Mii

Seems like they’ve actually done this now. There’s a preface note now.

This topic was chosen based on the technical merit of the project before we were aware of its author’s political views and controversies. Our coverage of technical projects is never an endorsement of the developers’ political views. The moderation of comments here is not meant to defend, or defame, anybody, but is in keeping with our longstanding policy against personal attacks. We could certainly have handled both topic selection and moderation better, and will endeavor to do so going forward.

Which is better than nothing, I guess, but still feels like a cheap cop-out.

Side-note: I can actually believe that they didn’t know about Justine being a fucking nazi when publishing this, because I remember stumbling across some of her projects and actually being impressed by it, and then I found out what an absolute rabbit hole of weird shit this person is. So I kinda get seeing the portable executables project, thinking, wow, this is actually neat, and running with it.

Not that this is an excuse, because when you write articles for a website that should come with a bit of research about the people and topic you choose to cover and you have a bit more responsibility than someone who’s just browsing around, but what do I know.

So, ethics and legality are strategic liabilities? Jesus fucking Christ, that’s not even sneer-worthy. This guy is completely fucking insane.

Such meme. Much wow. I see we’re continuing with giving dumb names to everything the Muskrat is involved in. Glad that hasn’t changed.

Thanks, I thought about something like that as well, but figured it’d be more hassle in the long run. I like to keep my mail in one basket.

But honestly, I feel like there just isn’t a good solution anyway. Email comes from simpler times and any encryption is bolted on and either awkward to use or has some problems with functionality. Hell, even Proton’s bridge was a pain to get running properly with send-email because for some reason it insisted on reformatting outgoing mails. I honestly wonder if I should even bother at this point, because most of the stuff I use email for isn’t even private. It’s mostly corporate communication and mailing lists which are public anyway. All private communication goes over other channels (and some of which are arguably even worse than email, like Discord).

Not saying that this is the conclusion everyone should come to and YMMV, but spending the last weeks combing through the email landscape this feels like the realization I’m starting to arrive at, because I want my email to just work.

Personal rant: in my ongoing search for a replacement for ProtonMail after they pivoted to AI had me almost sign up with Tuta because, hey, they looked good and were on my radar originally anyway, when I found out that they do not offer any IMAP/SMTP access at all.

I mean, I get it, their whole thing is privacy and, yes, storing mail locally on my machine kinda undermines the idea of strong and impenetrable E2E encryption, but I should at least have the choice like I do with Proton Bridge. Because without SMTP Tuta is completely unusable for git send-email. I mean, yes, technically I could copy-paste the output of format-patch into the web client but, first, I am lazy and don’t wanna do that, and second, from my experience it rarely works anyway because the clients do some encoding crap so that git am doesn’t eat it without cleanup.

Meh. I guess I have to keep looking.

Wild that “We left OpenAI and founded out own company with alignment and safety”-Anthropic decides to get into bed with Palantir of all companies.

It’s almost as if their whole safety shtick is complete bullshit. Hmm.

Fuck me sideways. Looks like the machine will continue running at least for a while.

That’ll go down well with everyone and not erode the public’s opinion about the shitheads even further, I’m sure, when they’re allowed to ingest everything and make their chatbots even more racist and plagiarize even more stuff.

For anyone who wants a belated Halloween scare:

https://xcancel.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1852033244729860397

Spoiler: The real kicker is in the hash tags.

Alignment-locked races (or classes for that matter) are just stupid. It’s probably the thing I hated about D&D the most and getting rid of alignment altogether was one of our house rules. I’m actually really happy Baldur’s Gate 3 did that, because suddenly a whole bunch of players realized how you can easily work around those restrictions.

It’s so much more fun when you travel to, say, the Abyss and don’t operate under the pretense that everything you meet there is chaotic evil by default and that you could maybe even meet a morally complex demon. Even more fun in a Planescape campaign.

/off-topic rant

It’s already too late for a lot of places, imo. DeviantArt for example is overrun by LLM-generated sludge and no amount of cleanup will undo that; and that site has been a staple of amateur and upcoming artists for decades. The same seems to be happening to Pixiv (which is big in Japan), too. Search engines are also full of generated SEO spam and it’s getting worse, with image search being close to useless unless you do implement some sort of blocklist. Which, for that use case, luckily already exist and aren’t bad (shameless self-plug), but it’s still a manual step you have to take and won’t help my grandma who’s looking for cookie recipes.

The silver lining might be that a growing number of people are willing to try decentralized solutions. I’ve seen more non-techies come over to Lemmy, Mastodon and Misskey as a result, but it’s still sad to see, especially because this will ultimately lead to tons of older content becoming either lost or needles in a shitstack you can’t ever hope to recover.