Merlin has the problem that it doesn’t have something like like aimesh where you can auto synch the config between all your routers. I’ve got a network of three Asus routers and they work great and I can admin them like they’re one router, and I’d hate to have to give that to up.

Never turn on remote admin. You don’t need to admin your router from outside of your house.

Don’t worry, Ontario voters are still overwhelmingly supporting the pcpo, I’m sure things will get better.

May as well just say “only when you ask me that” and get to where you were going eventually anyways.

The animation and aesthetic is amazing and I like the music but … what’s the gameplay? I confess I got a little disappointed when it shifted to platformer perspective.

I can’t help but notice the stark contrast between the rate of improvement to Lemmy vs the glacial pace of work done on Mastodon. Lemmy seems to embrace the “move fast and break things” ethos so much better than Mastodon which just crawls at implementing critical functionality. Which is funny, I follow Dessalines and Gargron on various platforms; Gargron seems like a much more sensible and reasonable and decent person so this is kinda disappointing.

This is a social network. It’s recreation. I want you to move fast and break things. That’s how Facebook won. You’re not going to chase down the gazelle by walking.

So after everybody saying the Liberals were going to lose this fight, Google flinched.

I mean, I’m still not sure this is good policy but it is nice to see the haters proven wrong.

Source? That would be exceptionally bone-headed messaging to say out loud, and while the Liberals are masters at cramming their feet in their mouths (Freeland in particular) that level of pooping-out-toes is beyond even her.

WearOS, at least the Samsung variant of it, is goddamned awful. It seems to want to be a full standalone device when I want it to just be an extension of my phone, and it’s an extension of my phone when I want it to stand alone. Worst of both worlds.

I miss my Pebble. Week-long battery, truly always-on-screen, and knew what it was trying to be (just show me notifications)

That’s not what I mean. I’m not thinking about Play Store security, but Android OS security. Like, your app physically has to ask for permission (or even require the user manually change settings) to do most unsafe things.

As somebody who occasionally had to develop for android: the churn of improvements to app security was a huge pita. And as a user I know many of the abandoned apps that I liked that lost compatibility was for that reason.

So the fact that in spite of this pain, Android security still allows apps to do horrible crap like that is infuriating.

DevOps is bad because for some reason we’ve decided to invent new programming languages that you can’t debug locally and so you have to keep pushing commits to the pipeline server. It’s bullshit.

“Why do you write all your pipelines as shell scripts and then wrap them in yaml at the very end”?

Because then I can run them locally quickly and test individual components of them instead of “edit, commit, push, wait 10 minutes, read error message, repeat”.

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And I don’t make my own paints either when doing art. I still agree with the basic original point:

It is disappointing that we’re currently automating creativity far faster than manual labour. I’m angry that my art is getting automated away faster than my folding of laundry.

I mean yeah. I’m not disagreeing with any of that (except the fact that AI caused it - search engines got destroyed by SEO before AI textgen started crapflooding).

But it is what it is. The SEO spammers won. They defeated Google and Microsoft and DDG’s respective search algorithms. Traditional search got killed. The internet got worse instead of better.

In light of this miserable new reality, AI-based content synthesizers (particularly ones that can coherently point to the references for their synthesis) are the current solution to SEO spam. Maybe this is another temporary plateau that the SEO spammers will murder. And yes, it’s tragic that this energy-pig of AI is the best solution to something that used to be doable with a simple trie.

But still: there is a real problem today for which an AI-based tech provides the current best solution. In this one specific case, the AI lives up to the hype. It swallows the hellscape of noise of the internet and gives you the signal.

Bing Chat provides its sources.

Okay but I still have to fold my own laundry.

Absolutely.

Bing Chat Assistant is better than Google, Bing search, or DDG today. If I search for “how do I do X in software Y” on a normal search, I get zillions of dead-link-filled MS pages, some interesting tangentially-related stackoverflow posts, and a bunch of old blogspam.

If I ask the robot, I often get “no, there’s no supported way to do that officially” which is the clear clean answer I can’t find elsewhere. Or sometimes it misunderstands the question and gives me a tangentially-related result, which is bad but is the same thing I get from Google via StackOverflow, except Bing is much more responsive to me saying “no, I didn’t mean that way, I meant this” in which case I often get either the right answer or the “no” answer, which is still good and accurate! The problem is as you iterate, the conversation accumulates cruft and becomes more erratic and hallucinatory.

But right now, with the level of SEO that has ruined all major search engines (ironically partially caused by AI), Bing Chat is the best search on the market now imho. <homer>The cause of and solution to all of life’s problems </homer>

So yeah, in terms of “things where AI has lived up to its potential”? It is winning the search war today. Everything else is something on the horizon in various distances (art, music, text generation, true general AI) but better search for information is here right now.

Glass backs are the dumbest idea in the history of stupid.

The only way things like that could be defensible if they were easy to replace (bring back Moto-Z style magnetic backs!), but since phones are all held together with glue now, that’s not a thing.

Except there isn’t much of a Google stealing their thunder. Bing isn’t better. DDG isn’t better.