Gregory's Server
This article explains a bit about why I realized that I don't want a more productive e-reader or a big tablet e-reader, if you are interested. https://sixcolors.com/post/2024/01/two-e-readers-that-made-me-reconsider-why-i-use-e-readers/
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Today I learned that the .cbz file format used for digital comic books is just a zip file full of jpeg images with the extension changed from .zip to .cbz. I'm definitely going to start using that. Sometimes I zip up a bunch of images, primarily to keep them archived together, and later I want to poke around in the zip file to see if it contains a particular image. @munroe I'd never heard of that file format, but I can't help but wonder if cbz stands for "comic book zip"? I feel strange listening to a folder of 50 songs called Best of Madhuri Dixit – an actress. I think it’s movies from her movies ripped from a DVD and then I saved just the audio. Something to keep my thoughts from tumbling down. I suspect that many of these songs were all sung by the same singer. I need to find a Wikipedia page about the music used in those movies – and the singers.
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@NanoRaptor "This is Commander Jameson, en route to Lave Station. There is an unexpected item in the bagging area. Please wait for assistance."  This was my ICQ number: 98129982 #FlashbackFriday: My #InteractiveFiction "Whom the Telling Changed" (2005) retold the epic of Gilgamesh as a living story told around an ancient fire, with those in the crowd each hoping to sway the telling to their own purposes. Debuted the highlighted keywords system that later appeared in Blue Lacuna, and features a maybe-confusing but still cool idea in the early moves where you define your character via disambiguation messages. https://buff.ly/3yyQz4r @aaronareed This game was definitely among the stuff that gave me the confidence to make The Baron! Loved it.  @alex This Hacker News thread, with comments by the founder, may give some answers. "We developed our own custom epaper display tech we call LivePaper. We focused on solving the tradeoffs RLCDs traditionally have - around reflectance %, metallic-look / not Paperlike enough, viewing angle, white state, rainbow mura, parallax, resolution, size, lack of quality backlight, etc." Daylight Computer is a 60fps paper white thing display (but not e-ink?) for $729. Did anybody here give it a try or see a review? I like the sound of Public Benefit Company even though I'm not sure what the actual benefits for the public are. @alex This Hacker News thread, with comments by the founder, may give some answers. "We developed our own custom epaper display tech we call LivePaper. We focused on solving the tradeoffs RLCDs traditionally have - around reflectance %, metallic-look / not Paperlike enough, viewing angle, white state, rainbow mura, parallax, resolution, size, lack of quality backlight, etc." @johncarlosbaez "most of humanity is committed to business as usual" I'm not sure this is correct. Absolutely most of humanity scaled by their energy usage is, but this is a very different thing than most of humanity. Far fewer minds to change, much more entrenched opinions. I seem to have stumbled into involuntarry Talk like a Pirrate Day as my RR key likes to double-type. Arrrrgh! We really haven’t learned a goddamn thing about female-gendered bots have we. (I wrote this *eight* fucking years ago.) https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/bots You cannot separate the ongoing fascination with creating femme AI servants from the ongoing efforts to restrict reproductive and trans rights. They are both part of a concerted effort to equate feminity with servitude, and to maintain caretaking as free and unwaged labor.  @aworkinglibrary thank you for writing this - at the moment I'm heavily involved in AI projects and Tome of Voice is important, but just as much is now it's delivered - in essence we build "for the many people" so having things not be creepy or fake is very important. The persona will be something we have to tackle and your view is a great one to add to the design considerations Aristocracy is not a bad model for thinking about generative AI. If you think of websites as a form of virtual real estate, then the function of, say, LLM-powered search is to shift the value of other people's labor to the internet's biggest landholders. You pour your hard-won knowledge and creativity into your little digital plot of land, and an AI bot comes along to collect your harvest so that Google sell ads when they take it to market as their own. Somehow you work for them now. "It’s not enough for people to prevent animals in captivity from experiencing bodily pain and discomfort, he said. 'We also have to provide them with the kinds of enrichment and opportunities that allow them to express their instincts and explore their environments and engage in social systems and otherwise be the kinds of complex agents they are.'” https://nautil.us/insects-and-other-animals-have-consciousness-571584/ @jaranta I loved this quote: "We have much more in common with other animals than we do with things like ChatGPT." That bitter-sweet feeling when I'm wavering between "what a silly comparison to make" and "maybe some people do need the reminder…" Good Lord. Every WiFi network access point that has ever been in range of an iPhone has its network name (SSID) and GPS location (taken from the iPhone) stored and used by Apple. Apple introduced a way to opt out in March 2024 - you must append the string "_nomap" to your SSID. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/05/why-your-wi-fi-router-doubles-as-an-apple-airtag/ (h/t @briankrebs )
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 @BradRubenstein That's not what @briankrebs is reporting. He says it's the BSSID. Which is worse, because you can't change it as easily as the SSID.  The issues around this were discussed more than a decade ago in the IETF's geopriv working group. @coopdanger was one of the chairs at the time, and the utter insanity of expecting home users to change their SSIDs to get this privacy was well-explored. That Apple is only now adding this fig leaf of a "better than nothing" solution would be hilarious if it weren't so stupid and sad. I was part of the first generation to take to the web and fill it with my hopes and dreams, my stories and music, seeking connection and building community. Watching assholes like Sam Altman treat all that collected humanity as a strip mine makes me indescribably sad. It also makes me want to punch him in his smug fucking face.  Well, I’m inspired by your whole goat-farm thing. We’re all going to have to be more intentional about how we do “human.” Surprised to learn SQLite uses "flexible typing". I assumed DB's are the kind of system where it's ridiculous not to have a strict types. Funnily enough, SQLite has a page ready to respond to people like me: https://www.sqlite.org/flextypegood.html There is a lot being written about how AI is impacting higher education. One of the things that it highlights to me is not just a condemnation of AI. Students not writing papers show they are not properly engaged in learning. People who are excited, engaged, and empowered usually want to speak. People who are checking a box for credit want to shortcut the work. LLMs suck. But so does producing students who have so little say in their learning that they don't want to be involved. 1/2 In my professional life, I've wandered into a research project on modeling famines and starvation physiology. Which means I'm reading scientific literature on starvation physiology. I'm in a place of safety and resilience, but I can tell that even short term immersion in this material does have an effect on me, especially with where the world is right now. It turns out that the bulk of the scientific literature on starvation physiology comes from the 1940s. You can fucking guess why. It turns out that people in the United States and other members of the Alliies were extremely interested in how to care for chronically starved populations starting around 1944. United States business cycles of booms and busts from 1775 to 1943, published in 1943. An amazing graph from the pre-computer data visualization era. @randomwizard can you relay the source? Hard to read on mobile and I wanna take it all in and read the print better.  @alex A Russian bank has a male assistant named Oleg. I don't remember any other male voice assistants though |
