Notices by Mx Amber Alex (she/it) (amberage@eldritch.cafe)

@jessew their motto used to be "Sie kennen unsere Pferde. Erleben Sie unsere Stärken." (you know our horses, experience our powers/strong suits)

@davidgerard jesus christ, what a trainwreck that piece is. From basic misinformation (no, GPT didn't ace the bar exam; later research found it failed disastrously), to conflating nice-sounding text with intelligence, to using quotes from deeply interest-conflicted people (like Google AI "researchers") as implicit evidence that "AI" is advancing, to glossing over well-known facts (Keith Starmer can't be replaced by AI? Tech billionnaires want to remove governments!) and facts that anyone writing about "AI" should know (such as the pseudoreligious, cult-like structures among these billionnaires, like their absurd but steadfast belief in Roko's Basilisk and other cyber-esoteric garbage).

And then, at the end, it turns out the author works for what is essentially an "AI" greenwashing scheme.

What a trainwreck. Subpar even by the Guardian's standards.

WHALES ARE UNGULATES?!

Montana has no fucking business being so large. wdym that place is larger than Germany?? You don't even have two million people!

@lanodan @codl nah, if I turn the heat up, the solder just burns at the tip of the iron. It's caked in burnt residue by now; I used to regularly try to get it up (unsuccessfully) and eventually gave up.

The rare times I solder, I just use leaded solder. It just works.

@codl I'm "why does the solder just stick to the iron and refuse to stick to the contacts"

@annika ok follow up, I have never seen a three-ring binder. I only know ones with two rings.

@annika I have no idea what a three hole punch is :o

@annika guten Morgen

@jo and it needs a means of migrating not just follows and followers, but actually moving old posts to a new instance. Backdating them on the new instance, the old instance redirecting to the new; some sort of verification system that can prove the authenticity of a backdated post from a migrated account.

That's the biggest flaw in the current migration process.

With the reminder that Octodon is shutting down next month, I really wish more admins would consider handing over the reins instead of closing up shop.

Like, yeah, I get it. You're sitting on a huge pile of user data, including email addresses and a database which a malicious new admin could peek into to read your users secret messages and look at their nudes or whatever. It's gotta be someone you trust.

But that's why you gotta have a team. People you've worked with for years, people who can gradually ease into learning the technical side of running things, etc.

I'm pretty sure most users would prefer "hey, I'm going to hand over operations to my bestie puppygirl69 in three months, feel free to migrate and/or delete your account if you take issue with that" by several orders of magnitude over "hey, I'm tired of it all, we're shutting down in three months, find a new place".

Windows 8 is now closer to Windows XP than it is to today.

Windows XP is closer to MS-DOS than to modern Windows 11

@staff you can't see this, because you blocked me for criticising your BDFL too much, but close your goddamn sign-ups and drop the growth mentality and you won't have spam problems anymore.

What a revolting update, and what a lovely way to find out my privacy settings (don't show anyone my last seen time) are probably being circumvented for paying customers.

I really wish Telegram wasn't used by 99% of my friends so I could finally ditch it…and I wish there were an alternative that at least begins to approximate its features.

@thompsondt Google has been using AI for ages, and the disastrous results can be seen in the left image. Buildings that clip into each other or the street. Ten years ago, it wasn't like that.

@annika I keep forgetting they don't even weigh flour in lbs, they just use volume measurements 🤦♀️

Oh for fuck's sake, the Firefox dev tools don't even have a way to test dark mode?!

Google's complete uselessness in one picture.

@Sylvhem THEIR DESKTOP APP USES ELECTRON?!?!?!?!