@prologic@twtxt.net the new product was GPTs. A way to create tailored bots for specific use cases. https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts (fun fact: I did an internal hackathon where we made something like this for $work onboarding. And I won a prize!)

The competed project is poe https://quorablog.quora.com/Introducing-creator-monetization-for-Poe which is basically the same idea. Make a AI bot tailored to a specific domain of knowledge. And monitize it.

The timing fits very well as openAI announced it just a few weeks ago.

Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox. Spoofing Chrome magically makes this problem go away. : youtube

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I lasted for a long time.. Not sure where or when it was “got”. We had been having a cold go around with the kiddos for about a week when the wife started getting sicker than normal. Did a test and she was positive. We tested the rest of the fam and got nothing. Till about 2 days later and myself and the others were positive. It largely hasn’t been too bad a little feaver and stuffy noses.

But whatever it was that hit a few days ago was horrible. Like whatever switch in my head that goes to sleep mode was shut off. I would lay down and even though I felt sleepy, I couldn’t actually go to sleep. The anxiety hit soon after and I was just awake with no relief. And it persisted that way for three nights. I got some meds from the clinic that seemed to finally get me to sleep.

Now the morning after I realized for all that time a part of me was missing. I would close my eyes and it would just go dark. No imagination, no pictures, nothing. Normally I can visualize things as I read or think about stuff.. But for the last few days it was just nothing. The waking up to it was quite shocking.

Though its just the first night.. I guess I’ll have to see if it persists. 🤞

Pinellas County - 5 mile progression: 5.01 miles, 00:09:00 average pace, 00:45:10 duration
was hoping for a rain, mist, or whatever but alas it did not happen. comfy run and talked with several people in the park. exchanged pleasantries with the older gentleman i see all the time. had to run in the grass towards the end for some kids on bikes who never passed me. must have been going fast!
#running

Hey Apple, it’s 2023 - about time to start supporting the content indexation of markdown files in Spotlight out of the box, don’t you think?

DeepMind AI can beat the best weather forecasts - but there is a catch
By using artificial intelligence to spot patterns in weather data, Google DeepMind says it can beat existing weather forecasts up to 99.7 per cent of the time, but data issues mean the approach is limited for now ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de time to write your own browser? Or at least a fork maintained outside the EU?

time to tackle all that clutter

Come on! how do I keep my pet next to me in #nethack? They always go wandering without me and I loose them or my time trying to find them

Anyone have any ideas how you might identify processes (pids) on Linux machine that are responsible for most of the Disk I/O on that machine and subsequently causing high I/O wait times for other processes? 🤔

Important bit: The machine has no access to the internet, there are hardly any standard tools on it, etc. So I have to get something to it “air gapped”. I have terminal access to it, so I can do interesting things like, base64 encode a static binary to my clipboard and paste it to a file, then base64 decode it and execute. That’s about the only mechanisms I have.

I’ll shut down this instance soon, I want to say thanks to all of you, especially @prologic@twtxt.net . It’s been fun here, but I do not spend much time here anymore - cutting down on the things I host and use \ spend time on etc.

I’ve been using activitypub more - since it’s more or less replaced ‘x’ for me, and can be reached at:
@stigatle@activitypub.stigatle.no

Pinellas County - Base: 7.25 miles, 00:10:21 average pace, 01:15:03 duration
it was alright. had to wait too long each time i crossed 113th, the second time the blood rushed to my head and made me a bit nauseous so walked that off.
#running

More data contradicting the existence of “echo chambers”. As I’ve argued many times before, the concept of an echo chamber or information bubble is not real. The podcast below is an interview of an author of a study where they actually intervened and changed the information diet of 20,000 people (with consent!), then surveyed them after three months. They observed essentially no changes to the study subjects’ beliefs and attitudes. They also observed that the typical person, while they tend to gravitate towards people with similar political leanings, only get about 50% of their content from such like-minded people. They get the rest from neutral sources and maybe 20% from non-like-minded people.

Varied information diet + No change in attitudes when information diet is forced to be different = no echo chamber.

Listen to the podcast episode here

Haunted House
⌘ Read more

Time to write my own S3-compatible Object Storage server 🤣

I think about 8pm is the ideal time for sunset.

