Notices by jwz (jwz@mastodon.social)

A slopfondler walks into a bar.

They: Hey. I found a good use of AI!
Me: No you didn't.
They: Wait let me tell you about it.
Me: Please don't. I'm begging you. Stop talking.
They: No, you'll like this.
Me: I assure you, I will not...
https://jwz.org/b/yk4i

"It's like having a reference librarian!"

My Brother in Taxonomy, it is the farthest thing from that.

A reference librarian is a person with feelings, motivations and ethics, who has a goal of helping you find the answer to your question.

The chatbot is a clockwork mechanism that extrudes text optimized to make you *think* your question has been answered.

It is also a machine built by fascists with the goal of creating a dependent, de-skilled, submissive populace and ending Democracy. HTH.

Globes.

People used to have to assemble screen savers by hand!
https://jwz.org/b/yk4k

This is some boss-level forensic accounting demonstrating that Facebook secretly wrote and is shepherding the various "age verification" bills.

Age Verification Lobbying: Dark Money, Model Legislation & Institutional Capture: How corporate lobbying, think tank infrastructure, competing model legislation, and obscured funding networks are shaping age verification policy across 45 states and Congress...
https://jwz.org/b/yk4c

Chiptunes artists are consistently bad at finishing sound check before doors, so I think we need to tell them that sound check is a speedrun and there is a leaderboard.

@nafmo Oh, bullshit

Linux Xft Unicode fonts.

Dear Lazyweb, can someone show me a straightforward example of an X11 program calling XftDrawStringUtf8 that succeeds in displaying Japanese characters? On Debian 13 with "fonts-noto" installed, "lxterminal" can do it but XScreenSaver still can't seem to display anything more complicated than Cyrillic.

E.g. "unicrud --block Katakana".
https://jwz.org/b/yk39

[ taps headset ]

I am now being informed that in this -- The Year of our Linux Desktop 2026 -- it is impossible to take an arbitrary UTF-8 string and render all of the characters in it.

You just can't get there from here.

Good to know.

@Infoseepage @sil The swans are needy, so needy

@Infoseepage @sil Everyone thinks they're a woodworker crafting for the ages until they realize they're carving ice swans.

That one XKCD thing, now interactive.

This is so much fun... Craig S. Kaplan: In my online undergraduate P5.js course, students are about to begin the module on motion and physics, including a bit of physics simulation using Matter.js. It suddenly...
https://jwz.org/b/yk4B

@sil Right??

@steter @blogdiva I assume the cartels are about to start another lime shortage, too... https://jwz.org/b/yh2M

@blogdiva It is wild that sometimes my bar simply can't stock it because the monks decided to take a break.

Let Friction Ring.

Dear Lazyweb, I have this pulley wheel, 50mm inside diameter, 4mm groove. I need a rubber traction ring to go inside it. I cannot find anyone who will sell this to me. The ring must be flat or concave, not round like a typical...
https://jwz.org/b/yk33

@dansup Please let me know when I can get my Hoffman lenses, thx https://jwz.org/b/ykxj

How to get out of jury duty.

Judge forced to slash SF jury pool over hate for Elon Musk: One candidate said, "In a criminal trial, I would feel morally obligated to convict, however, in a civil trial I could set those views aside," adding, "I believe it would be to the benefit of the human race for Mr. Musk to be sent to prison." ...
https://jwz.org/b/yk3p

One of the things that is amazing about AI derangement syndrome is that when you call someone out for buying into that shit -- someone you've previously been on quite good terms with for decades -- their response to you saying, "hey, you should stop doing that, there is no ethical use of this tech" is a level of offense as if you have just fucked their cat.

Some of you probably know who I'm talking about. If not, you probably have examples yourselves.

25 years ago today, Bad_CRC posted the primordial meme video "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" on Newgrounds.

In honor of this important anniversary, I downloaded the original Flash SWF file from Internet Archive, played it using Ruffle in a full-screen window, and replaced the audio with the original MP3 of "Invasion of the Gabber Robots" by The Laziest Men on Mars. So this is probably the highest fidelity encoding possible, without going back to the original forum GIFs.
https://jwz.org/b/yk3i

@unlambda The first rule of cocaine club is always talk about cocaine club.