I think the alt text isnโt working on friendica, but even getting the image to upload and appear in the post is more than any other client has managed.
Today on โImmigrants who call themselves ex-pats do the stupidest thingsโ:
โI sent my laptop, which I bought in the UK and brought to Portugal, for repair in the UK, then had them ship it to Portugal. Now customs are holding it, saying import duty is due. How do I challenge this as I already paid tax in the UK?โ
So you want to 1. Admit to tax evasion from the first time you imported it without declaring it, and 2. Throw a strop to try and get away with tax evasion again?
Do let us know how that goes for you, wonโt you?
#Brexit: Fucking around and finding out since 2016.
@geekylou :transgender_flag: Yes. If you are going to do this, you smuggle it in hand luggage. They know it happens. We know they know it happens. They know we know. A certain amount is tolerated.
But it seems other countries' taxes don't apply to Mr Brexional Exceptional.
Iโll never understand why humidity is so high in Portugal even when it doesnโt rain and so low here where it rains all the time. Mold and damage caused by humidity is way too common.
Jess Phillips, MP, someone many trans people regard as a transphobe, reads out a list of murdered women in the House of Commons every year. This year she included Brianna Ghey, a murdered trans girl.
Her own side has turned on here for being insufficiently hateful. Check out the replies to this tweet, but donโt reply: never interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake.
With apologies to the heterosexuals reading, Iโve been browsing relationship advice on Reddit and a constant refrain is women complaining that their boyfriends wonโt propose.
I mean, you could just โฆ propose to him? ๐คท๐ปโโ๏ธ
I do not watt your app. I realise I may need your app to set things up, but after that I never want to open your app again. I have many gizmos and they all have apps. I don't care about your "dashboard", I don't want to set up an account, you can keep your "cloud", I don't want to import my data. I do not live in your app. I do not want to be reminded of your app's existence. If I have to use your app beyond 5 minutes of initial setup, you have failed.
Stop trying to make me use your app. I do not want to use your fucking app. Most of you can't program for shit anyway. Just set the gizmo up and fuck the fuck off.
I wonder if thereโs any point in those of us in Europe occasionally connecting to VPNs in the US red states and googling abortion pills. Poison the well a bit.
This is a beautifully concise statement about what’s wrong with “algorithmically driven” social media.
My introduction to social media, at least in its web form (ie I’m not counting Usenet) was LiveJournal, because I was searching for stuff early in transition and that’s where the info was.
The info was there because the community was there. I made a lot of friends. Some really really good ones. LiveJournal changed my life, profoundly, and for the better.
And then we were lured away by Twitter and Facebook. Slick, sexy, and almost entirely bereft of the community that LiveJournal encouraged. Facebook has it a bit, which is why I’m still there.
This is why I have high hopes for the Fediverse, and particularly platforms like Friendica, which is very LiveJournal like in many ways (I think that Mastodon in particular is slightly missing the point, watering down the community aspect in an attempt to replicate Twitter, but Mastodon is not the Fediverse). I want that sense of community back.
And yeah, this is a long
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This is a beautifully concise statement about whatโs wrong with โalgorithmically drivenโ social media.
My introduction to social media, at least in its web form (ie Iโm not counting Usenet) was LiveJournal, because I was searching for stuff early in transition and thatโs where the info was.
The info was there because the community was there. I made a lot of friends. Some really really good ones. LiveJournal changed my life, profoundly, and for the better.
And then we were lured away by Twitter and Facebook. Slick, sexy, and almost entirely bereft of the community that LiveJournal encouraged. Facebook has it a bit, which is why Iโm still there.
This is why I have high hopes for the Fediverse, and particularly platforms like Friendica, which is very LiveJournal like in many ways (I think that Mastodon in particular is slightly missing the point, watering down the community aspect in an attempt to replicate Twitter, but Mastodon is not the Fediverse). I want that sense of community back.
And yeah, this is a long form list that includes formatting and an embedded quote. I know Mastodon will mess it up because it doesnโt play nice with non-Mastodon Fediverse content. I think itโs time Mastodon started playing nice with extra-Mastodon federated content.
After all, weโre trying to build community here, arenโt we?
It's not social media when talking to your friends is a gamble.
If you're saying something for friends to see, and the algorithm hides what you're saying because it assumes that what you say is "not relevant" to your friends' interests, that is *not* social media.
