Notices by Jef Poskanzer (jef@mastodon.social)

Something just occurred to me about that 'ask a chatbot to draw a clock' thing that is going around this morning. If you search the web for "draw a clock", what you get is a bunch of papers on diagnosing cognitive decline. The clocks the chatbots draw look just like the examples in those papers. This is not because chatbots are demented, it's because those crappy clock drawings in the psych papers are what the chatbots trained on.

@rollovereasy If you folks ever want to invest in a restaurant, I have a concept: late night drunk snacks, with a weekly special that rotates between different national drunk cuisines: fish & chips from England, the munchy box from Scotland, the Irish spice bag, Canadian poutine, German currywurst, etc. And now I have a name for it: Drunchy's.

@Gargron @Mastodon It's an older version of Firefox.

Can't you catch the error and do some fallback behavior?

Once again the nightly @Mastodon web UI has broken on my old-version browser, so I'm back to using Semaphore today.

The version is v4.5.0-nightly.2025-10-01

Here's the console output:

Uncaught TypeError: Intl.DisplayNames is not a constructor
<anonymous> initial_state.ts:124
initial_state.ts:124:21
<anonymous> initial_state.ts:124
InnerModuleEvaluation self-hosted:2381
InnerModuleEvaluation self-hosted:2381
evaluation self-hosted:2332

This is what antifa looks like.

🙄

#NoKings Berkeley

@thomasfuchs The customer is not the end user, it's the manager who decides to buy the chatbot and mandate its use. And those folks love that shit. They want you to talk to them that way too.

That cat was accused of counter-revolutionary activities by the Committee of Public Safety.

CAPTCHA difficulty level: nightmare

Used to be when a dictator wanted to takeover the airwaves, he sent the army to the TV station. These days he has one of his flunkies go on a right-wing podcast and issue vague Mafia-style threats. The result is the same though.

My new favorite 'how it's made' video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NctbIQ1iFLQ

Happy 53rd birthday to Bay Area Rapid Transit.

@evan It's not immoral or anything, but it seems unwise. It reinforces the outside stereotype of Mastodon that we're a bunch of scolds.

@jwz All riots are Bell Riots now.

@bruces I wonder sometimes if before the Big Bang there was a whole era of quark-gluon plasma, including fast-living sapients, some of whom warned of the impending phase change. But their concerns were ignored because it wouldn't happen until far in the future - several attoseconds! Who cares!

🤡 https://www.flickr.com/photos/jef/54751043465/

Photo sharing site for dragons: Smaugmug

@jwz Yum.

I just downloaded all my data from github. It was pretty quick because it's zero bytes because I don't use that shit. Never have, never will.

Ok so actually the reason I never got a github account is that my preferred username was already taken. Yes I am that petty. But it turned out to be a good decision in the end, right?