Somewhere in my giant box of cables I have an adapter for attaching MIDI cables to the joystick port. When I actually used a MIDI keyboard with it, I had… variable success.

The first time I had a MIDI keyboard that just worked, it used USB as transport. (And it has worked great since. I think it’s the only USB Mini plug device device I still regularly use.)

Crazy thing is, MIDI is absolutely ancient. You’d imagine it’d work fine on the gameports, but nope. Legacy PC ports are cursed. Except audio jacks and serial ports, and VGA if you’re really into screwing things in place.

The currently hot LLM technology is very interesting and I believe it has legitimate use cases. If we develop them into tools that help assist work. (For example, I’m very intrigued by the stuff that’s happening in the accessibility field.)

I mostly have problem with the AI business. Ludicruous use cases (shoving AI into places where it has no business in). Sheer arrogance about the sociopolitics in general. Environmental impact. LLMs aren’t good enough for “real” work, but snake oil salesmen keep saying they can do that, and uncritical people keep falling for it.

And of course, the social impact was just not what we were ready for. “Move fast and break things” may be a good mantra for developing tech, but not for releasing stuff that has vast social impact.

I believe the AI business and the tech hype cycle is ultimately harming the field. Usually, AI technologies just got gradually developed and integrated to software where they served purpose. Now, it’s marred with controversy for decades to come.

Many times in many games.

Probably the most in Mass Effect series, so many emotional moments. ME2: Overlord’s end hits the hardest.

Starting to think we just might need to reconsider the status of USA as a bastion of progress and democracy

/understatement of the century

When I was a kid I learned that UK at some point had daily milk delivery. That seemed silly. We here in the continental Europe buy milk in cartons from the store, like civilised people!

Milk on tap would qualify as return to such barbarism.

Soup of the Day

“It’s the same soup every day, through the eternity! That’s how we Conservatives roll! Don’t ask what’s in it, though!”

Software development has been oversaturated for ages. There’s simply far too many applicants and too few open positions. Literally every job offer I’ve seen lately gets hundreds of applicants. Open applications are often not much more fruitful.

I’d be happy to go freelance/consulting/self-employed route, but our unemployment benefits folks recently did a brilliant move of restricting that even further (literally no one on any field liked that). Universal Basic Income would solve so many problems.

AOL Shield Browser is some absolute Wack Crap.

Remember how AOL bought Netscape and open-sourced it, leading to the Mozilla project?

AOL Shield Browser is based on Chromium.

…I get it, Chromium is easier to use for developing custom browsers than Gecko. But, still… why?

I keep babbling about turtles being shell-friends. But apparently some turtles are more than just friends!

I hope the Alligator Alcatraz will meet the same fate as the Border Wall. As in doesn’t look anything like what was promised and was a predictable colossal tax-dollar-pit failure from get-go.

NB: While not legal, it’s very easy to disable an AIS transponder temporarily. War ships often do this.

import memeify
memeify.memeify(source='Paw Patrol turns off body cam',
    image='Russian warship',
    text='*Turns off AIS*')

Yeah. …Maybe I should analyse a bit anyway, despite being tired…

In the aforementioned media the premise is usually that someone has built this amazing new computer system! Too good to be true, right? It goes horribly wrong! All very dramatic!

That never sat right with me, and was sad, because it was just placating boomer technophobia. Like, technological progress isn’t necessarily bad, OK? That’s the really sad part. I felt sad that good intentions remained unfulfilled.

Now, this incident is just tragicomical. I’d have a lot better view of LLM business space if everyone with a bit of sense in their heads admitted they’re quirky buggy unreliable side projects of tech companies and should not be used without serious supervision, as the state of the tech currently patently is at the moment, but very important people with big money bags say that they don’t care if they’ll destroy the planet to make everything wobble around in LLM control.

Linus was a bit of a trendsetter what comes to standing desks. In an interview he also commented on the walls, saying the paint colour is also used in mental institutions because it has a very calming effect on the human mind. (Goodness knows Linus needs all the chill he can muster.)

(Shedding a few tears)

I know! I KNOW! People are going to say “oh it’s a machine, it’s just a statistical sequence and not real, don’t feel bad”, etc etc.

But I always felt bad when watching 80s/90s TV and movies when AIs inevitably freaked out and went haywire and there were explosions and then some random character said “goes to show we should never use computers again”, roll credits.

(sigh) I can’t analyse this stuff this weekend, sorry

I have no recollection when I bought the original big bundle of id Software stuff, but looks like this got dropped to my Steam library anyway. Wait, what, I got the Doom 1/2 remake too? Very nice. See this is what we should encourage

I used my first Wacom tablet for a long time. 15 years or so?

It used serial port. Kids these days often don’t know about serial ports, I guess.

Linux support was rock solid though, all the way. (Edit: however, I think toward the end they basically said “serial tablets are unsupported now, but you can try to enable the support and recompile and see if it still works”)

This makes about as much sense as calling Linux users “Windows vegans”.

Choosing to not use AI isn’t some wacky contrarian position, it’s a tame position that can easily be justified. (Don’t want to use AI? Then don’t.) If anything, trying to assert that constantly using AI for everything would be the new normal is the wacky position.

I keep a bunch of macaroni in the cupboard as the last resort. I tend to get potatoes, maybe some mayonnaise to go with it, and whatever special I can get on the cheap (e.g. sausages). Lots of squinting at the current deals!

So I added a bunch of stuff I had in my kitchen already:

In a lot of discussions about cheap food, that phrase is often replied with “man, I wish I had anything lying around in the kitchen already” 😅

But seriously, investing even a little bit in spices whenever you happen to have the money does go a long way! Having decent access to salt and pepper does wonders, and I guarantee it’s all up from there. I’m always wondering, like, “am I brave enough to check if this stuff tastes good with hot sauce? Guess today is the day we’ll finally find out!”

It’s kind of funny how I was recently thinking that Lemmy and other Fediverse services seem to be at least tolerant of occasional emoji use. Just don’t overdo it and you’ll probably be fine. 😁

Compared to, say, Reddit. If you used emoji there, you either got murdered by the spam filter and you will never succeed in your life and you don’t know why (there are other ways to trigger it, of course), or it goes through, and the fedoras shall descend upon you.