mossman

@pheonix@hachyderm.io I personally never ever use any of that shit and have no need to. My IT/engineering consultancy keep banging on about it - and I was heartened this week when a request came down from management for people to come forward with examples of how they're using in our engineering team... complete silence on the chat except for one guy who said he'd used machine learning in university (before joining our company) to create an engineering substitute model (i.e. an actual application, not some chatbot crap). From the other twenty team members...? Nada. Ha ha ha - screw you upper management!

@timwaterman@mas.to I second this - completely drawn into other worlds by her books as a kid. Same for Octavia E. Butler, whose name I had forgotten until the internet reminded me yesterday, coincidentally

@davidgerard@circumstances.run I can't put my finger on why exactly, but I have never trusted Ecosia - even way back when my favourite Vivaldi briefly partnered with them a decade ago. It always felt like greenwashing to me.

@nemeciii@mastodon.social @randahl@mastodon.social @GeePawHill@mastodon.social as I understood it, that money is going to run out very very soon - Putin has sold most of Russia's gold reserves to prop things up after the fuel price crisis hit people there...

@Sustainable2050@mastodon.energy forwarded to my vegan relatives back in NL (who just said "yeah, we know already")

@Dero_10@thecanadian.social @fesshole@mastodon.social I'm assuming prog-rock - the kind of long-winded, pretentious guitar & synth-based compositional music from the 1970s... Pink Floyd, Genesis etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_rock

@scottearle@poorlyrendered.com @TimWardCam@c.im ooh... sweet thick-sliced white bread, butter, two slices of mature cheddar, couple of slices of lettuce, one sweet vine tomato segmented, big dollop of mayo... [drooling noises]

@knapjack@social.vivaldi.net @Colarusso@mastodon.social wasn't space Lego all the rage back then? I remember the mid to late seventies as being when Lego first started making things which weren't standard brick elements (space, technic, etc.).

@StevenLawsonPhotography@mastoart.social @MsHearthWitch@wandering.shop maybe tape on a couple of extra fingers and random fingertip extensions, for that matter...

@masek@infosec.exchange and then you are assumed to just have a PayPal account in the first place... I have never, for example, had a FaceBook account - and never will. It's tiring that so many people assume everyone has submitted to these crappy Big Tech things and is encouraging you to let them suck up all your data.

@i0null@infosec.exchange funny you should say that, because Urban Dance Squad were doing their thing way before RATM appeared on the scene and took all the glory - and in my opinion they were way better, more original and less simplistic/derivative as well. I lived in NL at the time and the way Rage were idolised was intensely annoying when I'd been hearing Dance Squad for years already. Edit: actually I'll go further... Rage were always just a shabby rip-off and pale imitation of Dance Squad and totally undeserving of the fame they got. There, I said it. 😛

@knapjack@social.vivaldi.net @Colarusso@mastodon.social 1978 apparently - my rich friends must have been really early adopters, they had buckets full of little astronauts, radio dishes, rocket nozzles etc. and this was before we lost touch as we were in different schools in 1983

@woltiv@mastodon.social @davidgerard@circumstances.run I switched the ol' desktop from 2010 and "TV laptop" from 2015 from Win10 to #Q4OS last year, and noticed that Lord of the Rings Online (a Windows game) runs *better* on those than it did in Windows. For normal use (Vivaldi, VLC, torrenting, file and media server, etc.) things are far better than they were in Windows...

@CarstenBoll@mstdn.dk @CiaraNi@mastodon.green the Monster Raving Loony Party and Screaming Lord Sutch were doing this decades ago. They basically set the prototype for this in the UK. There have been loads of parody candidates at key by-elections ever since. Binface himself has been through several iterations and there was once a Binface vs Binface match (including an actual "fight" between the two). Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7EdJtTG354

@Dero_10@thecanadian.social @fesshole@mastodon.social "take the piss" is an expression (like "take the mickey") which means that someone will make fun of you or mock you. Yes, language is weird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_the_piss

@vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de @davidgerard@circumstances.run that was kind of what I remember as well

@fj so presumably they had to set up some kind of bilateral committee to ensure equal funding from both sides, equal opportunities for contractors to set it up, written plans for liability, maintenance etc. etc. 😜

@GroupNebula563@mastodon.social in the mid 1990s, I had cheap CD ROMs of thousands of MIDI files, thousands of Tracker files (the way techno music was made on Amigas, Ataris and PCs - a lot of real dance music was the simply same type of files triggering Akai samplers), thousands of homebrew levels for Doom... ... and I've just remembered for the first time in decades that I also had a couple with thousands of - ahem - pictures on them as well.