The problem right here is that we call platforms designed to help people find each other and make connections, and platforms designed to make people fight each other for entertainment and advertising revenue the same thing.
The great con is that Twitter and co want you to think theyโre in the same โfeel good, community and friendshipโ business that LiveJournal and things like it were in.
And they just arenโt. Even if you are only using them to talk to your friends, they will still try to make you pick fights.
I am, frankly, amazed that the Tories have allowed the power of the Financial Services Ombudsman to continue, but they have, so it would be a glaring omission if I didn't at least try and use it to shove a red hot poker up EE's arse.
(specifically, them treating the finance agreement for the phone and network access as an indivisible unit makes their inflationary price increase effectively a punitive interest rate increase on the phone's finance rate).
I'm not at all sure the FSO will side with me here, but if you don't ask, you don't get.
Dear Phone Provider I haven't used as much data or made as many calls as I expected to, therefore I am reducing my monthly direct debit by 15%! I'm sure they'll be quoting the agreement you made when you signed the contract then.
EE just emailed me. They're putting my UK phone contract up by 15% because "inflation". Apparently it's got so much more expensive for cell towers to just ... sit there and stuff.
Oh, wait, no, it's because energy is more expensive because the price of wind and sunlight has gone up.
What we are seeing is not inflation. Companies are making record profits and just hoarding it, while simultaneously firing people in large numbers.
Not satisfied with hoarding nearly all the wealth, the billionaire class want ALL of it. They want an entire population of, well, serfs basically. They're trying to turn the whole of western civilisation into one huge company store, and the idea that there are still people who can afford to live comfortable lives is profoundly offensive to them.
Sooner or later there will be a reckoning. History tells us that there always is when the ruling classes think they can get away with this crap.
So here's the thing. I bought by phone through them. The price I'm paying each month therefore is part the cost of the phone, part the cost of the network.
There is no feasible world in which the price of the phone has gone up, but they're treating it as a single entity.
@Zoe O'Connell spotted this. Might be time to chat to the regulator.
@geekylou :transgender_flag: @Zoe O'Connell So I've just asked them for an itemised bill of the financial agreement. They cannot provide one. I have raised a complaint. They have 8 weeks to respond to it. I have marked that in my calendar.
We shall see what happens, but I suspect the next step involves the financial services ombudsman.
that reminds me. Time to make my annual phone call to them, pretend Iโm leaving and get my tariff lowered again (one reason Iโm sim-only)
Recommend trying that if youโre not tied to a handset. You can usually haggle down a decent amount. Find a similar product with any other UK network and give โem a call.
By the way, when you say "Companies are making record profits and just hoarding it, while simultaneously firing people in large numbers" - this is true - but it still leads to inflation, at least as the central banks define it (and they're the ones raising rates in response). So-called "greedflation" is just as real as the wage-price spiral that everyone gets so worked up about. It's just that price increases are driven by corporate profits rather than higher wages.
Amazon doing its โyou just bought this thing that is not a consumable and you will almost certainly never need to buy again, why not buy more?โ thing again.
We really need to stop calling computers misusing probability โAIโ and start calling it what it is: artificial stupidity.
I never saw Amazon doing anything even slightly related to AI.
Amazon is just a big American company selling stuff under the market value in order to bankrupt the existing webshops. We don't need Amazon on this side of the pond ...
Much as I loved to visit Spain, there was something intensely disappointing going on. They seem to be building US-style suburban sprawl as fast as they possibly can, having learned none of the very obvious lessons about why thatโs a terrible idea.
And they are building vast amounts of new car infrastructure without EV charging, at all. Like, guys, itโs gonna be illegal to sell new internal combustion cars in just over six years. Read the room.
Driving through Andalusia was like driving through bits of the US southwest, and not in a flattering way.
It was a relief to cross the Guadiana back into Portugal; the misguided tribute act to Arizona was getting a bit much.
Have rather enjoyed my time in Malaga. Heading home in the morning. Gonna try and do it on a single charge stop. Had amazing gluten free tacos at a local cafe today. Nice place. Will visit again.
Didnโt quite make it on a single charge stop. Stopped at Loulรฉ services for a wee and a cup of tea and thatโs long enough to get us over the line.
In wholly surprising news, a man who grew up benefiting from Apartheid has come to the support of someone who has just torpedoed his own lifeโs work by doing a massive racism.
