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• Post #2552829

  Catering's printer filled the waste toner bucket. No printer means no price labels, no allergy labels, and thus no food for anyone. The catering printer is critical infrastructure. So of course there is no spare toner bucket. Once one thing for it then. There is toner everywhere. I look like a coal miner. My clothes are covered. Everything I touched is covered. I've had to throw buckets of water over the outside area where I worked to wash away the toner, which only turned it...

• Post #2552828

  The panel improves.

• Post #2474186

  I made a thing. Out of a shipping pallet. I now know the difference between cheap scrap wood and good quality wood: A £6 tub of wood stain. This structure shall be installed above a gate to stop intruders from climbing over it.

• Post #2359926

  The site rewrite is done. Now people can not care about my site in two protocols. At least it looks neater. I shall have to release my gemtext to html converter. Many such scripts exist, but they all share the flaw of being written in python and not perl. This is the sort of thing perl was written for.

• Post #2359925

  Bleh. As expected, the "We aren't fascists, we just want to purify British culture of forigners and perverts" party has made the sort of electoral showing that firmly establishes their viability. No longer a mere fringe protest party, but a serious player in British politics. We aren't at the stage of death camps and purges yet, but the possibility of them is on the horizon.

• Post #2087044

  Parent phones school to complain "One of the other boys called my boy a racist!" After some investigating, it was found the the boy in question is, in fact, a racist. Or at least a xenophobe, which is a subtle distinction. And this is why schools log all electronic communications. We don't need to deal with heresay and rumor when it's all nicely and conveniently recorded.

• Post #1919649

  Human creativity was thought to be something special, bordering on spiritual. The ability to imagine something new and craft a great work of art was something unique to the human mind, beyond what any mechanism or mere animal could achieve. And maybe if we had the sci-fi version of AI, it wouldn't be so bad. But, no. Turns out that a simple regression solver can make passable art, music and writing - and it does so without any of the magic of sentience required. Just a lot of very basic ma...

• Post #1919612

  Sagan wrote of the 'Great Demotions' - scientific discoveries which dealt a blow to the collective ego by proving that mankind is not the center of everything. Astronomy showed the Earth is not the center of the universe, and then that the universe is vaster than imagined. Geologists showed that humans are newcomers on the stage of history. Darwin argued that mankind is not made in the image of the divine. I propose that generative AI deals such a blow to the ego precisely because it s...

• Post #1852770

  Project Clear the Alley hit a problem: A neighbour pointed out that some residents actually want the alley to be impassable, because of concerns over thieves using it to access back gardens. The neighbour did throw in a bit of casual racism to make it quite clear which ethnicity he believes is responsible for the thieving, but even so, it is a valid concern. Well, then. I'm going to have to do something about the flimsy wooden gate, adding bolts and concrete fixtures and spikey bits on...

• Post #1852769

  Would you like to install these Crappy Crush clones and other apps from our sponsors now, or later?

• Post #1785660

  I am re-writing my personal website in gemtext. It'll still be accessible on HTTPS, but the HTML version will just be a conversion of the authoritative Gemini site.

• Post #1724490

  Whirrrrrrr, clunk-clunk, wheeee whee goes the LTO drive, as it reaches the end and turns back upon itsself. Whert-clunk-clack-wurrrrrr goes the LTO drive that was thrown out as e-waste ten years ago after five years of daily backup runs. Yarrrr, goes the archive of totally legitimate video files.

• Post #1540140

  SAS card installed, onboard ethernet stop working. SAS card removed, onboard ethernet start working. The ethernet interface is detected either way. But with the card in, it just acts as though no cable is plugged in. It feels this computer is taunting me because I am trying to fit an ancient tape drive into a modern computer.

• Post #1451883

  New light switch, installed.

• Post #1111465

  A perfect example of how to write news headlines with an information gap. What popular travel item? What airline? The headline can't tell you - if it did, you'd have no reason to read the story. Better to keep the mystery and let people's curiosity guide them into clicking. If the manipulation isn't so obvious people won't even realise they are being played.

• Post #1111464

  The time nears to give up on my usual 'fill the silence' use of YouTube. Something has changed in the algorithm lately, at least for me, and suggestions has started trying to push me towards a lot of far-right videos. And I mean the really far right stuff - videos titled "Are black people intellectually inferior?" and "Black men make horrible fathers." And the comments section is even more proudly and openly racist. I've known this wou...

• Post #1111463

  One mini-ecocide going nicely. Two different compositions of herbicide deployed upon the alley, at intervals more frequent and in doses far higher than directed. Everything must die! The ivy somehow endures, everything else is wilting. Once the overgrown vegetation is exterminated I will clear some of the smaller objects of fly tipping. No idea how to be rid of the two fridges though.

• Post #983155

  @captpackrat@pawb.fun I get this a lot at work. The people so affected can't even log in to raise a support ticket, so they have to go to the IT office in person to request aid.

• Post #881486

  Just read a BBC article and comments on energy costs and government support. Most of the comments are classic complaints about working people's money being stolen and given to useless people on benefits. And a good part of those specifically single out immigrants and refugees, expressing fury that tax money might be used to assist such undeserving scum. I know the UK has a proud history of hate and especially xenophobia, but it's growing a bit worse every year.

• Post #842933

  @coffee@cafecreature.club It's actually a good show, providing you don't try to connect it to the books in any way. The books aren't really the sort of story that adapts well to TV. So the show is more sort of 'inspired by.'

• Post #735926

  @gregly@retro.pizza @bontchev@infosec.exchange I don't think Trump actually wants war though. What he wants is to 'negotiate' and prove that he is the best deal-maker. He just just pragmatic about it, and knows that the best way to get a good deal from someone may be to have a gun to their head. Most of the time you don't even have to pull the trigger, you just have to make sure they know you are willing to. He is probably a bit confused about why Iran aren't begging to surr...