Is this how time normally passes? Really slowly, in the right order?

Sunday, June 30

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 June 2024

Halfway Edition

Top Story

  • Europe wants to deploy datacenters into space.  Studies say it's feasible.  (CNBC)
    ASCEND’s space-based data storage facilities would benefit from "infinite energy” captured from the sun and orbit at an altitude of around 1,400 kilometers (869.9 miles).
    Well congratulations, your datacenter is now permanently running away from you at sixteen thousand miles per hour.

    Fortunately the writer of this piece spoke to some people who aren't certifiably insane:
    Winterson estimates that even a small 1 megawatt center in low earth orbit would need around 280,000 kilograms of rocket fuel per year at a cost of around $140 million in 2030 - a calculation based on a significant decrease in launch costs, which has yet to take place.
    That's not the launch cost, that's the upkeep.

    And that's for a tiny datacenter.  The AI center Tesla is building right now is targeting not 1 megawatt but 500 - which would cost $70 billion per year to maintain given these assumptions.

    Back on Earth, Tesla is spending around $4 billion on the entire datacenter.

Tech News

  • After the malicious domain polyfill.io was shut down by the domain registrar, it switched to polyfill.com.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Which had much less impact because nobody was using polyfill.com.

    The registrar for that domain shut it down as well, and the hackers switched to polyfill.cloud - and a whole list of other domains, including various forms of bootcdn, bootcss, and staticfile.

    In an interesting twist, the hackers behind the polyfill.io scheme (the original Polyfill library itself is innocuous and its developer innocent of all this) put their code on GitHub including their API keys and database password.

    So if they hadn't already been taken off line they would have been hacked by now.


  • Unraveling Factorio's Lua security flaws.  (Memory Corruption)

    The game Factorio lets you add scripts written in the programming language Lua, which is intended to be safe - or mostly safe - for such things.

    One researcher found that a malicious script could hack every player in a multi-player Factorio game simultaneously.

    The article is excruciatingly detailed, which is great for me because I myself have written code that embeds Lua for scripting and I need to know this stuff.

    Normal people will likely tune out after page 30.


  • A French court ordered global DNS providers like Google and Cloudflare to poison their data in order to block a pirate streaming site.  Rather than comply, OpenDNS blocked France.  (TorrentFreak)

    Which has the same net effect: If you're in France you can't access the site by using OpenDNS.

    Time to run my own DNS server again, maybe.  Not that it's particularly hard; I have two dedicated and two virtual Linux servers running at the new house now.


  • The Associated Press is setting up a sister organisation explicitly for pay-to-play propaganda.  (AP News)

    The AP itself will continue with its current function of providing propaganda for backroom deals and political favours rather than cash.


  • Writing technical books for money.
    Rule 1: Never write a technical book for the money.
    Oh.  Also:
    Authors are those people who consider $500 a lot of money.
    Publishing is pretty miserable for small authors now - which is to say anyone who isn't getting the benefit of a seven-figure money laundering deal - but then it always has been.


  • An experiment in Denver doled out varying levels of UBI to three test groups.  (Colorado Sun)

    Oh?  What happened.
    The percentage of people who had housing at the 10-month check-in of the Denver Basic Income Project climbed to 45%.
    Well, that sounds great.  What's the catch?
    They were separated into three groups. Group A received $1,000 per month for a year. Group B received $6,500 the first month and $500 for the next 11 months. And group C, the control group, received $50 per month.
    Seems reasonable.

    Group A gets a small but steady income.  Group B gets a big advance so they can get out of whatever hole they're in, but a much smaller income.  And Group C gets shafted.  Such is life.
    About 45% of participants in all three groups were living in a house or apartment that they rented or owned by the study’s 10-month check-in point, according to the research.
    If the results in the control group are indistinguishable from the results in the trial group, the medicine had no effect.
     


Disclaimer: ~fluffles away~

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Saturday, June 29

Geek

Daily News Stuff 29 June 2024

Unreal Estate Edition

Top Story

  • Forget the debate, the Supreme Court just declared open season on regulators.  (Tech Crunch)

    There has been plenty of coverage of what the reversal of the 1984 Chevron decision means - the emasculation of the administrative state - so I'll just examine the tech industry impact of this, via the same liberal fascist wailing that we see everywhere else.

