Rob Isaac

There’s many hilariously awful things about Google wasting half a page of search results on their asinine LLM thing, but perhaps the best one is that it takes every page of the SCP Foundation wiki completely seriously and reports it as stone cold fact.

Someone once explained to me that the reason companies like Google turn to shit is beyond a certain scale they can only grow by hiring the people their competitors are most willing to let go, and I think about that a lot.

Me: If I reduce this pasta sauce outside on the barbecue, the resulting steam won’t turn my whole house into a swamp. I am a genius. Literally every fly in the country: be right there bro

not everyone knows this, but there’s actually an ongoing competition among open source developers to use the most obscure compression algorithms possible, with an annual awards show for whichever project prevented the most users from unpacking the source tree

I am very, very bored with people churning out middle-of-the-road opinions in the AI meme wars with zero acknowledgement of the astonishingly well-funded disinformation campaign feeding them their talking points.

I just signed an executive order permanently declaring Gavin Newsom “Gavin Newsom” in California. You’re welcome, America.

if I had to distill a lifetime of experience down to a single security principle, it would be “do not put a fucking web browser in the firmware of your game console”

@glyph@mastodon.social Among the more Linked-In-Brain people I know, the “AI is real” mantra originates mostly in AI being hip and new and not part of the old paradigm. They have no idea what it actually is, of course, but the public pledging of allegiance allows them to associate themselves with something they consider cutting-edge. It’s not a response to any overt criticism, just the most obvious thing you can say to position yourself without revealing how little you know.

i was a calibre hater before it was cool

Your polycule can be any size you want, but the free tier on Tailscale stops at more than five people.

Controversial take, maybe, but after someone says Romani people are like wolves and you should shoot or deport them, you don’t have to waste any more time on their opinions about anything.

Stating for the record that I have met Aral Balkan ( @aral@mastodon.ar.al) in person, and have engaged with him personally and professionally for roughly 13 years. Adopting a lazy and brainless “devil’s advocate” position that maybe his current humanitarian work _could_ be some sort of financial scam is incorrect, unhelpful, and contributes nothing but noise to a serious and unpleasant topic. Please stop it.

Every slack I’m in right now has that one guy who won’t shut up about his fleshlight. How they use it for everything and it’s the future and people who don’t get on board with it are going to be left behind and how do you know if you’ve never tried it bro why won’t you debate fleshlights with me bro

The slop tide rises ever higher. I hope this is the future you want, friends.

Good news, everyone. Only three more days until the next insultingly stupid press release from a “frontier” “AI” “lab” makes another nonsensical claim and gets uncritically reprinted by every newspaper on Earth.

“But here I am, buying meth on a street corner for the past year and a half. I’m not comfortable with it, but the utility is just too great for me to take a principled stance here. I like it, and I want it, so I’m using it. Maybe that’s morally questionable, or worse. But, as I said: here I am.”

@glyph@mastodon.social when I am emperor, doctorow will only be available on prescription.

I know which side of the “model rights wars” I’m going to be on, ffs, because I’m exactly the sort of person who keeps a gun next to the printer in case it makes a noise I don’t recognise

RE: https://mastodon.social/@pallenberg/117043093887400189 the wrong robots are dying

@jwz@mastodon.social @glyph@mastodon.social Now wondering parenthetically if all weird shitty Internet behaviour can be explained and characterised in nightclub terms, but you’re literally the only person I know qualified to comment.

@billbennett@mastodon.nz @thomasbeagle@mastodon.nz Facebook ended my teenage libertarianism almost entirely single-handedly and I now favour extremely aggressive regulation.

@thomasbeagle@mastodon.nz there’s a lot of problems with consumer VR as a concept but I’m pretty sure Facebook squatting all over it is the biggest one

@stephen@ephemera.vital.org.nz also it’s cold and you keep fucking moving, stop that

@aurynn@cloudisland.nz hey want me to answer a question you didn’t ask or have enough people done that already

@kf@666.glitchwit.ch I can’t.

@ThisCJ@mastodon.nz that is absolutely the best take on that song and it’s not even close

@stephen@ephemera.vital.org.nz FUCKEN BORED, MATE

@lykso@tiny.tilde.website @aurynn@cloudisland.nz Fuck, that’s awesome.

@mxshift@social.treehouse.systems Too many people for TOO MANY DAYS

@mjg59@nondeterministic.computer I’ll cheerfully state under oath that the original ratio was 100% to 0%.

@mhoye@cosocial.ca also Whitman _wishes_ he’d come up with anything half as good as “wilderhey”

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io We bought some for work, and the tiny iPhone hidden inside it has a machine vision model for _tracking your face_, so if you sit off centre it throws away some pixels to re center you in the frame it sends to UVC.

The second problem is an unrelated glitch in the current generation Android onboarding process, and while it’s possible to dig into it more, a faster solution would be to factory reset the Android device before installing the SIM from your iPhone, and complete the Android onboarding flow a second time, because there are too many carrier-specific edge cases to wrangle. It’s not related to the iMessage problem at all, but when you have both problems, this is what the symptoms look like.

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io Zawinski’s Law of Software Envelopment. They’re just getting ready for the day people need their monitors to be able to read mail.

@mhoye@cosocial.ca Mandatory testicular saline injections for all active duty personnel.

Can’t decide if Blue Prince is genius or 12.5% too smug

sat down to read @grimalkina@mastodon.social’s book only to find my partner has TAKEN IT WITH THEM

To fix this, turn off the Android phone, remove the SIM card, put it into the iPhone you used most recently, and make sure you see a banner from the carrier that issued the SIM. Then, on the iPhone, first go to Settings / Apps / Messages and turn off the “iMessage” transport, and then second, go to Settings / Apps / FaceTime and turn off the FaceTime transport as well. Among other things, that tells iMessage (the service, not the app) not to attempt delivery via iMessage to the endpoints listed under “Send & Receive”. This will allow you to receive (some) text messages from people you know with Apple devices, using whatever transport your carrier provides.

@ThisCJ@mastodon.nz Bitfocus Companion detected.

@PavelASamsonov@mastodon.social masterful

@fincham@cloudisland.nz yeah my love stretches exactly as far as wireshark and a homebridge or esphome plugin

@artnacrea@mastodon.ie +1 for Aurora Store.

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io I tried to buy some (I thought) hopelessly obsolete DDR4 yesterday, only to find out that the price has literally doubled. For RAM that was made ten years ago!