“My god!” She exclaimed.

“What is it?” He asked.

“There’s no time to explain.”

She jumped up and from her desk in the operations room and ran to the metal locker in the corner.

She flung it open to reveal a full-bore shotgun, which she grabbed, along with as many shells as she could fit in her hands and jeans pockets.

“Veronica?! What are you doing!!” He screamed, now standing as well.

But it was too late. She had already charged through the door and had headed on to the datacenter floor.

He walked out onto the balcony to see what was going on. He was treated to only the briefest listen to the familiar white noise hum of the servers and equipment racks, before the tranquility was shattered by the unmistakable carnage of several shot gun shells being fired towards the hardware.

He ducked for cover. It must’ve only been a couple of seconds, but it felt like an eternity as she laid waste to the computers that until just a few minutes ago she had been peacefully monitoring.

The shooting subsided, he felt comfortable enough to stand up once again.

Dust, bits of servers, smoke and other debris filled the air.

She slowly walked back up the stairs, now covered in a dirty layer of the various materials, and holding a still smoking shotgun.

“What the hell was that about?!” He asked.

“The AI,” she said. “It started podcasting.”

#microfiction

In 1941, Irving Berlin wrote a song protesting Hitler called When That Man is Dead And Gone. It's had a recent uptick in popularity, for some reason...

https://youtu.be/bEJe2PIvam0?is=z0Dy5pU0jawE0A0L

RE: https://oldbytes.space/@feoh/116687129039392818

Advice I was given in my youth:

Print your slide on a full piece of paper. Put the paper on the ground. Stand on a chair.

If you can’t easily read your slide, neither can the person at the back of the room.

It flummoxes me that 30 years into using computers to show slides, tiny fonts in slide is *still* widespread practice.

RE: https://fedi.lwn.net/@lwn/116686303139385065

A while back, rsync's maintainer had not quite gone silent, but there were long stretches of quiet, and there was some concern about the maintenance of the project. A few things happened, and it resulted in Tridge coming back to maintain the project.

As with many FOSS projects, there's a ratio of about 100,000,000 users to one maintainer. I saw reports about a regression and "a bunch of slop commits" to rsync and was a bit alarmed, but I also thought "that... does not sound very Tridge-like".

If you actually *look* at the commits, which a lot of the slop accusers have not, the bulk of them are tests and not actually commits to rsync itself. There are some LLM-written or co-written commits with (I think) Claude, but I think if you actually did the work to comb through them all (which I did not) you'd find the ratio is like 9:1 in favor of tests.

Anyway, I was pondering whether we should write an article on the situation after Tridge had made some comments in the rsync Discord* but his response here seems more than adequate for the moment.

The harassment that Tridge was getting is not OK. It's fine to decide "this project is no longer for me." Folks who are 100% opposed to LLM-driven work in all its forms will probably still want to find an alternative. That's fine. I respect that. If you're an "LLM vegan" then right now the world looks pretty damn bleak, because it's winding up in everything. But piling on maintainers who are doing this stuff for free... that's just a community killer.

If you're not contributing, you have very little standing to complain.

* I'm actually a bit more disappointed in the decision to use Discord than anything. But Tridge is stepping up to do the work though he's retired, so I will largely keep that to myself and say "thank you for the work" instead. #rsync #llms #opensource

Tangible versus Virtual. Here's a great example of how the promise of streaming has been betrayed by cartelized corporate greed. First photo is my recently delivered box set of "The Expanse", 19 DVD's all for $32.40 USd including tax & shipping. Second photo is the cost to stream all 6 seasons contained in the DVD set, from Fandango at $59.99.

I acquired a bit ago a nicely working DVD/BluRay/CD player with HDMI & spdif audio outputs for $15 from my local Goodwill, hooked into the 55" display & big speakers in my studio, for a home theater vibe. Nice thing is that it is also easy to rip DVD's to digital video files, and with Jellyfin on my OpenMediaVault server, easy to stream to other devices too. Versus a bigger payment for just a corporation's potentially rescinded promise towards future viewing access.

Once upon a time, given the relative costs of materials/time/energy/labor needed to create tangible formats like optical discs, made one of the big selling points of streaming, besides obvious 'convenience', was that it was almost always less expensive for the consumer. While streaming certainly has costs to produce - needing lots of servers & CDN's for encoding, hosting & delivery - this should still end up being a fraction per stream compared to what it takes to manufacture, package & deliver optical discs made out of plastics and metals. So seems to me what we've seen of late is the media corporations raising in concert rates for streaming, with profit margins on these ballooning, while the last of the optical disc manufacturing plants, have reduced their profit margins to the bare minimum. The result is an inversion in pricing between the tangible & virtual options for many releases now. And for those of us interested in lasting & ready access to specific works of art, and for those of us that value "digital sovereignty", against a marketing system working to make these things more scarce, the tangible options are looking increasingly attractive.

"Iranian hackers responsible for Los Angeles transit system breach, Israeli researchers say"

Beyond absurd, why is CA hiring Israeli firms to do investigations like this? Israeli intelligence adjacent firms are _not_ neutral

We are talking about a country that wont stop bombing woman, children, emergency workers during a ceasefire bc they want the Iran war to continue at all costs. Peace for them is unacceptable outcome regardless of how much damage it does to everyone globally

Weekend plans: try to be as happy as this weird dog.

#IKnowItsABear #dog #dogs #dogstodon #dogsofmastodon #bear #bears #humor #humour #friday