Andalusia seems to have fallen into the trap of building US style sprawl. Half of southern Spain feels like itโs been eaten by trading estates, and thatโs really sad.
This is the problem of the IT industry writ large: there are small numbers of people who understand the system and can work out problems, and then large numbers of people who are, for want of a better description, cargo cultists.
Iโm not talking about googling specifics on Stack Overflow here, thatโs fine as long as you still have the understanding and the results you get arenโt just treated as magic runes.
But too many people donโt want to go to the effort of just buying a goddam book and fucking reading it.
There are two types of #EV chargers: AC and DC. The DC ones are generally known as โrapid chargersโ and are the EV equivalent of filling stations, delivering a lot of charge in a short time. You use these to extend range on a long trip.
The AC chargers are what everyone uses at home, overnight, to slowly charge their car at a much lower power level. These stress the battery a lot less and also, the power grid can cope with them easily, which is harder with the beefier DC rapid chargers.
But there are also public AC chargers. These are generally used if youโre staying somewhere for several hours, as is the case here where I left my car overnight in Malaga, or by plug in hybrid owners who, for some reason, have to show the world that they can go three more metres before their engine comes on after leaving the supermarket ๐คท๐ปโโ๏ธ๐๐ป
I know it's a bullshit fountain. If you want info, it will give you crap and sound really authoritative while doing it.
But I just felt like talking to someone about how I miss my mum. She died of cancer in December 2021, and it's the middle of the night now, so I talked to ChatGPT about her.
Cis people on social media say the stupidest shit about โsex and genderโ.
My god, youโd think that people with opinions that poorly developed would have the sense to keep quiet about them, rather than show the world how little theyโve actually considered them while being confidently incorrect, but apparently not.
Dear god. After multiple posts with paragraph after paragraph of cherry picked bullshit about how Iโm โreally maleโ, random internet TERF who I will never meet says, โsex isnโt relevant to how I address peopleโ.
The simple fact is this: if your classification system of sex results in you deciding that some women are not women, then the problem is your classification system, not reality.
SNP leadership manoeuvres serving as a wake up call to the โflee to Scotland to escape the anti LGBT atmosphere in England and Walesโ strategy. The bigotry in high places is lurking, crocodile like, just below the surface throughout the whole wretched island.
@Christine Munro ๐ง so many failures of western democracies are the complacency of the โwe are better than that, and therefore it canโt happen hereโ.
Yeah. A lot of people have been saying that about the UK in general. It's frustrating that they continue to say it regardless of how many objectively bad things keep happening. :|
Looking for technical stuff about DHCP. Google was returning lots of junk and so, wary that ChatGPT is a bullshit fountain, I asked it anyway.
It gave me several concise and to the point answers addressing exactly what I asked.
They were all completely wrong. It just confidently spouted bullshit the same way a narcissist bluffing about a subject they know almost nothing about will.
However, the bullshit it gave me allowed me to frame some pertinent google searches to actually get the information I wanted.
So I guess thatโs a usage model for it: to guide your google searches.
The issue is that Google will slowly fill up with the output of the bullshit fountains, at which point we wonโt be able to check their answers anymore, because theyโll effectively be marking their own homework.
Weirdly it's possible to imagine a world where Wolfram Alpha is the sole survivor of the second search engine war because it's the only one that makes any attempt to trace the provenance of the elements of its inferences.
@esther it's very dated but this covers a lot of ground to help you get started to ask the right questions. Shame you need to know half the answer before you can do that. redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/gg2โฆ
To be fair, this is a tried and true method of getting quick answers on Stack Overflow: stating a clearly wrong answer gets the right answer much more quickly than asking an honest question!
I wonder if the model behind ChatGPT could be adapted to make this feature more explicit. Let's say for a given query it can produce some amount of suggested topics and/or terms that might be relevant for you. Basically strip the "generate bullshit" step and directly expose the "this information is adjacent to what you asked" knowledge encoded in it.
I think that maybe Google delivered too well to start with. It never promised to give the best answer (truest?) simply the most relevant for the question (most popular?)
Maybe we are seeing things hitting their 'eternal September' much more quickly?
After all, "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea. Massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
Sarah Brown
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Sarah Brown
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I think the alt text isnโt working on friendica, but even getting the image to upload and appear in the post is more than any other client has managed.
Please take my money!
Mona app
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Sarah Brown
in reply to Mona app • •@Mona app Thanks.
Youโve got my money regardless, but thanks ๐