    Net neutrality:
    The entire concept of net neutrality is perched atop the FCC’s interpretation of whether broadband data is an "information service" or a "communications service," the terms written in the act empowering that agency.
    Wrong right out of the gate.  Net neutrality is a universal concept.  The FCC is trying to arrogate the power to enforce net neutrality by twisting the definitions in its charter until they squeak, but that is a different question.
    If the FCC is not empowered to settle this ambiguity in a very old law that was written well before today’s broadband and mobile networks
    It is not so empowered and never has been.
    who is?
    Congress.
    Whatever court takes the case brought by the telecommunications industry, which hates net neutrality and would prefer an interpretation where the FCC doesn’t regulate them at all.
    No, Congress.
    And if the industry doesn’t like that court’s interpretation, it gets a few more shots as the case rises towards - oh, the Supreme Court.
    And Congress.
    Why is this so consequential for tech? Because the tech industry has been facing down a wave of regulatory activity led by these agencies, operating in the vacuum of Congressional action. Due to a lack of effective federal laws in tech, agencies have had to step up and offer updated interpretations of the laws on the books.
    Which was never within their authority.

    I support net neutrality.  ISPs and cable companies amply demonstrated themselves to be hideously untrustworthy.

    It's just that the FCC has no authority to make such a regulation.

    AI:
    Let us be optimistic for once and imagine that Congress passes a big law on AI, protecting certain information, requiring certain disclosures, and so on. It’s impossible that such a law would contain no ambiguities or purposeful vagueness to allow for the law to apply to as-yet-unknown situations or applications. Thanks to the Supreme Court, those ambiguities will no longer be resolved by experts.
    The experts can resolve the issues when the laws are enforced.  There is no problem with that.

    The only change here is that the courts are not required to defer to experts within the regulatory agencies on their interpretations of the laws.
    (As an example of how this will play out, in the very decision issued today, Justice Gorsuch repeatedly referred to nitrogen oxide, a pollutant at issue, as nitrous oxide, laughing gas. This is the level of expertise we may expect.)
    Face first on a rake.

    There are at least a dozen compounds under the generic label "nitrogen oxide", and it is not the proper name for any of them.


Tech News

  • The Verge also joins in with a long and detailed article lamenting the demise of regulatory fascism vis-à-vis the tech industry. (The Verge)
    This decision is arguably the largest single deregulatory action that could be taken, and as we have all observed, without regulation, tech - like any other big industry - will consolidate and exploit. The next few years, even under a pro-regulatory Democratic administration, will be a free-for-all. There is no barrier, and probably no downside, to industry lawyers challenging every single regulatory decision in court and arguing for a more favorable interpretation of the law.
    Write better laws.
    Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan has made no secret of her ambitions to use the agency's authority to take bold action to restore competition to digital markets and protect consumers. But with Chevron being overturned amid a broader movement undermining agency authority without clear direction from Congress, Schettenhelm said, "it's about the worst possible time for the FTC to be claiming novel rulemaking power to address unfair competition issues in a way that it never has before."
    As with the previous article, the writers of this piece freely admit that the regulatory agencies are engaged in an unbridled and unconstitutional power grab; they just believe this is a good thing.

    The article notes that the FTC's recent ruling against noncompete clauses is likely in trouble because - once again - the FTC never had the authority to make such a ruling in the first place.
    To be clear, none of these are necessarily bad outcomes - and as Lemley notes, most people "have bigger fish to fry." No one is going to think, Well, on the one hand climate change will kill us all, but on the other hand, I have my Apple Watch.
    I'm not sure where they were going there.
    Beyond that, the disempowering of federal agencies means the empowerment of another entity
    Congress.
    and in this case, it is the increasingly conservative judiciary.
    Sounds lovely, but no.


     
  • A lawsuit claims that Microsoft tracked sex toy shoppers in real time.  (404 Media)

    What a depressingly stupid article.

    The websites Good Vibrations and Babeland installed online tracking software called Microsoft Clarity on their websites.

    It's like complaining that someone wrote down your name - and then prominently mentioning the name of the ink manufacturer every time you discussed the case.


