I scolled around the “ludwell institute” a bit for fun. Seems like a pretty professional opinion piece/social media content operation run by one person as far as I can tell. I read one article, where they lionized a jailed BitCoin Mixer developer. Another one seems to be hyped for Ethereum for some reason.

Seems like pretty unreflected “I make money by having this opinion” stuff. They lead with reasonable stuff about using privacy-respecting settings or tools, but the ultimate solution seems to be becoming OpSec paranoid and using Tor and Crypto.

Checks out.

I am a dad who makes that sound and also use debian.

I was looking into pepping up my CV and was poking around the 2024 CCC style guide when this abomination hit my retinas:

Use the provided LUTs to tint your images in the predefined scheme. You can load them with your graphics software of choice. Ask your friendly AI overlord if you don’t know how.

After being provided with such reproducible instructions, I was of course poking around blog posts for half an hour to finagle this thing. Adding insult to injury: poking around the LUT files shows they were made by Affinity Studio (a freeware pumped out by Canva) instead of the true scotsman’s choice: the G’MIC command line tool! (In fairness, there doesn’t seem to be a FOSS option with a usable GUI for this task. The G’MIC GIMP plugin is sort of okay, but it can’t parse this particular file.)

Wow, the first project to have found a use case for cryptocurrency!

Just kidding. This is trash. I don’t care about fancy privacy features if the backend is tied to the Ethereum scam machine. Use Signal or Matrix.

I think it’s great that you use privacy-enabling tech, and developing these is valuable in my eyes. But nothing about your setup screams “mass adoption” to me. I’ll spare everyone the mobile OS adoption charts, and browser adoption isn’t looking better.

You just can’t put out an on-par mobile service nowadays without an app in Play and Apple’s store. I don’t like it, but it is what it is.

This is a non-argument, even though it made it onto Wikipedia. A mass-adopted Taler-based payment system would also require mobile support, which would be gatekept by Google/Apple.

Breaking oligopolist control over the mobile ecosystem is a separate battle and applies to both Wero & Taler.

That’s not to say that Wero couldn’t do more in this regard, e.g. publish to F-Droid.

bro, tits, or ass?

I think I’m with Haunted’s intuition in that I don’t really buy code generation. (As in automatic code generation.) My understanding was you build a thing that takes some config and poops out code that does certain behaviour. But could you not build a thing instead, that does the behaviour directly?

I know people who worked on a system like that, and maybe there’s niches where it makes sense. Just seems like it was a SW architecture fad 20 years ago, and some systems are locked into that know. It doesn’t seem like the pinnacle of engineering to me.

(Those are my 2 reference points, if I’m ignorant of some cool org let me know.)

The era of useful Silicon Valley Non-Profits seems to be fizzling out. I wonder how long Signal is going to hold out…

loopback interfaces to nowhere

Wendy’s automated AI order-taker is still in its experimental phase and has encountered an error. Please hold for a human attendant…

Dat’s a raw vein of untapped soyjak potential right there!

I heard the same complaint from leftist metal fans.

Recently my research lead recounted a meeting among the senior people, where they hammered out a bunch of project pitches. Some of the wording was still a little rough, but they were going to pass it all through DeepL anyway, to make it read good. Also everyone’s bad at spellling these days, since you got a thing that autocompletes for you, right? They were proud they remembered how to spell “continuous”.

Sure, everyone has days they can’t word good, but this starts sounding like worrying de-skilling. These people spend a good portion of their paid time working on and arguing over wording.

I think I heard a good analogy for this in Well There’s Your Problem #164.

One topic of the episode was how people didn’t really understand how boilers worked, from a thermal mechanics point if view. Still steam power was widely used (e.g. on river boats), but much of the engineering was guesswork or based on patently false assumptions with sometimes disastrous effects.

Fresh from the presses: OpenAI loses song lyrics copyright case in German court

GEMA (weird german authors’ rights management organisation) is suing OpenAI over replication of song lyrics among other stuff, seeking a license deal. Judge rules that whatever the fuck OpenAI does behind the scenes is irrelevant, if it can replicate lyrics exactly that’s unlawful replication.

One of GEMA’s lawyers expects the case to be groundbreaking in europe, since the applicable rules are harmonized.

You flatter me, I haven’t thought about any shit as cool as this in a while.

This sound like cyberpunk setting backstory, to explain how the continental US came to be managed by a fickle alliance between several corporate nuclear powers.

But I’m sure everything’s gonna be fine.

Doesn’t matter if any of those projects come through. The aesthetic of the current US ruling clique is gilded toilet bowls and AI-generated poop videos, and always will be.