@prologic@twtxt.net It really is cringeworthy

@prologic@twtxt.net Horseshit hype:

• AI that we have today cannot think–there is no cognitive capacity
  
• AI that we have today cannot be interviewed–“inter” “viewing” is two minds interacting, but AI of today has no mind, which means this is a puppet show
  
• AI today is not free–it’s a tool, a machine, hardly different from a hammer. It does what a human directs it to do and has no drives, desires, or autonomy. What you’re seeing here is a fancy Mechnical Turk
  

This shit is probably paid for by AI companies who desperately want us to think of the AI as far more capable than it actually is, because that juices sales and gives them a way to argue they aren’t responsible for any harms it causes.

@jmjl@tilde.green I’m sorry that I’m not super knowledgeable about alternatives to jmp.chat but I’ll tell you what I know.

You’re probably right about jmp.chat not working for you, at least as it is now. You can only get US and Canadian phone numbers through it last time I checked, so if you’re not in either of those countries you’d be making international calls all the time and people who wanted to call you would be making international calls too.

I’ve seen people talk about using SIP as an intermediary: you can bridge SIP-to-XMPP, and bridge SIP-to-PSTN (PSTN = “packet switched telephone network”, meaning normal telephone). You can skip the SIP-to-XMPP side if you’re comfortable using a SIP client. I don’t know very much about SIP or PSTN so I am not sure what to recommend, but perhaps this helps your search queries.

There are a fair number of services like TextNow that let you sign up for a real telephone number that you can then use via their app (I wouldn’t use TextNow–they had tons of spyware in their app). I don’t know if that kind of service works for you but if it does perhaps you’d be able to find one of them that isn’t horrible. This page (https://alternativeto.net/software/jmp-chat/) has a bunch of alternatives; I can’t vouch for any of them but maybe it’s a starting point if you want to go this route.

Good luck!

@mckinley@twtxt.net Yes, I’m still with jmp.chat, and still very happy with them overall. Their beta period ended and their pricing increased a bit, so that’s worth a bit of consideration. I also managed to get one of their eSIMs. I’m slightly less happy with that aspect of their service, though they seem to be actively working on improving it and I knew in advance this was an early beta kind of thing and likely to have issues.

The only unreliability with calls that I’ve noticed was traceable to the unreliability of my own internet connection. I’ve confused incoming calls by simultaneously making and taking calls from the computer and the phone, but I think it’s understandable that problems might arise and that’s not a real use case for me. Once or twice I did not receive a text transcription of a voice mail, but the support is usually quick to address things like that.

I host my own XMPP server and have for a good decade now, and that’s what I use with jmp.chat. I can’t speak to the quality of their hosting options.

Group texting works fine for me if one of the other parties initiates the group text. I haven’t tried to initiate my own group text in well over a year; last time I did, it didn’t work. That may or may not be a problem for you, and it may or may not have been fixed by now. Worth investigating more if it’s important. I should also say I’ve only ever used group texts with 3 participants, and can’t speak to what happens if there are more nor whether there are upper limits.

Group texts don’t use MUC. Rather, they use a special syntax in the JID, something like “+1XXX,+1YYY,…,+1ZZZ@cheogram.com”, where the + and , are required, the XXX, YYY, through ZZZ are the phone numbers (no dashes or other special chars just digits), and the @cheogram.com at the end is required.

I recommend the cheogram app if you’re on android. It has a lot of nice features on top of the Conversations base. I use gajim on my (linux) computer and it works well with jmp.chat.

I’m happy to answer other questions if you have them!

Ugh, ffs–the datasette project just added #ChatGPT garbage. Another seemingly nice piece of software and project that I need to stop using.

I guess I can be thankful they self-identify.

@prologic@twtxt.net Invidious might satisfy these requirements: https://invidious.io

It’s worth noting, though, that Youtube is right now in the process of locking itself down and it might not be long before all third-party frontends stop working. Similar to what twitter and reddit are doing.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net No, Google does not predict this. “Google AI” has been self-promoting like this for decades. Remember when they used to brag that they could predict the onset of flu season weeks before it started? That silently went away because they got it badly wrong many times and people caught on to how bad their “predictions” actually were.

They can’t stop themselves. Anything about AI coming out of big tech companies these days is marketing, not real, and certainly not science.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net because of course they have.

