Notices by Valerie Aurora (vaurora@wandering.shop)

i dislike some of the censorious tendencies of the last decade, even the ones those very billionaires complain about. but “free speech unless you piss off a billionaire” strikes me as imposing a far worse chill than any excesses of wokeness or public health overcaution. /fin

@janl I'm trying to share documents for review with other people via URL and it cannot do a readable format on a phone without their app installed no matter what I try. Really kinda stunning

@preya I saw a presentation by Collabora in June saying they had dramatically sped up input lag, but also I am also not entirely sure how to buy Collabora as an individual... I click on the partners page and then I get lost in a maze of twisty little pricing options with no details

@bookwar I just want someone ELSE watching the alerts and applying the updates :)

@Merovius yeah, I really don't want to go back to the days of export/scp to my webserver :(

So I am moving off ProtonMail to Fastmail and I still need a Google Docs replacement, and I see so many people self hosting their NextCloud... are you not putting any sensitive docs on that or are you confident you won't get hacked or what? My experience of self-hosting is that someone is actively trying to hack you all the time and I hate dealing with that stress

@janl I just migrated to proton a month ago and I'm going to migrate off to fastmail. Their docs are barely functional so nothing lost there.

@checkervest the chunky hematite frog is 🤩

There are a lot of ducks, too! They're super cute and you can see a lot more of the gradation of sizes here

"At that point, legal questions or analysis of company actions becomes secondary, because [social media companies like Meta and X] are no longer seeking to win in court, but to make themselves politically untouchable."

Good analysis of Meta's recent changes by @AugustB arguing that focusing on the specifica of policy changes and the DSA, etc. misses the point: these companies see an opportunity to get hard power through corruption

https://bourniquelaw.com/2025/01/13/facebooks-new-villain-arc/

LLMs are a near-perfect rentier technology. The cost of training them to the point where they're even marginally useful is so prohibitive that only people with very deep pockets can do it. The goal then is to make us all reliant on them, by shoehorning them into as many products as possible.

And it doesn't matter whether or not we actually need them if products won't work without them.

My corporate training business email somehow ended up on a radiation safety spam list and I'm not even mad? I replied and asked if they have anything a hobbyist can afford

@paulknightly my Philips Sonicare is still going strong after 7 years (with brush head replacements). The error a lot of people make is recharging it after every use; instead put the charger in a drawer and only pull it out when the toothbrush requests charging

@matuzo I think you have your priorities straight!

The other -- you know I'm always going to recommend Cheryan! -- it's Cheryan & Markus (2022): Masculine Defaults: Identifying and Mitigating Hidden Cultural Biases

https://psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2020-59614-001.pdf

While working on my emergency preparedness here in Amsterdam, I started looking for a backpack to carry stuff in an evacuation, and then realized I will almost certainly be riding my bike! Emergency evacuation hits different in a city with 1.9 bicycles per person

@kf this is such a great idea!

@Aphrodite @dx @pikhq DAFT worked for me. It's surprisingly easy!

@baldur this sounds familiar - the newsletter pace preventing you from thinking about bigger questions while also not helping with business. One pattern in my life is avoiding bigger questions by inventing work for myself that doesn't help me (and often doesn't help others). Stopping that was really hard and admire you for the newsletter pause

I have succeeded in creating an account using English on the European version of the domain registrar, but now I have to wait out the rest of the 60 day waiting period before I can move my domains again

Lesson learned: assume there might be a non-EU version of the EU service with identical branding and UI and don't accidentally sign up to that version instead 🙄