FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Now go. Become unmarketable.

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Despite earlier worries, the new owners of Bandcamp, though they HAVE fired the entire employee union bargaining unit, are still holding Bandcamp Friday

https://isitbandcampfriday.com/

This is great because it means you can buy music without supporting the union busting

Here's my list of over 100 Bandcamp recommendations with micro-reviews:

https://cohost.org/mcc/post/922976-bandcamp-friday-reco

"Over 100 recommendations is too many. I want one recommendation"

Okay, listen to this song

https://chipzelmusic.bandcamp.com/track/spectra

REMINDER: ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other large trained neural models are NOT "artificial intelligence", they're just stochastic parrots, remixing and regurgitating what they've been fed. There's no theory-of-mind involved, so no understanding: there's no "there" there. (A real live parrot exhibits more intelligence than this.)

Don't call it AI; call it parrot-tech. That way you'll have a better perspective on what it can (and can't) do.

By and large ACPI has been a net improvement in Linux compatibility on x86 systems. It certainly didn't remove the "Everything is Windows" mentality that many vendors have, but it meant we largely only needed to ensure that Linux behaved the same way as Windows in a finite number of ways rather than in every single hardware driver, and so the chances that a new machine will work out of the box are much greater than they were in the pre-ACPI period

The main distinction between Device Tree and ACPI is that Device Tree is purely a description of the hardware that exists, and so still requires the OS to know what's possible - if you add a new type of power controller, for instance, you need to add a driver for that to the OS before you can express that via Device Tree. ACPI decided to include an interpreted language to allow vendors to expose functionality to the OS without the OS needing to know about the underlying hardware.

"Why does ACPI exist" in the beforetimes power management on x86 was done by jumping to an opaque BIOS entry point and hoping it would do the right thing. It frequently didn't. Failed to program your graphics card exactly the way the BIOS expected? Hurrah! Data corruption for you. ACPI made the reasonable decision that, well, maybe it should be up to the OS to set state and be able to recover it. But how should the OS deal with state that's fundamentally device specific?

touchHLE v0.2.1 is out. Happy Halloween! 🎃

This is the first release with support for Wolfenstein RPG, Doom II RPG and I Love Katamari. There's also some important usability improvements on Android, among other things. Please check out the release notes! https://github.com/hikari-no-yume/touchHLE/releases/tag/v0.2.1

"Stefano Quintarelli, a former Italian politician and technologist came up with another alternative, 'Systemic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences' or SALAMI, to underscore the ridiculousness of the questions people have been posing about AI: Is SALAMI sentient? Will SALAMI ever have supremacy over humans?

from
There's No Such Thing As Artificial Intelligence. [WaPo, 3/26/2023, gift link]:
https://wapo.st/40th8C7

love how my mom will point blank ask about the state of our finances and will then completely ignore the entire games industry's knowledge about how much games with 5 digits of wishlists make on steam and just pretends kitsune tails could fail hard enough to make $0

like, if you're just gonna ignore what i say which is backed up by loads of research in the industry, why are you even asking me?

Niche gripe: pop sci books that cite a psych study and say something like "people who [x] are more likely to [y]" without mentioning the effect size, and then treat the result as if it's a statement about humanity. Like, in science a 3% increase is HUGE, but probably doesn't mean a lot about how to think about humans at large.

@ZachWeinersmith a nice visual illustration of that:

A trillion bots and human actors all lunge at registrars to acquire the domain name "fuck.ing"

https://blog.google/products/registry/introducing-the-ing-top-level-domain/

it's out of touch thursdays!

🚨 Another EU mass surveillance attempt. Will kill privacy on web. Must not pass. 🚨

“[A]ll web browsers distributed in Europe will be required to trust the certificate authorities and cryptographic keys selected by EU governments.

These changes radically expand the capability of EU governments to surveil their citizens by ensuring cryptographic keys under government control can be used to intercept encrypted web traffic across the EU.”

https://last-chance-for-eidas.org

#eu #privacy #surveillance #eidas

just woke up and i've already seen a "releasing games on linux is too hard" take, a "why bother making my website work in firefox" take, and a story about someone filing a CVE that was hallucinated by an LLM.

i'm not really enjoying computers lately

En tråd om Israel-Palestinakonflikten.

Det är svårt att inte få ett slags mental whiplashskada av att följa både rapporter från Gaza och vad som sägs av Israeliska politiker, och hur saker debatteras i västerländsk media. Varje dag ser jag folk prata om "Israels rätt att försvara sig", och varje dag ser jag videor av barn med sina namn skrivna på armar och ben för att de ska gå att identifiera om de dödas av Israel. Tänk dig en situation där du själv behöver göra det.