Emily Bender, a computational linguistic and excellent critic of this generative AI nonsense, uses an analogy of an oil spill to characterize what is happening as a result of generative AI. It’s polluting the world with false information, false images, false “academic” articles, false books. The companies that create this stuff are not cleaning up their misinformation spill; they’re letting the mess spread all over. It’s being used to commit crimes, and that’ll only get worse. Just like an out of control oil spill will destroy entire ecosystems.

Keyword: Decentralization - Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure

Figured you’d be interested in this @prologic@twtxt.net

@Phys_org@feeds.twtxt.net oh fuck off

@xuu@txt.sour.is “tiny” 😆

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net Wow!

here’s my old web page at Brandeis University

Coevolutionary algorithms typically explore domains in which no single evaluation function is present or known. For the purpose of selecting which individuals to maintain and vary, they instead rely on the outcomes of interactions between evolving entities.

I’ve been using variations of that same phrasing for a very long time–I wrote that web page circa 2005 maybe?

Found another example of Google stealing something I’ve written and putting it in a “featured snippet”.

What’s super annoying about this one is that the source is a course page at Tufts University, not the official page of the publication they’re taking this text from. I know the professor who taught that course and I’ve guest lectured for them before on this topic. They put this publication in their course readings, and I guess that’s where Google picked it up.

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, bummer. I was hoping that translating the docker commands to podman syntax would work but it looks like it’s more subtle than that. Thanks for trying!

The weird thing was I wasn’t getting errors like that on my end when I tried it. podman thought the connection was created, and it set it as the default. But I don’t think it was sending anything over the wire. When I have more time to tinker with it maybe I’ll play around and see if I can figure out what’s up.

@prologic@twtxt.net Change your script to this:

#!/bin/sh

set -e

alias docker=podman

if [ ! command -v docker > /dev/null 2>&1 ]; then
  echo "docker not found"
  exit 1
fi

mkdir -p $HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas

## key stuff omitted

# DO NOT DO THIS docker context create cas --docker "host=tcp://cas.run:2376,ca=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/ca.pem,key=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/key.pem,cert=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/cert.pem"
# DO THIS:
podman system connection add "host=tcp://cas.run:2376,ca=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/ca.pem,key=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/key.pem,cert=$HOME/.docker/certs.d/cas/cert.pem"
# DO NOT DO THIS docker context use cas
# DO THIS: 
podman system connection default cas

@prologic@twtxt.net

$ podman --docker                                                                                                                                                        
Error: unknown flag: --docker

Why are you using a flag that podman doesn’t have?

@prologic@twtxt.net podman supports TLS.

@prologic@twtxt.net what do you mean when you say “Docker API”? There are multiple possible meanings for that. podman conforms to some of Docker’s APIs and it’s unclear to me which one you say it’s not conforming to.

You just have to Google “podman Docker API” and you find stuff like this: https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/podman-rest-api

Podman’s REST API consists of two components:

• A Docker-compatible portion called Compat API
  
• A native portion called Libpod API that provides access to additional features not available in Docker, including pods
  

Or this: https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-system-service.1.html

The REST API provided by podman system service is split into two parts: a compatibility layer offering support for the Docker v1.40 API, and a Podman-native Libpod layer.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t understand what you’re saying. podman works with TLS. It does not have the “–docker” siwtch so you have to remove that and use the exact replacement commands that were in that github comment.

@prologic@twtxt.net My understanding is that podman can talk to the Docker Engine API. It’s just that the commands sometimes have different names in the podmanverse. I think–never used those features.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t get your objection. dockerd is 96M and has to run all the time. You can’t use docker without it running, so you have to count both. docker + dockerd is 131M, which is over 3x the size of podman. Plus you have this daemon running all the time, which eats system resources podman doesn’t use, and docker fucks with your network configuration right on install, which podman doesn’t do unless you tell it to.

That’s way fat as far as I’m concerned.

As far as corporate goes, podman is free and open source software, the end. docker is a company with a pricing model. It was founded as a startup, which suggests to me that, like almost all startups, they are seeking an exit and if they ever face troubles in generating that exit they’ll throw out all niceties and abuse their users (see Reddit, the drama with spyware in Audacity, 10,000 other examples). Sure you can use it free for many purposes, and the container bits are open source, but that doesn’t change that it’s always been a corporate entity, that they can change their policies at any time, that they can spy on you if they want, etc etc etc.

