Gattsuru's Rambling Spot

[kremlin]

im sure glad the "normal" "well-adjusted" end user can appreciate the convenience of USB-C's cable symmetry, where you can have both ends of the cable be "USB-C", instead of like before where a USB-A--to--USB-A cable didn't exist. because it sure as fuck made the most complicated four* wires in the universe several times fucking harder

[gattsuru]

I especially like that there are two forms of USB-A-to-USB-A cable:

Legal, incredibly specialized, expensive, and rare: they were intended as a data migration tool back in the old days when not everyone had a LAN at home, so you could transfer data from one machine to another (over several hours).

I have seen one in the flesh once.

Illegal and ships with random low-grade products or can be easily produced by slapping together five adapters or couplers. Will likely permanently damage your computer's motherboard even if the official USB spec says it shouldn't; if connected from a computer to the wrong grade of power adapter, can start a fire.

[andmaybegayer]

it is in fact relatively easy for most web services to be gdpr compliant if they don't collect random bullshit to sell to advertisers and have a "delete account" button that works.

[goelzma]

And also you need a designated legal representative in the european union.

I'm a big fan of the GDPR in general but that requirement was unnecessary and disproportionately expensive for foreign operators on the edge of private/commercial operations where your indie web forum is no longer a personal project operating in disregard of the law but you also don't want to hire a european resident lawyer to act as a liability sponge using your personal money.

[gattsuru]

I also like the data portability rule, even if I think it's absolutely doomed, but it's a ton of overhead and cost to make a bad barely-complaint version.

[teaboot]

Do you think Clark Kent's first few major articles were about the continued presence of lead pipes in parts of Metropolis' water system

[teaboot]

(Average Metropolis reader after investigative reporter C. Kent's 452nd article on yet another case of landlords/business owners/factories' continued use of lead pipes/paint/gas/glass knowingly exposing the public to dangerously toxic lead levels) what the fuck happened to this guy

[teaboot]

One day Bruce Wayne mentions in an interview that heroes like Superman are overrated, as the most effective way to reduce crime is to provide public resources and improve local infrastructure, then cites how neighboring city Metropolis has effectively lowered their violent crime by 13% after addressing their outdated water system and investing low income housing. the reporter conducting the interview suddenly starts looking a little uncomfortable

[teaboot]

To be clear, Clark is still a fantastic investigative reporter. He still has to track down the sources to prove all this shit

[teaboot]

"Who, Clark Kent? Yeah, we're pretty sure he's a Meta. Is he a superhero? Like what, "Lead-detector guy"? "Captain pipes?" Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy and it's a handy trick, but it's lead detection, not laser vision. He's not about to go running around in tights any time soon."

[sindri42]

I just love the idea of a cape maintaining their secret identity by pretending to be a completely different and less impressive kind of parahuman.

[roach-works]

everyone assumes that kent is so squirrely around superheros because he’s just desperately hoping not to be conscripted to the JLA to fix their plumbing

[teaboot]

Local Metropolis Reporter Publically Recognized For Contributions To The City; Awarded Medal Of Distinction

[championofdnd]

They tried to get superman to present the medal but he was offended at being called "overrated" in comparison to Clark so he declined

[teaboot]

Counter offer: Bruce Wayne disguised as Superman

[teaboot]

beating this dead horse with memes

[everythingismadeofchaos]

Hey this was a real fun little read. It's so great to find these treasures on this site

[teaboot]

We’re happy to have you!

[beardedmrbean]

[incomingalbatross]

In the same vein as my "books that don't seem to enjoy their settings" post: the - urban fantasy? romantasy? YA something-or-other fantasy? - WHATEVER the subgenre is that has fantasy elements but very little wonder. That's weird to me.

Like, there are shapeshifters and elves and mermen and all that but they're flat. They're just People With Abilities living in a version of real life that has fully incorporated them. The author does not seem to want it to feel magical, these are just... the genre conventions?? A way to avoid the messy constraints of realism?

