nstart

There's javascript in the back. And there's javascript in the front. Curious what you use for application development on the frontend and if you have some recommendations for that?

Thanks in advance!

Just made the same comment and deleted it seeing that you already stated it. Protecting against all of these is hard and no tech is going to automatically protect for all of this on its own. Such a weird statement to make that takes away from the message of the site entirely.

But the content is present globally. We are talking about a subscription to block ads. If it’s to do with some YouTube original content, they can not distribute it here for all I care. I’ve seen that content and it’s awful.

If it’s about tax collection, then that’s again weird because google will take money for any other service. I genuinely don’t understand it and I can’t find a single good explanation out there for it either.

Sorry if that comes across as aggressive. I promise that it’s entirely just exasperation at this point :(

Just want to shout out a couple of things.

One, it's great to see a hack project here that's been done just for the fun of it. I'm noticing a few comments questioning the "why?" around this. To me at least, it's just a really fun thing to do to hack together something, just because. There doesn't always have to be a rhyme or reason for things like this.

Two, it felt like there was a period where sites that would host hack projects with no limitations was slowly dying out. Not just because of costs but also because of the associated risks with it (spam, phishing, etc). I really do love what Vercel is enabling here. When I mentor younger folks, it's becoming really easy to tell them where to go throw up a hack project after they've learnt git and Vercel is fast becoming The choice to send them to. Much kudos and gratitude to the team there.

I mean if YouTube wants to block ad blockers, that's unfortunate, but I also understand the motivation. But here's the rub. Youtube premium is still not available globally. I had a weird workaround that I used a long time ago through google play but when my current credit card expires, I won't be able to use that method again and all the benefits of my membership will go away. That really sucks because I actually enjoy the ads free experience and the fact that I can pay for it.

I don't understand how a giant company like Google hasn't figured out global availability of a service like this. Especially given that videos can be geo locked if needed.

All this and we still aren’t at the mid game even where GPT 3.5 equivalent AI models make the leap to consumer machines as apps/packages that can be installed in a standard way.

Urgh. Did they forget the lessons of the Ballmer era that forcing choices doesn’t give more usage. It’s making sure you meet people’s choices where they are. That was the big change that seemed to be in the air when Satya took over. Not entirely sure what is happening here.

Some people discussing cheating and the more boring aspects of chess. Thing is,

- chess education is more accessible and is fun af now thanks to folks like Hikaru and Levy (aka GothamChess).

- default games are now rapid 10 minute games or 20 minute games at tops. This makes it as quick as a Fortnite round and the odds of cheating in such rapid games goes down drastically. Couple that with the excellent anti cheat work being done and the game really does stay short and enjoyable.

With the game being in popular culture via queens gambit it feels understandable that it is rising amongst younger folks (impossible to have predicted but very much easily explained looking backwards)

Speculation: Windows 10 end of life's in 2025. It's entirely possible that by the time that year rolls around, they throw in some backwards compatibility with some asterisks around performance.

Right now, Microsoft is not officially supporting the older processors but Windows 11 runs on 7th gen intel processors without any real issues except that it's a little slower than how it would run with Windows 10. But no work stopping issues at all if you were to run it yourself. I believe Microsoft even has a published way to do it if I'm not mistaken. It's manual and a little messy for now, with some asterisks around risks for automated updates, but it works.

Given all of this and MS's outlook towards backward compatibility I can see them eventually allowing older generations to upgrade after agreeing to some risks/performance degradation.

So, I recall ballmer doing really well financially at msft during his time. Ignoring stocks, revenue was up. I think profits were up. But then they missed every major trend during that time, and were looked at as creaking in the wrong direction. The reason I said they should ask themselves questions about windows is because it feels the same way to me. A product that still makes its way to enterprise and other money minting categories. But it’s quietly losing its way in the young developer/business/influencer market. Maybe one day MSFT wakes up and looks at windows and realizes they’ve been going in a stupid direction of screwing the long game over the whole time.

I dont know how to explain it. I’ve used all major OS’s including a couple of flavors of Linux. I just love windows. 11 is pretty awesome for me where I use it on my surface pro 8 and it’s just really nice especially with touch. Touch is definitely a huge part of my workflow too to the point that when I sit at my desktop I sometimes try to touch the screen.

There are so many tiny quality of life things like being able to use auto hot key to macro my way around daily stuff or how the file explorer works in a way that feels more intuitive. The little thing of being able to win+shift+s and snip a part of the screen where it loads into the clipboard immediately and does not save to a file by default. I heart power toys so much especially fancy zones which I use extensively. I also do like customizing my start menu. I find building my native home brew apps for the OS to be more pleasant. I find the windows terminal to be a fabulous experience I couldn’t live without now. Wsl is a blessing where I have multiple OS’s which I need and they don’t bog the system down. All my games work fine. I just… I really love the OS and what it lets me do.

Other OS’s could probably do similar things (auto hot key is your final boss though) but I guess windows just clicks for me really really well.

