Josef 'Jeff' Sipek

@jeffpc@mastodon.radio
244 Followers
236 Following
2.7K Posts
Webhttps://www.josefsipek.net
Blahghttps://blahg.josefsipek.net
Josef 'Jeff' SipekDec 11
Show threadBaldur BjarnasonNov 30

More and more, generative models are looking like productivity tobacco. Promoted by biased research, it’s addictive, harmful, and the little benefit it has (nicotine is a somewhat effective ADHD drug, for example) cannot outweigh the fact that it’s hurting us all, directly and indirectly.

This shit is already turning out to be one of the most harmful tech innovations of the 21st century. It needs to be regulated at least as much as tobacco, if not banned outright from most economic spheres

Show threadJosef 'Jeff' SipekDec 11
@w8tam @yo3gnd Hopefully the people working on it have fun - rewrites can be a weird mix of fun and pain. (And hopefully it goes smoother than the previous rewrite.)
Show threadJosef 'Jeff' SipekDec 11
@w8tam @yo3gnd Is this going to be another complete rewrite?
Josef 'Jeff' SipekDec 11
Show threadPete OrrallDec 11

@SrRochardBunson @ajroach42 @stefano

The BSDs are *awesome* operating systems. #FreeBSD is a high performance general purpose OS. It is modern #Unix. #NetBSD is for portability, it supports nearly every CPU architecture under the sun. #OpenBSD is security-focused. #GhostBSD is a FreeBSD fork focused on the desktop.

Most of my experience is with FreeBSD, which I will enthusiastically share. It is unquestionably a solid server OS. As a desktop OS, it works quite well. It definitely does not feel like "Linux from 2004." The major desktop environments like #KDE #GNOME #XFCE are all supported and #nvidia releases drivers for the OS too. Modern hardware is supported. For *cutting edge hardware*, #Linux may be the better bet here. It's a little slower to adopt cutting edge gear because it is focused on stability and elegant solutions, not trend-chasing.

FreeBSD is an excellent OS to learn. It runs beautifully and it's more coherent and better designed. Documentation is *solid*.

Edit: Corrected errors. GhostBSD, not DragonflyBSD. Thanks @aru

Show threadJosef 'Jeff' SipekDec 5
@emilianosandri @stefano Interesting. Thanks for the acronym expansion & link.
Josef 'Jeff' SipekDec 5
Show threadsarah tonin Dec 5
@hipsterelectron because that's how good developers say "memory is cheap". memory isn't quite as limited as it was before. but the saying has been taken as well by less qualified devs, who view it as a reason to not optimise for memory usage anymore
Josef 'Jeff' SipekDec 5
Simon TathamDec 5

I started up Zoom this morning and it gave me the message

"It looks like we are unable to connect. Please check your network connection and try again."

But my network connection was fine. The problem was at Zoom's end, or more precisely, Cloudflare's. (And it seems OK now.)

I'm beginning to be annoyed by this reflexive "please check _your_ network connection" coda in these messages. What it is, is victim blaming. And possibly gaslighting too. _Their_ network connection went wrong, and their immediate response is to tell all of us users that _we_ must have done something wrong. It makes us all do lots of pointless work checking things that don't need checking, and it probably makes half of us feel inadequate when we can't find any problem.

If you're _going_ to advise users to check their own network connection, take reasonable steps first to ensure the problem really does look like being at the local end. Try pinging a few other independently run well-known sites; try some DNS lookups; if you can't do _anything_, suggest the user checks their connection, but if the rest of that stuff works and only your own server can't be reached, maybe redirect to your application's status webpage instead?

Josef 'Jeff' SipekDec 5
dch  Dec 5

In a world full of people who no longer trust each other, sometimes a small thing happens that just makes everything better.

A week or so ago I asked for German sci-fi books for my middle kid, who is struggling with his German grammar.

He's dyslexic and loves reading *my scifi books* in English, to the detriment of his German.

I asked on the internet, and I got a lot of fantastic advice, including from @lk108 who replied and said he had a whole series, and offered to send them.

So he did, and I happily paid for the postage as soon as he said he'd sent them.

The box arrived today! I had no doubt that they would, a random person who I did not know at all, said they would do something really nice, and I was sure it would be so.

Anyway thanks @lk108 for the lovely offer, and I'm sure Theo will be delighted.

Please give this post a round of boosts because a nice thing happened and we don't hear enough about that.

#GoodThings #SmallPackages

Show threadJosef 'Jeff' SipekDec 4
@ClickyMcTicker @emilianosandri @stefano Ah. I’m not sure I’ve seen it abbreviated as PTP before. Certainly have seen P2P.
Show threadJosef 'Jeff' SipekDec 4

@emilianosandri @stefano PTP? Precision Time Protocol? Are you by any chance talking about MTP? Media transfer protocol?

Regardless, you are 100% right that even a small step in the right direction is good.