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John

@semanticist@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06
  • Open on mastodon.social

I still make and fix internet things. I continue to live on the internet, which makes for a short commute. Cat Ops. Exiled to Fife.

0 Followers
0 Following
44 Posts
Joined March 31, 2017
Pronouns:
He/Him
Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago

Not that anyone reading my feed is who should be reading this, but if you have fond memories of BBC Basic and the BBC Micro, you're not allowed to be transphobic and have to boycott Harry Potter. Sorry (not sorry), I don't make the rules.

(Those things were made by a trans woman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Wilson#BBC_Micro)

Please share with people who discovered computers in the 80s and grew up to be bigots. Even the worst villain can have a Heel-Face Turn redemption arc.

en.wikipedia.org
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago

So we just watched the pilot of Northern Exposure, the first time I've seen it probably since it originally aired in the UK.

I was worried that some 30 year old TV that I watched when I was a teenager might not live up to how I remembered it.

But it absolutely does. So I think we'll do one episode a week for the next couple of years!

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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 10mo ago
Replying to
@glyph@mastodon.social On the one hand, fucking milkshake duck, on the other I always feel a bit iffy around people who feel very performative "friendly geek dad", since that's the public face of 'controlling creepy dad'. Not always! Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, so I would never _assume_ the iffy vibe has any substance without something more. But still, it was there.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago

Tried to go to bed three times now, but every time this face does something adorable and I’m trapped here. Earlier he must have been cold because he tried to crawl under my blanket. Except I don’t have a blanket and he was trying to stick his face under my t-shirt. He doesn’t really understand ’clothes’.

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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@glyph The only scenario I’ve found interesting is the idea that a sufficiently advanced AI doesn’t need to replace the people, just be so amazingly perceptive that it can convince, blackmail, or threaten anyone it can communicate with into doing anything it wanted. It’s a great idea… when I read it in 2000AD comics. But only good enough to be my third favourite series after Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper, not something that keeps me up at night.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago

Sit downstairs watching YouTube with a snuggly cat next to me: so tired I’m dozing off. Go to bed, lying in bed freezing cold and wide awake. Visited by same cat three times, who clearly also thought I was better off downstairs. Corporeal forms, what’s even with these fucking things?!

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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@glyph Could this be the thing where chrome downloads a 4GB local model unless you use an option in settings://system to disable it? I found it had automatically turned on for me on MacOS whateverI’musing.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 10mo ago
Replying to
@glyph@mastodon.social @dalias@hachyderm.io As a non-dad I just avoid interacting with people/going outside, saves so much confusion. I’m sure my neighbours think I’m a psycho, but I’m fat and walk with a sick, so at least I’m the non-threatening kind of psycho. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@johnofrobotz@mastodon.girolab.foo @elight@tenforward.social And it’s so unrealistic that someone as high profile as the captain of the federation’s flagship would be bald, like they couldn’t cure baldness by the 24th century!
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago
The working week is done and I've an empty tonight, so what should I do? Go downstairs and watch YouTube on the sofa (aka the 'Pinky and the Brain' option, that is, 'the same thing we do every night')? Play Baldur's Gate 3? Keep fiddling with the Ruby port of a Rust TUI library that looks kinda cool? Have a nap (aka, the option the cat would pick if she had a fediverse account)?
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago

If you report multiple projects to Kickstarter (because a "newsletter" you never signed up for and have unsubbed from multiple times has three shitty projects in it), they will almost always reply to one report quickly, saying that it doesn't violate their rules despite being spam.

This has happened again today for, like, the 3rd time.

However, in the past they've replied to the other two reports several days later saying they're taking unspecified action. I wonder if that'll happen this time.

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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@Tapi@mastodon.online @pinskia@hachyderm.io @glyph@mastodon.social Anti-abortion people always end up being ‘control for me but not for thee’. Always some sort of special circumstance for them/their family, but any other women seeking medical care is “a slut” who should be shamed/jailed.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@ceejbot@toot.cat If you haven’t, it is 100% worth watching the CEO appearing on a business news program with no answers to basic maths and looking like he was stoned out of his gourd.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 10mo ago
Replying to
@ska@social.treehouse.systems @glyph@mastodon.social I dunno, I think there's a lot of reasons to do something in a performative way that aren't negative at all. @glyph@mastodon.social mentioned making a show of being a "safe person" to help people feel at ease. Being performatively queer can be important to show that you're safe around other queer people or in queer spaces, etc, etc. Very few people are going around out in the world without some sort of social performance.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@jascha I don't like that you're spying on my home office. That's not cool.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@acf Online forms make this stuff so easy. When I was in uni I had to write our own online questionnaire form in PHP! (But we were doing tricky psychology student things with question ordering, so there’s that.)
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago

RE: @glyph@mastodon.social

This piece made me so glad I don’t work at a large company. Yes, we’re doing AI stuff, but no one’s making *me* do it and we’re simply not big enough to have competing teams being incentivised to exclude each other because of AI mandates. Our entire dev “org” is basically a single two pizza team. It might be a one pizza team.

Articles like that one are terrifying. How do people function in environments like that? It’s incredibly anti-human, and I don’t mean in the sense of AI mandates.

mastodon.social
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@only_ohm@mas.to She didn't transition until a decade later, so at least it's not like a conscious deadnaming. I've read that she mostly went by her surname, but I guess people would make gender assumptions based on that too. At least her CBE was in the correct name!
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@glyph @ceejbot @aredridel Covid-induced cognitive impairment might also be a factor there. I wonder how many people are keenly grabbing onto AI assistance because it lets them feel 'productive' after getting Covid 'brain fog'?
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@elight@tenforward.social I remember how many people bitched and moaned about DS9 not being real Star Trek. They were in a space station! Not going anywhere! How could it possibly be any good?! Same people several decades later wearing Niners baseball shirts and calling their children Ezri before making hate posts on Twitter about Starfleet Academy and Discovery not being real Star Trek.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 115mo ago

I am deliberately not saying much here because I'm going to launch my own instance tomorrow and there's no way to migrate accounts. (Or is there, but I missed it?)

