Notices by Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca), page 2

This is the best thing anyone has turned up in response to my “is 4K really beneficial?” post. Would *really* like to hear confirmation (or otherwise) from an Apple insider who knows what’s really actually going on.

https://mastodon.social/@elharo/113868028426076482

Yow, just ran across video of Elon’s Nazi Salute episode and no, he wasn't caught in an unfortunate position, he Sieg Heil’ed to the front of the stage and then turned 180° and Sieg Heil’ed the lucky people in that direction. It was explicitly Nazi and any news organization that doesn’t describe it as such is committing severe malpractice.

@evan @mick @GottaLaff @emd @coop @johannab We’d be honored to have ya, Laffy. We’re a BC-registered nonprofit co-operative, residents of Canada only. Built for sustainability. Warning: Not free, a big $50/year.

Ah, that fresh Prairie air!

This week I’m in Saskatchewan helping out my 94-year old Mom while her support system is on vacation. I've been doing all the shopping/cooking/cleaning. This afternoon I was busy and when I went to the kitchen she'd set up dinner all by herself and put it in the oven. When it was ready I was watching football and she said “why don’t I bring the food in here?” and dinner was just fine.

So, here’s a toast to my mother Jean Bray, born in May 1930, still taking care of me sometimes.

Question about 4K: I have a monster 77" TV with a Mac mini (among other things) plugged in, and even at that size, the full 3840 x 2160 is unusable unless you’re sitting close enough to get face-burn, and neck damage from head-swiveling.

So in basically every situation, full 4K resolution is not usable. So why aren’t we all buying 1920x1080 screens like we did ten years ago? Is the fact that 4K looks crisper to my eyes just a placebo effect?

I suspect I’m missing something obvious…

Just to reassure people saying a 77" monitor is crazy: They’re right, it’s just a TV, used mostly for TV purposes. But it's got a Mac plugged in too because there are lots of nice TV-like things besides accessed through a real first-class browser. My actual monitor is a bog-standard 27" (also not running anywhere near native).

In which I consider the announcements from Mastodon and Bluesky-adjacent “Free Our Feeds”, both surfacing on the 13th, concerning fundraising and governance measures for the worlds of ActivityPub and ATProto: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/01/14/Protocol-Churn

#bluesky #fediverse

@anildash I'm a little cynical about announcements of fundraising *targets* but still, the important take-away is that a lot of people have noticed that social networking as a commercial product really doesn’t have an interesting future, it’s time to build out alternatives.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/

Stuck my head into IMDB for the first time in a while and maybe I'm just paranoid but I think there's a pervasive LLM stench in the reviews.

Hmm… Hachyderm.io, one of the larger Mastodon instances, just decide to defederate from threads.net: https://community.hachyderm.io/blog/2025/01/09/defederation-from-threads/

@lauren Got a link on that?

Strong stuff from the heart of LA:
https://www.404media.co/email/512a4009-8b31-43ac-bb3b-f27ba5e8f8e9/

@evan Really? We finished it but weren’t left feeling good…. On the other hand, one day after a kitchen chore I said “It’s getting very Scavengers Reign in the compost” which got a laugh.

I strongly recommend you read this whole thread, and consider your behavior here in light of it.

https://fediscience.org/@kathhayhoe/113787783732811080

@mekkaokereke
X: Cheap competitors in generic SaaS offerings like blob storage and CDN.
Y: IFTAS, maybe.
Z: (stretching here) AI (but not genAI) models to help moderators with traffic the way it helps radiologists with images.

@DavidDarnes At one level, “design” is the activity at the core of the engineering profession; could there be such a thing as a design-oblivious engineer? Would it be fair to say that your usage of the word “design” is aimed at UI design? I.e. an engineer whose focus is on front-end software?

@etienneff @evan @coop BTW this is a .ca, you can talk to the world en français. Welcome!

Geeks only: Seconds Since the Epoch https://aphyr.com/posts/378-seconds-since-the-epoch