Notices by The ol' tealeg 🐡 (tealeg@mastodon.online)

Don’t fall for #microsoft extending #windows 10 support in the EU. Kicking the can down the road doesn’t change anything.

They want you to throw away working hardware, pay to upgrade, and accept intrusive new advertising, AI and privacy violations on your desktop. It will cause the biggest pile of e-waste ever and increase the environmental impact of AI data centres.

Time to get out of the abusive relationship, permanently: https://endof10.org

https://youtu.be/wqh_40hyGYw?si=s_yA9C1qNfLdbjsf

#endof10 #linux

@shriramk my own campus tours were nothing like this, but that was 31 years hence in the academic backwaters of England. We were mainly concerned about the ratio of campus computers to students needing to use them and the price of a pint in the student union.

@shriramk ….. that’s what I tell the Germans ;-)

@shriramk drinking things at a low temperature reduces your ability to taste them. Thus by extension, cultures that insist that beer *must* be cooled are clearly the ones that haven’t worked out how to make it *not* taste like the secretions of a rat’s posterior sebaceous glands

#go / #golang folks. If any of you is still using my `github.com/tealeg/xlsx` library (>6k stars suggest some of you are), please note that it has now been migrated to `codeberg.org/tealeg/xlsx` and bumped to v4 (to reflect the incompatibility of this path change).

The old #GitHub repo is now archived. It will still work in your code, but no further attention or work will happen there. Please create your issues and PRs at #Codeberg instead.

https://codeberg.org/tealeg/xlsx

A fine suggestion Google, but I have neither my bat nor a ball with me! #cricket #Bavaria cc. @shriramk

Long read, short summary: AI is really bad for the planet.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

@prahou

It’s going to be one of those days. 2 months before it’s due to be replaced, my work laptop has had an argument with gravity.

And now the train is stopped because there are forest fires.

Apart from the inconvenience, and the fact that my big toe is very bruised from the impact of the falling laptop, the most disappointing thing is that the eventual replacement laptop will also be running macOS.

One of my (very few) annoyances with #OpenBSD is that, in the event of total power failure, the filesystem can be left in an inconsistent state and require manual intervention to fix it before the machine will boot.

I'd find it more annoying, apart from the fact that I have to use the command `fsck_ffs` which perfectly mirrors my own sentiments when it occurs :-D

"Draft e-mails confidently with Gemini"?!?

... dang!

I've been pretty confident about drafting e-mails since, I dunno, at least the mid 1990s.

Know what I'm not confident about?

Any kind of message written with autocorrection of my typing and spelling. I experience a greater number of errors as a result of such technology.

Now you want me to trust the entire endeavour to an LLM using "the content of the fucking Internet" as its basis for good writing? Are you serious?

@GreenSkyOverMe ... worse still. We squander immense amounts of computing power achieving little or no more than we could have achieved 30 years ago.

Now we're fetishising AI because it can make this drudgery a little less, all at the cost of massive amounts more energy, computing power and natural resources, for a marginal gain in real terms.

I'm stating a sincere feeling that It would be better for our sanity, economy and planet if we stopped and simplified.

@GreenSkyOverMe I mean both.

We express everything in tools that encapsulate that information in difficult formats or behind walls of proprietary software and SaaS.

We spend time on confusing layouts, and complicated interactions in order to make our software and services look attractive or modern at first sight.

All of these things are far harder to custom programming around. All these things make our business processes harder to automate and less flexible when we do.

I know I'm getting old, or dare I hope to say, wise, because I can't shake the feeling that any and all demonstrable #productivity gains generated by the use of #AI could be outweighed by simply #teaching people to use and manipulate structured plain text efficiently.

Likewise, teaching new #engineers to do those basic things well instead of jumping straight to "this is how you install the latest framework".

@GossiTheDog this one is sooooo for @shriramk :-D

@shriramk that's a message with mixed blessings!

At the rate this presidency is going, Mastodon might be the only social network we Euro types can viably use. :-/

@shriramk @GossiTheDog - ah, I've pretty much given up on BSky again.

@rsc @oec now, now, Russ, don't mess with my emotions like that 😍 - I'm anyone's fool.