My two main considerations right now are: use docker/docker-compose, or run services normally; and use discordiancabal.org.uk or tehinterwebs.co.uk?

And finally, a cat picture. https://mastodon.social/media/mYbDMe_kXhcwZCJerp8

mastodon.social
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 115mo ago
Replying to
@marksutherland@mastodon.social Ha! If I could just get fucking disk caddies for my 'cluster in a 2u box' server I would already *have* a kubes cluster to deploy this on! :D
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@decadecity @adam Fair point - I guess it's the complexity of task you can do now without requiring an entry on TOP500.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@ultrazool One of the things I’ve got in my self-hosting array is essentially a self-hosted version of archive.is, only without the weird internet grudges and hijacking your browser to do DDoSes. As is typical I forget it exists and never use it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago

It's cold and there's wind and rain outside. It feels more like December than April, light levels notwithstanding.

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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@Starfia@mastodon.social Yes, I’ve monitored specific individuals from when I was 13 until today using a highly advanced network of spies. You should check under your bed, there might be one there.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@acf Weev went after one of my friends back in the LiveJournal days. The only time I wouldn't piss on him is if he was on fire. Absolutely an example of the worst that humanity can be.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@adam @decadecity I saw Corridor Digital (YouTube film makers who specialise in doing high quality low budget CG effects) made an AI tool to do incredibly difficult green screen work. They didn’t use Claude or whatever, they produced their own training data and trained a neural net. I see zero ethical issues with what they’ve done - it’s open source and substantially better than any other software and most humans without ripping anyone off. But it took specialist expertise to make it.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@xris@ecoevo.social @Starfia@mastodon.social @johnofrobotz@mastodon.girolab.foo The response at the time to people sincerely moaning about Picard being bald was along those lines: why would enlightened future post-scarcity utopian people care about such vanity as body hair? But then there’s Riker and his beards… and I’m pretty sure there’s no unshaven armpits in TNG…
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 9mo ago
Replying to
@DG1JAN@radiosocial.de Bambu Labs model sharing site makerworld has a tool for generating these signs: https://makerworld.com/en/makerlab/makeMySign (free account required, I think)
makerworld.com
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago

It just occurred to me that the US Secretary of Defence/War in real life is basically the same personality as The Deep from The Boys, only without the sea life fetish (as far as we know).

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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 115mo ago
Replying to
@ceejbot@mastodon.social That'll be helpful, at least.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@Starfia@mastodon.social Maybe, but the thoughts of its creator also included making the working environment so uncomfortable for women that two of them left and only came back after he was forced out of the production. But maybe the real point is that ‘it’s not real Star Trek’ is the mating call of arseholes who want things to not even evoke what a TV show used to be decades ago but to evoke what their own biases cause them to misremember what it was like.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@caius Wales only gets an 'assembly' instead of a parliament, and they don't even have their own money! (In their defence, their language is actually meaningfully used compared to Scots Gaelic, so there's that.)
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@nicolas17@social.treehouse.systems Yeah, I happened to re-read it relatively recently. The hypocrisy is stunning.
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John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago

RE: @MostlyHarmless@thecanadian.social

Other options include almost, but not quite, escaping a sinister cult in a remote Scottish village, and becoming vampire fodder while partaking of the fresh air at Whitby. TBH, after climbing up Whitby steps being murdered by the living dead would feel like a kindness.

thecanadian.social
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@adam @decadecity Modern engineering does use a bunch of automation, constraint solvers, stuff I don’t understand. Often it produces parts that look like no human would ever design. But this is very specialist and focussed ‘AI’. It’s not like going to ChatGPT and saying ‘gies a bridge, lol’.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@adam @decadecity Fundamentally not even really that novel - it’s what they were teaching us at uni nearly 25 years ago. All that’s really different is compute power enough to do interesting things doesn’t require planning permission.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 7mo ago
Replying to
@Starfia@mastodon.social Dude, I have no idea who you are but I’m not even sure we disagree on the substantive issues, you just like picking apart arguments. Go troll Reddit or something. I’m muting you now.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
Having said all that, if the Jeep Gladiator (off roading pickup) was available in the UK I would have been seriously tempted. I know it’s stupid and unnecessary, but I just can’t get past the chunky ‘child’s drawing of a car’ looks and I want one. They sell them in right hand drive in Japan, but not here. Importing is possible, but puts it into nice new car price territory.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@sammachin@chaos.social A Warhammer youTuber I follow mentioned he was selling off an army on 'eBay Live' today. I guess eBay are doing some sort of launch event, because I don't see how only getting bids from people who happen to be around at that time gets him the most money. Also, yuck, so much AI slop art.
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Open post
John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 17mo ago
Replying to
@adamu@fosstodon.org I’d like to think that memories of Windscale are still strong enough in that community to have caused a massive outcry if someone had tried anything like that.
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John @semanticist@mastodon.social
· 17mo ago
Replying to
@adamu@fosstodon.org Mixing responsibilities like that is something that almost certainly will bite you later, and if you’re not used to writing nginx config then getting your head around the redirect/proxy/whatever is good practice. Having said that, for a personal project no one’s going to give you a poor review of your just hack together some that works - just make sure to leave a note for future you explaining why the weird code exists!
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