Technology

I’m pretty much hanging out over there now. Find me here (original) if you have an account. I have spare invites from time to time so if I know you feel free to ask. It’s imperfect. In particular the company leans more rationalist than I’d like, although I think a bunch of trans people and sex workers successfully nudged them towards the left in the first six months after it launched – thanks, y’all! However, it benefits from the scarcity effect; people are less likely to be total throwaway dicks if it’s harder to get a new account. See also Metafilter. ...

I launched a new online campaign this week and with the consent of the players, I recorded the session for later reference. (One of them wrote a great summary, but it’s still nice to have the recording.) My original plan was to use Whisper to get a transcription but it turns out the built in Google Meet captioning system is plenty good enough. I did give Whisper a shot anyhow, and Whisper’s quality was higher, but the thing about Google Meet is that it adds speaker information to the transcriptions which is a huge difference. ...

Nah, I don’t do these on a schedule or anything. James Fallows writes about word processors … in 1982. Paywall, sorry. Really good reminder of what computing used to be like. The Sol-20 he was using was a pretty important machine, historically speaking. Do you interact with other human beings on a regular basis in any way? Read this piece. It’s aimed at engineers but it’s good general advice, which I can summarize as “learn to write well.” You know how you can always find the rough spot on a floor by walking on it barefoot? People notice bad writing, spelling, and grammar even if they don’t know they notice it. ...

Previously… The song coverage is more varied than I’d thought. For example, Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy has all three levels of coverage. “Johnny Strikes Up The Band” has line-by-line lyric tracking, “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” has no lyric tracking, and “Werewolves of London” has syllable-by-syllable lyric tracking. “Werewolves of London” is in the Sing: Classic Rock playlist, for what it’s worth. It seems more and more like the process that generates a Sing-compatible track is either manual, automatic but time-consuming, or costly in terms of licensing. Otherwise surely you’d want every album with a playlist song on it to be fully enabled, to give explorers like me the sense that there’s a ton of coverage?

I am not a karaoke aficionado, for the record; I just like singing loudly to the music of my childhood. So I updated my Apple devices today, as one does, and with the updates came Apple Music Sing. It’s pretty cool; like it says on the tin, for songs it works with, you can turn the vocals way down and the lyric display shows you where you are in the song – down to the syllable – and you can sing along. Nice. ...

New text AI! Let’s try it on some tabletop RPG work. Bold is my prompts; I’ve snipped the polite banter out of most of the AI’s answers. Spoiler: this is way better than the last one I tried. If I repeat the same prompt it gets a little repetitive, but still not bad.

Phew. No big Paxlovid bounce, thankfully. This is what I thought of when I heard about Tesla engineers coming over to validate Twitter code. It’s both true that the author seems pretty savvy and that the culture over at Tesla is focused on velocity over anything. Good times. Let’s get all the Twitter stuff out of the way! Evelyn Douek has smart things to say about Twitter’s regulatory challenges. Not just in the US, not just in the EU – India’s going to be a huge headache. This layoff guide for Twitter employees is worth reading for anyone who’s nervous about their job. Or anyone, really. Use your work laptop in a way which will enable you to execute on those precautions quickly. One billion dollars in infrastructure cuts? This is already working out badly (original). Sympathies to the guy who just went on call for a bunch of systems he doesn’t know. Gergley has a good thread on the problems ahead. Here’s another SRE still employed by Twitter, and he thinks it’s gonna be ugly. Rakyll is a well-respected principal engineer in the reliability biz; she’s pessimistic (original) and thinks people are leaving. Tangentially related: Starlink is inevitably having to throttle bandwidth. Some math: Starlink wants $5K/month for 2 terminals with a total of 350 Mbps download. That’s cheap and cool but the existing mobile solutions can deliver bandwidth in the Gbps range. OK, that’s enough horrified observation of the train wreck. Mastodon is treating me OK so far. ...

Still got covid but thanks to Paxlovid or my natural recuperative energies or something, I’m feeling much better than I did on Tuesday. Let’s see how this goes. The report described severe staffing challenges that included large numbers of unfilled positions on its Site Integrity team, one of three business units responsible for policing misinformation. It also highlighted a lack of language capabilities so severe that many content moderators resorted to Google Translate to fill the gaps. In one of the most startling parts of the report, a head count chart said Site Integrity had just two full-time people working on misinformation in 2021, and four working full-time to counter foreign influence operations from operatives based in places like Iran, Russia and China. ...

It’s reasonably well known that one path to a hospitable online community is charging people a fee to register. See Metafilter for the best case. They charge $5 to register and it cuts way down on drive-by assholes. The less good case is Something Awful, which charges $10 to register and is often a pit. But that’s because they don’t moderate all that hard. (Something Awful is also the only pro wrestling discussion forum I know of where you’ll get raked through the coals for saying things like “Unfortunately abadon as an attractive woman would have a lot more success if her gimmick didn’t involve making herself extremely unattractive”. It’s a pit of contradictions. Anyhow.) ...

awk '/in_reply_to_screen_name/ { print $3 }' tweets.json | sed 's/[","]//g' | sort | uniq -c | sort | grep -v BryantD | tail -20 56 graphxgrrl 57 patrickoduffy 58 jessnevins 59 othergretchen 60 GlobeChadFinn 61 ryantomorrow 65 smakofsky 66 seclectech 69 multiplexer 73 gentlyepigrams 75 rmd1023 76 mgrasso 79 JimHenleyMusic 79 Wolf_six 89 carlrigney 102 _r_o_n_e_ 107 rone_____1 129 emilytheslayer 306 rdonoghue 341 ce_murphy