Asides

uspolPolitically speaking, I don't care about whether Hunter Biden is corrupt or not. I …

uspol

Politically speaking, I don't care about whether Hunter Biden is corrupt or not. I care whether Joe Biden is corrupt or not. Hunter isn't (and wasn't) the one in office. Or even in the administration.

Prosecute Hunter for his own crimes, sure, but you don't need a congressional investigation.

That's just the GOP trying to establish guilt by association because they don't have anything on their actual target, and it's JUST. SO. TEDIOUS.

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TIL that the last version of NCSA Mosaic, with juuuust a few modifications, is available …

TIL that the last version of NCSA Mosaic, with juuuust a few modifications, is available as a Flatpak, 1996-era UI widgets and all.

https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.fries1234.ncsa-mosaic

The Github project also has directions on building on Arch and Ubuntu.

Unfortunately, modern TLS and SNI aren't supported, so #Mosaic can't connect to a lot of websites, but it's still a fun look back at a piece of #WebHistory !

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Interesting point: the two biggest markers of the anthropocene era in geology would be radioactive …

Interesting point: the two biggest markers of the anthropocene era in geology would be radioactive isotopes from nuclear weapons and microplastics from mass production and consumerism…both of which are major aspects of the modern world that really got going after World War II…and are handily represented by Barbie and Oppenheimer. https://wapo.st/3OkTKlH

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“For the last six months, EFF, our supporters, and dozens of other groups have been …

“For the last six months, EFF, our supporters, and dozens of other groups have been sounding the alarm about several #BadInternetBills that have been put forward in Congress. We’ve made it clear that these bills are terrible ideas, but Congress is now considering packaging them together—possibly into must-pass legislation.”

@eff provides a brief explanation of each and (for those of us in the US) tools to contact your senators & representative:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/07/you-can-help-stop-these-bad-internet-bills

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Fascinating article comparing interactions with LLMs to interactions with a psychic doing cold readings, and …

Fascinating article comparing interactions with LLMs to interactions with a psychic doing cold readings, and how the same mechanisms that create the illusion of mind-reading for the audience can create the illusion of actual understanding, even for the people building the chatbots.

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

#ai #llm (via metafilter)

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Kmail

Ugh… I was hoping KMail had gotten more reliable since I last tried it, but just setting up an IMAP account I had multiple issues:

  • The inbox wasn’t synced. Everything underneath it was, just not the inbox.
  • It didn’t initially recognize all the special folders like Trash and Sent to begin with, either.
  • Even after I managed to get it to sync the inbox folder, it was literally impossible to move or delete anything from that folder! In some places the action was disabled, and in some it was missing!

That last one was first reported 10 years ago, supposedly fixed, and then it came back.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=316153

There’s a workaround that involves messing around with the akonadi console, but apparently even that’s only temporary!

I wanted to use the defaults on this system as much as possible before bringing in other stuff, especially since I could theoretically share contacts and calendar accounts across multiple apps without signing in on every single one…but I think I’m going to just install Thunderbird and have done with it.

Gyahhh, now I’m thinking of that old Apple commercial where the actor who played Lord Refa on B5 is trying to set up a Windows program and his kid eventually gets frustrated and says, “I’m going over to so-and-so’s house. They have a Mac.”

“I think we are dealing with a dominant cultural belief—one might say a national spirit—that …

“I think we are dealing with a dominant cultural belief—one might say a national spirit—that believes that any people who suffer aren’t actually people, because if they aren’t people then we won’t have to take care of them—and so, if neglect makes them so desperate or unsightly that they cause us discomfort, then we can get rid of them, blaming them for causing the discomfort that resulted in our having to inconvenience ourselves with their disposal.”

https://armoxon.substack.com/p/the-die-ers

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politics (general)I figure that's how we ended up with a bunch of religious rural …

politics (general)

I figure that's how we ended up with a bunch of religious rural working-class folks voting overwhelmingly for the multiply-divorced big-city hotshot who barges in and thinks he knows how to do your job better than you can. Twice. And remolding themselves to be more like him as the years went on.

That's how you end up with people calling Liz Cheney's political suicide “cowardly,” because she “sided with the Dems” in the Jan. 6 probe

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