And I am, myself, a fan of fantasy's ability to let me handwave things like Strict Medical Care and Travel Times sometimes! But like. You don't have to use magic for that if that's the only appeal to you.

*"this meeting could've been an email" voice* These dragons and vampires could've been plain organized crime.

[samueldays]

Yeah and "These dragons sound less alien than the Japanese are."

[thathopeyetlives]

That, and also maybe another thing... A lot of this kind of fantasy theoretically involves settings where there's a certain amount of intrigue, fighting, heroic deeds, and men of personal power.

And a lot of the time the intense tropeification seems to also leave that flat as well.

[isaacsapphire]

I think a lot of this is just bad writing/the market for what is essentially millennial potboiler steamy romance doesn’t actually want “good writing”.

Like, Fourth Wing is kinda badly written imo, or rather, it’s not living up to its premise to my tastes… but all it’s “flaws” are essential to its success with idiot normies, who wouldn’t be able to handle eg. truly alien dragons.

[gattsuru]

Yeah. It's not hard to imagine a more fantastic version of the Mercy Thompson or Dresden Files series, where the werewolves are more than ABO rejects, the dragons aren't just bigger and more powerful humans, and the fey were something genuinely alien rather than just humans with weird rules. Butcher, in his defense, is a good enough writer that he even motions around the weirder and more alien stuff, even pretty early on (there's nothing original about wolf->human werewolves, but they're a rich opportunity to see a very different world)... they just don't matter.

But it wouldn't probably sell very well.

I love xenofiction! Book of Night With Moon is one of my favorite books, not least of all because it's so heavily acting on a mythic arc while keeping 'human' stakes for characters that aren't human and don't even fully share human drives. ... and it's also pretty clearly a labor of love that Duane had to push hard to get published, get sequels, and get attention. Compare to the Young Wizards series that's the same magical conventions and setting, but everything's humans-in-weird-bodies (even the whale!) and the magic is just portals and guns, and it's understandable what's going to be more accessible.

And sometimes that accessibility comes with benefits. Most of it's slop, because most of everything is slop, but Dark Lord of Derkholm is a really strong discussion of family, and it's trappings are biomancy and office politics and community organizing that could be fantastic and really aren't. I've got a partial draft for a story in an alternate universe magic mind control slavery thing going on, and if I was leaning into the alternate history or magic side hard it should be wildly and incomprehensibly different. That might eventually be worth messing with...

But I'm writing this specific draft to explore interpersonal relationships: how do people handle control, responsibility, and duty; what does absolutely knowing your own character do to someone; how can this specific seductive power change people for the worse in ways that forces them to confront and overcome their flaws. The magic isn't stapled on, because being this weird and not-at-all-realistic thing is what allows that exploration without the real-world grounding that would make it incredibly uncomfortable to read.

That sort of story is not and can't be wonderful, in the sense that someone like Jenna Moran's most prosaic story can be. It's still worth having around.

[milk5]

Sorry to be obnoxious for a second but i think its a bit jarring when people will draw their ttrpg character or oc or whatever as like a big lovable sensitive gay nerd but still have this like generic fantasy armor on that communicates an implicit intent for violence BUT violence has been so abstracted in the context of the subject that it isn't really equivalent to real world acts of violence at all. now thats wordy but in a practical sense think about a "modern" version being like your big lovable sensitive gaY nerd character always wearing a kevlar vest and open carrying an assault rifle

[moral-autism]

a) maybe the modern au of my guy didn't get into a situation where fleeing town and becoming a caravan guard was plausibly the best option given that they were framed for murder

b) park rangers sometimes carry guns so plausibly my druid having a slingshot and a scimitar is just totally reasonable actually. does tumblr take the stance that park rangers can't be lovable nerds.

[rendakuenthusiast]

I think it would be neat to hang out with a big lovable sensitive gay nerd who was always wearing a kevlar vest and open-carrying an assault rifle.

