I imagine there are fan groups for Our Flag Means Death.

Pop verification neck to continue.

My argument is thus:

LLMs are decent at boilerplate. They’re good at rephrasing things so that they’re easier to understand. I had a student who struggled for months to wrap her head around how pointers work, two hours with GPT and the ability to ask clarifying questions and now she’s rockin’.

I like being able to plop in a chunk of Python and say, “type annotate this for me and none of your sarcasm this time!”

But if you’re using an LLM as a problem solver and not as an accelerator, you’re going to lack some of the deep understanding of what happens when your code runs.

It takes nearly as long to decrapify a new Firefox install as it does to compile Librewolf.

Install uBlock.

Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

Disable “sponsored” stories. AKA, listicles designed to draw in idiots who want to see which 8 child actors from the 90s turned out to be the tallest. Alarmingly close to the tacky crap that you might see on a fresh Windows install.

Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

Now disable Pocket. Remembering to go into about:config to really disable it

Disable telemetry.

Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

Remove Amazon, Bing, et al. from the search engine list.

Remove “suggested” and “sponsored” autocomplete.

Tell Firefox that you don’t want to sync at the moment.

Remind yourself that, despite this crap, Firefox is still a better browser than any Chromium knockoff.

I think that it’s absolutely fair to jump on Microsoft for this.

There is nothing wrong with this hardware. RAM and CPU clock speed plateaued a long time ago. The overwhelming majority of these systems being thrown away would run Linux flawlessly.

Microsoft has never given a damn about security before. These new security “features” do more to lock people in than they do to keep them safe.

Oh! So I can’t go into a post-op ward in a white lab coat and tell the recovering patients that the power of prayer is better than surgery?!

What’s next?! Taking away my Professional Engineer certification just because I’m not an engineer?

Or maybe you want to bankrupt my architecture firm simply because my certifications double as my Colgate Cavity Patrol diploma!

Never forget: If you can’t commit outright fraud with your free speech, is it really free?

/s

I stopped caring several years ago.

It’s like when Disney bought Star Wars. They homogenized it to make it more palatable and ended up making it dull and unappetizing. Neither franchise has a soul anymore. Just a formulaic plot with a set of waypoints in a dull 3 act format. Sprinkle in some in-humor, pedestrian jokes, and a special effects budget that would make the Pentagon blush and you have a recipe for dull tripe.

The “easier to keep an eye on them” mentality only works if we do something once we observe shenanigans.

Otherwise it’s just a mealy-mouthed punt in the same category as “both sides”.

Some of us like control over our hardware but still want feature parity with our friends and family.

My off the cuff thought is that it may be used to change the content on the tags. Show it a specific QR code and it updates the content.

They cynical side of wants to believe that it’s being used to gather shopping analytics and correlate it to facial data.

Can I expect similar protections for The Satanic Verses, or is this another instance of religion being afforded a special status with the power to control non-adherents lives?

I always get the two mixed up.

Ahh Medium. The Pinterest of articles.

I think the entire community would appreciate articles posted in an accessible manner.

Old archaeologist joke:

Q. Why are the Great Pyramids in Giza?

A. Because they wouldn’t fit in the British Museum.

Montana, here.

Nothing quite like when it hits -45°F and you have to start closing off rooms and stuffing blankets into registers and doorway cracks.

Any kind of outdoor airflow can burn so bad that skin necrosis can begin in just 5 minutes.

Summer in Arizona is shitty. Winter in the Northern Rockies will straight up murder you.

Don’t lump them in with us! I’m a proud member of the Satanic Temple, and I wouldn’t touch PHP on my most hedonistic night.

There’s the Devil, and there’s the Devil.

The accuracy required for the ink droplets just isn’t there for prosumers.

I can (and have!) built multiple extruders for a variety of 3D printers. Some of my own design.

Sadly, the tolerances for an inkjet are at least an order of magnitude greater.

I have zero doubt that a few clever hardware hackers could design an open source inkjet printer. But A: They’d get sued back to the mesolithic by every printer company with a patent. And B: the process would likely involve micro machining your own hardware.

I’ve just said, “fuck it” to the entire industry. I’m I’m my early 40s and I’m reasonably sure that my Brother laser will outlive me. And possibly the heat death of the universe.

Ordered the iFleshlight. Looking forward to seeing the jealous looks I get at the coffee shop.