High school students using AI to write college application essays that are then graded by AI from admissions departments is a great example of how AI usage devalues systems while people can accurately point to “productivity gains” from using AI.
Sixty-five members of the University of Minnesota Law School have signed an open letter “to address the federal government's ongoing campaign of fear, intimidation, and violence against Minnesotans.” docs.google.com/document/d/1bJ…
January 25, 2026 To the Minnesota Law Community: We, the undersigned faculty of the University of Minnesota Law School, write in our individual capacities to address the federal government's ongoing campaign of fear, intimidation, and violence aga…
Just ran into this on a technical article I was reading. This is what MAGA has done to us: Taken a nation that was doing quite well, and finally trying to grow out of and atone for its wrongs, and turned it into one where our citizens qualify for "relief pricing" because we are under the malignantly cancerous rule of a fascist regime intent on destroying everything of value here.
I really really really really really really hate the JAWS install at this point of time. In other news, we're getting up to 60 CMs of snow... 3 feet, so nothing better to do than to repeatedly install and uninstall JAWS versions.
Asking again if someone happens to have contacts inside Harvard University or Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory who feel responsible for open source software licensing. Please get in touch. :)
Note: Please do not copy and paste the contacts for their legal departments, etc. #harvard #ucb #berkeley
"Signal doesn't log metadata" -- does that really matter in practice? If the government wants to prove you sent a message at a specific time all they have to do is go after your mobile carrier or ISP and get their netflow logs associated with your IP address
They can even prove you have an account as well because when you activated the service you received an SMS... and they can prove this happened too
So even if you try to disavow any ownership of a message they find on someone's phone, they'll still nail you to the wall. They'll even be able to tell where you were when you sent it.
None of this actually protects you when it matters most. Don't for a second believe that a passive monitoring dragnet by the NSA is within your threat model. You're being gaslit by people who are still addicted to the state of technology and the world during the Snowden revelations
Your own personal AI assistant. Any OS. Any Platform. The lobster way. 🦞 - GitHub - clawdbot/clawdbot: Your own personal AI assistant. Any OS. Any Platform. The lobster way. 🦞
I honestly never thought I of all people would get tired of new tech stuff, but with the speed at which stuff comes out, I'm finding it harder and harder to keep up. Damn I guess I'm really getting old lol.
So just a quick question, I've been noticing people putting re then a link to a post then their reply, why are you doing this, when you can just hit reply on the post you want to reply to?
Every year, we have a fine old tradition of renting a hot tub over Christmas and New Year’s. Sometimes they leave it longer if they don’t have anybody booked immediately. We still have the tub and we just went in. We are having an epic snowstorm in Toronto right now. They are saying we might get 60 cm. They were snowbanks higher than the edge of the tub.
A lesson I have to keep learning over and over again, most people aren't out to get you. I'm often fearful of interacting with people, especially those I don't know, always scared of saying the wrong thing or offending someone. 99% of the time it goes well, and I end up telling myself "hey, it wasn't so bad man, calm down." No idea where this came from but it's always been something I've struggled with.
Wow I finally used Codex enough to where I have 20 percent usage left and it doesn't reset until Wednesday. Thinking of either buying credits, trying some Gemini CLI or Claude, or looking at other tools. Not ready to spend $100/200 a month yet. There are also some tasks that I could start doing with Codex 5.1 Mini to save credits, and some things I was admittedly lazy on that I could do without AI entirely. Curious what others in the space are using. Not looking for the anti AI answers here :)
No no this is the fediverse. If you have ever used AI even once, for captions, alt text, or language translation, you are guilty of war crimes against humanity. No but seriously, look at openrouter.ai. If you're using codex-cli, you can just change the endpoint to openrouter, get an API key from them, and then pay per token. Or just use this fork with built-in openrouter support: github.com/ymichael/open-codex
I'm really liking claude code. it seems to get things right more often than codex. I like having them both though. I don't know if you can do this with codex, but claude code lets you buy extra useage credits so when you run out of tokens it will dip in to your reserve fund.
@Doug73 Coding anything fun? Aside from the games and TeamTalk stuff I've been on, I want to return to doing some Shopify things as well, though like a lot of things, it needs to use current practices and not knowledge it learned in 2020. It also seems to really get stuck on complex NVDA add-ons, I wonder if there are things to add to the developer guide to help it do better.
For all of you who save the most randomm things that would likely never be needed again. Does anyone have any recordings of All in Play Crazy Eights gameplay? This was a bit before podcasts so I don't think there is anything there. The very first SeroTalk has Poker gameplay but that's all I found.
I think there's some gameplay on the blind cool tech podcast that covered it. I do have it I would just need to figure out which one it was. want me to send it over?
I'm looking in my archive and I can send the podcast with timestamps for the specific game you want. I think this one covered annagrams, poker and crazy eights I just have to find it now
@MariahL It's been a dream of mine for a long time to have a lot of these old podcasts transcribed and searchable. A lot more doable these days and would help in many ways for doing research on non-current access tech that doesn't often leave much of a trail online.
@MariahL I did this a while ago with the whisper turbo large model. An entire text transcription archive of the BCT archive. dropbox.com/scl/fi/5nl18shclh0…
I spent a good ten years completely uninterested in audio. Too much work to hear it and too much rewinding/repeating/whatever. I can now get text by hitting enter and can hear almost anything I want. Halucinations can be spotted and background music/sound/whatever just isn't a problem. Try that with Dragon.
