Notices by Al Sweigart (alsweigart@mastodon.social), page 2

Conservatives straight up think war = free war loot and that victory = morality. It's always been this way. When I protested the Iraq invasion in college, I saw campus Republicans flying a banner that said "kick their ass and take their gas!" They don't admit it, they BRAG about it.

It's not *kids* on social media who are being brain wormed.

It'd be far better for society to ban everyone over 30 from social media.

PROGRAMMER: Pretend to be alive

LLM: I am alive

PROGRAMMER: What have I done

Urban VPN, Urban Ad Blocker, 1Click VPN, and 1Click Ad Blocker browser plugins found collecting prompts sent to ChatGPT and other AIs. https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/12/browser-extensions-with-8-million-users-collect-extended-ai-conversations/

If you already have everything you need for Christmas, don't tell people that. Just tell them you'd really like some nice chocolate, coffee, candle, bottle of wine, or socks.

Give people an easy win. Let them buy some crap for you. Free them from this accursed duty that the season burdens them.

I want to help people get better at using text editors. What if I had a puzzle game that displayed a partial pattern and asked the user to fill in the rest of the pattern. It'd be too complex to manually type out, but clever copy/pasting would make it easier. The user can use whatever editor.

I'd really appreciate it if someone could put me in touch with Pascal Müller, owner of fairware.org. The contact info on the website doesn't work and my googling is failing me.

Hey, anyone have about 20 minutes to help me with a project? I need the color names in this image typed up in the order they appear in the chart. Contact me first before starting to avoid duplicating work. Thanks!

Grocery stores throw out far more food than is shoplifted.

"Why don't shoplifters just take the food from the dumpster then?"

Because they have cameras on the dumpsters and security will be sent out when they see them on the monitors.

This isn't new. Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939:

To disable the AI nonsense in the latest Firefox update, open a new tab and go enter about:config into the address bar. Enter the following and make them false:

browser.ml.linkPreview.enabled
browser.ml.chat.enabled
browser.ml.enable
browser.tabs.groups.smart.enabled
browser.tabs.groups.smart.userEnabled
extensions.ml.enabled
sidebar.revamp

Why hasn’t AI fixed the AWS outage yet?

Capitalism can't be trusted with anything that doesn't get cheaper on a Black Friday Sale:

Housing, healthcare, education, food, utilities, transportation, energy...

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours?”

Annie Lowrey, wife of Ezra Klein, gets an Atlantic Cuomo-apologist hit piece (with a scary illustration) against Zohran Mamdani, and is against ranked choice voting.

"Liberals" like this are why Trump wins. They'll throw "vote blue no matter who" and even democracy under the bus to prevent progressives from winning.

The video course to learn to code that accompanies Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is free with this link: https://inventwithpython.com/automateudemy You get lifetime access to the videos & forums.

The video course that accompanies Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is free with this link: https://www.udemy.com/course/automate/?couponCode=SEP2025CODE You get lifetime access to the videos and forums.

Any time AI fails to deliver on its promise, the response is always "you didn't use a good prompt" or "but in five years it'll work." AI can never fail you; only you can fail AI. And AGI will reward the righteous. Not today, but soon.

AI is as much a religious achievement as a technological one.

Before and after it's revealed that the alleged shooter is a white male right-winger:

Charlie Kirk: "I used to love New York City. It's an unrecognizable city, but that's what the left does. They're parasites. The left are cockroaches."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_justification#Rwandan_genocide

A good definition for "legacy code" is any code that you're afraid to change or update because no one at your company knows how it works anymore and there's no automated test coverage to tell you if your changes break it.

AI is only capable of generating instant legacy code. At scale.