Ariel Millennium Thornton @arielmt@computerfairi.es

after years of digging and research, i finally found the toolkit that was used to make MS multimedia software Encarta, Dinosaurs and Dangerous Creatures.

when i fell in love with these programs, i imagined they were built with a rich multimedia authoring environment/IDE like Macromedia Director. e.g. dragging and dropping images, sounds, text and video onto a stage, animating it with keyframes, and then scripting it for interaction.

the toolkit used was, as it turns out, a very roughly hewn collection of individual programs. there was no IDE. all of the content was written in RTF files, which were then compiled with links to external resources like wavs and avi's.

i cannot imagine what a nightmare this was for the MS Home teams to work with. there is no drag and drop of any kind, no object linking and embedding (OLÉ!), nor animation editor. this is a dog's breakfast of individual programs written by different people.

i'm frankly amazed that the MS Homes teams put together such well-designed programs *despite* how painful this toolkit is to use

the one thing i can say in its favour is that it has one badass tetricube logo for cover art :D

huge thank you to @philpem for archiving this extremely obscure piece of software

https://archive.org/details/microsoft-multimedia-viewer-2.0-rips-20210921-1.7z

#multimedia #cdrom #retrocomputing #win31

happy pride babe:)

too bad for the people who spent the last few months developing ai workflows that are now completely unworkable with no alternatives

coulda just listened to the moral and ethical arguments against though

or if that doesn't work the people who looked at the underlying economics and accurately predicted massive price hikes

or the fact that you're willingly deskilling yourself by buying in

or the fact that it just doesn't work very well at all

not too much sympathy here actually

OI.

YOU LOT FROM THE UK.

you remember Radio.Garden and how it was blocked from the UK for Copyright reasons?

add https://radio.garden/api/geo to your adblock filters.

enjoy worldwide radio!!

When therians shift

So tired of blacking out every full moon when I really want to stay up and help the townsfolk hunt for the werewolf

Just a note to everyone - Pride Month is no excuse to use generative AI to make "happy PRIDE" posts, merch, or any image or text related to it.

Generative AI is funded by facists who hate LGBTQAI+ and who fund laws against us. It is the tool of the enemy we all should resist together - not generate useless slop that muddies the message with AI vomit.

Using it shows no care, no love, and no solidarity.

#fuckAI #NoAI #PrideMonth #PRIDE #NoAIInPride

Planning documents for "Scout" say the plan is to "make people addicted" to the tool before adding new features.

https://www.404media.co/microsoft-wants-to-make-people-addicted-to-scout-its-new-ai-assistant-internal-documents-reveal/

"the solution might be cancelling my AI subscription"

https://thoughts.hmmz.org/2026-05-31.html

"[AI coding tech] is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends."

All stand for the flags.

#RedfuchsPhotography #Photography #Photo #Pride #Pridemonth

PRIDE

Welcome Kori to the World! Kori is KDE's non-binary⚧️ pet dragon and they'll be presiding over KDE's 30th anniversary celebrations throughout 🏳️‍🌈Pride Month🏳️‍⚧️.

https://kde.org/anniversaries/30/

#kdeAt30 #egg #Pride

The computer exists to be gay and mess with fascists, just like Alan Turing intended

headline: “LLMs believe false statements even after explicit warnings they’re false”

pal. no.

they believe nothing. they have not the capacity for belief.

they do not understand truth and false on any level that would matter to a non-mathematician, and even that they manage to do poorly despite decades of mostly successful usage of the concepts of true and false in computer programming.

not believing known false statements is something you would expect from an intelligence with understanding. large language models understand exactly one thing: how to model language that looks like language it has been shown. that’s all. just that. attributing it with any other understanding whatsoever demonstrates a lack of understanding on your part.

hope that fucking helps.

@davidgerard@circumstances.run

GitHub Copilot became unusable for individual devs after the usage-based billing change — what are the real alternatives ??