amount of users, that was how things worked, but apparently only because IT HAD TO and not because it’s good fucking work ethics to have. Now that you can just zero-day patch everything it’s apparently okay to ship unfinished shit and use your customers as beta testers.

I hate this so much and I try to avoid doing this as much as I can professionally. And whenever I can’t I actually feel bad and want to apologize to everyone who has to use that shit release.

Their accountant is probably three GPTs in a trench coat that’s being fed prompts by an unpaid intern or some poor dude in India.

Hey, at least there’s no way the Elon simps can spin that, right?

Never mind.

Yes, I can confirm this is true. Homeopathy is really accepted here and is even covered by most health insurances.

There is even a passage in the pharmaceutical law that specifically excludes homeopathic shit from having to prove its effectiveness (they only have to prove it’s not hurting anyone, and the rules for that are much laxer than for other medicine). It’s absolutely baffling.

Wow, I’ve been saying for years that this extension is shady as fuck. Nice to see that it’s getting some attention.

I didn’t expect it to steal affiliate cookies, but that they let you control which codes it “finds” isn’t even a secret, and I thought people know this. But every time I mentioned this on Reddit I was downvoted and called a liar.

Oh look, YouTube managed to circumvent uBlock for like two hours again before someone figured out a fix, lol.

Seriously, I wanna know how much funds Google allocates to fight ad blockers just to come up with a working solution every odd month that then gets fixed by the uBlock community in hours. There’s no way this is profitable for them or gets a sizable number of uBlock users to buy their subscription.

They have a CLI app though which you can hook up to dmenu or rofi or whatever to get global shortcuts.

https://github.com/firecat53/bitwarden-menu

Their desktop app is a bit shit anyway. I just use the CLI and the Firefox extension and it’s working solid.