  • NASA wants to stress that the two astronauts who travelled to the ISS on the Boeing Starliner, Butch and Sundance Suni, are not stranded.  (Ars Technica)

    The agency just doesn't know when or if they will be able to return home.


  • Mustafa Suleyman, a less-successful clone of OpenAI's Sam Altman, has confirmed that Microsoft is taking all your data to train its AI and they don't give a shit what you think about it.  (The Register)
    That's the future Suleyman anticipates. "The economics of information are about to radically change because we can reduce the cost of production of knowledge to zero marginal cost," he said.
    Looks like it's take off and nuke the entire site from orbit o'clock.

Not Tech News

  • Watched the latest Ghostbusters movie - Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire - last night.  It's not bad.  The 2021 film Ghostbusters: Afterlife was a loving return to the original, introducing a new generation of characters (two new generations in fact) nearly forty years later.  Like Ghostbusters II, though, Frozen Empire runs into the problem that once you've gotten your group of misfits together and saved the world, what do you do next?

    Well, you save the world again, of course, but it's never the same the second time around. 

    Still pretty good.

    We don't mention the 2016 abomination.


  • A-chan is leaving Hololive after seven years.  (Dexerto)

    She had taken a leave of absence due to an illness in the family, but was unable to return to work as originally planned.

    Hololive was originally a tech company selling a new face-tracking phone app for vtubers - originally this required much more complicated and expensive equipment - until two girls fresh out of high school approached them at a trade show and suggested that what the company needed was its own vtuber to show off the software's capabilities.

    One of the pair is now Tokino Sora, the first member of Hololive, with nearly 1.2 million YouTube subscribers.  The other is known simply as A-chan, and is one of Hololive's most senior managers.  And even as a manager she has 900,000 subscribers of her own.


Disclaimer: It's the only way to be sure.

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Friday, June 28

Geek

Daily News Stuff 28 June 2024

Mouse Cakes Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Disclaimer: Pipipipipipipi!

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Thursday, June 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 June 2024

Blargh Edition

Top Story

  • A Russian propaganda network is promoting an AI-manipulated Biden video.  (Wired)  (archive site)
    Experts tell WIRED that Russian disinformation campaigns are using generative AI more and more.
    What would we do without experts?
    In recent weeks, as so-called cheapfake video clips
    Which is to say, live news footage.
    suggesting President Joe Biden is unfit for office have gone viral on social media, a Kremlin-affiliated disinformation network has been promoting a parody music video featuring Biden wearing a diaper and being pushed around in a wheelchair.
    Note that the video is...  A video.  (Twitter)

    Wired is too scared to link to the video but it's not hard to find.

    It has human actors, in makeup and wigs, and it's edited, and put over a kind of bad song in a a thick Russian accent.
    An analysis by True Media, a nonprofit that was founded to tackle the spread of election-related deepfakes, found with 100% confidence that there was AI-generated audio used in the video. It also assessed with 78% confidence that some AI technology was used to manipulate the faces of the actors.
    There's only one voice in the entire video and it doesn't sound like anyone, so that claim is completely irrelevant.

    Is it used for the faces of Biden and Trump in the video?  Eh.  Maybe.

    But again, it's a parody video.  Nobody thinks this is real.  The reason Wired didn't link to it is because they want you to think people think it's real.
    Fink says the obvious nature of the deepfake technology on display here suggests that the video was created in a rush, using a small number of iterations of a generative adversarial network in order to create the characters of Biden and Trump.
    It's not a deepfake if it intentionally looks fake.  But pretending it is a deepfake, is a deepfake.

    The article then wanders off to foam at the mouth about scary AI a bit more:
    The report details how the campaign, dubbed CopyCop, used the AI tools to scrape content from real news websites, repurpose the content with a right-wing bias, and republish the content on a network of fake websites with names like Red State Report and Patriotic Review that purport to be staffed by over a 1,000 journalists - all of whom are fake and have also been invented by AI.
    Just like CNN.
    The topics pushed by the campaign include errors made by Biden during speeches, Biden's age, poll results that show a lead for Trump, and claims that Trump’s recent criminal conviction and trial was "impactless" and "a total mess."
    My apologies, not like CNN at all.  It's actually reporting facts.

    No wonder Wired is upset.


