@davidgerard Rustem was one of the first electric guitar players in Azerbaijan. After he adapted our national songs and melodies to the guitar, it was quickly picked up by others, and basically every wedding (which is a big musical event in our culture) has at least one guitarist.

Rustem was using Jolana Tornado - a soviet made now discontinued guitar, and nowadays people play an adapted version of it, called Fitar.

If you are looking for similar stuff, I'd highly recommend Elman Namazoglu and Rahman Mammadli.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-JwVRmeFq8
https://rhmanmmmdli.bandcamp.com/album/azerbaijani-gitara-volume-2

now playing: The Lizard Train "The Ride" 1990

amazing Australian 80's indie rock'n'roll album I liked at the time and love now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvxuaptvTj0

another world is possible. you have only to make a cupcake sandwich to know this.

Our bed is shitty and broken and needs replacing. Please recommend a decent superking deliverable (we don't have a car) to Glasgow. Amazon or otherwise. Anyone bought one recently?

To the person who suggested putting an emergency mylar blanket over the window (my apologies, can't find you comment anymore), wow that worked well. The indoor temp dropped 4C in 15 minutes, and that was with no direct light aimed at the window. I'm surprised that extent of solar energy was coming through. Nice hack, and one that is easy/cheap to do.

Edited to add: I always thought those blankets are opaque, so expected the effect to be like a blackout curtain. But it turned out they are more like a tinted car window. The amount of light is notably reduced, and the residual light bleeds through with an orange tint. But when there's light outside as backlight, the view across the street is still clear and detailed -- just darker. At night it's effectively opaque. (Though don't make any assumptions re privacy since now the interior is what would be backlit.)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@vicgrinberg/116856970122743941

While the general statement is true, the line underneath undercuts the statement a bit. "I use these tools as well all the time". Okay but if you know that they undercut your ability to think ... why? What the fuck are we doing?

Midjourney AI pivots to Theranos - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sg8S-lw9hE

Blog post:
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/06/19/midjourney-ai-pivots-to-theranos-ultrasonic-ct/
by @davidgerard

So much hype ... as usual.

:facepalm:

#AI #GenAI #Midjourney #Theranos #MedicalImaging #Health

I have a prediction for the next TypeDrawers post I'm going to write, and it'll go something like this:

The perfect encapsulation of the tech dudebro mentality is a person who points at a model they got an LLM to code, based on research that other people carried out, trained on data they didn't create, written in a framework they got for free and in an open source programming language, running on someone else's computer, and says "Look at this, I made it all myself".

this is a useful imgur unblocker for UK firefox users

(uses DuckDuckGo as a proxy)

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/srcrplc-unblock-censored-image/

@davidgerard you missed the chance to mention that "planting trees" is itself a scam.

Know what happens if you take a field of dirt and wait, in most regions of the world? Grasses grow, then shrubs, and finally trees. In some places depending on soil nutrients, fire regimes, water availability, etc., you might find that grasses or shrubs dominate long-term, but they often store just as much carbon as a forest would.

So if someone says they're "planting trees" to help the environment, you should always ask "how, specifically, is that supposed to help the environment?" What trees are you planting, on what land, and what's going to happen to those trees in 50 or 100 years?

Here's a article that digs into more details:

https://www.ecoenclose.com/blog/tree-planting-initiatives-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/

Is true that in some very specific situations planting trees can be a useful part of a restoration program, but in general programs that count the number of trees planted or which donate money towards "planting trees" should be viewed with suspicion.

going to the pharmacy for some Nyquist. ah fuck I'm seeing aliases at double my frequency. oh shit. fuck

Got a much better shot in cheese. Still shitty, but no more shitty than I expect from a Lenovo 720p webcam

won't be replacing the nice phone for videos i think

just tested my laptop's lovely webcam

truly spectacularly shit

anyone know if there's such a thing as a webcam module suitable for a Lenovo X13 gen3 that isn't unusable?

EDIT: looks like a software problem, got a much better shot in Cheese

@peter_mcmahan I just switched from Xubuntu to Debian Xfce for this precise reason, the embrace of gen AI.

Ubuntu is a Debian so skills transfer back to the mothership pretty well.

Debian doesn't have a strong anti-AI stance, but it hasn't been overcome with slop *yet*.

Mostly my issues have been fiddly details, things that Xubuntu includes that Debian Xfce doesn't. I need to make a list.

But so far it's been great.

Hardware is a Lenovo X13 gen3, the most generic Intel hardware ever, which helps.

What about the ones in this list? https://noai.starlightnet.work/ @peter_mcmahan

We know that the original Perl developers are getting to the age where they're starting to lose their faculties and be susceptible to all sorts of nonsense, but this hard-on that some of them have for AI slop is just embarrassing at this point.

For example, Randal Schwartz has just slopped out a video and announced it to Reddit with the title "The AI Revolution is Validating 40 Years of Perl Philosophy". Yeah, I suppose that if Perl's philosophy was to spew out acres of unmaintainable line noise full of security problems, AI has knocked it out of the park.

Agentic AI has "guardrails" (e.g. you have to explicitly say "don't delete all the files on my computer" if you don't want it to delete all your files).

One of these guardrails is asking users to confirm whether to do things. Claude Code apparently has now decided that if you take over sixty seconds to answer a question, it'll just go ahead.

Turns out guardrails get in the way of consuming tokens, and you must consume tokens in order for the business model to work.

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/73125

Heavens help me, I'm asking for linux distribution advice on fedi. 🫣

It's becoming increasingly clear that I'll need to jump ship from Ubuntu very soon. I've been using linux as my only os for several years now, and I originally chose Ubuntu because I wanted web searches for "<error message> <distro name>" to generally just give me an answer. But every release has made things harder (like avoiding snap) and canonical seems dead set on driving their os into the GenAI void. So I need recommendations!

Is there a distro out there that has a strong anti-AI (or at least AI critical) stance that will mostly just work for laptops (reliable sleep on lid shut is a must)? With a strong community and good governance structure? Maybe with good zfs support? And rolling releases and up to date packages available? I've looked into basic Debian and Chimera, but I'd love to hear folks' thoughts on those and other options.

(Boosts welcome)

idle question: is there a rugged e-ink tablet?

i see some that are a bit tougher than not, but don't promise serious durability

i feel like this is a gadget we have all the parts for but nobody thinks there's a market for the thing

prog guitar from Azerbaijan. This album has apparently spawned a genre of this stuff. Goes surprisingly hard.

https://rustemquliyev.bandcamp.com/album/azerbaijani-gitara