Hmm, I didn’t say anything about AI (although you’re right that, like most people in the fedi, I don’t like it) and I’m not anti-Chinese. It’s the crypto connection which raises trust issues. They list Binance as a partner and supporter, whose founder was convicted of fraud and pardoned by Trump because his sons are in on the crypto grift.

I don’t think I’ll be trying this app out, even though it sounds interesting, unless some trustworthy party audits the code. But hey, you do you.

While this app seems sensible, I checked out the github developer account DimensionDev and it looks like their primary product is something called Mask which is something about “Web 3” crypto/NFT integration … looks like they’re a libertarian crypto grifter cult to me. They also have a gaudy, nonfunctional company page whose copyright notice reveals that is owned by a Chinese parent company with it’s own stale, uninformative web page.

It’s open source, and yeah, maybe they thought they’d make something actually useful … but the source is full of red flags.

Have you checked the Wayback Machine? My old site is up there somewhere.

I recently asked ChatGPT to generate some boilerplate code in C to use libsndfile to write out a WAV file with samples from a function I would fill in. The code it generated casted the double samples from the placeholder function it wrote to floats to use sf_writef_float to write to the file. Having coded with libsndfile over a decade ago, I knew that sf_writef_double existed and would write my calculated sample values with no loss of precision. It probably wouldn’t have made any audible difference to my finished result but it was still obviously stupidly inferior code for no reason.

This is the kind of stupid shit LLMs do all the time. I know I’ve also realized months later that some LLM-generated code I used was doing something in a stupid way, but I can’t remember the details now.

LLMs can get you started and generate boilerplate, but if you’re asking it to write code in a domain you’re not familiar with, you have to understand that — if the code even works — it’s highly likely that it’s doing something in a boneheaded way.

The Republicans are absolutely committed to the lie that the shutdown is because the Democrats are demanding the government pay for illegal aliens’ health care. It doesn’t matter how many times they get corrected; they’ll just keep repeating it.

It’s an interesting experiment in just how brazen a lie they’ll be able to get away with. I’m hoping this is the one that finally breaks them, and they lose credibility for good, but the right-wing media bubble is sewn up pretty tight, and so far it seems they’ll believe pretty much anything they’re fed.

For those who haven’t seen it this is the video (or at least, the version I know about).

This is a hideous mis-meme-ing of the original XKCD comic. The tiny pillar is supposed to represent something we all actually need – since we have built so much on top of it – but barely think about. Like curl or ffmpeg.

Trump and Hegseth are not the sharpest tools in the shed, for sure, but they’re also not the ones really making decisions. Stephen Miller is possibly in charge? JD Vance’s vassalage to dystopian surveillance tech titan Peter Thiel is another influence channel.

At least when I’m cleaning up after shit devs who used Stack Overflow, I can usually search using a fragment of their code and find where they swiped it from and get some clue what the hell they were thinking. Now that they’re all using AI chatbots, there’s no trace.

I’m convinced that the real purpose of this meeting was to gauge the willingness of top military officers to support a coup. I would be surprised if their private conversations in response to this spectacle were not spied on.

Fortunately, at least in public appearance, they don’t seem thrilled with this administration.

The ICE campaign of terror is not a distraction, in the sense that it is meant to draw attention away from something else. It is a primary ambition – perhaps the primary ambition – of this administration. Remember those “MASS DEPORTATION NOW” signs people were holding up at the Republican National Convention?

It is also unsympathetic to those being abused by ICE to call their plight a “distraction”. No! It’s something we need to pay attention to and put a stop to!

If I had to guess, I’d say there are probably many in the military’s high ranks who believe that blowing up random fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela is a violation of international law, and would refuse if ordered to do so. Maybe everyone who has such a conscience will be fired?

This could be a real thing: at each turn, you can either make a standard chess move, or slide one of the board tiles … who wants to code it up?

Beehiiv is an option.

In all previous instances, the agents of the ruling class were totally in control of the media landscape. Mainstream media has finally ceded enough to the internet, and the influencers they rely on to deliver a single message are all off their leashes, with fully half of them unwilling to get back in line.

I’ll concede that it’s probably still wishful thinking on my part, but the current situation is significantly different that what has happened before.

The whole ‘Q’ mythos is based around the premise that liberals must be pedos because, lacking a religion-based straitjacket of a moral code, there’s nothing to keep them from doing anything.

The reality is that, while there are certainly instances of bad sexual behavior across the political spectrum, it is the authoritarian MAGA culture in which child sexual abuse is a systemic problem— a natural consequence of deference to power and the entitlement felt by those given that power.

I know it’s wishful thinking, but the Epstein obsession of the MAGA base may end up crumbling more than just the current GOP.

Governor Walz is grieving the loss of our state’s house speaker, Melissa Hortman, who was killed by someone influenced by violent extremist Republican rhetoric. As the polar opposite of the Republicans— who would never take a milligram of blame for Hortman’s death— Walz is introspective, looking for anything he might have been able to do differently to change this outcome, which is a common part of the grieving process.

So I don’t blame him for not thinking clearly here, but the truth is that the sort of rhetorical attacks he was making on the Republicans is sorely needed. Calling them “weird” was clearly a winning strategy and the campaign consultants who got him to stop are at least somewhat responsible for the fact we now live in a fascist dictatorship.

No one would ever mistake Walz’s rhetoric as an actual call to violence (even though Republicans would be certain to make that bad faith claim). We need to call out who these people are and what they’re doing in a direct, non-apologetic manner. I hope Walz comes around to understanding this and goes back to calling out the fascists.

Whoever downvoted MeaanBeaan here, why? I suspect you just disagree; that’s not a legitimate reason for a downvote. He bothered to offer his analysis, and at least to me it reads like a legit take on events, not trolling. If you disagree, say what you disagree with (like I did). If you’re too lazy to do that, just skip it. Downvotes are for trolls.

CBS’ parent company, Paramount, is in merger talks with Skydance. Mergers must be approved by the federal government. (I thought it was the FTC, but I see the FCC mentioned in articles about this … don’t want to dig into the weeds here. The feds must approve.)

This used to be done by a theoretically impartial board which would make decisions based on benefit to the public. Now there isn’t even a pretense of caring about the public good. If Trump is happy with the tribute he receives, the merger will go through. If he’s upset, it won’t.

Yeah, CBS already folded and paid a huge fine as a “settlement” to a lawsuit they could almost certainly have won in court, but when you’re trying to appease a mob boss you just have to keep paying.

It’s true that putting the end date for Colbert a year out isn’t as extreme an appeasement than just pulling him off the air, but there are many factors involved. The mob boss has declared that he is pleased with the outcome, so mission accomplished.

I’m thinking about getting the new FairPhone 6 when it comes out and running /e/ OS, but I’m so reliant on Google Maps and Gmail (my email account, not necessarily the app … but I do rely on the app).

I’m afraid that I’ll either install Google apps and end up with a phone just as compromised as a stock Android install, or if I don’t it will be too much of a pain in the ass to use.