If there's one thing I find sad about the modern internet, it's that we lost the ability to thing like this. Not all of us did, most of eastern Europe still can, but the US and UK especially are pretty bad in this regard. Separate the art from the artist and the work from the employee. Let work be work, private life be private life. If an employee of a company does something disagreeable with their own money and on their own time... well, it's their money. Huge respect for the company here for standing by their principles despite mob pressure. P.S. If you disagree here, do you think it's right and proper for companies to be cancelled over one of their employees being transgender or attending the pride parade? Because that's absolutely what's going to happen. Governments change. Attitudes change. Sometimes people we heavily disagree with gain social prominence or come into power. Making sure that privately expressing an opinion doesn't impact the company you work for is a check on the power of those people, who will happily use whatever power they have to crush our value!. https://corneill.es/@pi_r/116821863509317168

In many European countries, the death rate due to heat is higher than the gun death rate in the US. Yet, everybody in Europe knows about "those stupid Americans", but air conditioning is dismissed as a luxury for rich folks who dont care about the environment. And this is just gonna get worse with every single year. The US has solved this problem a long time ago. It is not that hard. We should learn from our much wiser brethren. https://mastodon.social/@mackozer/116810815552672861

Bad news. Mastodon also meets this definition. Its algorithm may be simple, it's essentially "take all posts from people you follow, sort by date, apply filters", but there is an algorithm. I knew the EU was dumb, but I didn't know it was "we'll repeal content neutrality on a random tuesday and pretend it's all fine" kind of dumb. https://goblin.technology/@dgold/statuses/01KV85GNVWEKHPE08BNFGG9KE4

It's definitely a machine that turns money into projects, though, and significant amounts of money at that. In other news, I'd be extremely surprised if I still have a job at the end of 2028.

I've spend my last two days Fabling, and I don't think things will ever be the same. For me, this is the first model that went from "makes me faster but can produce garbage" to "do I even need to review this" in many cases.

I was so excited about the new feature the Polish government added to our government app recently, the ability to sign documents using a "qualified digital signature", *for free*.

For the non-Europeans in the audience, a qualified signature is the European equivalent of DocuSign, except far less intuitive, far more expensive, and, by extension, not accepted anywhere near as widely. By regulation, it's the only kind that has the same power as a classic paper signature.

This feature requires an electronic ID card, and as my old ID was soon to expire, I recently got one of these anyway.

I tried doing this with two different providers, and it turns out that both of them just return a very helpful "Server error, without even an explanation of what's wrong."

As they say, disappointed but entirely not surprised.

This is a five-year-old Mac. There's just one thing that can consistently make it feel sluggish (beyond the obvious ones like running a big build with all cores blazing). What is it? It's obviously Win11 on Parallels.

Also it would have come a lot quicker. Does anybody still remember the ridiculous OpenAI developer requirements (back in the day when they were the only game in town) that heavily discouraged experimenting on their platform.

AI would have been so much more fun if it started in the political environment of ~2005 instead of the social media ragebait driven one of ~2021.

How accessible is Discord in a browser?

We're using it at work (don't ask, Shadow IT), and I'm strongly considering switching to a two-account setup at this point. Especially because their track record on privacy (from your contacts, not in the weird "I don't want personalized ads" sense) is spotty at best.

On the first day of christmas, my true love sent to me:

A large list of email addresses of everybody working in my department

Because they forgot to use BCC.

Just tried getting a program to run that didn't want to.

"ooh I forgot I have that thing called a coding agent, let's see what it can do."

Two minutes (and a few really weird binary metadata inspection tricks) later, I have the command that makes the program run.

Not being very familiar with the environment, I'd be surprised if I could pull it off inside an hour if I had to do it all myself.

Hey @prism, do you perhaps know somebody at Meta who works on Messenger for web, and could you connect us? They took away my precious Mac app, and the web version is... not really in an usable state, at least on that platform, where the app very much was. I unfortunately happen to live in a place where Messenger is everywhere, and one cannot live without it.

Cheap and accessible Bluetooth bathroom scales anyone?

(I say Bluetooth here because I assume that'd be cheaper than a blind-specific product.)

If a cloud flare can take down half the internet, imagine what a solar flare could do.

I can't believe I have to say this once again, but not using AWS or Cloudflare doesn't mean your service won't go down as often.

It's just that nobody cares if the website of some little shoe manufacturer in Wyoming goes down, but everybody cares if all the websites go down *at once*. This is true even if, statistically speaking, CF / AWS go down less often than some little server located in a basement.

The old internet wasn't more resilient, your downtime on the old internet was just less corelated with everybody else's downtime, which made it less visible, and hence psychologically less of a problem.

Without CF (or somebody like them), there's no freedom of speech on the internet. If you say the wrong thing, your critics can just DeDoS you until you go away, and there's very little you can do about it. If you aren't rich enough to afford DeDoS protection, you have to be very careful when working against people who have more money than you do. This was a somewhat common occurrence back in the day, and the emergence of big social on one hand and CF on the other eliminated that problem entirely.

We should be really thankful for everything CF has done for the internet. Not every private company is as evil as people want you to think.

Does anybody perhaps have a copy of Microsoft's original SAPI4 documentation (as well as any code examples they may have produced at the time) lying around somewhere? CC @datajake1999

So Elon's new Wikipedia clone, grokipedia.com, is actually 10x as accessible as Wikipedia itself.

This is despite it being a React / Next.js ap, while Wikipedia is a classic, server-rendered site.

I find non-vegetarian people who won't eat things marked as vegetarian or vegan in restaurant menus so puzzling.

I'm not vegetarian myself, but if it's delicious, it's delicious, I have no problem with eating something that doesn't have meat in it.

Unpopular opinion.

If you have a static website, it should be able to scale from 0 to "it's the first Google result for the question which is currently on 'Who wants to be a Millionaire' with no hitch."

It's not hard. It's a problem we've solved a few dozen times by this point, and the solutions are free and widely available.

You just have to stop hosting it on an old PowerPC Mac behind your carefully-crafted router running OpenBSD 4.