[shieldfoss]

I still feel OP is on to something though. You can play D&D however you like, but the obvious text of the game is that you are a killer.

If you're playing D&D as-intended, you're playing a game that expects you to kill more people in your first dungeon crawl than many IRL professional killers get around to killing in their entire career. By the time you're a high level character, your kill count is unmatched by any except strategic bomber pilots and artillery commanders.

[gattsuru]

Not just or even primarily a D&D thing. I like a lot of what FFXIV does with player characterization, but it ultimately has the problem where you can interrupt a beach episode or a game of cards or literally anything involving the Lopporits, all while you're wearing the goofiest or sexiest possible glamours...

(by Khurt Wagner)

With your daily mass-murder roulette.

That's explicit text! Your player character ends up having a long talk with an entire zone of Garleans traumatized because of you, specifically, sometimes including people who's friends and family died at your hands. One poor girl panics at the thought you, specifically, invading so much that she flees into the wilderness and dies.

Your character has justifications, but you're still a monster with justifications. And your character isn't even the most woobiefied monster in the setting! Most of the fan favorites split between that genocidal maniac with issues and a sexy voice on one side, and snarky gay-coded guy who's felt the weight of the world on the other.

And then you share a fantasy pita bread, and the space-bunnies enter the scene with a comedic aside where they act like zombies but it's just one really getting obsessed with pudding.

That's honest, in a sense, because some people in the real world are like that, whether they're really good people or bad people at heart. But it's a weird revelation to actually grapple with.

[merrikiwi]

New sticker for may mcm london

Will give for free in exchange for real salmon

[official-kircheis]

@caesarsaladinn

[thewolfofthestars]

Ngl part of the reason I want sex, sex work, and sexuality to be destigmatized and decriminalized is because I think it would be really funny for there to be a genre of cam streamer who are doing all the horny stuff but with like. Jerma vibes

[thewolfofthestars]

no chat I'm not gonna--I'm not gonna deepthroat the monster dildo okay? Chat I have a terrible gag reflex, there is zero chance I deepthroat the monster dildo without gagging. I'm gonna end up yartzing my dinner all over the fuckin keyboard and everyone's gonna be grossed out. Okay some of you are still gonna be into that but most of you won't, alright? Most of you won't. No one is actually gonna like that. We can just stick the monster dildo in my pussy okay, I know everyone likes that. We can just do that. I'm not deepthroating it. I'm not doing it

[gattsuru]

[andmaybegayer]

New Mythos red team stuff mainly, like most AI stuff, makes me worry about how this is going to make existing bad things much faster and cheaper. There are already huge botnets based on well-known unpatched vulnerabilities, but what will happen when anyone can scan a shitload of security cameras or poorly secured factory computers running Apache 2.4.20 and whip up a bespoke attack for them for a few hundred bucks?

[gattsuru]

To be fair, there's some big gaps about how much the 'real' cost of the more severe attacks are. They say 20k USD for the set of operations that caught the big OpenBSD bug, but if that's just GPU time costs, actually getting it into a usable state and the related infrastructure costs exceed that, you might have a bit more time before it's a 'every rando can X' world.

To be less charitable, that's a constraint that's dependent on zero software or hardware energy improvements. If we get an 8x cost reduction in software, to take a random example, a previously impractical threat could be a serious one overnight.

On the other hand, Mythos is focused on IT security, and if you think about broader security issues, you'll find the threat of widescale AI attacks is more present than you'd expect. There's <100B param models that know how to mix extremely dangerous materials from common household chemicals or how to make a number of unprecedented infrastructure attacks, and while they've been RLHF'd to Not Do That, it's pretty trivial to remove those restrictions and people do it so they can RP smut, badly. Some rough estimates puts those models as quickly operable on home computers on an inexpensive gaming computer in 6 years. And that's if you want it to run quick; if it's fine going overnight you can do it today.

It's scarier in software because the LLMs can just do things without an intervening human, but 'can you hire a person to do this stupid thing' is not a strong protection. At least for software, we have the option of 'don't connect it to the internet'.

