BoxOfRain

This isn't a uniquely American thing to be fair, in the UK it's not unusual to discuss area in terms of football pitches or for very large areas, Wales.

Also events like Partygate in the UK really didn't help, people were already pretty done with the pandemic lifestyle after nearly two years of it on and off including fairly heavy-handed enforcement; the British government then lost all its practical moral authority to impose restrictions when it became clear the very people imposing them had been having massive boozy parties throughout the worst parts of the pandemic. That more than anything was the final nail in the coffin for things like mandatory masking and the 'rule of six' from what I remember.

I wish that public leaders realised just how much their personal moral fibre determines what people in general will and won't tolerate. The public trust they cheerfully destroy in minutes takes decades to rebuild, and I'm genuinely worried that if there's a pandemic with this still in the majority of people's memory they will go 'so you're going to put us under house arrest and have massive parties again? Why should we listen to you?' and it'll be a very difficult question to answer.

My MSI monitor does it, I don't object to it in principle. What I do object to is a tool, that I own, demanding this is done on its own schedule rather than mine in a way I can't always dismiss. There's no reason it shouldn't be configurable to do it at three in the morning rather than when I'm trying to run the standup for example.

Definitely will be checking more carefully the next time I buy an OLED monitor that it'll let me do this.

I've come to realise that the only truly good recommendation engines for music are written in wetware; there's a lot to be said for DJ sets and independent radio.

Load bearing is a funny one because before LLMs the only time I heard it was in the phrase 'load-bearing bug'.

You can't have a very good discussion with someone about something they've made part of their identity in my view. I'm not an instinctive AI booster but nor am I going to bother engaging with people who believe a tool I use is ontologically evil. It's a poor use of everyone's time since there's no debate to be had.

This works both ways for what it's worth, I have parts of my identity which I simply don't see fit to make a discussion of since there is no ground to gain or concede.

That's pretty much my one gripe with the general culture of the Fediverse, a lot of people have made opposition to AI in general part of their identities and it can be a little tedious to have discussions at times because of it.

Out of interest, would you have made this argument with respect to Big Tobacco back in the day? In my view surveillance-based behavioural recommendation engines belong very much in the same category.

I'm so glad I got myself off Instagram and Reddit, the longer I go without them the more I realise what massive cognitohazards both of them are if you spend too much time on them. Different mechanisms but both were much more of a net drain on me than I realised before leaving them.

Yeah I try to refrain from shouting at LLMs for a similar reason, I fear that it'll degrade my own social skills over time by lowering the threshold I think it appropriate to use inclement language and tone in general, including with people.

An unlikely failure mechanism perhaps but it costs me nothing to avoid it.

I quite like the /i-have-adhd plugin which attempts to curtail the verbosity and habit of burying the point.

I'm currently working on an LLM harness for e-ink and Kimi was very keen to criticise Claude for introducing a bug that I missed in the tool calling logic! Really it should have been telling me off for not auditing Claude well enough.

The Bigme's boot screen has a 1 Hz animation of the outlined logo filling in with black letter by letter which looks pretty decent in my opinion.

That's a good shout, surprised this didn't occur to me actually as I was only recently dealing with a print-based feature at work. That's a helpful link, much appreciated.

> If you’re working with a touch display, perhaps a hold-and-drag-to-scroll feature could work? Have no indicator when pressed and only refresh the screen when the user lifts their finger.

I like this idea, definitely going to test it out.

I really like this, what a cool idea!

Cheers, will check that repo out.

>you cannot rely on color as an accent

Yeah definitely found this using some 'normal' webapps, default dark mode makes it worse too.

I just had a look, definitely a lot to draw from there!

This is really helpful, much appreciated.

Yeah I'm dogsitting at my childhood home right now and it's missing the rural pubs on the dog route.

I would not call Turing's experiment ill-specified, on the contrary among other factors the paper the game is introduced in earnestly calls for a telepathy-proof room to ensure no side channel leakage. The 1950s was an interesting decade.

That's fair actually!

To undermine my own point further, Battersea Power Station in London is iconic. In particular the control rooms were very well-styled with lots of art deco ornamentation, anyone who's listened to Quark, Strangeness and Charm by Hawkwind will have seen it as it's the source of the album art. To be honest I think the idea that ornament in general is bad did a lot of visual damage to the world.

I'm not a huge fan of their aesthetic in its own right, but it beats the aesthetic of fossil fuel infrastructure any day in my view.

My massive Apple annoyance at the moment is how there's an unremovable nag screen for an Apple Music subscription on the iOS app, when all I ever want to do is sync local music to an iphone like it's an ipod in 2006. They just can't take 'no' for an answer, I'm happy with my current streaming service and I'll never want the hassle of migration.

In my view there really needs to be some 'no means no, not maybe later' legislation against this burdensome dark pattern.

I currently rent a 1930s mid-terrace, literally everything wrong with it is stuff I could address myself if I owned it. It's mostly the years of 'landlord specials' that would need undoing, and I'd reinstate the fireplaces too. These kind of houses were meant to breathe through the chimneys, and since the 1960s we've been bricking them up and wondering why our houses have damp problems.

Fully agree with this in the UK, the king (then Prince Charles) was on the money when he said that unlike the post-war town planners, the Luftwaffe can't be accused of replacing our buildings with anything more offensive than rubble!

The idea that ornament is a crime has done more visual damage to our buildings than any other single factor in my opinion, the fact we still regularly poll as preferring Victorian and Georgian buildings is an indictment of those responsible for our stock of them; I prefer those buildings but it depresses me that we've made things worse rather than better aesthetically for the last century or so when we didn't have to.

Modern new builds are bleak things for the most part; oppressively low ceilings, tiny postage-stamp sized windows as the enshittified way to comply with energy efficiency legislation, styling which looks like it was done by ChatGPT, and build quality that makes British Leyland cars look like epitomes of careful manufacturing. While if it were up to me I'd replace our discretionary planning system with a rules-based one and remove a lot of incumbent NIMBY vetos, I can see why NIMBYs exist in such enormous numbers given the race to rock bottom on everything except price when it comes to housing.

Despite the fearsome smell when it’s collected together in bulk, modern garum in the form of Colatura di Alici is a genuinely magical ingredient. It’s very similar to what the Romans used, except it’s made exclusively from anchovies whereas the Romans used many varieties of fish to make garum. I use it often in pasta dishes especially, but it’s a versatile ingredient for adding umami in general. It’s similar to fermented fish sauces found in South East Asia, while being quite distinct from them.

Max Miller does a lot with garum, he even made some at one point (not a process for the faint hearted!) and it was his and Historical Italian Cooking’s dishes where I first learned about colatura. Highly recommend them both, another ingredient I’ve become fond of through Roman cooking is long pepper. Not too sure about its global availability but in the UK I buy it from Indian shops. Parthian Chicken is another excellent dish, although some have an acute sensitivity to the smell of asafoetida resin as my unfortunate housemate discovered! Asafoetida is actually a substitute for silphium, a herb harvested to extinction by the Romans themselves.

Doom pioneered this model, the Doom engine was open-sourced while the assets remained proprietary. This is where projects like Freedoom exist, to create an entirely free software equivalent.

I'm not being funny, but anti-authoritarianism and libertarianism are literally political stances. To be anti-authoritarian you need to understand what authoritarianism is, appreciate why it is undesirable to a hacker specifically, and to have a system of reasoning which allows you to articulate these sentiments. This is doing politics in the oldest and truest sense.

The hacker community has always had a strong political element to it, what else is the GNU GPL but a statement of political intent? Anything which deals with the allocation of power and resources is political.