Linguists: writing like this (superfluously mixing three languages in one fucking sentence!) does not make you seem like some sort of linguini houdini. It makes you seem utterly unable to communicate

#linguistics

ssh is an obscure but widely-deployed command. It stands for Secure Snake Home and was made in the 90s to securely play snake online

I made a massively multiplayer backend for it with support for thousands of concurrent snake players

ssh snakes.run to join!

Daughter just came home to tell me the teachers at school tried to confiscate her vape but they couldn't because it's actually a kazoo.

"I made a kazoo noise at them and I could see them dying on the inside so I made a sad kazoo noise instead. I don't think it helped."

The grin on her face.

TIL: "If the last entry in a crontab is missing the newline, cron will consider the crontab (at least partially) broken and refuse to install it."

It does so silently. I didn't know that.
May this piece of information save you time.

I'm watching people in my feed screaming at each other over Firefox's "AI kill switch" this morning with some trepidation.

As far as I'm concerned, Firefox already has an AI kill switch. It's called browser.ml.chat.enabled, I set it to false more or less the day it appeared, it hasn't mysteriously popped back on since, despite angry posts to the contrary, and that's been that for me. It's disabled every "AI" feature I find objectionable. I'd prefer if Mozilla leadership would sync up with reality on occasion and stop deciding to put this paid placement trash into Firefox in the first place, but at least there's a reliable way to get rid of it.

Everything else people have been screaming at Mozilla about? I'm not sure I see the problem. The little model you can download to summarise web pages for you? I wouldn't trust it, and so I don't think it's necessarily a productive use of Firefox devs' time, but at least it's opt-in. The other little model you can download to help organise your tab groups? I don't use it much, but this one seems more practical, and it's also opt-in, despite the occasional angry report of it slowing down people's browsers even without having been downloaded. Liek, bro, maybe try closing a Slack tab or two.

I don't want ChatGPT in my browser, or Claude, or any kind of world burning data centre LLM pretending to be our new AI god. browser.ml.chat.enabled = false does that for me. It would be even better if it wasn't there in the first place. But tiny, focused ML models doing nominally useful things? I not only do not see the problem there, I'd like some of them to be part of the Web platform rather than just the browser. I've been wishing since they launched them that Mozilla would make an API available to web sites out of those translation models of theirs, for instance.

I'm monitoring the situation, as European heads of state like to say, but so far, despite the posturings of their C-suite types, it doesn't seem like any critical Mozilla resources are being diverted away from maintaining the Web platform into AI boosterism. Every new Firefox changelog is delivering on what it should be delivering on, and it's only occasionally that I see a new "AI" feature advertised. Compare that to a product like VSCode, which has been completely consumed by the cancer of slop production with only one in a hundred changelog entries being about building an actual damned code editor, and I'm not feeling all that alarmed about Firefox just yet.

I know this is Mastodon, but sometimes I just wish people would entertain having opinions that can have some nuance in between "burn the world down so the AGI can live" and "Butlerian Jihad now," you know?