Literally, the only things I’d change about it right now are the whole adware/spyware bit and making the file path work like it does in Unix based systems. Backslashes! Urgh.

Windows is my daily driver. I actually like the OS but Microsoft would do well to listen to these concerns being raised consistently. They need to ask some deep questions of themselves of what they want Windows to be.

This reminds me of the days where Ballmers goal seemed to be to lock everyone into Windows and MS products when the real upside turned out to be “make MS products fully available where people already are”. To me this brought about some great changes to their products on android, Mac, and iOS. Even the web versions of their products are actually really good.

I feel like windows is going through the same identity crisis that Ballmer took the MSFT brand through. Like what does it want to be? Is it an OS or an advertisement platform. Right now it’s trying to be both and that sucks. I hope that someone from very high up finally steps in at some point and clarifies the vision for windows and closes up all these crap avenues of revenue squeezing.

A quick note to say that this article is mostly a rehash of the New York Times article it references as its source. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/technology/google-search-...

Unfortunately not enough people use it. And realistically, in the middle of a formula 1 race or a ufc fight, there’s no time to be hashtagging each and every keyword if you are live sharing your thoughts or replying to others. A single key hashtag is fine like #AusGP. But when I want to search for Albon and Red Flags and opinions on that, I can’t expect people to do #Albon and #RedFlag. Full text search is sorely missed :,(

> Most of what we hear of the Fediverse is rants about twitter and a few of the same subcultures over and over again.

I feel like this isn't true anymore. There's definitely a lot of chatter about Twitter of course and even more so now that there's regular Twitter related drama happening. But I have 7 federated instances on speed dial that range from general purpose, to infosec, to art, and to game development. They all talk about a lot of stuff, not just the things related purely to the server theme. I checked all of their local timelines just now and found only one post talking about Twitter and it was just a link to a news item where Elon talks about government access to Twitter.

Notably absent were any growth hack posts. Everything was just stream of consciousness stuff.

To be fair, if you don't use Twitter then you are already well removed from the target demographic that might find Mastodon useful. That said, there are a lot of really useful takes on Mastodon on various topics. Politics is probably the area where you will find the most number of takes. But in infosec, and game development at least, there's a lot of interesting info. The biggest issue with Mastodon or the fediverse rather is the lack of full text search and the cultural push back against it. I don't view the push back as negative. It's a sign that the community has strong opinions and that's a good thing. But the lack of search does make it hard to peek into a conversation around a topic which to me takes away from the experience of jumping into communities of interest.

Absolutely. This was the case even when the artist won that art competition using midjourney. The overall mood of the picture was nice but the moment you looked at it a little more closely, everything that wasn’t the immediate subjects kind of warped into nonsense. Would love to hear from the judges of these competitions on how they select winning entries

This extends to a lot of areas outside of physical freedom. There seems to be a lot of pressure kids face to just do well and perform from an absurdly young age. I don't think that this starts with the current generation of parents either. I know that growing up there were a lot of children, myself included, who were made to feel worthless if we were incapable of winning at our sport of choice or performing at a top 10 range in the classroom in the subjects of "importance". Science, Math, that kind of stuff.

I'm trying my best right now to let my kid manage himself and learn how to ask for help where needed. I want him to go through his own choices, both good and bad, and experience success and failure on his own. I try to teach him that the only value I care about is not being a burden to others. Raising people up is true success instead of winning by pushing others down. Those core beliefs are the only ones I hope I can pass on to him. But I want to do whatever I can to make it come from him and for him to learn it from me through example rather than control.

I know that no matter how strict my parents were, it never actually did anything to increase my performance. It never did anything to increase the obedience of my siblings. All of us just went underground over time because we couldn't trust our parents to be reasonable when we talked about our experiences at school and sports. If it wasn't up to their standards they would just make us feel like we weren't living up to their standards. I've heard this being referred to as "ego" parenting or something like that. But part of the reason we could go underground was because of physical freedom. I cycled to school and sports. I took public transport and was free to sort myself out from completely from teenage years.

Instead of addressing the bit though about making a safe space for kids and not chasing them underground, it feels like parents have taken the approach of encroaching on their physical space as well to ensure that they do not escape the boundaries of the standards they demand.

And now children are giving up on trying to find freedom in physical spaces. How could they when the parents are following them to every event and class that they go to? They can't even go to a mall with friends anymore without having parents around in some form or another. I feel like the desire to go underground in the digital spaces is a natural evolution although I have nothing but my own anecdotal experiences to share to support this.

This is a tangential sharing of experience and opinion in relation the article. I leave this as a thinking point because I think physical freedom is being dampened for more than just the reason of fears of safety. There's also a strong desire to control children and have them grow up in our image of "perfection". If we want to reverse this trend, it may take a lot of parents having to get really uncomfortable with themselves and understanding that there's a significant amount of their own ego that needs to be removed. Else the end is going to be a never ending unhealthy war to find ways to control children's spaces every time they find a new one to go underground in.