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah, it’s true. Thing is, Linux as a desktop operating system sucked in 1996 yet I adopted it then anyway because I wanted nothing to do with MS anymore 😆 I know it’s not for everyone but I’m pretty tolerant of a less-than-stellar experience if it means I can be free of big-company garbage.

I haven’t tried a Linux-based smartphone OS in a long time so I don’t have any idea how bad/good it might be. I figure when I finally break down and get a new phone I’ll experiment on my current phone.

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net F-droid. Getting APKs from developers you trust and side-loading them. Some flavor of Linux. Some distro of the open source parts of Android.

There are lots of options. Bit by bit I divest from anything that’s distributed from Google Play. With my latest phone I find and download APKs so that I could have the app without all the Google crap woven through it. By the time I need to replace this one I’ll be fully free of Google Play. Most of my apps come from F-droid now. You can a perfectly functional phone/pocket computer unless you’re addicted to installing dozens of corporate apps.

@jmjl@tilde.green I’m sorry that I’m not super knowledgeable about alternatives to jmp.chat but I’ll tell you what I know.

You’re probably right about jmp.chat not working for you, at least as it is now. You can only get US and Canadian phone numbers through it last time I checked, so if you’re not in either of those countries you’d be making international calls all the time and people who wanted to call you would be making international calls too.

I’ve seen people talk about using SIP as an intermediary: you can bridge SIP-to-XMPP, and bridge SIP-to-PSTN (PSTN = “packet switched telephone network”, meaning normal telephone). You can skip the SIP-to-XMPP side if you’re comfortable using a SIP client. I don’t know very much about SIP or PSTN so I am not sure what to recommend, but perhaps this helps your search queries.

There are a fair number of services like TextNow that let you sign up for a real telephone number that you can then use via their app (I wouldn’t use TextNow–they had tons of spyware in their app). I don’t know if that kind of service works for you but if it does perhaps you’d be able to find one of them that isn’t horrible. This page (https://alternativeto.net/software/jmp-chat/) has a bunch of alternatives; I can’t vouch for any of them but maybe it’s a starting point if you want to go this route.

Good luck!

@mckinley@twtxt.net Yes, I’m still with jmp.chat, and still very happy with them overall. Their beta period ended and their pricing increased a bit, so that’s worth a bit of consideration. I also managed to get one of their eSIMs. I’m slightly less happy with that aspect of their service, though they seem to be actively working on improving it and I knew in advance this was an early beta kind of thing and likely to have issues.

The only unreliability with calls that I’ve noticed was traceable to the unreliability of my own internet connection. I’ve confused incoming calls by simultaneously making and taking calls from the computer and the phone, but I think it’s understandable that problems might arise and that’s not a real use case for me. Once or twice I did not receive a text transcription of a voice mail, but the support is usually quick to address things like that.

I host my own XMPP server and have for a good decade now, and that’s what I use with jmp.chat. I can’t speak to the quality of their hosting options.

Group texting works fine for me if one of the other parties initiates the group text. I haven’t tried to initiate my own group text in well over a year; last time I did, it didn’t work. That may or may not be a problem for you, and it may or may not have been fixed by now. Worth investigating more if it’s important. I should also say I’ve only ever used group texts with 3 participants, and can’t speak to what happens if there are more nor whether there are upper limits.

Group texts don’t use MUC. Rather, they use a special syntax in the JID, something like “+1XXX,+1YYY,…,+1ZZZ@cheogram.com”, where the + and , are required, the XXX, YYY, through ZZZ are the phone numbers (no dashes or other special chars just digits), and the @cheogram.com at the end is required.

I recommend the cheogram app if you’re on android. It has a lot of nice features on top of the Conversations base. I use gajim on my (linux) computer and it works well with jmp.chat.

I’m happy to answer other questions if you have them!

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net No, Google does not predict this. “Google AI” has been self-promoting like this for decades. Remember when they used to brag that they could predict the onset of flu season weeks before it started? That silently went away because they got it badly wrong many times and people caught on to how bad their “predictions” actually were.

They can’t stop themselves. Anything about AI coming out of big tech companies these days is marketing, not real, and certainly not science.

