Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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  • 36 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • Interesting. A quick search around finds someone confusing a bot into selling them a Chevy Tahoe for $1 at the end of last year.

    Can’t tell whether that one went to court. I can see an argument that a reasonable person ought to think that something was wrong with the bot or the deal, especially since they deliberately confused the bot, making a strong case in favour of the dealership.

    Now, if they’d haggled it down to half price without being quite so obvious, that might have made an interesting court case.


  • NTFS file reading and writing is reasonably well supported under Linux, though exFAT or native filesystems are preferable. Actually finding software that will understand your files is one level removed, and getting equivalent or even the same software running is another level still. e.g. reading MS Office documents - LibreOffice is pretty good at that. For games, Steam and Proton have a lot of that covered.

    If all you do is on websites, most if not all of the usual web browsers are available and work indistinguishably.

    That said, I will leave you with these three words: Backups. Backups. Backups.


  • This has already been tried in at least one court.

    There was that story a while back about the guy who was told by an airline’s AI help-desk bot that he would get a ticket refund if turned out he was unable to fly, only for the airline to say they had no such policy when he came to claim.

    He had screenshots and said he wouldn’t have bought the tickets in the first place if he had been told the correct policy. The AI basically hallucinated a policy, and the airline was ultimately found liable. Guy got his refund.

    And the airline took down the bot.


  • I think they thought they could be the “true Tesla” to rival the “Edison” thief or mangler of ideas that the company named Tesla is or, at least appears to be*.

    Ironically, that seems to have been the only truly good idea they’ve had.

    * For legal reasons this is a hypothetical opinion I believe, in some form, might have belonged to the founder(s) of Nikola Motor, and says nothing of my own disappointment opinion.




  • The secret to Mastodon is to follow hashtags, not people. (It took a while for that feature to mature, which made that difficult earlier on.)

    You can follow people too, but with the population there being lower, it generally makes more sense to follow a topic and hide accounts you don’t want to see.

    Caveat: I don’t spend a lot of time on microblogging platforms, Mastodon or otherwise. The above knowledge might be stale, but used present tense to not give the impression the platform is dead.










  • One way to fight back is to try to get the video ID of the advertisement from the debug info, go to the video directly and leave a dissatisfied comment. This will work until they hide that ID anyway. Or the advertiser turns off comments. At that point we’re left with sending our disapproval in other public forums, preferably the more public the better.

    “Your ad was shown to me on a pause screen where I don’t want to see ads. As such I will ensure that I do not purchase your products for the foreseeable future and that I will recommend that friends and relatives do the same. Thank you for participating in YouTube customer feedback.”


  • There was that one bash.org quote where a script kiddie was given 127.0.0.1 as part of an “oh yeah I dare you” taunt after he said he could hack anyone, and he fell for it hook line and sinker. He was posting things like “Hahaha your K drive is being deleted! Now your H drive! [connection reset by peer]” and right after that the challenger was like “I don’t even have a K drive.”

    (RIP bash.org though. I would have tried to link it otherwise)