Toasters were the first form of pop-up notifications.

#DadJoke #DadJokes

*gently grabs the cheeks of all programmers to stare deeply into their eyes*

All I want is a dry tech manual. A boring, well indexed manual that defines every function. Not a chatbot. Not a training. Not a million "articles" that I have to search through. Not a "community forum".

My rice cooker came with one. I want one for every piece of software I have to interact with.

Go get yourself a technical writer if necessary.

I. Want. An. Instructional. Manual.

"There's a beaver dam in northern Canada that's twice as wide as the Hoover Dam, and was discovered from satellite photos because it's so remote, and forms a wetland delta despite there not being any distinct creeks or rivers feeding into it." --Beaver Stan Account (on Bluesky), from January 2024.

Very Canadian #JoyScrolling ("If we thought in terms of hockey rinks, that’s 1600 hockey rinks of water.") Sadly, no alt-text for the photographs in the article. #Beavers

https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/nt/woodbuffalo/nature/beaver_gallery

sometimes I stop to think about how in the 2010s, how google's indexing and search was just insanely useful. You query it, and it returns what you want.

Google hacking was essentially just applying logic similar to SQL queries, and seeing what insane shit google managed to index.

backups, open directories, sensitive documents, it was bananas. My personal favorite was indexing of anonymous FTP servers.

They killed that fun, sure enough. By putting complex queries behind captchas, and eventually just nuking it to the point of uselessness.

I've read about how google plans on replacing their search function with an AI that just feeds the results to you, and all I can think is that this is a system ripe for exploitation. Like every other instance of information control in the history of the world.

What happens when the government starts asking them to change the behavior of the AI to just... not return information on Jeffrey Epstein? or the January 6th riots?

I don't like where this is headed, and we have a government that is entire complacent with this, because they stand to gain a lot of control out of this.