FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

2/ It's done! 🥳

A few minutes ago #PREEMPT_RT (aka: #realtime support) support landed in #Linux mainline, as Linus honored the PR that Tglx handed him yesterday in person (see first toot in thread): https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/baeb9a7d8b60b021d907127509c44507539c15e5

Congrats and thx to everyone who was involved in this 20 year long journey!

#Kernel #LinuxKernel

Smartest thing I did living on practically no money for cooking: Buy MSG!

Never considered it before, Swedish people are kinda taught not to! But wow, it's a very efficient way to get food to have taste while barely spending money.

Next, I need to figure out how to do the same, but for making food hot. What has the best Capsaicin to price ratio?

I have been asked to find a Japanese anti-LLM expert to participate in a Japanese symposium on so-called “AI,” and I can’t find one. Internet searches turn up nothing but pro-LLM propaganda. I asked in a Japanese toot, with no luck, so now I ask on the off-chance that someone who reads English might know of a Japanese expert who could make the case against LLMs. Help! #LLM #AI @emilymbender Professor Bender, @timnitGebru Dr. Gebru, have you come across any Japanese scholars/experts writing critically about LLMs? Any help would be greatly appreciated. LLMs are being embraced with a shocking lack of criticism here in Japan.

americans be like "lets shoot the shit" and then get upset when I shotgun the toilet

@kasdeya I think an issue in modern UI for me is "change for the sake of change". It seems like usability and familiarity goes absolutely out the window just because of obsession with making something "new".

I think that's why some people (myself included) cling to things like KDE Plasma and macOS. They update and evolve without generally breaking all too much muscle memory.

I miss when UIs looked like this. everything you can interact with immediately jumps out at you because they're prioritizing visual clarity over aesthetics - and yet it is still strangely beautiful in its own way

urgent to @pisscotheque

UNSOLICITED TV PITCHES:

Skeletor is diagnosed with osteoporosis

when the stock market is soaring that means a handful of thieves are feeling VERY pleased with themselves

haha wow the stock market is at historic highs hahaha the economy is doing so good bro hahahahaha this is totally a real indication of the material conditions and isn't a grim portent like AT ALL lmao lmao lmao

💕

Reading through Mozillas jobs page: "Senior Staff Machine Learning Engineer, Gen AI", "Senior Staff Software Engineer, Ads", "Program Manager, AI 360", "Principal Product Manager, Generative AI","Sr Staff Fullstack Engineer, Anonym", "Senior Manager, Sales (Anonym)"

I see they have fully pointed the ship towards a future of AI and Ads.

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/

I've told this story at conferences - but due to the general situation I thought I'd retell it here.

A few years ago I was doing policy research in a housing benefits office in London. They are singularly unlovely places. The walls are brightened up with posters offering helpful services for people fleeing domestic violence. The security guards on the door are cautiously indifferent to anyone walking in. The air is filled with tense conversations between partners - drowned out by the noise of screaming kids.

In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn't look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable. She stares at it intensely; blocking out the world with Candy Crush.

Or, at least, that's what I thought.

Walking behind her, I glance at her console and recognise the screen she's on. She's connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit. She's not slicing fruit; she's arming herself with knowledge.

The PSP's web browser is - charitably - pathetic. It is slow, frequently runs out of memory, and can only open 3 tabs at a time.

But the GOV.UK pages are written in simple HTML. They are designed to be lightweight and will work even on rubbish browsers. They have to. This is for everyone.

Not everyone has a big monitor, or a multi-core CPU burning through the teraflops, or a broadband connection.

The photographer Chase Jarvis coined the phrase "the best camera is the one that’s with you". He meant that having a crappy instamatic with you at an important moment is better than having the best camera in the world locked up in your car.

The same is true of web browsers. If you have a smart TV, it probably has a crappy browser.

[🖼 Twitter's guest mode displayed on a TV.]

My old car had a built-in crappy web browser.

[🖼 The dashboard of a BMW i3 - there is a web browser on the central display.]

Both are painful to use - but they work!

If your laptop and phone both got stolen - how easily could you conduct online life through the worst browser you have? If you have to file an insurance claim online - will you get sent a simple HTML form to fill in, or a DOCX which won't render?

What vital information or services are forbidden to you due to being trapped in PDFs or horrendously complicated web sites?

Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they're in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary - but can be used to progressively enhance stuff. Add alt text to images so people paying per MB can understand what the images are for (and, you know, accessibility).

Go sit in an uncomfortable chair, in an uncomfortable location, and stare at an uncomfortably small screen with an uncomfortably outdated web browser. How easy is it to use the websites you've created?

I chatted briefly to the young woman afterwards. She'd been kicked out by her parents and her friends had given her the bus fare to the housing benefits office. She had nothing but praise for how helpful the staff had been. I asked about the PSP - a hand-me-down from an older brother - and the web browser. Her reply was "It's shit. But it worked."

I think that's all we can strive for.

Here are some stats on games consoles visiting GOV.UK

Interestingly we have 3,574 users visiting https://t.co/CcU3PLPTpj on games consoles:
• Xbox - 2,062
• Playstation 4 - 1,457
• Playstation Vita - 25
• Nintendo WiiU - 14
• Nintendo 3DS - 16

20/22

— Matt Hobbs (@TheRealNooshu) February 1, 2021

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/01/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-simple-html/

#HTML5 #web #WeekNotes #work

Found on FB with the following text:

"While I was trying to photograph the Northern Lights in the wee hours of the morning, my cat decided to photobomb the picture. Since I had the camera’s shutter speed maxed out, it ended up leaving a sort of ghostly image of my cat in the photo.
Township of Holway, Taylor County, Wisconsin
Admin asked me to edit my post with the nearest city. The nearest city to the location of this picture is Owen, WI, which is 9 miles away."

Photographer: Kristie Kohn

Mozilla leadership
(in ref to https://mozilla.social/@mozilla/113153943609185249 )

#comic #firefox #mozilla