Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social)

@mhoye "magnificent frigatebird" - did... did a magnificent frigatebird name this bird?

Still researching various options for a new host (on a new domain) for my personal website. My needs are very modest (a ~1GB, totally static website), I just want a simple setup with a company that is trustworthy and will still be in business in 10+ years. Any recs?

confirmation that FB had some offices remove sanitary pads from men's restrooms: https://archive.ph/zSajm
more than anything, this cruelty reads as performative - making a big show of "turning anti-woke" to please his new master. and his pathetic whining on rogan completes the picture: this is a man who has some idea just how widely hated he is, knows his empire is crumbling, believes in nothing but his own self-preservation, and is kissing the old-new oligarch's ring to save himself.

because here's the thing, he is sacrificing you in the hope of saving himself. that is how little he thinks of you. you should hate this man, your boss, down to the core of your being. you should not be able to be in the same room as him without wanting to [REDACTED]

a critical thing to realize is that your employer is pulling the mask off another mask it was also always wearing - there was never anything sincere about its earlier cooptation of your queer identity, and the only morally positive payment for your years of complicity is to damage that machine's capacities for harm as much as possible before it discards you.

if you somehow made it all the way to 2025 still working for Facebook you should absolutely not quit in protest of their disgusting new policies, you should unionize and make your bosses' lives a constant living hell and make sure the press covers it fairly. at the very least make them pay dearly for firing you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnozAHKTz9o the thing about "clearing the uncanny valley" is that the audacity with which various teams claim they've done it is nearly perfectly inversely proportional to how badly they've stumbled straight into it. and this same cycle has repeated for decades now.
meanwhile, pixar et al have been content to confidently hold a sick handplant at the near edge of the valley, with well-acted stylized characters. at some point you have to ask what ideologies are being upheld here.

@MLNow "two different waymos were causing huge traffic jams so a cop had to drunk-drive one of them away" is an amazing portent for our extremely wealthy new mayor's tenure

one my favorite game code tricks: Quake (1996) defined light styles with a simple string of alphabetic characters, with A as the brightest light value and Z as the darkest.
so style 5, "gentle pulse", is expressed as "jklmnopqrstuvwxyzyxwvutsrqponmlkj" while style 10, "fluorescent flicker", is "mmamammmmammamamaaamammma".
https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/master/qw-qc/world.qc#L329

had an idea for a joke image involving multiple stock images of "cloaked figure" and sure enough i went to image search that, and the results were almost entirely generated slop... never mind then! it's not like the prior era of shutterstock etc was good or anything, i just wanted to make a quick simple joke image that was 100% free of the repellent aesthetics of LLM art, and the people who run search engines have decided that will no longer be possible.

i think maybe a lot of people out there believe that something has to be Important to be worth saving. but the only reason we know much of anything about history and culture is that so many decidedly unimportant things managed to stick around, or people actively decided to save them despite there being no obvious benefit.
i think humanity loses something absolutely essential, the world becomes so much bleaker and our spirits poorer, if we don't do this.

in my opinion it is presumptuous and narrow-minded and vaguely nihilistic to say that it's fine if everything written on the fediverse gets erased forever. we don't know what use what we say here will be to future humans, or even our future selves. given how deliberately destructively a huge % of twitter has been erased, directly and indirectly by its owner, it's clear that nothing inside a corporate walled garden should be expected to survive. it's up to us.

"ad companies know you better than you know yourself" - stop. respect yourself and humanity enough to not say things like this. to these companies you are nothing but a pile of statistical correlations and random scraps they've fished out of your trash cans; they don't "know you" any better than LLMs "know" anything. charlie brown did not in fact have hoes.

may they do grievous, lasting damage to one another's missions

people talk about leftist infighting but at least we don't have the problem the right has, which is that every coalition that white supremacist upper and middle class straight men successfully build outward inevitably violently shatters for the most obvious reasons.

the capitalists are still very very racist but being capitalists is their most deeply held conviction, and vice versa

apparently the extremely racist pieces of shit and the extremely capitalist pieces of shit are fighting

"If a car is in an accident due to another car’s excessive glare, for instance, the offending vehicle that caused the situation would likely never know it and just keep driving. The inability to clinically prove the dangers of headlight glare is at the heart of the issue." https://www.theringer.com/2024/12/03/tech/headlight-brightness-cars-accidents
such a classic example of "if you're increasing an easily measured desirable metric while causing a harm that's hard to measure, you can get away with it for years or even decades"

@xgranade and this was how he rewarded their complicity!

@xgranade Singal is the textbook Level 2 Moderation test: someone who's not shouting slurs, makes a big show of how "civil" they are, but acts in incredibly bad faith, stirs up mobs of users who *do* shout slurs, breaks bread with the worst bigots around, makes the whole place undeniably worse over the long term, and acts attacked when called on any of that. incredibly basic pass/fail shit, and it sounds like they blew it.