@uc@mastodon.scot @streetartutopia@mastodon.online exactly what I was thinking... the graffiti itself depicts Marge holding a match and with a novelty exploding cigarette in her mouth... the joke seems to be that she SET HER HAIR ON FIRE!

@openrightsgroup@social.openrightsgroup.org why does the evil corp seem to keep getting unfettered access to the very data which is MOST dangerous to give to an evil corp?!?

@krans @beyondmachines1 all my HP corporate/client laptops since ~2020 have had the shutter, but they don't cut power to the webcam (you get a dark grey smudgy image which clearly shows the shutter being opened and closed). My gaming laptop appears to (and is supposed to) completely disable the webcam when switched, so if the microphone was on the same circuit (as someone else here said theirs does) then that would fix the privacy question.

@masek@infosec.exchange similar for me - I was instantly suspicious of FB back in the day (which proved to be justified) - but I was peer-pressured by work colleagues into very reluctantly creating a WhatsApp account a few years ago... I did everything I could to keep that from having any of my personal details and people were shocked how serious I was about how much I hated having to do it. Of course since then no-one uses that WhatsApp group any more... The other thing I hate is the way Google uses fingerprinting to track you across different accounts. I got a new work phone recently and transferred my stuff from the old phone to the new one. At some point I logged into Google (using Vivaldi) to see my personal account and *BINGO!* - I suddenly got notifications on my personal phone to complete setting up my work account on the new phone!!! ARRGGGHH!!

@anildash thinking about it, I don't think the YouTube algorithm has served me a single Corridor Crew video since that one... And I would see their stuff listed quite regularly when I surfed YouTube. Coincidence...?! 🤔

@streetartutopia@mastodon.online went to pick up my wife and her drunk colleagues after a night out in Bristol a few months back. Walking back to car park, we passed that bridge and - after one of them spotted this strange figure in the dim reflected streetlight - they spent five minutes stumbling around the road wondering if someone was about to jump, if it was a new bit of street art or just some student prank...

@Halaana @NiwlCraft my thoughts entirely - all payroll and presumably associated GDPR data out on the street? Wow...

@heidilifeldman my whole life, I have been of the opinion that stock markets are just group-think emotionally-driven gambling dens. I have never understood why people subscribe to the idea they're a good thing or why they have been allowed to dominate so much of modern life. I wish they could be regulated back to being a fringe activity on the edge of the business world.

@randahl @xs4me2 antisocial media... Hmm... Good phrase, not sure I've heard it before - but will use it from now on!

@david_chisnall @scalzi I had an A4-sized soft cover "Star Wars storybook" (should still be in a box somewhere) which must have been created while the film was in final edit or something. It's based on production stills with accompanying text and I'm sure there were images/events in there which I never saw on the screen - or maybe it's just because Lucas kept cutting things around for TV edits and whatnot. E.g. there's a page of Luke and Biggs doing stuff on Tatooine before the droids even show up which I don't remember being in the final cut.

@infobeautiful@vis.social I don't know - it looks to me like Eire is proportionally more "dark red" than the UK...

@srtcd424@mas.to @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange got that feeling when driving through Dunblane a few years back. Then immediately felt guilty that a place should be defined by something that happened there for decades afterwards...

@skeletor like the alt text

@beyondmachines1 my gaming laptop has a physical switch for the webcam (only time I've seen this) - I suppose a second switch for the mic would be extravangant, but maybe one switch could cancel both?

@n_dimension @wdjorth do you not see all the lines which make loops around and around and around?

@Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt WANT!