Tech News

  • SpaceX has scored a $843 million NASA contract to blow up the moon.  (Tech Crunch)

    Or to deorbit the ISS sometime after 2030.  One of those.


  • If you are using Polyfill.io, STOP THAT RIGHT NOW.  (Bleeping Computer)

    The domain has been sold to a Chinese company which is using it to distribute malware.

    You're probably not unless (a) you're a web designer and (b) haven't updated your site in a long time.

    The developer of Polyfill warned about this in February. He has no connection with the polyfill.io website but people have been using it as an easy way to run the software, which was very useful to patch up browser incompatibilities years ago but is no longer needed by any modern browser.

    Google is notifying website owners where they can, and Cloudflare is offering a free alternative source.


  • You're holding it wrong: An Australian bank is measuring how you hold your phone to stop scammers.  (Pymnts)

    The article as it is written makes no sense, which may be because the bank is avoiding telling anyone exactly how it works, or may be because it doesn't work.

    But the article does make the same observation as the one about the rise of crime in Sweden: If you make payment frictionless, you also make theft frictionless.


  • The Rabbit AI pin - which is rubbish but at least much cheaper than the Human AI pin - has been hacked.  (404 Media)

    Or at least the API services behind it have been hacked.

    Briefly.

    Rabbit has apparently rotated the API keys - taking all the Rabbits offline briefly - and now the hack no longer works.


  • AMD's new Strix Point laptops ship July 15.  (Hot Hardware)

    This looks like a pretty good chip.  Four Zen 5 cores, eight Zen 5c cores which are identical but run about 30% slower, and 16 RDNA3.5 graphics cores.

    That would make it twice as fast on the CPU side and nearly three times as fast on the graphics side as my new laptop.

    And Strix Point Halo, even faster, is still waiting in the wings.


  • An AI-designed horse purse is tearing the horse purse community apart.  (The Verge)

    You might well ask, is this a purse for AI-designed horses, or a horse purse for AI-designers, or a horse shaped like a purse designed by an AI, or...  I don't know.

    In fact, it's a shopping bag.
    Collina Strada spokesperson Lindsey Solomon noted that only two of the prints used AI - others, like the "Sistine Tomato" print are done by "photograph[ing] every element of the print and compos[ing] them together, hand placing each rhinestone and tomato."
    It's a shopping bag with hand-placed rhinestones and tomatoes.
    The AI prints, meanwhile, are based on outputs generated by feeding Midjourney images of Collina Strada's past work, essentially remixing the brand’s own designs. Is it still theft if your inputs are your own work?
    Is it theft if you eat the food you cooked for yourself?
    And what kind of freedom should artists have to experiment with these tools before it’s seen as a moral failing?
    I cannot wait for you idiots to be replaced with ChatGPT.


Disclaimer: Unless that's already happened, in which case I cannot wait for the bubble to burst and AI execs to go to prison.

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Wednesday, June 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 June 2024

Stochastic Scrabble Bag Edition

Top Story

  • Fearless Fund's founder has resigned, and it's a sad reflection on the VC world for Black women.  (Tech Crunch)

    Is it, though?
    Still, it is being sued by a politically conservative group called the American Alliance for Equal Rights (AAER) over its charitable grants program. AAER is challenging the fund’s right to provide $20,000 in small business grants to Black women, claiming the program violates the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bans the use of race in contracts.
    Oh.
    The case is not going particularly well for Fearless Fund. As TechCrunch recently reported, earlier this month an appeals court ruled against Fearless. It upheld a preliminary injunction that prevents the firm from making grants to Black women business owners. The firm told TechCrunch at that time it is weighing its options on how to proceed.
    Shockingly, it turns out that racism is not only bad, but sometimes illegal.  And while larger funds don't care about quaint notions like right and wrong, they do care about lawsuits potentially involving massive damages:
    Still, as we previously pointed out, the sad fact is that big names in the tech ecosystem have not exactly come out swinging in support. CEO Simone told Inc. earlier this year that the fund had lost nearly all its partnerships aside from two, JPMorgan and Costco. Even Mastercard, who sponsored the now-contested Strivers Grant, has publicly never commented on the lawsuit.
    You hate to see it.  Wait, not hate.  The other one.


