Amateur professional #selfhost sysadmin. Professional amateur #cloud#security at #AWS. Also fond of #cats, #cigars, #whiskey and #pipes. I like board games and some video games. I am #covid cautious and I still #wearamask. Opinions are my own, but they can be yours too. 100% Organic:,No artificial colors, preservatives, or intelligence added.
Oh look: #discord outsourced their age verification to some vendor. You know, the #ageverification that countries like the UK want to make mandatory for basically every online service. And the vendor had a data breach exposing photos of government IDs for 70,000 people.
Do you feel safer? How many children did we protect by exposing the IDs of these 70,000 (presumably) adults? Thanks for taking one for the team, you 70,000 canaries in the #privacy coal mine.
One of the ways that LLM-authored code improves productivity is by merely SAYING it does things. It's way faster than the whole time-consuming process of actually doing things. This is real code someone sent to me for review.
This is the classic look of a #cat who, having gone somewhere he has never been before, has no idea what to do now. Walking on a towel bar in the bathroom.
I eventually had to rescue #MrMittens because he got too many paws slipping through the bar and I was worried he’d hurt himself.
I see this announcement from #OpenAI in the same way I see casinos funding gambling cessation orgs. Those orgs genuinely do good work, but they’re also working against their funding source, so you wonder how earnestly they work. And if they were effective to the point of harming the gambling companies, would they keep getting funding?
Same here with OpenAI’s ‘gentle reminders’. Kinda like “The Surgeon General says smoking is bad for you. But cigarette cartons are buy one get one on two-fer Tuesday!”
From the article: ‘As part of OpenAI’s announcement on Monday, it said it was introducing measures to promote “healthy use” of ChatGPT, including “gentle reminders during long sessions to encourage breaks.”’
How long will they keep those reminders going, if the reminders actually work and cause people to use the product less?
Took the #train to work today, which I do when I go to Arlington. First time I’ve seen #VRE get so screwed up. 2 trains due a while ago are 40+ minutes late.
The voice announcer is automated text to speech. But it’s like Dr Sbaitso bad. We have had far better text-to-speech for decades. It has silly quirks that show it has not been tuned for public transport.
Train 305 is referred to as “train three hundred and five,” which is not how anyone would say that.
It consistently emPHAsizes the wrong sylLABles.
With text-to-speech system in the age of very accurate machine translation, we could be making these announcements in several languages. But no. We only do English and with a cadence that even native speakers struggle to understand.
This was state of the art in 1992. Compare this to what you hear on a modern train or airport text to speech.
And finally, our national embarrassment, Washington Dulles International Airport. A lot of it is smooth. But when it comes to something essential like “Board here for all B gates,” you get “bored here for albigates.”
I don’t think people today have enough experiences with toasters. Or maybe they have smart toasters and that’s why they don’t get this analogy.
A toaster couldn’t be much simpler. Bread goes in, toast comes out. Incredibly predictable. Incredibly reliable. Totally understandable. When you make technology that is THAT kind of reliable and intuitive, you have made a huge accomplishment.
Too much today we are left wondering. Why did it do that? Did I cause that? Did “they” update it and make it do something new? Will it happen again or is this just a transient error? Can I get it to go back to how it was?
And it’s been this way a while. A lot of people are used to it and don’t know there’s a different way for technology to be.
This was vaguebooking something that happened to my 93-year old mother last night. #iOS updated. When she opened her phone today it was insisting she set a passcode. (She never sets one and has no need to) it confused her to no end. She thought it was asking her to enter one. She’s never set one, so how could it be prompting for one?
We figured it out. She had set one and then didn’t know how to turn it back off. Thank goodness she remembered what numbers she typed in. The way she said it to me was “I just put in some numbers and it worked.” I thought “oh shit. If she doesn’t know what she typed this is gonna be a disaster.” But it wasn’t that bad.
A histogram showing posts per minute on Sunday, 10 Aug 2025. Each bar represents one minute. The event was 105.3 minutes long. There were 2468 posts during the event with an average of 23.43 posts per minute. The busiest moment was at 36:00 from the start with 42 posts in that minute. The quietest moment was at 105:00 from the start with 8 posts in that minute. The yellow line is a 15-minute moving average.
The word cloud for Sunday, 10 Aug 2025. Words are larger the more frequently they appeared in posts. There were 6932 unique words posted, and the wordcloud shows the 200 most frequent. Top 10 most frequent words were: godzilla: 441, mothra: 129, kaiju: 114, good: 84, monsters: 83, monster: 75, think: 68, giant: 68, see: 60, time: 60, These words were excluded from the word cloud: movie, movies, film, films, watch, now, one, guy, got, going, will, godzillaalloutattack, and the hashtag monsterdon.
A histogram showing posts per minute on Sunday, 10 Aug 2025. Each bar represents one minute. The event was 105.3 minutes long. There were 2468 posts during the event with an average of 23.43 posts per minute. The busiest moment was at 36:00 from the start with 42 posts in that minute. The quietest moment was at 105:00 from the start with 8 posts in that minute. The yellow line is a 15-minute moving average.
The word cloud for Sunday, 10 Aug 2025. Words are larger the more frequently they appeared in posts. There were 6932 unique words posted, and the wordcloud shows the 200 most frequent. Top 10 most frequent words were: godzilla: 441, mothra: 129, kaiju: 114, good: 84, monsters: 83, monster: 75, think: 68, giant: 68, see: 60, time: 60, These words were excluded from the word cloud: movie, movies, film, films, watch, now, one, guy, got, going, will, godzillaalloutattack, and the hashtag monsterdon.
Paco (2026: New) Hope