I think I’m like a battery and I have maybe a hundred units of energy every day and every time I go up and down the stairs here one unit is drained from me.

here’s my old web page at Brandeis University

Coevolutionary algorithms typically explore domains in which no single evaluation function is present or known. For the purpose of selecting which individuals to maintain and vary, they instead rely on the outcomes of interactions between evolving entities.

I’ve been using variations of that same phrasing for a very long time–I wrote that web page circa 2005 maybe?

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, bummer. I was hoping that translating the docker commands to podman syntax would work but it looks like it’s more subtle than that. Thanks for trying!

The weird thing was I wasn’t getting errors like that on my end when I tried it. podman thought the connection was created, and it set it as the default. But I don’t think it was sending anything over the wire. When I have more time to tinker with it maybe I’ll play around and see if I can figure out what’s up.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t get your objection. dockerd is 96M and has to run all the time. You can’t use docker without it running, so you have to count both. docker + dockerd is 131M, which is over 3x the size of podman. Plus you have this daemon running all the time, which eats system resources podman doesn’t use, and docker fucks with your network configuration right on install, which podman doesn’t do unless you tell it to.

That’s way fat as far as I’m concerned.

As far as corporate goes, podman is free and open source software, the end. docker is a company with a pricing model. It was founded as a startup, which suggests to me that, like almost all startups, they are seeking an exit and if they ever face troubles in generating that exit they’ll throw out all niceties and abuse their users (see Reddit, the drama with spyware in Audacity, 10,000 other examples). Sure you can use it free for many purposes, and the container bits are open source, but that doesn’t change that it’s always been a corporate entity, that they can change their policies at any time, that they can spy on you if they want, etc etc etc.

That’s way too corporate as far as I’m concerned.

I mean, all of this might not matter to you, and that’s fine! Nothing wrong with that. But you can’t have an alternate reality–these things I said are just facts. You can find them on Wikipedia or docker.com for that matter.

Solar Panel Placement
⌘ Read more

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net hello @prologic@twtxt.net here’s another feed that’s spewing multiple copies of the same post. This one above is repeated 8 times. @awesome-scala-weekly@feeds.twtxt.net now has 13 copies of each post every week. This definitely looks like a bug in whatever code is generating these feeds, because the source feeds don’t have multiple copies of the original posts:

• Has 8 copies of the above post: https://feeds.twtxt.net/New_scientist/twtxt.txt
  
• Has only 1 copy of the above post: https://www.newscientist.com/feed/home/
  

I forget whether I filed an issue on this before, but can you tell me where I should do that?

New kitchen time I think.

I’m playing around with snac2, which I think @stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no mentioned on here, and I have to say it’s extremely easy to set up and it’s been pretty straightforward so far. I wanted to experiment with having a presence on the Fediverse without going through the process of picking Mastodon vs. Gnu Social vs. Friendica vs. …, and I wanted to self-host instead of picking an instance of one of those. For now I’m abucci@buc.ci, but no guarantees that will remain stable; I’m just testing for the time being.

What I see here is that when I was reading your .txt, the timestamp was like 40 minutes later than current time. Say it’s 1pm and that twt is timed on 1.40pm

No idea why, perhaps your server has a wrong Timezone, or your twtxt tool is doing some timezome conversion?

Time to add

<meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex,nofollow”>

to everything I guess.

An official FBI document dated January 2021, obtained by the American association “Property of People” through the Freedom of Information Act.

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This document summarizes the possibilities for legal access to data from nine instant messaging services: iMessage, Line, Signal, Telegram, Threema, Viber, WeChat, WhatsApp and Wickr. For each software, different judicial methods are explored, such as subpoena, search warrant, active collection of communications metadata (“Pen Register”) or connection data retention law (“18 USC§2703”). Here, in essence, is the information the FBI says it can retrieve:

• Apple iMessage: basic subscriber data; in the case of an iPhone user, investigators may be able to get their hands on message content if the user uses iCloud to synchronize iMessage messages or to back up data on their phone.

• Line: account data (image, username, e-mail address, phone number, Line ID, creation date, usage data, etc.); if the user has not activated end-to-end encryption, investigators can retrieve the texts of exchanges over a seven-day period, but not other data (audio, video, images, location).

