Picard management tip: Debate honestly. The goal is to arrive at the truth, not at your preconception.
XML watching everyone hate on it for 15 years, then suddenly becoming the main character in every AI prompt:
'well well well how the turntables'
*aggressively angle brackets at you*
Here, it was supposed be a long-ish rant about how AI (not today's LLMs specifically, though) is a fundamental component of a post-scarcity society, and how nobody seems to be seriously interested in applying AI in that way. As opposed to earning a fuckload of money. But fuck, I'm tired and irritated, and it should be self-evident that people shouldn't need to break their backs to have safe, dignified and enjoyable lives.
That’s a big dandelion
Do other people also have this? You randomly experience a spike of FOMO (usually on something really inconsequential), and then you go "fuck this, now I'm not doing it on principle"?
Also, ffs so much of the modern Internet is built on causing FOMO to make people buy your shit.
Self-hosting offers ultimate control and privacy. It's the *future* of data management, empowering users directly 😊 #opensource
In 3 days Pocket is shutting down, so it's high time to worry about a replacement, if you haven't already. I know a lot of folks took this as a cause to try more sophisticated knowledge management apps (hey @obsidian@mas.to ).
Personally, I was looking to keep the experience of the simple reading stack. And boy, @readeck@mastodon.online is exactly what I was looking for, and better than I was hoping for:
- Open source, written in Go, simple frontend stack.
- Self-hosted, tiny resource footprint, very snappy.
- Does exactly what Pocket used to do, without any of the "discover random shit" nonsense.
- Browser extension and neat workarounds for mobile OSes that make saving pages for later quick and easy. This was where a lot of alternatives fell through for me, saving links was just too fiddly.
- Works equally well on desktop and mobile, supports PWA.
- Pretty well functioning readable mode! And if I find something that doesn't work I could actually go and patch it, if I care enough. Pocket tends to swallow or mangle code blocks more often than not, which was a big pain.
Last but not least, it can import your data from Pocket, so migration is pretty smooth. It did take a few hours to chew through ~2500 articles I've apparently saved over the years, since it had to fetch the links and re-extract the content. This is actually one gripe I have with the Pocket export: it just gives you a CVS with links and light metadata, but it doesn't export the saved article content. If you have a 10 year old link in there somewhere, ~pray~ donate to web archive gods that it has been saved there. If you care.
One thing that I wish worked differently is that it splits its state between database (SQLite or Postgres) and disk. I kind of wish everything went into the database, so that can be backed up together with the rest of Postgres index, but beggars can't be choosers. I'll take it.
the fact that the Internet Archive got into bigger trouble for lending books they paid for than Facebook did for reproducing books they pirated tells you everything you need to know about copyright.
Repeat after me: every life is precious, every death is a tragedy.
Hey Germans, please come up with a word that means "the fear of typing `return` vs `shift-return` because you don't know which inserts newline and which sends the message"
Had a discussion with some colleagues about the potential of using #AI for incident auto-mitigation.
It struck me that a lot of concerns boil down to the fact that we are not used to the idea that computers can also exhibit a failure mode we know as "human error". We are used to computers failing "as programmed". When framed that way, we've invented a lot of guardrails to prevent humans from doing dumb mistakes, and many of them can translate into the AI context.
I don't know where I'm going with it. Just a thought.
The thing about vibe coding is that it quickly gets you through the first 80% of the project, and slams you face-first into the second 80%.
Would you look at that! Another blog post about a command shell! It's almost as if being on vacation provides me with time to do something enjoyable
whoami 🤣
Me, every freaking time:
this mobile app surpassed my enshittification tolerance, is there something better?
oh, can I replace it with my own #PWA?
probably not, but let me google a little bit
wow, there is a web API for that, that's almost too good to be true!
ah, of course. iOS doesn't support it.