Most GenAI was trained on material they had no right to train on (including plenty of mine). So I’m doing my small part, and serving known AI agents an infinite maze of garbage. They can fuck right off.

Now, if we’re talking about real AI, that isn’t just a server park of disguised markov chains in a trenchcoat, neural networks that weren’t trained on stolen data, that’s a whole different story.

Our twins jumping on my back. Unlike an alarm, I can’t turn them off and go back to sleep.

NixOS?

algernon ducks and runs, fast

Invent a time machine. Go back in time. Study.

Failing that, learn from your mistakes, and next time… well… study.

Does the target layer (the number layer) have to be a layer number greater than the starting layer? Number layer is layer 4, and QWERTY is 9 - do I need to move 4 to 10? Is there some other, common, issue I’m encountering?

Yes, you’ll need to move the number layer, to have a higher index than the QWERTY layer. In QMK, layers are index-ordered (see the docs here), no matter the order you activate them. If you activate layer 9 (qwerty) and layer 4 (numpad), then even if you activated layer 4 later, it will still be below layer 9. So any key that is not transparent on 9, will be looked up from 9. Only transparent keys will be looked up from layers below.

Lie to myself, and chug another cup of coffee.

In our kids’ elementary school, the rule at the start of year was that kids tell the teacher they have to go, then they simply go. Notifying the teacher is mandatory, 'cos they are responsible for the kids, they need to know where they are.

This was slightly changed since, because of bullies. While the vast majority of kids can go to the bathroom whenever they want, bullies don’t: they can only go alone, or supervised. So if there’s anyone else out, from any class, they have to wait. If it is urgent, a teacher or another adult will go with them, and stand by the door, close enough to intervene if need be.

My bank app does not function under Graphene, because my bank is doing anything in its power to force using a stock Android. I have friends, who use the same bank, and while the bank app works under Graphene from time to time, it is broken often enough to render it unusable.

But it doesn’t matter, because Graphene does not support my phone anyway. As I wrote: most alternative operating systems for phones support only a very limited set of phones. Mine’s not one of them.

I did that, it did not make my phone experience any better.

On desktop: Linux since late 1996. It is the only operating system that I can perfectly tune to adhere to my - often weird - ideas, and can run all the software I need. I’m a developer, mostly working on free and open source software, so Linux is right there to assist me with that. When I play games, I play them through Wine/Proton, have been since I started gaming on Linux some two decades ago. If a game does not work under Wine/Proton, that’s simply not a game I will be playing.

For portable gaming, I have a Steam Deck. Surprisingly, that also runs Linux.

My phone is running stock Android, and I hate it, because the way I function, and how Android imagines I would are not compatible, and the system does not let me bend it to my will, there isn’t enough flexibility built in. Like… I can’t uninstall a bunch of applications I’m never going to use, because my phone came preinstalled with it, and they’re not removable, unless I jailbreak it. Unfortunately, I can’t jailbreak it, because then my bank’s application would stop working. Which would be fine, since I don’t do banking on the phone. Except the application is required for mandatory 2FA. FML.

Thankfully, I can go days without touching my phone, so I can live with it being a piece of crap.

(The rest of my family is also on Linux: both parents, wife, and eventually the kids too.)

What is stopping someone; say the FSF or some other group championing libre software from coming up with their own web engine completely different from the incumbent engines?

Building a browser engine is hard, especially when the target is moving at a rapid pace, and that target is controlled by Google. Like it or not, the web as it is today, is pretty much driven by Google (and to a lesser extent by Apple and Microsoft) these days. They can throw infinite resources into developing the browser engine and the browser itself. The closest competitor we have today is likely Servo, and they scrape by on pennies.

Developing something from scratch, with even less funding and expertise than Servo is a non-starter. It’s not going to happen. Sure, sure, there’s LadyBird and some other independent efforts, but I very highly doubt they’ll ever catch up to the three major engines.

To develop and maintain a browser, you need people, and they need to be paid. Paying open source developers is… quite a big problem in and of itself, even for things considerably easier and smaller in scale than a web browser.

surely if Web Devs tell them to go pound sand, or intentionally break the site when using Google Chrome, and put a message saying, “Go to Firefox / Safari for a better experience”, that will make Google backtrack.

