Mastodawn

Picked up a very mouldy, broken, dirty #cassette in #KualaLumpur: a collection of songs by Frances Yip, an absolute #cantopop legend.

Someone had been inside before, fixing a snapped-off leader tape by just connecting the magnetic tape directly to the reel. The card insert was bent and fox-eared and the jewel case cracked. Parts were covered in insect droppings.

Replaced the felt pad and rusty screws, spliced in a new leader, straightened the tape shell with heat, cleaned, steamed and pressed the card, replaced the case and slip mats, reglued the labels... the mould came off with a few plays and now it looks and sounds great. It has its battle scars but it's alive and kicking, ready for another 46 years.

#fixed #cantonese #CompactCassette #repair

i will Never Stonk

Via https://mandatoryrollercoaster.com/

anomalocaris Jan 4

Glyph Dec 19

look I know LLMs are problematic but this is my favorite one and I promise it’s fine, everybody else just isn’t using theirs responsibly enough. it’s great; you should really give it a try. you’ll love it

Mozilla right now.

@kagihq has finally managed to lose me as a paying customer. I tried to look away from all this godawful AI shit, I implemented the custom CSS to hide it all, but now that I glanced at an update and see they've even implemented Grok, the explicitly nazi LLM built by the world's riched fascist... I'm sorry, but fuck #Kagi and fuck this shit. You build such a beautiful search engine and then just keep insisting on diluting the goodness with garbage. If I'm going to use a search engine that keeps trying to feed me spoonfuls of shit, I'll at least do it while not sending any money their way.

anomalocaris Dec 9

It is certainly interesting that Cloudflare gets to take down a significant portion of the Internet for the better part of a day and afterward everyone just shrugs and keeps paying this awful dogshit company. Fascinating

anomalocaris Dec 7

Deborah Pickett Dec 6

Has anyone been keeping a list of tech that has milkshake ducked this calendar year? If not, let’s build one together.

• Framework: welcomed racists into its “big tent”
• calibre: added LLMs to software that doesn’t need it

Just to be clear: we're listing the projects and corporations who were our darlings earlier this year, until they lurched dramatically into unacceptability. The ones who've been on a downward spiral for years, they're for a different list.

anomalocaris Nov 11

the recurring ritual of Having To Do Something On A Work Laptop That Runs #Windows. It's maybe once a month that I do not bring in my real computer and am left no choice but to sit at a Windows machine, swearing profusely, to do over the course of an hour what would take ten minutes on my ten year old #Linux laptop. How do people live with this ecosystem that is just constantly trying to stop you from doing anything? Where everything requires constant logins, where every little thing involves popups and badgering about AI bullshit? Want to do something as trivial as editing a PDF? Better go to the IT department to request a licence! A licence to edit a PDF! nightmare

anomalocaris Nov 2

last minute #SilentSunday from a vineyard in Champagne where we went to pick some leftover grapes

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