Notices by Andrew (andrewt@mathstodon.xyz)

Please help me, Reddit, I 41M can't get a present delivered to my GF 39F because Argos say it's not a valid postcode

AITA? My girlfriend (36F) is upset that whenever I mention her I parenthetically tell everyone her bra size

We have handy words for "clockwise" and "anticlockwise" but we don't have good names for the two main 2D diagonal directions.

So I propose that the south-west to north-east diagonal be called "stonkswise" and the south-east to north-west diagonal be called "antistonkswise"

anyway so bluesky continue not to fix this nonsense so i am going to keep abusing it until someone does something about it

Cybersecurity training: always be on the lookout, because cyber criminals use a range of highly sophisticated technical and social engineering techniques to create extremely convincing messages targeted specifically at you

Cyber criminals:

@ikeacurtains @dat it could, but it sounds like bluesky don't want to do that kind of solution because "the server" could be anyone. you know, because bluesky is """decentralised"""

So it turns out the geniuses over at Bluesky trust the client app to fetch, and honestly report, webpage metadata for preview cards, so with a little tinkering in the debug tools you can post whatever news stories you like and they look exactly the same as real ones.

https://bsky.app/profile/andrewt.net/post/3ljo2dja62224

@julesh nothing good has ever been "unleashed"

Thomas Becket is often mistakenly called "Thomas a Becket" after a medieval scribe hit the "a" key instead of "shift" on his phone keyboard

Surnames exist because medieval peasants would find a bread seller they really liked but already had a "Dave" in their phone, so they put the new one in as "Dave Baker"

follow me for more history facts

In the eleventh century, the easiest way to look up your friends' birthdays was on Domesdaybook

In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen claimed to have built the world's first chess computer, however it eventually turned out that the machine was using humans to make moves via the AWS Mechanical Turk API

Leap years exist because of a miscalculation by Pope Gregory XIII, who wanted to align the calendar and the Earth's orbit. The rockets he used were slightly too powerful and the orbit ended up almost a quarter of a day too long.

The American Revolutionary War ended on July 4, 1776, when Horatio Gates managed to upload a computer virus to the British mothership

@ryanc Hahaha, incredible

from https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/771522130582044672

@ireneista @jalefkowit I mean it also just says everything about these people, right? "AGI is when it makes $100bn" is absolutely what we should have expected.

Imagine OpenAI building a real artificial superintelligence and it not officially counting because it doesn't think that making $100bn is a worthy goal

I've found the reporting on this story super weird. I mean, it would have to be. The standard rules don't work here.

The reports I've seen are treating it like they do when a pretty and well-liked student gets shot in a robbery or something, complete with the middle section about how kind and generous the victim was — and I have to believe even the staunchest libertarian would struggle to forget that literally the only thing anyone knows about this guy is that he made billions of dollars by depriving people of life-saving medicine.

If he'd just been sternly rebuked, that section would have read "Thompson was CEO of UnitedHealthcare, a $500 billion company in the US health insurance industry, which experts estimate causes one death every twelve minutes", but quite reasonably journalists have rules against saying anything that makes a murderer sound based as fuck. But the system Thompson represented is so self-evidently evil, how can you report on this *without* the reader rooting for the shooter?

But, you know, they never care about that when they're reporting about, say, Hamas generals being killed. They never get a eulogy from surviving friends and family. If you see it as a one-off shooting, sure, the current reporting makes sense, but if it's the first real retaliation in a class war that's already claimed countless lives then the current reporting looks like taking sides.

Which, of course, it is. In a class war between billionaires and the working class, the news media aren't exactly Switzerland. Besides, we already know the US media are singularly incapable of adjusting their reporting to a world where the old rules no longer work.

Who knows what's next 🤷

@welshpixie you would think they could at least avoid doing it on the "why do people keep doing exactly this thing we have just explained is bad" posts, it's like, this could not more clearly be a trap, have you considered simply not

@ryanc @eniko

I saw a couple of posts there from Scalzi the other day and I found it interesting that the reasons he says BlueSky is succeeding (which are probably right) are the reasons I'm not using it more. I can socialise on fedi, BlueSky feels like an RSS reader with comments. I'm sure it depends a bit on who you follow etc but I don't think I did anything *that* wildly different when trying out the two platforms, so I do think this is a BlueSky thing more than a me thing.

https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com/post/3lbn4tfq72c2d

https://bsky.app/profile/scalzi.com/post/3lbnfx2as322o