matsdis

Reminds me of the text-based role-playing heavy MUDs, where the players did their “pose” (a short paragraph describing what their character does) and you wait for 5 minutes while the other player(s) describe their move in return, often also adding a bit environment description. Some of the better player’s logfiles were basically prose you could almost publish. (Example: SpheresMUX)

Also, you got to like the name they came up with: it’s a MUSH (multi-user shared hullicination).

Since you are already on Mastodon, I would start by checking out the instances of people you have interacted with. Many topic-instances are still pretty general-purpose. Decentralize yourself! Join two or three instances. Subscribe to different topics on each. See what sticks.

On a small instance, the local feed is much more important. Local users have a larger influence on what you discover. So, check the local feed first. It may be a bit boring but should be free of spam. Check the external feed. It should not be too tacky, and have a CW where you want one. Check the moderation policy. If you want to commit to only one small instance, find out who pays the hosting and maybe donate.

I love how you can pick almost any number between 1 and 100 and there will be instances in FediDB with exactly that many accounts. Long tail indeed.

Regarding students cheating with ChatGPT, I liked this article from a professor, quote:

“Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a savior. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection.”

But when failing anything in class, students usually end up having fewer options, need to get better marks elsewhere to compensate, or get forced to repeat a year. So they use any tool or technique that might help them pass.

I’ve only crossed the “slight overweight” line now. But in the past 15 years I have monitored my weight while trying gentle changes: eat healthier, no added sugar, more exercise, build a small amount of muscle. Nothing has made a difference. I was gaining weight slowly, year by year.

Now I’m finally doing what I wanted to avoid for 15 years: stop eating while still slightly hungry. It was a psychological exercise: To focus on the feeling of hunger so I stay aware of it, so I don’t automatically walk into the kitchen. To convince myself that I’m okay with it, this is how it has feel, no need to panic. There was some resistance, but in the end it was easier than expected. I mostly do this towards the evening, and not every day, and when I’m more than just a bit hungry I still eat.

The effect on my weight was almost a shock after the non-effect of all my previous attempts. I feel like I can keep this up easily. In fact I had to dial it back, losing weight faster than I intended. And I did keep my healthy habits from earlier: especially I try to be active one hour each day, and if I wasn’t I usually go for a late walk.

Picture from 2002. This was a 2D plotter made from the motors of a CD-ROM drive. The open wires connected to a copper coil that smashed a pencil up and down. A hard-disk magnet was glued to the pencil. 3D printing wasn’t a thing back then, otherwise I probably would have started a fire with an improvised heater on top of this.

Yes, IIRC Undertale it will only taunt you a bit at first, you have to play almost to the end before you really notice. But then it masterfully beats you against the 4th wall, hard, several times. (Speaking about eating the wrong cookies, yes it does feel like that.)

And then, when you start a second play-through, the 4th wall stays broken. (Personally I didn’t care enough for the game for a second play-through, but if you read it up it’s a whole thing, the game will not simply reset.)

Are we hardwired to want social status?

Yes. Like many animals, we primates have a psychology of dominance. It helps to prevent constant daily fights over everything, so a group can function. You defer to the strong leader, or else. And you try to become the leader to get the benefits.

Unlike other primates, we have a second social status called “prestige” which is used for cultural learning. So you should upvote this post, like and subscribe, give me some virtual prestige. I may not be able to beat up your leader, but I can write eloquent posts such as this one, get more back from the hunt than others (see all those feathers and bones I’m wearing?), and everyone knows that I weave those useful baskets you use daily. Do what I do, and maybe you’ll become just as capable and healthy as I am. Defer to me to get access to me, to watch and learn from me, to copy everything I do. Which books to read. Whom to to vote for. Eating one carrot a day. You never know which of those is the secret ingredient. Better just copy everything this healthy-looking human does and believes.

I ca̴n’̸t rea̵d wha̴͌t ̸̈́y̶o̵u̷͆’r̴̚e̸ ̷s̴à̴y̵i̵͛n̴̓g̴͑ ̵f̶ró̵m̸̜̎ ̴̊ơ̴v̵e̴͂r ̵͎̽h̷̛̺̀͑̃er̵̆e̴…̴. But not sure what thé solutïon would be. Forbiddíng non-english text would be even worse UI.

Yes. Tech-savvy users should not run a script like the one below from extensions like open-with or similar. Be it on youtube or other music sites.

#!/bin/sh
yt-dlp --extract-audio --embed-metadata --no-playlist \
    --exec 'notify-send "download finished."' \
    -o ~/music/new/"%(album_artist)s - %(artist)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" \
    -f"bestaudio[ext!=flac][ext!=wav]"\
    -- "$1"

That’s a good book, not terribly deep but very much fun to read. I’m sure bots thinking they are human has been done several times. First show that comes to mind is Westworld, which is kind of centered around that idea.

It doesn’t do OCR. It just automatically cleans up the pages for archival or sharing. (I use it to archive my handwritten notes and sketches, so technically yes ;-)

FairScan to scan documents.

As a pretty new user to PieFed (and Lemmy), I still find those combined feeds (“Communities”) confusing. It helped with discovery, but feels like I have been mass-subscribed and now need to unsubscribe each community individually. (I’m sure this is not the case and I just haven’t figured out how it works yet.)

In contrast, the cross-post feature (mentioned by sibling comments) was easy to understand, and looks like a great way to discover (and loosely connect) small related communities.

Telemetry is in Server -> General -> Allow Anonymous Usage Collection. When you opt-out, it also send a final message to the server that you’ve opted out. The the telemetry itself looks reasonable, I don’t mind sending it. It’s really just the dark pattern of opt-out vs of opt-in that bothers me.

The donate button is the heart in the bottom left menu (not visible in the settings). It’s unobtrusive. I wouldn’t bother to remove it, except the tooltip says that I have to pay to remove it - now it has to go. Asking for donations is fine, but asking for money to remove a button is disgusting.

I’ve set up Kavita for my e-books. Nice UI, looks promising, and I’ve added some books. I haven’t really used it yet, because half of this was just an excuse to try podman (instead of docker). I wanted to set it up to run as unprivileged user, without the docker daemon running as root. That wasn’t too hard, but it was definitely a few extra steps.

But something about Kavita didn’t sit well with me. Maybe I don’t self-host enough stuff to know what’s normal, but there is a donate button, which I don’t mind, but its tooltip says: “You can remove this button by subscribing to Kavita+.”

I’m donating to a few software projects already, and I have developed a substantial amount of free software myself. There is nothing wrong with asking for money. But what I cannot stand is when software running on my own device is intentionally acting against my interests. And this tooltip was very clear about not letting me do something that I might want to do.

So I checked the source code for more. I found another anti-pattern: telemetry is opt-out instead of opt-in. But that seems to be it, I didn’t find anything worse than that. So… fair I guess, if the author wants it that way. It’s still free software. It looks like I could delete all the Kavita+ stuff myself and re-build. Which I’m going to do if I keep using it. But this is now an extra step that prevents me from just using it, because I need to feel in control of what I run. Kind of self-inflicted, I guess…