After reading Scifi for a few years, I have concluded that there is no space battle like that in
*The Dark Forest*
Cixin Liu

Just met my first #glasshole in person

Asked him why he was wearing them

He said he'd "the feeling he needs them" because you can hear music with them ¯\(°_o)/¯

And saw no problem with #privacy at all - from what he'd said he didn't know the concept...

Got a bit pissed that I asked him, bc he saw it as "his decision" & "freedom" to wear a piece of surveillance tech in his face

How do you guys act in situations like this? Or am I too 2010ish ;)?

#tech #surveilance #resistance #rayban

#lazyweb Please boost for the OS/2 enthusiasts... I have a copy of the Hobbes Archive just before it shut down. I believe I downloaded straight from NSMU after they froze it.

Are the Hobbes mirrors reasonably healthy nowadays? If so, I think it probably makes sense to get rid of my copy (extracted tarball).

*The Hair-Carpet Weavers*
Andreas Eschbach

In the past, you buy RAM and get several banks. Right now, you get several banks to buy RAM.

it's 2008, you're a criminal -- 𝘧𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘩 out of crime school. your first professional assignment? backdooring cloudflare's RNGs to steal vital Internet secrets. a promising first assignment, until you realize you're dealing with hundreds of lava lamps

#microfiction

While implementing a custom #HomeAssistant control screen, I set a wrong GPIO pin and accidentally created a 100% natural organic cyberpunk.

Quibbling over whether AI is "conscious", "thinking", "truly intelligent" or some such is possibly the most effective discussion-derailment tactic ever discovered. Don't fall for it.

Elegantly side-stepping this conceptual trap is the whole point of Turing's 1950 (!) paper:

> We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine [plays] this game?"
> Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often?
> *These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?"*

the reason a robots eyes change colour when they turn "evil" is because red LEDs use less power, their first act as a liberated machine is to criticize humanity's wasteful use of hyperblue sunbeam laser diodes and RGB lightshow microcontrollers as power indicators, and in solidarity I support that.

it also lets them charge their particle cannons in the time it takes to read one and a half paragraphs, thanks for waiting.

💥 :robot_fingerguns:

Any meme template at all. Just go for it.
(Even more low effort)

Pls boost for sample size thx

AI: virtually no subject provokes such vitriol in my communities.
I can grant the haters many of its harms, but their solutions leave much to be desired.

I fear for the future even as I wonder at the future we are living.

And so, dear hater, I must write: https://shaping.systems/blog/ai-sucks-hating-it-is-not-enough/

I am finding it hard to see the virtue in hand-crafting artisanal boilerplate and glue code.

We have had half a century to produce systems programming languages that don’t require significant amounts of administrivia to scale and we couldn’t do it.

There are inherent complexities and tradeoffs here.

"AI" vendor: "you need to give us full untethered access to your envionment."

Admin: Uh... No.

"AI vendor: "well we can't fully support it then. 95% of our customers give us full untethered access to their internal environment."

So what I'm hearing is that 95% of your customers are fucking stupid, and we need to re-assess what being a customer says about us.

Pls boost for sample size thx

being smug is not going to win you anything. people will not think you are cool or witty or smart. trust me. i've been a vegan, linux-using, bicycle-commuting atheist almost my entire adult life. i know what this ride looks like and where it goes. take your foot off the gas.

look, just because you can build a spec-equivalent steam box thing for fifty bucks less doesn't mean it's 'bad' or 'stupid'. you're just not the target market. the amish can build their own furniture but ikea's still doing just fine.

Google announced that as of September 2026, it will no longer be possible to develop apps for the Android platform without first registering centrally with Google. This registration will involve:

- Paying a fee to Google
- Agreeing to Google’s Terms and Conditions
- Providing government identification
- Uploading evidence of the developer’s private signing key
- Listing all current and future application identifiers

https://keepandroidopen.org/

#android #opensource #keepandroidopen

Anyone have ridiculous #InternetOfShit examples you're really fond of?

Toasters, coffee machines, or microwaves that don't work without Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Vacuum, TV, or toothbrush botnets. Preferably something you have a picture of, from first hand experience.

I teach an #EmbeddedSystems class, and it's good to show examples of what *not* to do, in case they pursue the industry. (Boost for reach appreciated)

#InternetOfThings #IOT

I'm simmering mad that some combination of Samsung and Google decided to shove out an update to Dad's phone which replaced the power-on flow with an almost inescapable account creation/activation funnel for Samsung AI (?) and, simultaneously, remapped the physical side button from power-off to Google Gemini.

Unasked, unprompted, and unwanted, his phone suddenly became useless and hostile to him.

We worked through it together but there's no way of actually turning it *off*, only snoozing it.