@NormanDunbar@mastodon.scot very good...

@whitequark @exec I also didn't really know about out-bidding other prospective tenants - now I'm wondering if that's what happened in the past to a couple of places we were close to getting... Also the no-pets thing seemed almost universal wherever we looked - surprised that is in there!

@twobiscuits@graz.social @ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us it's bad, yes (I have also had to go back and forth with the home office rejecting a massive dossier of paperwork for a residence permit on a trivial technicality - and arguing with Border Force on entry to the UK is always "fun"), but in my personal experience the Dutch are the absolute champions of insisting that mountains of paperwork are followed to the letter and the French are really good at both creating interconnected/contradictory dependencies (first get this form from that place then come back here to get that stamp, then take it to that department to...) while also randomly deciding rules depending on who's behind the desk and how well they slept last night, so...

@Ambulocetus wasn't this joke on For All Mankind or something?

@blakespot@oldbytes.space loving the dithered black and white image capture... Reminds me very much of the school magazine I edited in 1988 using semi-professional desktop publishing software and a bunch of PCs and (modified) BBCs (and even an Archimedes) all owned by a parent with fingers in both the IT and publishing worlds...

@blahajj @cwebber my corporate mandatory training is obviously being written using LLM these days, and worse still they're also using GenAI voices to read the GenAI script *and you can't skip through when you're done reading the text yourself!* They have taken already-dull subject matter and made it mind-numbingly, bang-head-on-desk-level irritating and utterly impossible to engage with or remember afterwards. I have said as much in any of the cases where they ask you to review after completing...

@notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com thank you - and yes, I have also had stupid online arguments about this with stupid people who were either blowhards or must have connections to the oil/nuclear industries. Base load *was* a thing, but not any more. Now it's about smoothing the variable sustainable load with batteries, pumped storage etc.

@manawyrm @jeffcodes @gsuberland @azonenberg @jik @zackwhittaker I used VeraCrypt (and before that TrueCrypt) on the main home desktop for over a decade (and used it on a couple of other machines) yet never once had a problem with it. I had problems with stupid Windows Update not updating because it didn't like the encrypted volume being there, but that was a different thing. That ancient machine is now using Linux (and is actually running better than ever, fit as a fiddle) *precisely* because of MS pulling stunts like this, otherwise I'd be cursing them yet again now. I'm still using VeraCrypt volumes on an external disk for backup since that allows secure access with both OSes. Assuming MS doesn't screw that up on our windows laptops as well...

@Gurre@mastodon.nu @SecureOwl@infosec.exchange I've had to endure excruciating AI-written and voiced "podcasts" creeping into corporate training material over the last couple of years. I can't stand them - they are dire and make my brain hurt.

@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu responded as someone in the UK who looks forward to when we finally rejoin and adopt the euro as well. (I spent most of my life on the continent)

And now I'm doing it again for twenty language versions of OneNote. Jesus Christ this is literally taking all night!

It's worse than I thought - I'm currently uninstalling "Microsoft Office Click-to-run" for each of about 20 languages... and it takes 5 minutes and a restart EACH TIME

@Dero_10@thecanadian.social @fesshole@mastodon.social e.g. I was wondering the other day why we started saying "take a dump" when we do a shit. Why are we "taking" it? Shouldn't we be "making" or "leaving" a dump instead? I can actually still remember the very first time I heard someone say this (in a field at the 24-hours race of Le Mans circa 1990) since I thought it was such a weird and funny way to describe what he wanted to do...

@glitzersachen@hachyderm.io @cornelius@mastodon.me.uk @paco@infosec.exchange (re-posting this since it got orphaned from the relevant thread, for some reason) picking up my first EV this week, but I've been following the EV scene for about fifteen years. Unless I'm mistaken, the standards have already shaken out: Europe has type 2 + CCS (and Tesla), China has its own format, and the US has officially standardised the type 1 Tesla. The other types such as Chademo in Europe and type 2 in the US are no longer being sold. Regarding the Tesla chargers at the hotel, you can get Tesla adapters in the US as part of that standardisation drive - so that would have been an option.