They would not, because for every developer who would do this, there’s 100 who would not, because their livelihood depends on people with Google browsers being able to use their stuff. Google is in a position of power here: they are the #1 search engine, they are the #1 browser, they’re pretty well positioned on the mobile phone market too. The vast majority of businesses (companies or individuals, doesn’t matter) simply can’t afford to go against Google.

If the vast majority would, then yeah, Google would backtrack. But that would require a coordinated effort, from the vast majority of the internet. Likely multiple months of protest. That’s not going to happen, people can’t afford it.

If I’m working for someone else (company or otherwise), I’ll write comments and docs in whatever language I can speak that they want me to (which pretty much means I write comments in English, because I rarely work for Hungarian companies nowadays, and even the ones I did work for preferred English, and these are the only two human languages I can write :().

When working on my own projects, it is always English, because Hungarian doesn’t have good translations for many of the technical terms, so half my comments would be English borrowed words anyway. Might aswell write the rest in English too. Also makes it easier for others to chime in, because there are a whole lot more people speaking English than Hungarian.

It was harder in the beginning, when my command of the English language was far worse, but even then, half-Hungarian/Half-English comments just looked weird, and more jarring than full English, even if that English was kinda bad.

A free account is an easy way to test out the platform, give it a test ride, see if it works for you. If it does, you can pay for a Pro (or Team) subscription, and you get to use your own domain, and keep all the posts you already made on the free account, with all their comments and replies and whatnots.

Or, if it works out, and you want to self host, you can do that, too!

The difference between write.as and medium and other enshittified things, though, is that write.as is not VC funded, and Matt has no interest in making an “exit”. Even if there are things I disagree on with him (eg, CLAs), I trust Matt to not enshittify write.as anytime soon. He’s been running things for almost a decade now, remarkably well.

It is pretty darn trivial to turn those env vars into a config.ini. But if you don’t want to, my writefreely-docker has you covered. It has been used in production for a couple of hundred writefreely blogs over the past few years.

Possibly. But if you - say - use a programming language that allows unicode identifiers, you can encode such emojis into the code, and if the model strips them out, they’ll get absolute garbage to train on.

( ͜ₒ ㅅ ͜ ₒ)ლ(´ڡ`ლ)

I think that comes pretty close. Seeing as LLMs seem to avoid the topic of sex and female presenting nipples, I doubt they’d be able to recognise this picture, and thus, it might be a decent way to poison their training set. Sex talk and cursing should also drive a scraper away quickly, but… horny emoji art? That might just get through and poison the training set.

At least if I understood the question correctly, and the goal is to scew with an ML trying to scrape and learn.

Yeah. But I’m also using a keyboard layout where frequently used keys aren’t on my pinky, and a keyboard where modifiers are on my thumb cluster, rather than on my pinky.

It’s not. It just doesn’t get enough hits for that 86k to matter. Fun fact: most AI crawlers hit /robots.txt first, they get served a bee movie script, fail to interpret it, and leave, without crawling further. If I’d let them crawl the entire site, that’d result in about two megabytes of traffic. By serving a 86kb file that doesn’t pass as robots.txt and has no links, I actually save bandwidth. Not on a single request, but by preventing a hundred others.

I don’t think serving 86 kilobytes to AI crawlers will make any difference in my bandwidth use :)

That would result in those fediverse servers theoretically requesting 333333 * 114MB = ~38Gigabyte/s.

On the other hand, if the site linked would not serve garbage, and would fit like 1Mb like a normal site, then this would be only ~325mb/s, and while that’s still high, it’s not the end of the world. If it’s a site that actually puts effort into being optimized, and a request fits in ~300kb (still a lot, in my book, for what is essentially a preview, with only tiny parts of the actual content loaded), then we’re looking at 95mb/s.

If said site puts effort into making their previews reasonable, and serve ~30kb, then that’s 9mb/s. It’s 3190 in the Year of Our Lady Discord. A potato can serve that.