Don Thompson @guardeddon@social.cleverlibre.org

Are there people out there who are looking at AI/LLM-generated content as pollution?

Because that is the analogy that makes the most sense to me. It's creating huge externalities for the profit of a few - proliferating enormous amounts of digital pollution (as well as real-world greenhouse gas pollution).

The more AI/LLM churn out content for the internet, the dirtier the water, so to speak. Or the air. And the less it functions for users.

@neil @nerdette One added joy with data protection, While I can make peace with Tesla basically owning my car and data, I do find EV Charge providers a problem. Ideally I want to bip a standard card (RFID with decent roaming or Credit Card, I don't care), But the number of chargers which demand an app download, a registration and lots of info before they'll dispense electric is non-zero. It's not soooo bad in the UK, but Norway seems to love mobile apps as the only method of access...

Ducks on the Saône, Lyon

Here's a YouTube playlist I've put together on my #qgis and #blender workflow.

I'm doing a workshop at FOSS4G UK in Glasgow next month, this is a backup.

Open to constructive feedback/suggestions!

I'm new to OBS and I have basic hardware, so the audio's not great. Need to get a de-esser in there!

If you struggle with my Scottish accent, closed captions are available! 😀

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHwYtliXGq3J1Fbb7HZh2-3CTzRqXYK98

In which I offer an overview of where Mastodon stands now in 2023/08; what’s good/bad, keeping an eye on the alternatives, etc. Not terribly technical (social-media technology is boring, it’s the “social” parts that are interesting).

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2023/08/12/Mastodon-Checkin

#mastodon #fediverse #bluesky

The best way to truly support my work on #curl, is to make your company pay for a support contract: https://curl.se/support.html

I work full time on #curl for wolfSSL. Support customers make me get paychecks. Paychecks let me buy food. Food makes my family happy. A happy family lets me do more #curl. More #curl benefits ... well, you.

Introducing Bark! Low-latency multi-receiver live-sync lossless audio streaming for local networks. It's like Sonos, but open source, so nobody can brick your devices remotely. It's also written in Rust :)

It sends 48khz uncompressed float32 data over UDP multicast. It can achieve playback sync to within hundreds of microseconds in ideal conditions, and usually to within a millisecond.

I've been working on it in my spare time over the past week, and I'm pretty happy with how it's shaped up. I have three receivers setup and it works remarkably well at keeping everything in sync as I walk around my house. For now it only really works on Linux, and supports Pipewire (and Pulse in theory), but there's no huge impediment to making it truly cross-platform.

It also features a fancy live stats subcommand, which can used on any computer in the same multicast domain to watch the status of the stream cluster:

Every time I write about the dangers of pickup trucks, I get attacked in hundreds of tweets and comments as a leftist looney. I hope it is more civil on Mastodon! But it is past time they were regulated, particularly in cities. https://lloydalter.substack.com/p/its-time-for-limits-on-truck-and

Do I want it?
↓
Is it by a startup?
↓
No.

(A ‘startup’ is not just any new small business. It’s a temporary venture capital funded company that must either fail fast or exit. An exit is where you’re either bought by Big Tech or become Big Tech through an IPO. To understand this better, if you have a sustainable small company, a startup is what will put you out of business.)

#startups #SiliconValley #ventureCapital #vc #SurveillanceCapitalism #PeopleFarming

Journalists: stop breathlessly reporting Elmo’s latest batshit emanations. He feeds off your free publicity.
Also you can just call it Twitter.

The degree to which the ugliness of the default #Mastodon landing page puts off new potential users is highly underestimated.

It was the main reason I didn’t seriously engage with mastodon for years.

My daily interaction with mastodon via mobile apps couldn’t be any more different. To this day, I’m confused for a brief moment when I land on a mastodon page in the browser!

Instead of “no one needs this” let’s try “how do we make this more private and more secure for the people who need this?”

I canʼt believe I have to tell people this, but

- Donʼt buy smart home shit
- Donʼt download an app to get a free smoothie
- Donʼt sign up for something you heard about in a piece of junk mail
- Donʼt create an account with fucking McDonald's or Chipotleʼs or whatever
- Donʼt use a coupon or a discount for something you werenʼt going to buy anyway
- Donʼt sign up for free trials
- Donʼt let the devil in through the front door
- Donʼt let them sell you anything

You will not come out ahead.

Grey heron

www.vickyoutenphotography.com

#photography #wildlife #wildlifephotography #nature #naturephotography #Mastodonnaturecommunity #greyheron #heron

We could fix this though. Throw this julian calendar nonsense in the trash, and instead do this: 360 days divided into 12 months of 30 days each. Every 3 months is a season, and then between each season we insert 1 or 2 extra days for synchronization. These inbetween season days are called "Quietus", and by law and custom most people should stay home and pretend that time doesn't exist. Quietus could be enforced by a deadly cloud emanating from the Seaslight, a giant lifegiving magical cryst

My #Radio station ( #APRS ) is routinely hitting 1000 miles to 4000 miles. Check it out:

https://aprs.fi/info/a/WI2ARD

#HamRadio #RF #EE #ElectricalEngineering

Yesterday, I learned that WiFi HaLow is a thing, and can apparently extend a signal up to a kilometer?????

Who here knows more abt this, and can point me at what I need to learn abt this, to upgrade my wifi :3

Reminder that you should absolutely never use the website called “sci-hub dot st” to get free access to research papers instead of feeding the greed of for-profit publishers.

That’s basically communism, which is of course illegal. 👩🏻‍🏫