Tech News



Disclaimer: You fell victim to one of the classic blunders.  The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia.  But only slightly less well-known is never get between a tech weasel and a stack of cash.

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Tuesday, June 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 June 2024

$Drizzy/BBL Edition

Top Story


Tech News


Time Patrol Bon

Today we're at the Battle of Marathon, where one of our heroes thinks its a good idea to shoot Pheidippides.  This causes problems.

A nice touch though is that they work those problems into the discrepancies in real historical accounts of the battle.



Disclaimer: This octopus, let's give him boots, send him to North Korea!

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Monday, June 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 June 2024

Wazzup Edition

Top Story

  • Meritocracy is bad, say people without merit.  (Tech Crunch)
    "The post is misguided because people who support the meritocracy argument are ignoring the structural reasons some groups are more likely to outperform others," Mutale Nkonde, a founder working in AI policy, told TechCrunch.
    "A founder working in AI policy" is code for oxygen thief.
    "We all want the best people for the job, and there is data to prove that diverse teams are more effective."
    If they are more effective, then by definition, they are at the top of a meritocracy.

    The problem is, they're not, and you know they're not, but you are not allowed to admit it.
    Emily Witko, an HR professional at AI startup Hugging Face
    Oxygen thief.
    told TechCrunch that the post was a "dangerous oversimplification," but that it received so much attention on X because it "openly expressed sentiments that are not always expressed publicly and the audience there is hungry to attack DEI." Wang’s MEI thought "makes it so easy to refute or criticize any conversations regarding the importance of acknowledging underrepresentation in tech," she continued.
    Well, yes, because DEI is fraudulent.


Tech News

Time Patrol Bon

Thinking this is not a children's show, based on the period-accurate costumes in Minoan Crete and two lead characters getting gored to death by an angry pot roast.

And now they're at the Battle of Okinawa, which was not a fun time for anybody involved.

Oh.  Yeah, playing Russian Roulette with an automatic is not theme commonly found in kid-friendly entertainment.

The base timeline in the story continues to be weird.  Tokens of the 2020s - this episode, a flat-screen TV - but a woman who would have been in her fifties in the manga had to be rewritten into her nineties.



Disclaimer: I am Chaos, the end of ends, a steel rose trapped in a cage of ice, your best friend, Baelz Hakos of Hololive English.  Witness me!

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Sunday, June 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 June 2024

Live Freeze Or Die Edition

Top Story

  • AI is exhausting the power grid in its tireless search for progressively more refined bullshit.  AI companies are proposing to solve this using unicorn farts.  (MSN)
    A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google, and is, somehow, even less helpful.
    True.  That 900% increase in power consumption is pumped directly into Nvidia's bank account.
    The companies also argue advancing AI now could prove more beneficial to the environment than curbing electricity consumption.
    I'm sure they do.
    "If we work together, we can unlock AI's game-changing abilities to help create the net zero, climate resilient and nature positive works that we so urgently need," Microsoft said in a statement.
    You have to admire the artistry of that statement.  I have never seen so much bullshit condensed into a single sentence in my entire life.
    The tech giants say they buy enough wind, solar or geothermal power every time a big data center comes online to cancel out its emissions. But critics see a shell game with these contracts: The companies are operating off the same power grid as everyone else, while claiming for themselves much of the finite amount of green energy. Utilities are then backfilling those purchases with fossil fuel expansions, regulatory filings show.
    No shit.
    Left unmentioned are the heavily polluting fossil fuel plants that become necessary to stabilize the power grid overall because of these purchases, making sure everyone has enough electricity.
    You could have been building nuclear power for the past thirty years, but no.

    There is some good news here, though.  Google is backing geothermal energy, OpenAI and Bill Gates are backing new nuclear reactor designs, and Microsoft is investing in fusion.

    Maybe this means our clean energy future will come with ads, but that will annoy the communists twice as much, so I  guess I can live with it.


Tech News

  • I've switched over to the new laptop.  40GB of RAM leaves 16GB for dead for my workload, and AMD's Zen 3 likewise the Intel 12th gen chip I had before.

    I'm running it in "whisper mode" which is not quite silent but you in a quiet house have to stop and listen for it, and the CPU is peaking at about 55C under constant load.  My previous laptop ran hotter, louder, and slower.

