saw Wildwood! it was great! yes!

Dimension 20 are doing the fated sequel to A Starstruck Odyssey?! oh no I guess I have to watch my favourite season again in preparation, woe is me

without further ado, here's Millicent, our first born child

she turns three next month and was rescued from a puppy mill that hadn't even given her a name; she's still recovering from her last pregnancy and being spayed a few weeks ago

we got her home yesterday to some nerves on arrival, but a few hours later, you can see in the pictures

this morning she's inseparable from my partner and her tail is wagging 😊

#millicent #dogsofmastodon #photography

I have been using Blender for eighteen years

I have just learned you can press alt-enter to apply a typed-in transform to every selected object relative to the active one

this is incredible

#blender

I would pay for Kagi right now if they weren't subsidising OpenAI and Anthropic with their subscriptions and presenting this as somehow more ethical because they anonymise your prompts or whatever

it's not, it's garbage, and it's the very thing Kagi should be against; much like DDG, I cannot fathom how it hasn't occurred to either company "huh all my users are here because they hate Google and MS/Bing... anyway, let's spend multiple years blindly copying everything Google does and buy our search results from Microsoft"

fuck outta here

the question is how to handle submissions and moderation

I was thinking 'it needs to work like /links pages where people suggest other people's stuff' and then it occurred to me that we could just let trusted people supply recommendations through their own websites via a hidden feed page they curate (think like RSS/sitemap.xml/twt.txt) and the engine would aggregate those and crawl the suggested sites

so people aren't just submitting their own site for moderation, but a smaller number of people (less pressure on maintainers) with extensive bookmark collections (like me) submit themselves as vetted contributors and can just find and publish recommendations for the engine and it just crawls those lists daily

after that, we have a reporting system during regular searching for dead or compromised URLs

and then the final problem is just how to deal with getting people to trust you again and allow *our actually polite and respectful scraper* to come visit their sitemaps and collect opengraph data

those massive slop website filters literally can't keep up, so maybe the solution is to flip it on its head and maintain the much smaller list of real human-made websites

is anyone doing a tiny moderated search engine like that? I know some tiny search indexes exist, but they're usually really narrow in scope, like for a single webring or something

anyone who ships serious software in python should go do something else

we're at package-manager-for-your-package-manager-wrapped-in-a-virtual-env levels of stupidity in python-land now and literally nothing works anymore

oh oh last thing before bed because it's 1am

here's my partner's Ribbet bard from our Daggerheart game this evening that I scribbled in like five minutes during the session

this is Pickle and Pickle uses all of their bits to play the tunes

#illustration #ttrpg

I also have a loosely connected essay in me about Zig, Odin and Jai and why I think Odin is the best take on "A Better C", which basically boils down to it being the only one that takes its own advice and — critically — questions whether a thing should exist at all *before* implementing a solution to it

e.g: Zig's build-systems-are-written-in-Zig vs Odin's why-would-we-have-a-build-system-at-all?

you know what I'm just going to write an essay on that last (deleted) toot

I'm gonna call it something like 'semicolon errors and internal design'

#illustration

noodling a friend

#illustration

this is pretty much it

#adhd

expression of depression through late night composing

#music

it's not really late night sound design tonight... late night folksy string quartet?

#music #composer

okay, so my painting app has a name now... https://ochre.art

I'm going to update this website as development progresses further and I get ready to open a private beta later this year

Ochre is designed with useful tools and quality of life features that production artists and illustrators need in their daily workflows; as an artist myself, the status quo isn't providing this right now, and I want to fix this

Ochre will be —

- focused on pure digital painting
- available on Windows, macOS and Linux
- not dependent on the internet
- forever without GenAI or similar
- reasonably priced and free from subscriptions

#ochre

- do you want to use google to sign in?
- do you want to add a passkey?
- do you want to add a 2FA token?
- we know you have 2FA but we've sent you an email instead
- this login attempt seems suspicious we've sent you a text about it
- can you click on these buses?
- you failed to click on the buses click on these bicycles instead
- should we save these details for next time?
- do you accept these trackers?
- you can opt out but we've decided it's legitimate interest anyway
- would you like to see a list of our 847 partners we share your data with?
- can we send you desktop notifications?
- can we access your location?
- do you want 10% off for signing up to the mailing list?
- do you want me to translate this page?
- hi I'm your friendly chatbot how can I help?
- oh no you can't buy this, reach out to us for a quote!
- do you want—

I'm tired boss

I keep seeing very worrying discourse about Mozilla and AI, and while I agree that Mozilla shouldn't be investing in AI, there's a vast gulf between "Mozilla is making Firefox an ENTIRELY AI BROWSER" (misinformation) and "Mozilla is going to add some easily disabled AI tools to Firefox" (reality)

the absolute vitriol with which I have seen people react to these headlines is bizarre; I hate AI as much as the next artist, but the sheer number of people declaring Mozilla to be the enemy of the people is wild

worse still, the advocacy in these threads for users to jump to other browsers like Brave (the cryptobro browser with an AI AGENT ALREADY IN IT) or even back to Chrome (we will extractively collect every token of data about your existence we physically can to show you advertising that's impossible to avoid while monopolising control of the web, its content and discoverability via our browser engine and then funnel this data into AI-driven sales tools which will cartel pricing to maximally extract money from you while selling this data and services to governments to help them oppress you, fuck your privacy, fuck your consent and fuck you) is actually terrifying

should Mozilla invest in AI? no, sure I agree, their leadership is all over the place, treating them with healthy scepticism and pointing this out to them at every turn should be the policy moving forwards

should you go back to Chrome or Chrome-derivative browsers because of this? FUCK NO

#mozilla

mastodon needs a mutuals visibility scope so you can be ✨ annoying ✨ to people who've declared your proximity to them acceptable