Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

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"

@cynicalsecurity short answer: yes
daemonising is, as a concept (forking into background), essentially incompatible with go runtime model, which implements its own M:N threading and uses OS threads rather loosely, and it's trivial to end up in a situation where the process would already have some threads started before it would reach your daemonizing code.

long answer: still yes, but daemonizing is bad anyway.
as a preface, the following is coming from being burned in many ways by processes attempting to drop privileges and daemonizing on their own. most often by silent failures with nothing on stdout/stderr/logs; but sometimes by leaking/retaining elevated privileges when they weren't supposed to.

self-daemonising is surprisingly difficult to do properly in general, arguably maybe even impossible if your code is anything but a statically linked executable directly interfacing with the kernel syscall interface (not even going through libc) because of how many things happen before "your" code is reached in process lifetime.
i've seen services dropping privileges improperly too often to trust just about any service to do so, regardless of what programming language they're written in, and instead i strongly prefer to have a service manager that would setup proper environment (privs dropped, etc etc) first, and then start the service.
if nothing else, there's less security sensitive code to audit, and it's in just one place, instead of having a myriad variations, with every service author implementing their own slightly different way of doing things.

toxic minimalism is a thing.

The three genders

source: unknown

I appreciate the modern world where sending my lawyer an email containing nothing other than 👍is an entirely reasonable thing to do

fucked up world where having a brain with exceptional pattern recognition and situational awareness plus the ability to absorb knowledge about completely unfamiliar and dissimilar topics like a sponge, synthesize unconventional ideas and solutions from it, and laser-focus on a task indefinitely if it’s immediately rewarding is a serious disadvantage and considered a disorder rather than a highly sought-after trait on the job market

1000 richest people are approched. "The end of the world is here. Time to go to your doomsday bunker", they are told. The billionaires nodded. They knew this was coming. They were prepared.

So they gathered their loved ones and locked themselves in luxury bunkers. No contact to outside world.

10 years later they emerge. The world has healed. The air is breathable, people are happy. "What was the catastrophy?" they ask the first person they meet.

She screams: "THEY GOT OUT!!!"

#microfiction