Do you have a link to this post by any chance?

There are definitely a few issues with it especially in the skin stretch and squeeze around the lips, nose, and cheeks areas. There are a lot of muscles and skin movement that’s supposed to happen and rendering that needs time and good attention to detail with the materials.

But outside of that, there are the limits of rotoscoping coming into play. Human motion has a lot going on and our 3d captures aren’t anywhere near that kind of fidelity yet. Therefore we still need to rely on what the old masters of animation discovered when they were getting past the rotoscoped era. To make a performance more believable there has to be a little more acting and exaggeration brought in. The eyes can’t just get wider. They need to have anticipation, movement, secondary movement through other pieces of the face, etc. Same with the mouth. It’s not that the mouth can’t stretch in an abnormal way. It’s that it requires a little bit extra like a neck movement creating anticipation of an angry snarl.

As far as we have gotten along with mocap tech, when it comes to film, there’s a loooot of hard work that goes into fine tuning done by professional animators to make the performance of each actor look good when it’s translated to the 3d character.

Don’t know about my blog itself, but looking at my drafts,

A) I can see how many ideas I had that fell apart the moment I started to write arguments about it

B) how horrible I am predicting stuff and just how much I’ve saved myself from being on the record with really terrible calls on the then future that is now the present :,). This too because once I started to justify my prediction I lost all confidence in it. I still think fpv drone racing could have been bigger than f1 though. Someday I’ll publish that as the hill to die on :D.

I have no idea about their internals but I’m curious how many people used docker’ own registry offering as their repo manager of choice because it’s configured to lookup the docker registry by default. Easier to setup pipelines and dev env workflows etc.

If this move means that people have to now manage access to multiple registries like quay and ghcr, will that also incentivize people to go ahead and try migrating to these other registries. Especially given that dockers own registry has such poor permission management.

I think it’s to do with the title character limits. I tried it out without the acronym and it’s a character or two long

The bank I use recently switched to using a similar method for sending their statements. The html page they send via email is password protected. I dig into how they do it (also to ensure they aren’t phoning anywhere when I open the report) and they encrypt the report content using a similar method to the one shared here. It’s neat and I have to give them kudos for doing something neat like that as opposed to sending a pdf with a password on it.

Why html though? They do have some js and interactive functionality in there. I can slice and dice my monthly report within the single html page they send which is actually quite handy (and there’s the default “show me my transactions in a list with opening and closing balance” option as well).

I looked into the site. From what I could tell and given the timeline, it looked like the person was using an older model of text generation to create this spam at the time. The one about crocodiles being without scales and being slow and ocean dwelling but also being somehow active is the kind of nonsensical zero context preserving stuff gpt used to generate before the gpt 3 model released.

It looks like Bing has fixed it. The screenshot I took was my own. Originally seen here https://fedi.cpluspatch.com/objects/6dc3bee4-1ff0-4cae-8994-... . I wish I could have posted the link to this directly but it only shows up properly from a federated instance. It can't be viewed at the link above.

Original shows as follows when viewed within my mastadon timeline: https://imgur.com/a/DxAHOWG

Their old engine. I just posted this because it’s the first instance I’ve run into in the wild where an engine gave an answer based off likely ai generated content. The content here gives the vibe of gpt 2 generated stuff.

It’s a topic of interest to me because there’s a tipping point coming where ai generated content easily outweighs the volume of non ai generated stuff. And I’m curious of the implications of that coming change

Fwiw, I do know quite a few companies outside the tech space that use, and even love teams. These are the ones where I have personally gotten to see how they use teams:

2 car sale companies. 1 Accounting shop. 1 ultra large company that owns multiple types of businesses across 4 different countries. A few real estate businesses. The vast majority of people using it have said they are happy and several have even been excited to show off their setups. All of them said that it allowed them to go remote during the pandemic and has helped them stay flexible once movement and office work started returning to normal.

The way they use it is also interesting. It’s not just chat. They integrate a whole host of apps directly into it including sales pipeline tools, document management, and project management. We are not talking about chat bots either. We are taking integrated apps+interfaces. All their meeting happen in MS teams itself. The multinational has a non trivial arrangements using multiple instances where some are separated for client convos and others are for different teams.

I use the term interesting because the way they use it is nothing like how I’ve ever seen any slack being used. And I don’t think I’ll ever see slack supporting that. Putting it out there because I think there’s a world of use cases for ms teams that doesn’t involve people being forced to use a bad thing.

Just a quick late note of appreciation. My friends and I have been trying to have some community way of each of us sharing progress on hobbies and side projects. After looking at this it was a smack-forehead moment. Setting up a private discourse to keep track of things as we go along :)

Exactly this. I like testing chat gpt’s hallucination and my most recent one was to ask it to convert a conversation I had so far into html. It followed the prompt correctly but instead of inserting its actual answer that it had given into the html doc, it started giving different answers which included hallucinating new information.

Again, the problem here is there is no way to know for sure if what these ai chat tools are saying is correct or imagined.