I wouldn’t be willing to disable my vpn for the nyt so thanks for confirming that it wouldn’t have made a difference. It appears that they now block everyone who doesn’t let javascript freely do whatever it wants to fingerprint you or whatever. I’ll not miss them too much.

autokey — a recent “autohotkey” sort of thing for linux. It comes to mind since I recently had to find a replacement for the one I’d used previously which died of bitrot. Mostly I just use it for app-specific key remapping for Firefox so that I can disable its ^W which I only ever hit accidentally when it was possible.

Mastodon is very bad at fetching replies, if you have a small instance I think you need to add some other software to do that: https://blog.thms.uk/fedifetcher

Your “empirical” sample size of one may be too small to get an accurate reading on the views of contemporary Christianity.

Too far … or not far enough? I think they should abandon the Canadian market, relocate to Florida.

To be clear, I did mean to say that the CN Tower remains the tallest building in Toronto.

I like how “used it in the past year” in one paragraph mysteriously becomes “regular, heavy use” in the next.

Yep. It sends me to fsf.org. If the link goes here or anywhere else and such things bother you, fix your “referer” settings.

The new mayor of Halifax. Opposed to bicycles, in favour of homelessness.

It’s to be very tall, but apparently the CN Tower will remain the tallest by more than a hundred metres.

“Judge not convinced by flimsy excuse” doesn’t really strike me as worthy of the Onion.

GNOME continues its long journey from being the one-time linux standard to a occupying a quirky little niche for masochists and corporate IT departments.

This would’ve been great news to hear about if not for the stupid opinion about DEI being included to completely undermine any faith we might’ve had in the competence or judgement of the person responsible.

I’m shocked! — shocked to find that LLMs aren’t superhuman intelligences that will soon enslave us all. Other things they’re not good at:

• Summarizing news articles. Instead of an actual summary they’ll shorten the text by just leaving things out, without any understanding of which parts are important.
• Answering questions about anything controversial. Based on subtle hints in the wording of your question they’ll reflect your own biases back at you.
• Answering questions about well-known facts. Seemingly at random when your question isn’t phrased exactly the right way they’ll start hallucinating and make up plausible bullshit in place of actual answers.
• Writing a letter. They’ll use the wrong tone, use language that is bland and generic to a degree that makes it almost offensive, and if you care about quality the whole thing will need so much re-writing that it’s quicker to do it yourself from the start.
• Telling jokes. They don’t really get humour. Their jokes tend to have things that superficially look as if they should be punchlines but aren’t funny at all.
• Writing computer code. Correcting their mistakes is even more laborious in computer languages. Most of the time they’re almost as bad at it as they are at playing chess.

Still they are amazingly clever in some ways and pretty good for coming up with random ideas when you’ve got writer’s block or something.

I am a debian user, and was just wondering whether to try 6.16 now or wait until next week.

Well that’s an interesting development, which people seem to have begun experimenting with in the past few weeks. Of course for the time being I suppose it’s made somewhat easier for the relays by 99% of the users being hosted on the small collection of official bsky.network PDS servers.

Some more discussion of it in which there may be hints as to how atproto people might slowly progress towards reinventing some of the things we take for granted on the fediverse.

Depends how tall they are.

If they don’t crawl the entire network then most of the network cannot contact them at all? Which makes it … not really a network. That’s where federation would come in.

They’ve been warning us about the dangers of a Cyber Pearl Harbor since 1991 but I’m not too worried: Computer systems have become much more flaky and unreliable than they were then, so we’re much better prepared for none of them working.

Really? I thought there were only two. How are the small ones able to afford the bandwidth to monitor everything from every PDS?