Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

I found out a feature on android called "Dynamic System Updates" that lets me load Generic System Images (GSI) Android Open Source Project ROMs temporary with no data loss. So I loaded the latest android 15 ROM and its so cursed.

on the homepage, there's an old google search widget with their old google logo that looks like its from 2011. most of the material design apps look like they haven't been updated since 2017. the calendar app looks like it hasn't been updated since android 4.

Linktree is maybe the saddest modern platform to me. Linking-as-a-service as a workaround to instagram's link-hostile dark design to discourage using the rest of the internet. Productivizing the failure.

REALLY tired of people saying, "Why are you still worried about covid? It's endemic."

"Endemic" does NOT mean "harmless & without risk".

It DOES mean "here to stay" which means the RISKS of covid are here to stay, which means we're all living with a HIGHER baseline of risk which means governments & institutions & people should be making PERMANENT changes that address that risk.

I curse the journalists & "let it rip" "experts" that made people think "endemic" = "harmless".

#CovidIsNotOver

Bij @delijn onderaannemer Autocars de Polder in Antwerpen is vandaag een onaangekondigde staking uitgebroken, maar geen enkele nieuwsmedia weet eigenlijk waarom er wordt gestaakt 🙃

So NaNoWriMo is using the language of progressives to redirect a whole bunch of money to rich people.

I haven't seen anyone fall for it on here yet, but mark my words: people will fall for this shit. People always do. That's why corporations keep doing it; it works. If people don't fall for it quick enough, the corp will pay some folk to loudly and publicly fall for it.

They'll pay folk to Start A Conversation about it, rather than dismissing the whole idea with extreme prejudice and an appropriate amount of mockery. Some easy marks will go along with it without even needing to be paid, and this whole thing will turn into a Serious Conversation rather than the ridicule that this whole thing deserves.

Don't fall for the "Let's Have A Discussion" stage of making this acceptable - withdraw your labour, then point and laugh.

Asking people about computer questions

People who know something about computers: maybe its caching?? maybe the DNS is routing wrong??

People who know too much about computers: maybe its the internet worms again. i hate it when this happens.

(context: Pivot to AI post describing and criticizing the organization's decision, hat tip to @resuna for linking to the post and quoting the bullshit)

...like, reading this, we're sitting here remembering a post from 2005 by writer Eric Burns-White on the now-only-preserved-in-the-Wayback-Machine blog Websnark, titled "What good is Nanowrimo?" (Content warning for brief description of a historical suicide and some light ableism.) Because it was really that post that made us try NaNoWriMo when we tried NaNoWriMo - made us think that it was worth entering this space where the only thing that matters is that you do write, that you put enough words down on the page.

Because that's what NaNoWriMo was - it was that special space where fifty thousand words of terrible writing counted, because writing counts, creation counts, and every participant is creating something out of nothing. You don't have to write something that's good by anyone else's standards, or even your own standards - you just have to turn a blank page into fifty thousand words and do it in a month, because any act of creation is worth it if you're willing to try.

And with their AI shilling (almost typed "shitting" there, that's very funny), the NaNoWriMo organization is explicitly saying that nah, you always need to be stressing about if your writing is good enough, and probably paying some carbon dioxide manufacturer to tell you that it's not.

It's not just flagrantly unethical in every way that LLMs are unethical, it's also a complete abandonment of everything that made NaNoWriMo good.

Fuck these assholes.

Apparently indie game development sometimes looks like this

hell yeah, love it when moderation actually happens. got a report of a remote user, opened it right away, and the remote instance had banned them before i could even view their profile lmao

So this is what I need to find:

- an on screen keyboard that works with Arrow Key + Enter navigation (to be used with a USB Remote without an airmouse.)

- a wifi configuration utility that is entirely navigable with arrow keys + enter + escape (with OSK for text entry.) Ideally something that can run in a terminal.

- ... I think that's it. If I can find solutions for those two things, I can probably whip up a prototype this afternoon.

A quick thought on the "criticism of generative AI is classist and ableist" bs, and why it's so fuckin' insidious:

Yes, those are genuine issues. AI is not a meaningful solution to *any* of them.

The solution to "there aren't enough non-English speaking/disabled/working class voices being published" is not and *never will be* "here's an ethically abhorrent tool that fundamentally reshapes marginalised voices into the statistical mean voice of those already published"