@Bri I was starting to question whether I was right and if I had just thought that file was there lol. I hadn't been able to find it but I was two files away from it as you sent that.
@Bri @munchkinbear @GamingWithEars @MariahL Ya Main Menu is a funny one, as it was not always archived properly. Probably could get a complete list of shows and notes using snapshots on archive.org but not sure.
@munchkinbear @GamingWithEars @MariahL I'm tempted to have AI take a crack at checking out this html snapshot I grabbed from the wayback machine and organizing a copy of the main menu archive somehow
@Bri @munchkinbear @GamingWithEars @MariahL That would be fun. A lot of earlier eps were in multiple parts. Ideally, as for A T History, a searchable database of podcasts and shows with guests and products that are featured as tags. I want to do a simlar thing with the BBQast, though at least those are all still online and @Ranger1138 did amazing show notes for just about every episode since 2015.
@Bri @munchkinbear @GamingWithEars @MariahL There was 2 or 3 points where they redid the archived pages and didn't post older shows, so probably a couple of snapshots would be needed.
@Bri @GamingWithEars @MariahL that was the 7zip file someone hosted, I literally just yanked it directly to the box for storage. lol. If you have something more current, I can just add another zip file, lol.
While much of the country has snow, we're enjoying soft Florida rain with occasional thunder. So calming. I'll take that over Tito's 18 inches of snow. I told him he can keep that.
I was cleaning the bathroom, and refilling dispensers when it dawned on me that having mouthwash and Window cleaner be the exact same color maybe no bueno....
ICE is using a Palantir tool that uses Medicaid and other government data to stalk people for arrest. This is exactly the kind of data privacy abuse that EFF has been warning about.
Apologies to all of you who tried to "follow", but where hanging in Limbo due to your instance being blocked here 😱 There seem to be hundreds of follow requests pending here – I didn't expect that, with the account being marked open 🙈 Trying to catch up, but have no idea how long it might take to the bottom of the Mariannes…
requests from *blocked* instances or accounts you wouldn't see at all, those must be merely *limited*, and quite possibly with good reason, which is why they still go through manual approval.
Basic Mastodon question please: is the limit of 40 posts per API call a TWBlue thing, or a server limit? Also, is there a limit of previous posts I can get? I'm trying to determine why I cannot get posts older than approximately one week.
Here's some silliness with this Macintalk speak windo thing people have been playing with lately.
I tried to have it sing the Casio VL tone song without using an external wave form by constructing a new voice based on "good news", but apparently, I ran into a length limit, or something, so it kind of broke. Reposting because I did a stupid thing and deleted it by accident.
Lol, I used to have a keyboard that would play this song on a demo thing, I have no idea how many times I set off this song at maximum volume on some strange organ sounding instrument at 10:00 at night. I was probably 8 or so.
The fact that the power company has outtages in a very urban area, without ETA. Same power company that is also hostile to home solar power (you can but fuck off the grid).
#TechIsShitDispatch I ordered two remanufactured toner cartridges for my #HP #printer. These are Staples-branded cartridges and the #Staples website claims they're compatible. Today I tried to use them and the printer rejected them: bad chip. It's bullshit that HP is still pulling this cartridge lock crap. It's bullshit that Staples lied about the compatibility. It's bullshit that because of these my printer is out of toner and the earliest I can get replacement cartridges is in three days. 😡😡😡😡
The most dangerous moment in any democracy's existence is when the faction in power realises that if they lose the next election, they're all going to prison.
I’ve documented a clean, native way to integrate FreeBSD 15 into a FreeIPA realm. No heavy dependencies, no Python shims, just pure Kerberos (GSSAPI) and nslcd.
We get full SSH SSO, automated home directories, and centralized sudo rules using standard BSD tools. Pure, stateless, and sane.
A clean approach to integrating FreeBSD 15 into a FreeIPA realm using native components - Kerberos for authentication, LDAP for identity, and no local user management.
> If “AI” is actually more expensive that paying actual people actual wages that’s still a good investment for capital because it is about breaking up the structures, networks and organizations that help workers organize and fight for labor standards and fairer wages.
With studies upon studies showing that actual measurable productivity gains through “AI” (which these days basically means chatbots) are really hard to come by and that “workslop” (meaning the extra work created for the rest of the organization by on…
I remember explaining this exact use case to Very Serious People at multiple non-profits who had received literal millions of dollars to research privacy, and these Very Serious People assured me that could never happen.
I quit these places with joy because these folks were myopic assholes who allowed their privilege to exacerbate harms.
One of these fuckers told me "but I like the ads - they help me see what sneakers I should buy."
CUPERTINO, CA—Explaining that they took immediate action against what they perceived to be a threat, local police officers repeatedly shot Apple CEO Tim Cook after mistaking an iPhone he was holding for a gun, sources confirmed Thursday.
Man, I have so many accessible games now that I don't know what to play. Rimworld, FF 1 through 6, maybe terraria although I may not because I'm not a huge fan of Minecraft style games, hand of fate and hand of fate 2, so many games now.
@NicksWorld I don't remember reviewing GG on BCT, but it was the first game I reviewed for Main Menu. On BCT, I did a review of Sarah and the Castle of Witchcraft and Wizardry. As it turned out, the version I reviewed had a bug in it where the character could get stuck at a certain location.
David K
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