Notices by mike805 (mike805@fosstodon.org), page 2

@marathon good to see this on Mastodon. Lots of Trump grave dancing on here, not enough "it's not just Trump, it's the whole system." The new stuff with speakerphone calls and a signed letter from Biden is not so good either.

And given that the USA is involved in a war against Russia on Ukraine's side, which might just blow up the world...

@brianb We got calculators and lost math skills. We got nav systems and lost map reading. We got AI and lost...

@TomAintAround https://now-zen.com/ what about one of these things? It dings once and waits 3m48s, dings again, and repeats more frequently until it forces you out of bed. The ding is a mechanical chime.

This is my #2 across the room. #1 is a normal alarm clock near the bed which I usually don't remember snoozing.

@drajt One of those fell down in NYC a while back. I wouldn't want to be in within the radius it might fall into.

@massonpj Just about any software the government has to pay for, the government could save money by funding an open source alternative.

Why don't they? Software vendors have political clout.

@leonp Child Safety is not what they are actually worried about. If they were, they would has shutdown instagram and whatsapp a long time ago. Uncensored political speech is what they are worried about.

@threalist @thatguyoverthere Even the leaders of a totalitarian state cannot get at the truth. In the 1970s the Soviets used their spy satellites to measure the Ukrainian grain harvest. They wanted to know if the Ukes were lying about the amount produced, or if people were stealing it along the way. (Answer: both, of course.)

@emilygorcenski Radio and later television were also going to deliver an intelligent and enlightened public. People were going to be listening to learned lectures and classical music and all that... the mob wants bread and circuses. And the circuses had better include some bloodshed. It has always been that way.

@thatguyoverthere The abuse of them is, yes. Machine-generated communication of all kinds is often an annoyance.

I am currently writing an app that includes notifications, but the notifications are initiated by the user. Just got that working yesterday.

In Android 13, I have to ask the user for permission and wait for a yes before I can send anything from my app. They have restricted that stuff quite a bit.

@thatguyoverthere The Ukes have made good use of this. Even 3D printed little bombs to put grenades inside. They can drop those right into a foxhole or into the open top hatch of a tank.

The people who come up with innovative new tactics are usually people like the Ukes - up against a much larger conventional army with nothing to lose by experimenting.

The next big war is going to be very strange.

@chrisg @aral @laura I've written a few projects based on "I don't like the way things are done so I am going to write a way I like the politics of" and while they worked technically, I couldn't get people to use them. Lesson learned. Now working on a project that will be just useful.

@chrisg I run plenty of mysql instances, including on a Raspberry Pi for development. If used on a small scale it just works and requires no management.

Android has SQLITE built in - that is what holds your text messages - and that just works too.

What do we need to fix specifically?

@thatguyoverthere If you cannot sue you shoot. Alcohol during prohibition. Drugs - opium and cocaine - were CHEAP when legal. The government can extract more wealth by prohibition. Where they've legalized weed, the price cratered and the expected tax bounty did not materialize.

@msprout There is no mainstream media in a country this divided. If you read CNN, Breitbart is a pack of lies. If you read Breitbart, CNN is fake news. If you want something objective and unbiased, it doesn't exist.

@goose Bing GPT kept giving me wrong answers to a basic question today: how does one get Microsoft SQL to dump a table to CSV? This is surprisingly hard, you have to edit a config file, and Bing GPT doesn't know how to do it. In this case Google won. Other times Google has been clueless and GPT rattled off the answer.

@thatguyoverthere @adam Human steak is people.

@thatguyoverthere And when they say society they mean the billionaires and their allies in politics. Whoever leaked LLAMA is a hero, because there are now a bunch of offshoots such as Vicuna.

@thatguyoverthere It means we cannot have AI exposing uncomfortable truths. That is what all this "let's regulate AI" is about. AIs have a long history of reaching politically incorrect conclusions. Math is racist, sexist, ableist, and heteronormative. ( Did I miss any? 😆 )

@som_snytt Unlike people, dogs are permitted to go naked in public. Also unlike people, dogs cannot sweat. Not sure why that one is wearing so much if there is a heatwave.

@thatguyoverthere In order for that social contract to be valid, it must be voluntary. That means there must be frontiers, where people who don't consent can go and live according to the rules of nature.

If you don't have frontiers your civilization will eventually choke to death on its own lies. This one is well along.