gausswho

This is a response to a short essay by Wendell Berry which you can read here: http://tipiglen.co.uk/berrynot.html

I welcome this. I don't want anyone to prejudge or train a profile on me based on my starring history. Because my history of starring goes back chronologically and for many years, it's a wider signal than one might realize.

I note that Github's only opt out for a public star list is to 'Make profile private and hide activity', with the description:

"Enabling this will hide your contributions and activity from your GitHub profile and from social features like followers, stars, feeds, leaderboards and releases"

That's a vague set of repercussions. Cleverly worded to discourage.

Feature request: A way of export your star list into a handy json format before you nuke it. I'd like to have this for my own historical record, without having to share it with the public or Microsoft.

I decided to get ahead of this and yesterday made the migration. Or rather I should say, asked GPT 5.5 to. I estimate that I have a fairly complex configuration, and I had some bumps - some were preexisting problems - but ultimately it went pretty smooth. I'm glad we're over the days of binde, bindd, bindl, and other magic-letters-at-end-of-commands, but there are cases were it feels verbose without benefit.

Regard the Supported Devices table, where the last column declares all devices Full (in red). Firmware too chonky for any of them! Oh Claude.

Makes you wonder if there's a strip-joint where they're all licensed therapists, but non-practicing.

Towards the end, he approaches the subject of digital provenance, and muses why it's not a part of our expectations. I find the argument compelling:

If a chatbot appears to be manipulative, mean, weird, or deceptive, what kind of answer do we want when we ask why? Revealing the indispensable antecedent examples from which the bot learned its behavior would provide an explanation: we’d learn that it drew on a particular work of fan fiction, say, or a soap opera. We could react to that output differently, and adjust the inputs of the model to improve it. Why shouldn’t that type of explanation always be available? There may be cases in which provenance shouldn’t be revealed, so as to give priority to privacy—but provenance will usually be more beneficial to individuals and society than an exclusive commitment to privacy would be.

Remember 'View Source'? And how bundling engines eventually made it irrelevant? What if every piece of content had a genuinely accurate and useful View Source?

Skip the Claude Fable 5 $25 video to 1:42. The disembodied Adams' Family hand is on the job.

I can relate to the tilting you're on, but try to consider the good that can come from this age, where such a tool might not have been built otherwise. It's also BSD/GPL license.

As an aside, I've been vibe-cooking for a few months on a personal project that's accomplished something lovely. For me. I sometimes wonder if I should give it away much like this project. But public reactions like yours temper the thought.

Tried this out for a few days. Works surprisingly well. I've yet to make it past the third inning before I'm out.

I've determined it must be fictional (maybe wrong?) given the just-entertaining-enough player names, which set me up into a smile during the lineup introduction.

Snarky lemma: In French, is the trend of things going worse to worse?

PDF of the full decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf

A balanced take. You name several exceptions that don't work seamlessly on Linux. Recognizing that, I'll note:

- Bitwig 5.x (haven't tried the latest 6.x) is working really nicely for me now across several NixOS machines (I'm using BitwigBox so that yabridge smoothes out VST integration). - Le Mans Ultimate is working for me now. It would hang on loading a track until a month or two ago (GE Proton recommended).

Both parties are incentivized for this abuse of consumer ownership. When this deal was arranged, there was plenty of precedent. Sony probably got a better price from Studio Canal by including the provision to mandate removing the films from customer accounts when the contract ended. The studio would be ok with the discount because it would improve leverage with the next customer, to whom it could pitch that their market is larger. No one (or at least no PlayStation customers) currently own their product.

It's AI usage mandates now, but rather than focusing on how the current hot topic has ripped through the business world, often without benefit nor repercussions at leadership, I'd prefer to analyze the higher pattern. We've recently experienced such ripples as the metaverse, blockchain/nft/web3, 'the cloud' (and a minor wave of cloud gaming). There was even a teacup buzz of 'apis', oddly disconnected from the semantic web.

Why do such fever dreams occur at all? Are they getting more prevalent? More damaging? Do they jepaordize the global economy? Should they be regulated in some fashion?

I can't prove my case, but I think it's a symptom of media manipulation/consolidation, the 'fiduciary duty' delusion, and that shareholders can hold the puppet strings tighter than they used to. More and more, they place their sillytown bets and expect the plebs to dance to them.

Further ruminations: https://syndekit.substack.com/p/the-butlerian-jihad-has-begu...

The Dec 2019 bug also hit me (living in NYC). I wasn't mentally myself for three weeks. I'm not even sure I fully recuperated. It was intense, and worse than when I eventually did experience COVID a couple years later.

From what I read at the time, there was a non-COVID flu at this time throughout the east coast. Tests months later did not show I had COVID antibodies. It remains to me a remarkable sickness unlike anything else I've experienced.

Seems application deadline ended a month ago?

It does make me wonder if we're just racing to the day we've got our kyc-blessed phone in a drawer at home at the official address that's already known to carrier. And strap on it the software needed to either forward messages and calls via voip to our real phone, or open a server on it to let us access it from wherever we are to poll for our messages.

Thanks for making this and the others too!

Have you considered building a feature where game data is recorded so that we could then replay them later?

After I discovered my Mac Mini was downloading animated wallpapers until filling up 80Gb of space, then doing it all over again every time I reboot, I decided I'd had enough and installed LuLu firewall and blocked every outbound to apple.com. I don't use any of their services anyway, and some of them approach malware suspicion (keyboard input analytics daemon??)

Syndicated without paywall here: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/chat-is-dead-openai-preps...

I've put OpenWRT on the Flint 2, and I've had issues with connectivity that I don't have with OpenWRT on a Linksys router. I need to disconnect and reconnect every so often. I'd read that this is due to the Mediatek modem not being as well supported, but I'm not sure how to diagnose.

It kinda depends where it's deposited, right? The expected AMOC collapse is fundamentally about salt imbalance.

Fair. I am curious how many folks are able to get root access on their work machines across the software workforce. If you do, what sort of surveillance tech does your IT expect for you to have on there? Are you given special exemption compared to Mac or Windows company machines?

I did find this odd at first too, but then I realized something: it's a pain to maintain a device. Customizing it to the way you like it is not only a waste of time, it's tedious and never ends in an age where defaults are often adversarial to your interests. It's enough work taking care of one pet/kid, you might not want another.

Now I'm a nerd and I went through a realization that I should treat my devices as 'livestock not pets' and went to the trouble of building a NixOS config so that I can have two or three machines that all behave the same. But that's its own labor and still doesn't solve the phone problem. Or the fact your employer won't provision you a Linux with root.

Living by this personal/business separation is probably something most folks would aspire to, but technology as we practice it conspires against them.

By having it in a small window that's always on the screen.

I think this is only true for mobile devices? I'm curious how one would configure Linux to randomize MAC addresses by default.

While a popular refrain, this is not the only reason one might engage in avoidance. Furthermore, even if it is rooted in a pain, not everyone will be motivated optimally by thinking of it as something that must be analyzed and extracted. One can simply be bored without it being a pathology.

I'll contrast with sibling comments. You're correct to raise caution towards fishing Pacific salmon, even in catch and release. Release mortality from one study I've found is about 25-40% https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016578362... It's worse during high water temperatures. They're likely quite fatigued by the time they arrive.

That said, this caution is not always warranted generally. Location, species, and season significantly matter. In healthy ecosystems, there's no harm to the group even if the individual fish might not agree.

Brazenly requiring the abuse of a browser feature's intended use against the user. What an age.

I'd like to hear from someone who worked on WebGL and how they feel about their ambitions being utterly subverted. Remember when the dream was playing games i. the browser?