This is fucked even without the hallucinating Clippy in the backend.

If your desktop is idle for more than 30-60 seconds (no “meaningful” mouse & keyboard movement), you get a red flag

People getting flogged flagged for being lazy for a few seconds reminds me of something …

That was a great read.

The point of all of this is to say: the tech utopia fantasy is truly dead to me. The image of the cool, hippie, leftist Silicon Valley tech is wrong.

I feel this in my soul, because I was that leftist hippie who got into tech because he believed all this shit and getting disillusioned over time was just fucking painful and made me hate those goons with a passion.

The straw I have left is that I’m not alone and that more people realize this and we make our own communities again that don’t suck. There’s still a long way to go, and Fedi has its own problems, especially when it comes to kick out the racists, sexists, and other bigots, but I try to stay positive that we’ll get there. At least to a degree.

(I mean, we have Awful and it’s an example that you can keep the bar nazi-free if you want to.)

Seems like they’ve actually done this now. There’s a preface note now.

This topic was chosen based on the technical merit of the project before we were aware of its author’s political views and controversies. Our coverage of technical projects is never an endorsement of the developers’ political views. The moderation of comments here is not meant to defend, or defame, anybody, but is in keeping with our longstanding policy against personal attacks. We could certainly have handled both topic selection and moderation better, and will endeavor to do so going forward.

Which is better than nothing, I guess, but still feels like a cheap cop-out.

Side-note: I can actually believe that they didn’t know about Justine being a fucking nazi when publishing this, because I remember stumbling across some of her projects and actually being impressed by it, and then I found out what an absolute rabbit hole of weird shit this person is. So I kinda get seeing the portable executables project, thinking, wow, this is actually neat, and running with it.

Not that this is an excuse, because when you write articles for a website that should come with a bit of research about the people and topic you choose to cover and you have a bit more responsibility than someone who’s just browsing around, but what do I know.

So, ethics and legality are strategic liabilities? Jesus fucking Christ, that’s not even sneer-worthy. This guy is completely fucking insane.

Such meme. Much wow. I see we’re continuing with giving dumb names to everything the Muskrat is involved in. Glad that hasn’t changed.

Oh, that is so much better, thanks for the suggestion. I reworked the whole paragraph to follow that tone and it does work much better and feels less clunky.

“Feel Good Productivity” indeed, because doesn’t it feel good to have a portfolio that keeps filling itself? To have a tool that promises to make writer’s block go poof? Because that, everyone, must be the future of productivity!

Thank you for reading.

“fear of the empty page” is a bit oddly named.

Agreed, it does seem clunky in hindsight. I changed that passage into “To have a tool that promises to alleviate writer’s block at the click of a button?” Which is just as much a bullshit claim as the other one, of course, but maybe gets the point across better. And I believe this is actually what some of the “writing assistant” autoplaggers claim to do.

Thanks, I thought about something like that as well, but figured it’d be more hassle in the long run. I like to keep my mail in one basket.

But honestly, I feel like there just isn’t a good solution anyway. Email comes from simpler times and any encryption is bolted on and either awkward to use or has some problems with functionality. Hell, even Proton’s bridge was a pain to get running properly with send-email because for some reason it insisted on reformatting outgoing mails. I honestly wonder if I should even bother at this point, because most of the stuff I use email for isn’t even private. It’s mostly corporate communication and mailing lists which are public anyway. All private communication goes over other channels (and some of which are arguably even worse than email, like Discord).

Not saying that this is the conclusion everyone should come to and YMMV, but spending the last weeks combing through the email landscape this feels like the realization I’m starting to arrive at, because I want my email to just work.

Personal rant: in my ongoing search for a replacement for ProtonMail after they pivoted to AI had me almost sign up with Tuta because, hey, they looked good and were on my radar originally anyway, when I found out that they do not offer any IMAP/SMTP access at all.

I mean, I get it, their whole thing is privacy and, yes, storing mail locally on my machine kinda undermines the idea of strong and impenetrable E2E encryption, but I should at least have the choice like I do with Proton Bridge. Because without SMTP Tuta is completely unusable for git send-email. I mean, yes, technically I could copy-paste the output of format-patch into the web client but, first, I am lazy and don’t wanna do that, and second, from my experience it rarely works anyway because the clients do some encoding crap so that git am doesn’t eat it without cleanup.

Meh. I guess I have to keep looking.

Wild that “We left OpenAI and founded out own company with alignment and safety”-Anthropic decides to get into bed with Palantir of all companies.

It’s almost as if their whole safety shtick is complete bullshit. Hmm.

This is the write-up on the idea of toxic productivity I’ve been meaning to do for a while now and have teased a few times on the Stubsack already.

I tried to cite and reference and give credit where I could, but a lot of still is still mental vomit from myself and just my opinions. Feel free to comment, critique, or rip it apart if you feel like it. Other than that, thanks for reading.

Fuck me sideways. Looks like the machine will continue running at least for a while.

That’ll go down well with everyone and not erode the public’s opinion about the shitheads even further, I’m sure, when they’re allowed to ingest everything and make their chatbots even more racist and plagiarize even more stuff.

For anyone who wants a belated Halloween scare:

https://xcancel.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1852033244729860397

Spoiler: The real kicker is in the hash tags.

I keep hearing that stupid-face thumbnails generate more clicks and more and more people do it, and yet every single person you ask says they think it’s fucking stupid, including the creators themselves. I really wonder who these people they A-B test this with are, or if this is just some Google Autoplag Bot that estimates it’s better because it falls flat into their uncanny valley home territory.

Alignment-locked races (or classes for that matter) are just stupid. It’s probably the thing I hated about D&D the most and getting rid of alignment altogether was one of our house rules. I’m actually really happy Baldur’s Gate 3 did that, because suddenly a whole bunch of players realized how you can easily work around those restrictions.

It’s so much more fun when you travel to, say, the Abyss and don’t operate under the pretense that everything you meet there is chaotic evil by default and that you could maybe even meet a morally complex demon. Even more fun in a Planescape campaign.

/off-topic rant

Dark Elf you say? Let’s ship his ass to Menzoberranzan and see how the NRx shit does there.

If Garcia does win the suit, it’d more than likely set a legal precedent which denies Section 230 protection to chatbots, if not AI-generated content in general.

I’m not gonna lie, that would be hilarious just for the monkey paw effect. They want chatbots to take the place of real employees? Let’s start with holding them to the same standards and treat everything they shit out as first-party content.

Developing and Empowering our Aspiring Leaders (DEAL) Act

That can’t possibly be the actual name of that thing. It sounds like something out of North Korea. The fuck are these people smoking?

That was the day when the transformer paper was released that kicked off this whole LLM shitshow. So my intention was just a little nod towards that. ;)

But yeah, the real number is probably quite a bit larger than that.

Day 2686 of wondering how much Google can keep enshittifying everything it touches before people catch on.