From the Small Mercies desk: remember Simone Collins was running for office in Pennsylvania? Well, she lost her campaign. Here's a piece about her from the Inquirer.
TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Running for office is just a stunt for these people. More unearned publicity.
big walmart is watching you.
https://old.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/1gqphel/body_cameras_for_front_end/
I made a sneer about moving from Twitter to yet another Jack Dorsey social network, but after looking into it he apparently left Bluesky and joined Musk's team instead, because of moderation options. Geez, maybe I should sign up. But creating and keeping track of new accounts to sites is a pain in the aaaaaaassssss.
Bluesky is backed by a cryptocurrency venture capitalists, which makes me nervous: https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a -- but in the same press release they reassure people that they're not about to go all NFT (Non-Fun Tokens) just because of their backers.
This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.).
a lot of projects with crypto ties have been doing this kind of hedge — they now emphasize data sovereignty instead of web3, decentralization, and other poisoned buzzwords, but they never really answer why crypto assholes would invest in a company if not to do crypto asshole shit when the time is right
They made this terrible thing look like a train
There's something sweet in the air what I can't say
Would I like a drink to calm the brain?
Oh, please stay in the chairs
But oh, God
I don't wanna go to Mars
What kind of brainwashed idiot does?
It's all a lab rat life in jars
They branded the dream of ages
I don't wanna go to Mars
Be with me here and return to dust
-- White Lies, I Don't Want To Go To Mars, 2022
I remember really liking it when I heard it around first release. it holds up.
You ever have that moment where you hear about a song and only then realize that you had liked 2 or 3 from the same band from radio or recommendations over the years without connecting that it was the same group? Because yeah that just hit me.
is the s
in esrtweets
for "shitty"? because holy fuck are they shitty
I know we're trying to cut back on the US politics for the sake of everyone's sanity, but Musk getting sneered by his own confabulator is still pretty good.
Got recommended a video from a friend, and its a damn good sneer at the state of YouTube sponsorships:
Another proposal for naming our militia: The Cassandra Division
Our Motto: "Sic diximus vobis"
is this a possible thing: all the AI assistant stuff being forced onto us in the next gen hardware is gonna need significant computing power bumps to support it, is this creating a potential surplus of computing power in all devices that could time very well with an excessive skeuomorphic UI design response to the decade of bland flatness we've endured that's gonna cook the cpus on the devices of everyone else?
The ongoing trend of "flat UI" is largely not due to processing power though. Even inexpensive computers have CPUs and GPUs that could push very fancy graphics without problems, see what the same machines can do in game graphics (and I don't mean high-end gaming, I mean the kind of simple gaming that can run on a low-end laptop these days). Some of the early GUIs in the 1980s had "flat design" due to performance limitations, but that went away in the 1990s. Today it could still be a reason in some embedded system scenarios with simple microcontrollers, but not in a desktop or laptop computer, and also not in smartphones or tablets.
The reason we have the bland flat design is the same why we still have things like "all surfaces are ugly glossy black plastic" (luckily this one is on its way out) or "war on physical buttons" aka "touchscreens everywhere"... it's simply a design trend.
Just chiming in to say to hell with skeuomorphism, I still want Apple Platinum back. Bonus points if it comes with an option for Dark Platinum that was only present in the early releases of OS X Server.