Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

So Tears for Fears recently released a new album. The album cover is pure AI slop.

I am... disappointed.

Actually, no, this looks like a real effort to come back online. I think I'm just getting different responses from different endpoints on their CDN right now.

Fingers crossed that the collections are coming back today. I have really missed the Archive!

Er, that was short lived. Getting the error page again. At least it's clear that they're trying!

@internetarchive looks like it's bringing its collections back online!

I don't write customer emails with AI because it's easier or better. I do it so that the model they try to replace me with suffers model collapse when trained on my outputs.

#Github is down entirely. That's fun.

We've already had the biggest IT outage ever, and the biggest PII leak ever this year, I guess we're on a roll.

Sitting at a bar and they're playing failarmy in all the TVs. This shit is just "Ow! My Balls!" IRL. Idiocracy was weirdly prophetic about some things.

Behold, an level of #enshittification you never dreamed was possible. A PC Mouse with a subscription fee: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/logitech-has-an-idea-for-a-forever-mouse-thatrequires-a-subscription/

My local grocery store sells "Bruno Bananas". I bought some, and had to do a lot of research before I ate one, because I couldn't find any information about the existence of a "Bruno Banana".

I think they are Burro Bananas, but they are huge. Like softball sized bananas...

Amarok on Linux Mobile with Jellyfin integration would be a fantasy scenario. I have no idea if that is realistic though.

I am actually quite excited about the return of @kde's #Amarok media player. It was my media player of choice in the mid-2000's and made it possible for me to sync my iPod up to the music library on my Linux desktop.

I'm currently a #Strawberry user, but I have always missed Amarok.

3.0.1 (beta) is out now. There's definitely work to be done, but I should consider reading up on KDE's Testing/QA process to see if there's anything I can do to help.

https://blogs.kde.org/2024/06/02/amarok-3.0.1-released/

I want to make a browser extension that changes the word "slammed" in news headlines to crazy hyperbolic things like "brutally disemboweled" or "roundhouse kicked into low earth orbit".

Would make the current state of news media a little bit more entertaining.

Fond memories of the Windows XP days, running through the PCs at Best Buy, opening Windows Media Player, playing "Like Humans Do" by David Byrne which was included with every copy of Windows, cranking the volume all the way up, and fullscreening the visualizer.

Those were excellent days. It's a shame it was before smartphones, because I would probably have a video of this.

Just renewed my Sustainer membership with @calyxinstitute.

I don't know how I would survive without my little uncapped, unthrottled 5G hotspot.

I mostly work from home, and especially as the weather gets nice, it's invaluable to be able to go anywhere with my laptop and still get connected. No need to stare out the window on a sunny day wondering when I can end my day and go outside. I can just do my job at the park.

Say it with me everyone: "Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump"

I honestly didn't think he'd get his ass handed to him this hard. It rules!

Looking to spice my kitchen up.

What's a local (USA) food product that you can't live without, that can be bought online (Nationwide or beyond)?

Mine is "Hot Jawn" hot sauce, made in Central District Seattle, where I live. It's $10 and it goes great on everything: https://www.allthejawns.com/

I am pretty sure that @KEXPMusicBot leverages this same API for what they're doing.

I have already done a little bit of analytics on the data, and found ~600,000 unique tracks. Looks like there's maybe 5% junk data just looking at random samples.

Every play is timestamped, so I suppose I could do some year-by-year breakdowns of what #KEXP played most. I have 2006-2023 fully captured in JSON format.

It is also classified by show, but I haven't figured out the key for the show IDs yet. Could have fun with that data, which also looks to be available via the API.

So I noticed that the "now playing" info on the KEXP website comes from a paginated API endpoint that let's you see previously played songs as well as the currently playing track.

It was kinda neat to poke at it to see how far back I could go. You could just keep rewinding to see all the tracks that aired going pretty far back.

And just how far back was that? 2,650,000 tracks, all the way back to 2005.

I love finding little secret info holes like this. I scraped all that data up to play with.