Notices by Bela Lugosi's Dad (jimbob@aus.social)

Microsoft renaming their entire office app "Copilot" so my phone now says depraved things like "Would you like to open this PDF in Copilot?" is going to send me full The Joker

If *there is no longer any way to stay in touch with people if you leave Facebook* then that, alone, should be more than enough for anyone to realise what has been going on and establish alternatives. Same with X or anything else to be honest.

If someone online is really your friend/family/colleague, they will be happy to give you their phone number or email address if you ask. If they aren't happy to, then maybe they're just a rando after all.

My 82-year old Dad apropos of literally nothing; "Somebody's got to shoot Musk".

As a journal editor I've become aware that it is becoming a *thing* in the US for high school students to be recommended to *have already published a scientific paper* so it can be cited when applying for college.

This is insane.

I'm aware of, including some young people I personally know, of high-achieving high schoolers doing internships with scientists over a summer and writing a paper, and that's awesome.

But telling kids it's a requirement, that it's something they need to aim for or they are going to mess up getting into college? No way. Stop that.

@abstractcode @weirdestate this wasn't an architect's decision, this was the seller wondering "how can we advertise our 3 bedroom house as a 4 bedroom house?"

When you buy some multipack item from a supermarket and it says "Contains 11 packets!" and you just know a year ago it would have contained 12. MFs don't put prime numbers of items in things for the sheer hell of it.

Exciting news of a victory from the front line

Hmmmm. Wordpress is a painful, perpetually insecure behemoth that has long since lost its way from its original purpose, while Firefox is still, as least currently, *good*. The world is full of alternative CMSs. The world needs more browsers. https://hachyderm.io/@cam/113252252831641675

@troberts I tried Gemini AI this morning, results were not fantastic

@AlgoCompSynth Broken system!

Opposition to fascism united the disparate parties of the left, you say? Imagine if that worked elsewhere.

Tasmanians Dazzled by Super Rare Phenomenon: Three Consecutive Days of Mainland Media Attention

https://theshovel.com.au/2024/05/14/tasmanians-dazzled-by-rare-phenomena-mainland-media-attention

@geordie @GossiTheDog an update, of sorts, has just arrived

Right. It has happened. My institution now wants to develop teaching materials for a course by literally just running my papers through an LLM to "simplify" them. Have told the person requesting this my opinions on this idea.

Despite the moonlight, some #aurora action in Hobart

@radiofreefedi thanks for all you do, and as a composer of that long, annoying drone stuff, I think you're right and nobody needs the radio filled with that. It's actually inspiring me to write some snappier, more palatable works for my next album. Literally writing music so it will get played on RadioFreeFedi now 😬

Tip for people running conferences, workshops etc. Be sure to schedule in Alone Time. I don't mean "Lunch" where you spend 45 minutes constantly networking, or a poster session. I mean just 10, 15 minutes of nothing. Time to go stare silently at the sky and talk to nobody.

TIL that the scp command does not, by default, compress files it transfers, and that you need to add the -C flag to make it do that, and by doing that I have sped up my transfer speed about 40x, and without this knowledge I have probably wasted literally days of my life waiting for things in the past.

@thomasfuchs it's not great to just assume "normal users" are too stupid to learn about these things. It's completely reasonable to help people understand and use the internet in a safer way - assuming people are stupid and treating them as such is how Facebook operates, not how we should operate.