Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

Exploring music by @gribbles@mastodonmusic.social. Good background music to focus to. Enjoying the tracks "What are the media" and "Jetty".

Just followed every artist on the @radiofreefedi rotational. Looking forward to discovering lots of new music.

I really hate Microsoft products. Thankfully I only have to deal with them at work, and not all the time.

Answer: It discreetly opens a "create share link" dialog in another part of the program (where I can't see it), and DOES NOT COPY ANYTHING TO THE CLIPBOARD.

To a casual user, it appears successful though.

And that's how I pasted a malicous spam link I was reporting earlier into a Teams chat when I was trying to share a SharePoint file from another chat...

You try to share a link to a SharePoint item from a Teams chat, and there's this button. Take a guess what it does. Remember, this is a Microsoft product.

Question for everyone who uses cutesy misspelled words and text art in your alt tags: do you know what alt tags are for?

Because people with screen readers don't want to hear the sounds that "chooooooooooonker" or ":-(" make.

Found the article. Seems like I was off on the cost ($64k, not six-figures), but here's the whole thing if you want to die inside: https://cointelegraph.com/news/mysterious-bitcoiner-spends-64k-inscribe-9mb-of-data-on-bitcoin

There is something so incredibly funny to me about watching a journalist that specializes in Cryptocurrency encountering a 9MB blob of encrypted data, and marveling over the fact that a language model couldn't magically break the cypher.

And then to tell the world that this is how he tried to decrypt data, with zero awareness that they're saying something devastatingly stupid to anyone who actually understands the topic.

And cryptography is literally the backbone of the tech he covers...

Cryptocurrency people are so funny. Recently someone with deep pockets spent six-figures embedding 9MB of encrypted data into the BTC blockchain.

I read a write-up about it one some website dedicated to cryptocurrency, and the author was especially impressed with the fact that encrypted data cannot be decrypted without a key. He noted that "not even ChatGPT could decrypt it".

Of course Cryptocurrency people don't understand cryptography... That's why they buy pretend internet money.

Doing a basic text search of the Epstein docs, and Trump's name appears 112 times, while Clinton's name appears 378 times.

Though, I don't think there's much to compare here, I wouldn't want my name to appear even once imho.

I found the best medical author on the Kindle store.

The only thing that would make it perfect is a Linux client. The Windows/Mac Clients are just electron Apps, so there are third-party wrappers, but an official release would be excellent.

I switched from Spotify to Deezer a little over a year ago, largely because Spotify wasn't adequately moderating disinformation and hate speech in it's hosted Podcasts, but if anything has made me love Deezer it is that I can upload my own MP3s and stream them everywhere.

I never have any issues with Deezer not having something that Spotify has, it's just nice being able to dump all my obscure tracks into one service so I can play whatever I want and make playlists using all of it.

People have largely forgotten how awesome diagonal scanlines used to look on a CRT monitor. All my Internet friends and I used to put a layer of scanlines on our forum singatures and pfps for that extra high-tech look back in the 2000's.

Looks terrible on a modern monitor. It just worked on a CRT.