Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

It's official. I'll be in Europe for 2+ weeks starting in late March, and I'll be in Saarbrücken for #RevisionParty2024!

Flying to Munich, then making my way by train to Stuttgart, Saarbrücken, Paris, and London, then flying to Dublin for a few days before my flight home.

YouTube just hit me with a copyright block on my only pubic video. :(

It was a potato-quality Japanese music video I found on a p2p network that pulled in 90,000 views since I uploaded it 17 years ago.

Sony waited until after they uploaded an official HD version of the same video, so I guess I forgive them.

The track slaps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ20Tgq3jk4

Stability AI just screwed up and published their latest project with an MIT license instead of the proprietary license they wanted. They just tried to pull a switcharoo a day later.

If anyone is interested in teaching a lesson to a company that doesn't respect intellectual property, consider forking their repo before this commit to set the precedent that this is FOSS whether they like it or not: https://github.com/Stability-AI/StableCascade/commit/209a52600f35dfe2a205daef54c0ff4068e86bc7

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.