• Signal: date and time of account creation and date of last connection.

• Telegram: IP address and phone number for investigations into confirmed terrorists, otherwise nothing.

• Threema: cryptographic fingerprint of phone number and e-mail address, push service tokens if used, public key, account creation date, last connection date.

• Viber: account data and IP address used to create the account; investigators can also access message history (date, time, source, destination).

• WeChat: basic data such as name, phone number, e-mail and IP address, but only for non-Chinese users.

• WhatsApp: the targeted person’s basic data, address book and contacts who have the targeted person in their address book; it is possible to collect message metadata in real time (“Pen Register”); message content can be retrieved via iCloud backups.

• Wickr: Date and time of account creation, types of terminal on which the application is installed, date of last connection, number of messages exchanged, external identifiers associated with the account (e-mail addresses, telephone numbers), avatar image, data linked to adding or deleting.

TL;DR Signal is the messaging system that provides the least information to investigators.

I never paid a lot of attention to Ben Shapiro before, but what he says is so transparently asinine it boggles the senses. You really have to have a Fox-addled mind to believe that the search for the submersible was completely faked and that the powers-that-be knew the entire time that it had imploded. To believe that a vast conspiracy among hundreds, thousands (?) of people from several countries and spanning several days was orchestrated to lie to the public in order to…..uh, achieve what exactly? “Undermine institutional credibility”? What does that even mean?

This is “the moon landing was faked” levels of conspiracy theory.

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Boy, the quality of Time is fallen from when it was the Time of its Time to being nearly the Time of our Time!

How Ukraine’s dam collapse could become the country’s ‘Chernobyl’ | Time

Chernobyl is in Ukraine you assholes 😆

Crypto collapse? Get in loser, we’re pivoting to AI – Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

Someone on here gave me a hard time when I suggested that the crypto grifters were pivoting to AI after crypto collapsed. But, they were and they still are.

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no I think I understand NATO’s hesitation, but at the same time if this drags on and on for years then it causes massive loss of life and is even more dangerous for everyone. If that nuclear power plant melts down, whether because Russia causes it directly or because of an “accident”, then all of Europe can be blanketed with fallout. The longer this goes on, the more likely that possibility (and worse ones!) becomes.

That is scary to be so close to Russia. I hope you’re doing OK.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de wow. I’d trade crow sounds for car sounds, or jet sounds, or leaf blower sounds, or lawn mower sounds, or…..100% of the time.

As far as fighting the birds goes, maybe they’re right, but probably it’d be better to re-balance the ecosystem so that crows aren’t so dominant? At least there are things to try. When it comes to reducing how much air travel people use, it takes a terrorist attack or a pandemic to affect it.

Erlang Solutions: How ChatGPT improved my Elixir code. Some hacks are included.
I have been working as an Elixir developer for quite some time and recently came across the ChatGPT model. I want to share some of my experience interacting with it.

During my leisure hours, I am developing an open-source Elixir initiative, Crawly, that facilitates the extraction of structured data from the internet.

Here I want to demonstrate how … ⌘ Read more

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci buuuuut it show when winter!

In the time scale viewed from the planets perspective, the climate has changed many many times.. The issue is whether that change that will inevitability come is hospitable to us meat bags. Or if we are doomed to take part in the next mass extinction event.

@mckinley@twtxt.net Yeah, that’s more clear. 👌

Systems that are on all the time don’t benefit as much from at-rest encryption, anyway.

Right, especially not if it’s “cloud storage”. 😅 (We’re only doing it on our backup servers, which are “real” hardware.)

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This guy is just such an idiot lol.