    I'm not sold on the numeric keypad, but I'm hoping to adjust.


  • Why going cashless has turned Sweden into a high-crime nation.  (Forbes)

    Because, you absolute ninnies, if you can access your money from anywhere at any time, so can everyone else in the world.

    With cash, someone has to be there to beat you up and steal your wallet.  With an online scam, they can be in Laos or Lichtenstein or Lesotho.  It doesn't matter and you won't know; your money will just be gone.


  • What's in it for us, ask journalists as the new companies they have murdered make desperate deals with AI giants so the executive suite can get one final payday before it all comes tumbling down.  (Tech Crunch)

    Nothing.  You get nothing.  Which is more than you deserve.


  • What is CUDIMM?  (AnandTech)

    There are basically two types of memory modules in computers: Unbuffered modules which are used in desktops and laptops - and soldered memory is all unbuffered, and registered memory used in servers.

    Unbuffered modules connect the memory chips directly to the CPU.  Registered modules have extra chips between the CPU and the RAM that keep the signals synchronised.

    CUDIMMs are clocked unbuffered DIMMs.  That is, the have one extra chip that syncronises the clock signal, but the rest of the wires are left to their own devices.

    This makes it easier to run memory at higher clocks, and, most importantly, is invisible to the CPU and motherboard.  These DIMMs should Just Work in current systems.


Disclaimer: Ow, my bees.

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Saturday, June 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 June 2024

Bolivians In Space Edition

Top Story


Tech News



Time Patrol Bon

Is this a children's show?  That witch trial scene is brutal.

And why does exactly one character have a mobile phone?

Wait, another family has a combination cordless phone and fax machine, and definitely not a 1978 model.

Problem with a modern take on an older story that's all about messing up and restoring the flow of history is you can't tell whether apparent anachronisms are plot points or just there to keep a younger audience engaged.



Disclaimer: Unless it doesn't.

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Friday, June 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 June 2024

Also Also With Edition

Top Story

  • I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again.  (Ludicity)

    Man has opinions.  The opinions are mostly correct though.
    I started working as a data scientist in 2019, and by 2021 I had realized that while the field was large, it was also largely fraudulent. Most of the leaders that I was working with clearly had not gotten as far as reading about it for thirty minutes despite insisting that things like, I dunno, the next five years of a ten thousand person non-tech organization should be entirely AI focused. The number of companies launching AI initiatives far outstripped the number of actual use cases. Most of the market was simply grifters and incompetents (sometimes both!) leveraging the hype to inflate their headcount so they could get promoted, or be seen as thought leaders.
    Usually both.  Usually both.
    And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at usLook at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly. This is why I have to visit untold violence upon the next moron to propose that AI is the future of the business - not because this is impossible in principle, but because they are now indistinguishable from a hundred million willful fucking idiots.
    Indeed.


  • A rant about front-end development.  (Frank M Taylor)

    Another man of conviction.
    There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSRonlyin the context of node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air.

    Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shittydivsoup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.

    Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.

    Lua is actually pretty good at this.
    Do you have any idea how frustrating it is that that in order to explain my sadness to my therapist I must first explain like 5 different technologies and by the time I’m finished she’s sad just hearing it, the session’s over, and I didn’t even get to what was making me upset? Technology has made my anger a recursive function.
    You don't need a therapist, Frank.  You need a weekend blowing up abandoned vehicles with a punt gun.



Tech News

The Only AI Company Actually Worth Anything is Literally a Turtle Music Video of the Day



Evil Neuro sings the theme song from the second season of the anime Mashle.

Neuro (and her evil twin) are AI vtubers developed by a single programmer who calls himself Vedal, and they show better than anything Google or OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta have produced, how AI can make our lives better: By endlessly roasting their creator.


Time Patrol Bon

Completely missed this because I don't normally check Netflix for new anime, but that's where it is.



One look and you know it's a 70s anime, except for the minor fact that it was produced this year.  Animation is by Bones, and it looks great - it still looks like a 70s anime, but an unreasonably well-animated and high-resolution 70s anime.

The original manga started in 1978, created by Fujiko Fujio, who was not a person but a decades-long collaboration of two artists best known for a little thing called Doraemon.



Disclaimer: For all I know, that might be his real name.

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