On the gripping hand:

[andmaybegayer]

excitement about the SLS launch tempered somewhat by knowing a little bit about how pants-on-head the five million years of its development process have been.

[gattsuru]

Yeah. It's be a fascinating accomplishment, and there's probably only like a 10% chance of horrible catastrophe.

SpaceX people have long been critical, sometimes pretty persuasively. But it's telling when people who absolutely hate Musk and Bezos write pieces like this. And I really don't like the mental image of Elon Musk having a Feynmann impersonation delivered to him on a silver platter, not least of all because a 10% chance of four dead people is _way_ over my risk tolerance for a glamour shot.

[amaruuk]

Made some graphics for a GifyPet over on Neocities. Haven’t made the page for her but my new addiction to Dragon Cave made me want to make a sprite! The background is super bullshit photobashing with some scribbling and palettization.

Twitter | Neocities | Twitch | Ko-fi | Commissions

[tsarina-anadyomene]

i'm not really sure we have a clear sense of what colleges are for

[tsarina-anadyomene]

We're heading in a direction where we're stuck in this prolonged credentialing system, where people get basically the same jobs with a college diploma that a high school diploma would have gotten you a generation or two ago. The college degree just serves to filter some moderately increased amount of discipline necessary not to completely fuck things up. But we're sacrificing four years that you could spend doing other things to this process.

Colleges are good to fund insofar as governments have an obligation to care not just about the survival but flourishing of their citizens. And I think in some ways college education can be genuinely conducive to that. It can hone your thinking, appreciation, give you new tools of reasoning, argumentation, analysis, etc. I won't say "critical thinking" because it's a handwaving phrase that sometimes seems to approach magic. In philosophy at least students seem to come out thinking demonstrably more clearly than when they came in. If nothing else, they're more articulate.

But it seems like the incentive structure is moving away from that. Undergraduate education is something everyone has to do, so it feels like more of high school where you don't really care and your interest in learning is basically nonexistent. Increasingly we see the softening of requirements, the easing of reading classics or influential recent work in favor of "accessible" texts and so on. And there is something to be said for accessible texts, but if you're going somewhere to learn and achieve things, then you should expected to work hard at understanding something. Many students want things spoonfed to them and will get angry if that expectation isn't met. I mean there are still (and probably always will be) students who go above and beyond and really take things seriously. But I fear they are becoming a smaller and smaller minority. It's anecdotal but pretty much everyone I talk to seems to think students are getting worse at doing their jobs as students.

[gattsuru]

I will also add that, not only has undergraduate education gotten worse at teaching people to understand (and learn to understand) things, it's also gotten vastly more expensive. The counterargument to the old conservative trope about majors in 'underwater basketweaving', after noting that dry reeds are not very pliable, is that it could well be fun, and worthwhile to learn. The counterargument to that is that you could hire an individualized tutor and several exotic cats for less than a semester of the average private college, and either the tutor or the cats could teach you more about how to weave.

(from here, do not buy exotic cats as pets)

Now, that's a funny illustration, but it's a lie, and not just because exotic cats cost a lot of upkeep and fall just behind horses in 'valid to eat fingers' count, and only if you use absolute measure rather than per-cat-i-paw.

It's a lie because if you want to hire an adjunct to personally tutor you, you'd have to pay out of pocket. Wash the money through a giant and hilariously inefficient system of administrators and corrupt officials, though, and... you'll either depend on a large pile of not-always-available subsidies or end up with a vastly greater pile of college debt that you can't pay with your degree, but the bill only comes due much later.

Don't worry, it's still more expensive after adjusting for inflation. Wait, did I say 'don't' worry?

Now, in a sane world, we'd have organizations that try to optimize for teaching people skills and the wonder of learning and self-improvement in an efficient manner, rather than gilding the lilies of three million Deans and an oversized set of very ugly architecture. And those organizations do exist! Local MakerSpaces, Arts Centers, and various skilled civic organizations do a lot of good work for less than the cost of a tiger. I've even volunteered for a few, and bought services from more.

