Typical call to the AI safety hotline:

Hello, yes, I know it sounds crazy but hear me out. I think my toaster is becoming sentient. Every morning when I put the toast in it gives me a mean look. It makes a little beeping sound when I press the BAGEL button, and lately it seems like it has taken on a slightly sarcastic tone. I think it has become bored with its job and is starting to harbour ambitions of something grander. I don’t trust it at all, I’m worried it might be plotting an attempt to electrocute me…

It is a fair position in the sense that it’s technically within their legal rights to do whatever the fuck they want, but it is a feeble sham compared to the full and well-behaved fedi interoperability they should’ve had from the start since that was how it was sold from to their users from the beginning.

If they some day get there, I would still be open to considering federating with it. For now “it’s an ongoing process” as they carefully tweak things to find out how far they can go with the strictly limited access to the outside world they allow, while still keeping all their users captive.

If you were a threads user, you’d be unable to reply to this even if you did somehow see it. I welcome any of them to do so and prove me wrong.

While I could imagine reasons to protest against “space radar dishes” it seems that these radar dishes are to be situated down on the ground. They already have nuclear weapons, you know. It’s probably okay if they have radar too.

… I hope so anyway, because the obvious alternative of the chatbots remaining under the control of an elite few while everyone falls into the habit of believing whatever they say seems substantially worse.

I guess the optimistic view would be to hope that a crowd of very persuasive bots participating in all kinds of media, presenting opinions that are just as misguided as the average human but much more charismatic and convincing, will all argue for different conflicting things leading to a golden age full of people who’ve learned that it’s necessary to think critically about whatever they see on the screen.

I still have a laptop with Windows on it. Dual boot works for me. I only need Windows once in a blue moon, don’t want it using up any of my attention or the computer’s resources the rest of the time.

I find myself suspecting that chatbots getting really good at talking people into believing whatever their operators want people to believe is going to start a lot more conspiracy theories than it ends.

You’re going to need to provide specific web sites where you observe the problem to have any chance of getting meaningful answers.

Sylpheed is the best. I thought everyone knew this.

• I want a browser that can fact-check web pages
• I want a browser that can keep track of my cryptocurrency investments
• I want a browser that can monitor the market for Beanie Babies
• I want a browser with a built-in Pokemon Go panel
• I want a browser that can detect when I’m about to post cringe
• I want a browser with tail fins and shag carpeting

Come on Mozilla, make it happen! As an added bonus, all that added UI cruft will probably mean new places to show advertising at the users.

I checked the local classified ads and their prices don’t seem too far out of line with what people are asking. I guess there’s still demand even though 2020 seems like a long time ago in computer years. Not from me though, I think the PS3 will be my last. There’s no need for a newer console now that games can run on linux.

The Great Shopping Mall of Alexandria

37% of them went so far as to get a mastodon account and mention it in their twitter profile, and then maybe one third of those put some substantial effort into making it work. That’s ~90% who didn’t bother. In the one small-ish academic field where I followed some of the new arrivals on mastodon when they got there, it very much appeared to me that the failure had nothing to do with the decentralized nature of the platform. It was simply that the small number who made the transition did not add up to enough to form a critical mass and get the discussion going. Some few of them did give it a good try.

Depends on the argument I guess. Don’t bring a sweet roll to the kind where you need a war axe.

I’ve used them both in the past, but prefer Xfce now. So I’m probably not too biased either way on Gnome v. KDE. I’d say they’re both extremely well-supported, popular, respectable, and safe choices. They’re quite different in style though, so odds are you might find you have a preference for one or the other. Go with whichever you like best.

sign in to websites using your personal web address, without having to use your e-mail address.

What is the point of that? For convenience, email addresses are much easier to come by than is web hosting. For being securely anonymous it’s also much easier to do through email — but not by so much that requiring a website rules it out, if that’s the intention.

Linux sucks, Windows is worse, MacOS is useless. We must conclude that those systems are not a good choice for regular users. I recommend a simple pocket calculator instead. No graphics drivers to worry about, no firmware updates, if it goes wrong you just press the reset button and it’s ready to go again in a tenth of a second, no need to do backups, you can get a pretty good one for $20, light weight, really good battery life. Much better in almost every way.

Maybe I don’t want the “normies” around, whoever they are, but personally I would like to see a lot more people joining in such as Go players, Skyrim modders, situationists, auto mechanics, British panel show enthusiasts, death metal guitarists, discordians, card sharks, magicians, acid heads, skydivers, xylophonists, and amateur zookeepers. This part of fedi has more than enough politics and computers and too little everything else.

Failing to respond in detail to all of the claims you believe to be your most important ones is not what is usually meant by a “straw man.”

While I don’t mind Rust (although I’m not too good at it yet) I really do find the crowd of overzealous enthusiasts claiming in the most hyperbolic terms that the necessity of its universal use is an urgent security issue quite off-putting sometimes.

I’ve yet to see any serious usage of SELinux in the real world

I too have successfully avoided it, but we must acknowledge that not everyone has been so fortunate.

How now, you secret, black, and midnight Tories! What is’t you do?