Discussion
@bonzoesc @GroupNebula563 apple should come out with one of those e-bikes that luxury brands shit out where all the parts are proprietary, the motor’s extremely weak, the battery is way too small, the mechanical parts are all entry-level Shimano (nothing wrong with this but the bike’s like $11k), and there’s a bunch of gimmick features designed by someone who’s never ridden a bicycle before
@wdormann That's right. Plenty of solid alternatives.
@mttaggart @wdormann some vendors bury their documentation in ONLY the LLM, it’s super frustrating and I can only believe it’s to pump their stats of customer adoption.
Claude Code (bear with me) has all these dumb little gewgaws & animations & "sorta slick, sorta annoying" TUI behaviors – none of this shit is germane to its use case.
However! The overall effect seems precisely like the AV presentation of casino games - their barrage of flashing lights, noises, and music. It tickles your lizard hindbrain, a constant pitter-patter of dopamine hits.
Those are literally designed to be attention-grabbing, focus-keeping & habit-forming, by (evil) psychologists. One imagines the same is true with chatbot UIs.
(Thoughts brought to you by my daily "what inane, mostly metatextual questions can I ask Claude Code so I don't get fired for zero usage statistics" meditation. Today's has been investigating if you can turn any of this shit off. Answer: of course not.)
Considering learning SAS just so I can put it on my CV for statistical programming jobs
Looking into it, I think I'm going to get this certification:
It's $180 USD for the exam, but there's a LOT of jobs that require SAS
If you work in pharma or biostats or another aspect of clinical trialling and you have thoughts about this before I get too deep, let me know!
Don't reply to tell me about 
, or to tell me what an AI or your Google search result said
Feels like some gnubro telling me about the 4 freedoms.
@zzt apple commentators are the epitome of access bloggers, if they don't say everything is great suddenly they quit getting loaner iphones
To hasten the process I’m having a strawberry shortcake ice cream bar
@farah Is cheesecake up next?
@zzt Perv pods. A good way to tank the brand image of a product (AirPods) that everyone thought looked stupid at first, but that has become a quite enormous success for Apple, pretty close to the level of the iPhone (even though it’s never mentioned in the same breath).
@TorontoWill @zzt airpods do $20b revenue on their own, jawdroppingly successful
So you think you have solved your age verification problem with zero-knowledge proofs... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/zkps-arent-age-verification-silver-bullets
@evacide "ZKP" aaah you mean Single Source of All Knowledge
or Single Point of Failure
or High Value Target
or Firewall of China as a Service
or...
Grand Jury Declines to Indict Man Caught on Camera Destroying Flock Pole
https://futurism.com/future-society/grand-jury-ohio-flock-alpr-surveillance-felony-legal?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into Futurism @futurism-Futurism
Some of my favorites:
- @closedcaptionsbot can be both fun in its out-of-context randomness, and also ominous
- @256 as a reminder of simpler times
- @AltTextHealthCheck is very informative, and I actually used it to publish a few reports about the fediverse: https://stefanbohacek.com/tag/alt-text-health-check-report/
- @bbcmicrobot is just neat
And @year_progress is a classic, everyone follows that one.
@adriano @cliffle @zarfeblong @cstross Perhaps we will be so lucky as to see a certain manuscript scanned by Big River first...
@farah I watched @TheBreadmonkey ’s video before seeing your post and so I had a very different reaction to this.
I'm here already, you don't need to remind me of what big mistake that is.
“It is completely unsurprising that people are building apps to fight back against Meta glasses and other surreptitious public recording,” EFF’s @cooperq told @arstechnica. Many people “have a deep revulsion to being recorded without their consent, which is understandable.” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/meta-ai-glasses-may-get-creepier-and-apps-that-detect-them-arent-perfect/
Let's hope Flock and Meta aren't in bed together.
@becomethewaifu that is true! the use case for the Facebook glasses is literally “you can upload hidden camera footage of women you’re harassing to your incel Instagram channel” and they’re not even subtle about that in the marketing
I feel like there’s still a fair bit of social revulsion in the ear cameras being surveillance devices too, and they’re supposedly planning both active and passive modes for the things. I can’t imagine using an over-loud voice command to take a picture or asking siri to recall a moment the other person thought was private will go over well in most circumstances, but my tolerance for this kind of crap is lower than most people’s.
> The other plan that stays the same as my last report on the AirPods with Cameras: the lenses are for AI and visual intelligence only. They cannot take pictures or record video, so people need not be worried.
you need not be worried, they just actively and passively take photos you can’t see and upload them to a cloud that the company that can’t do anonymous email or a working VPN says is secure
and then they turn those photos into a gigantic set of data about exactly what you’re doing at all times
that’s the product
@StefanEJones @chu A transparent wall in a bus shelter could do it, but I’m leaning on the entire image being AI-generated as a way of making fun of slop. 😉
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