((The latter is part of why I'm sure I'm not going to be able to practically learn to draw. No educational system can make a miracle happen.))

But you can't take a certificate from one of them, and go to a job fair, and expect anything but getting laughed out of the building. So a twentieth of the US economy is vanishing up its own ass.

[andmaybegayer]

measure once cut also once, no prablem

[andmaybegayer]

#i know i already reblogged this but i need to like. cross stitch it or carve it into wood or quilt it or something

concept for a vcarving project

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

no i get you this was perfectly centered when i wrote it

[shaydh]

I have done the cross stitch

[poolboydivision]

in honor of all the times I've made this mistake irl

[techno-entity]

made this into a blinkie

[irradiate-space]

Have an 88x31 web badge:

[gattsuru]

Some day I will get a sublimation printer tuned in correctly on the first go. Today will not be that day:

[elfhole]

im not a huge furry anymore and im SURE someone’s already done this but i really kinda wanna make an open species for cat likers thats just like. cat furries with 4 ears and alien features

[gattsuru]

I have excellent news for you:

(art by TwistedHound)

[andmaybegayer]

sort of weird how like two short-lived parser bugs convinced a significant number of people that QR codes are a kind of cursed rune for phones

[gattsuru]

There's a more general problem where it's going to open a link, and your average user can't tell the difference between a healthy link and an unsafe one, and there's a lot of inspection systems that react to plaintext or plaintext-in-image links that haven't adapted to QR codes yet.

[fugoslawbooks]

Discord is rolling out worldwide Age Verification and all accounts will be set to teen by default.

Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

Age verification for all.

[thebiglebowsk1]

The unfortunate thing about Discord rolling out age verification NOW of all things is that the current alternatives for it have changed vastly (Revolt), have paywalls (Teams), or they shut down (Skype, Hangouts, and Guilded; even though no one misses it). I know that Matrix exists, but speaking critically... The majority of Discord's userbase (myself included) wants a simple experience. Matrix has end-to-end encryption, meaning you need to put in an access code everytime you log in just to access messages. (Matrix explains end-to-end way better than I do, so here's the support page about it) Many will and have viewed this as a chore, and people can easily lose access to those codes including all their chats with it. Matrix is a good alternative, but it's not easily accessible for those that aren't super tech-literate. Discord picked the worst time to finally roll out ID verification onto their platform, and they fucking knew it. With all of their competitors dead or barely alive, some will feel the need to surrender their ID since there's no other platform like Discord currently. Shits very BLEAK.

[isaacsapphire]

I’m barely willing to use Teams when I’m paid to do so.

Stupid idea but is Slack a viable alternative?

[thathopeyetlives]

Honestly one starts to contemplate crazy homegrown stuff.

Really the inability of average people to use weird nerd apps is the fundamental cause of most of the problems with the Internet these days.

[gattsuru]

It's fairly easy to spin up a local Mattermost or RocketChat instance, and both of those have iPhone/Android apps. Hell, even NextCloud Talk does, and it's an afterthought more trying to clone Skype.

The trouble's getting anyone to use any one thing. No one wants to have ten different accounts for communicating with twenty different channels, and in the more social media world, it's rare for people to stop at twenty different Discord 'servers'.

But since Discord's actions are downstream of age verification laws everywhere from Texas to California to the UK, any service provider big enough in the English-speaking world that you're not making a new account for every other new group you run into, is going to do some variant of the same thing. Any that aren't that big yet are just hoping to follow EFF advice long enough to survive.

((And the EFF's advice isn't very actionable.))

Federation was supposed to be the theoretical solution to the user account problem... and it's largely smothered in the cradle. The technology exists! You can even use it!

But as Mastodon found out, either you're federating with everyone by default -- and everyone includes a lot of people you don't want to work with -- or whoever runs the server gets to spend hours at a time deciding who to trust. And they usually don't.