• There’s no such mass migration to “the south”. Tons of people are leaving Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and New Mexico for instance. I don’t know enough about the states with net influxes like Texas and Florida but I suspect they have policies that make it attractive for people to move there
  
• Not everybody is able to take account of long-term trends when they make housing decisions. There are financial reasons, family reasons, educational reasons, etc that impact such decisions
  
• But of course, most laughably, cheap energy is fast becoming a thing of the past, and so the problem isn’t “solved” by cheap energy, it’s just kicked down the road. And ffs, cheap energy is literally causing the very heating that he pretends air conditioning will “solve”–like “solving” your drinking problem by staying drunk all the time
  

This oversimplification to drive some kind of political point is so embarrassing coming from someone who pretends to be a university professor. It sounds like a teenage doofus from a 1980s movie talking. He well knows all these things, but he decides to present these views anyway.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I was visiting Germany once, and saw a guy try to load his bicycle onto the bike racks they have on the front of city buses. There were rules about when you could do that, which were posted on the bus stop sign, and I guess the guy thought this was a time when he could do that. But no, the bus driver disagreed. The bus driver got off the bus with a rule book, flipped it open to what I guess were the rules about bikes on the bus, and showed him the rules. The guy pointed at the sign, the bus driver said no and pointed at the book, and they went back and forth for I don’t know how long. It felt a lot like these videos lol

📣 Outage Notification: On Tuesday 23rd May 2023 between 7.30am to 5pm, there will be an outage of undefined length with no known start time due to planned power meter upgrades on the premises by the energy company.

You know, it’s one of those things where they give you a ~12hr window 🤦‍♂️ I will post here again once the technician is on-site and power down. I will power back up as soon as the work is complete.

According to the information I’ve received, the outage should be no more than ~1-2hrs.

Apologies for any inconvenience 🤗

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @prologic@twtxt.net @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club I love VR too, and I wonder a lot whether it can help people with accessibility challenges, like low vision.

But Meta’s approach from the beginning almost seemed like a joke? My first thought was “are they trolling us?” There’s open source metaverse software like Vircadia that looks better than Meta’s demos (avatars have legs in Vircadia, ffs) and can already do virtual co-working. Vircadia developers hold their meetings within Vircadia, and there are virtual whiteboards and walls where you can run video feeds, calendars and web browsers. What is Meta spending all that money doing, if their visuals look so weak, and their co-working affordances aren’t there?

On top of that, Meta didn’t seem to put any kind of effort into moderating the content. There are already stories of bad things happening in Horizon Worlds, like gangs forming and harassing people off of it. Imagine what that’d look like if 1 billion people were using it the way Meta says they want.

Then, there are plenty of technical challenges left, like people feeling motion sickness or disoriented after using a headset for a long period of time. I haven’t heard announcements from Meta that they’re working on these or have made any advances in these.

All around, it never sounded serious to me, despite how much money Meta seems to be throwing at it. For something with so much promise, and so many obvious challenges to attack first that Meta seems to be ignoring, what are they even doing?

I have no interest in doing anything about it, even if I had the time (which I don’t), but these kind of thing happen all day every day to countless people. My silly blog post isn’t worth getting up in arms about, but there are artists and other creators who pour countless hours, heart and soul into their work, only to have it taken in exactly this way. That’s one of the reasons I’m so extremely negative about the spate of “AI” tools that have popped up recently. They are powered by theft.

There’s a link to the blog post, but they extracted a summary in hopes of keeping people in Google properties (something they’ve been called out on many times).

I was never contacted to ask if I was OK with Google extracting a summary of my blog post and sticking it on the web site. There is a very clear copyright designation at the bottom of each page, including that one. So, by putting their own brand over my text, they violated my copyright. Straightforward theft right there.

Went to the barber shop today. Got a nice talk and, surprisingly, my first “contract” to 3D print something. So, I spent the last hour reading about QR codes, versions and patterns and rescue data to embed an image in the centre of the code. Then it took me some time to convert it from a PNG to an SVG to an STL, so I can put it into Tinkercad to design the new plate. I now have a baseplate, a backplate with the QRCode & two smaller plates which I have to glue into placeholders on the backplate.

@prologic@twtxt.net @carsten@yarn.zn80.net

There is (I assure you there will be, don’t know what it is yet…) a price to be paid for this convenience.

Exactly prologic, and that’s why I’m negative about these sorts of things. I’m almost 50, I’ve been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they don’t trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. It’s a societal cancer.

All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. They’ll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They won’t stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.

That’s a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for decades. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesn’t make sense. It’s insane.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net

I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing

So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don’t mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?

I’d really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don’t send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you.