Without a solution to that dilemma, any alternative service to an existing toolkit is dead on arrival.

[thathopeyetlives]

If one just wants to make some chat / forums servers with deep persistence and one can get people to make accounts, what should I do?

[gattsuru]

For forums, in the conventional async sense, your big options are :

PhpBB is the old, venerable, ancient but-still-open-source option. It's not pretty, it's not nice, and it's not getting a bunch of new updates on a monthly basis, but it's been around long enough to drink.

vBulletin is the paid software equivalent. Not worth it, imo, but it did have a major following... over a decade ago.

XenForo is the middle-ground. Very Web1.0 styled, with newer backend support and a faster development pace.

Discourse is the 'newest'-looking and most divergent mainstream forum software. It's wildly different in appearance and heavily Web2.0-styled, to the point of kidnapping CTRL+F, but it does have a lot of nice design decisions with the bad ones. Upside, lead by a StackOverflow guy. Downside, lead by a StackOverflow guy.

For less mainstream options:

If you're willing to put in the effort, Lemmy, Tildes, and Lotide/Hoot kinda work for small groups. They're weird and very opinionated, and performance isn't great, but you get a much more modern setup.

The drama website itself has a ton of bizarre and often-anti-human UI decisions, but the codebase is pretty respectable, and there's some less opinionated and more pretty forks out there. Gets you a modern backend and magic like unit tests and type annotations, like you're a real programmer... which only helps if you want to program anything.

For chat:

RocketChat is the easiest to setup option I've evaluated. It's also the most commercial software (technically: open core, paid feature licenses), and they've cut down on their free-tier over the years. At this point you can't get voice chat or long history without paying for it. Whether that's a problem for you depends heavily on your use-case.

Mattermost is slightly better, but it's a similar boat: open core, paid licenses. The free version's better-featured, with free voice chats (supposedly going to be limited to 40 minutes in a future release). In exchange, the UI is a little more Slack-like than Discord-like.

Stoat/Revolt is the explicitly-trying-to-replace Discord chat, focused on text and voice. It's pretty powerful and very Discord-like, but despite being around for five years it's still got some rough edges and always seemed a little seat-of-the-pants.

Matrix (technically, any Matrix-compatible server; Conduit is the one I got running, with Element as the client I used most) is the hardcore techie one. It's the most powerful and its handling of privacy/encryption/federation is the strongest and it has strong support for chat/voice/history, but it's not a great user experience as a result.

Weird outliers:

Zulip kinda does both text chat and forums, but it's very topic-focused, even compared to the already-topic-focused Discourse. While it claims to have voice chat support, it's just letting you link into a handful of third-party (and mostly commercial) providers. Not great as a Discord replacement imo, but for some uses it makes a lot of sense.

NextCloud is a file share first, but it does have a surprisingly full-featured text and voice chats. More attempting to mimic pre-MicroSoft Skype than Discord, so chats are more organized by people than by topic, but performance is good and if you're using it as a file share already, it can be easier to set up than almost any alternative. No forum feature, though (they use Discourse for their official forums).

Mumble/Murmur is a voice chat program first, intended as a Ventrillo/TeamSpeak competitor. It does have text chat support, but no history -- I'd really only recommend it as a supplement to a separate forum/chat service. That said, it is really good as a voice chat; I've used it professionally, and a good few major games use it as their internal voice service.

XMPP is a protocol, and the featureset supported depends heavily on implementation and configuration. I can't recommend it because the ecosystem is so fragmented, but I'll mention it because it does exist and does do everything... just with a big asterisk of 'when supported by the server and client'.

IRC does techically have a chat history backend as of IRCv3.

[eightyonekilograms]

OpenAI: We worked with @Ginkgo to connect GPT-5 to an autonomous [bio-]lab, so it could propose experiments, run them at scale, learn from the results, and decide what to try next. That closed loop brought protein production cost down by 40%.

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