That’s way too corporate as far as I’m concerned.

I mean, all of this might not matter to you, and that’s fine! Nothing wrong with that. But you can’t have an alternate reality–these things I said are just facts. You can find them on Wikipedia or docker.com for that matter.

@prologic@twtxt.net I had a feeling my container was not running remotely. It was too crisp.

podman is definitely capable of it. I’ve never used those features though so I’d have to play around with it awhile to understand how it works and then maybe I’d have a better idea of whether it’s possible to get it to work with cas.run.

There’s a podman-specific way of allowing remote container execution that wouldn’t be too hard to support alongside docker if you wanted to go that route. Personally I don’t use docker–too fat, too corporate. podman is lightweight and does virtually everything I’d want to use docker to do.

@prologic@twtxt.net @jmjl@tilde.green
It looks like there’s a podman issue for adding the context subcommand that docker has. Currently podman does not have this subcommand, although this comment has a translation to podman commands that are similar-ish.

It looks like that’s all you need to do to support podman right now! Though I’m not 100% sure the containers I tried really are running remotely. Details below.

I manually edited the shell script that cas.run add returns, changing all the docker commands to podman commands. Specifically, I put alias docker=podman at the top so the check for docker would pass, and then I replaced the last two lines of the script with these:

podman system connection add cas  "host=tcp://cas.run..."
podman system connection default cas

(that … after cas.run is a bunch of connection-specific stuff)

I ran the script and it exited with no output. It did create a connection named “cas”, and made that the default. I’m not super steeped in how podman works but I believe that’s what you need to do to get podman to run containers remotely.

I ran some containers using podman and I think they are running remotely but I don’t know the right juju to verify. It looks right though!

This means you could probably make minor modifications to the generated shell script to support podman. Maybe when the check for docker fails, check for podman, and then later in the script use the podman equivalents to the docker context commands.

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, now I get this:

$ ssh -p 2222 -i PRIVATE_GITHUB_KEY GITHUB_USERNAME@cas.run add | sh
sh: 135: docker: not found

The quickstart says:

## Quick Start

  ssh -p 2222 cas.run add | sh

so that’s why I tried this command (I had to modify it with my key and username like before)

Edit: 🤦‍♂ and that’s becasue I don’t have docker on this machine. Sorry about that, false alarm.

@prologic@twtxt.net aha, thank you, that got me unjammed.

Turns out I thought I had an SSH key set up in github, but github didn’t agree with me. So, I re-added the key.

I also had to modify the command slightly to:

ssh -p 2222 -i PRIVATE_GITHUB_KEY GITHUB_USERNAME@cas.run help

since I generate app-specific keypairs and need to specify that for ssh and I haven’t configured it to magically choose the key so I have to specify it in the command line.

Anyhow, that did it. Thanks!

hello @coreybag@anthony.buc.ci please post something that demonstrates you’re a human being and not a bot; otherwise I’m afraid I’ll have to delete your account!

@marado@twtxt.net hahaha

@movq@www.uninformativ.de

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net so what is the command to use? I did ssh -p 2222 GITHUB_USERNAME@cas.run help but that gives the same error. There’s something missing here.

@prologic@twtxt.net I do, but you didn’t specify in your twt that you needed to use a github account. I copy pasted the ssh command you posted verbatim!

@prologic@twtxt.net

# ssh -p 2222 cas.run help                                                                                                                                                
The authenticity of host '[cas.run]:2222 ([139.180.180.214]:2222)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is SHA256:i5txciMMbXu2fbB4w/vnElNSpasFcPP9fBp52+Avdbg.
This key is not known by any other names
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])? yes
Warning: Permanently added '[cas.run]:2222' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.
abucci@cas.run: Permission denied (publickey).

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net hello @prologic@twtxt.net here’s another feed that’s spewing multiple copies of the same post. This one above is repeated 8 times. @awesome-scala-weekly@feeds.twtxt.net now has 13 copies of each post every week. This definitely looks like a bug in whatever code is generating these feeds, because the source feeds don’t have multiple copies of the original posts:

• Has 8 copies of the above post: https://feeds.twtxt.net/New_scientist/twtxt.txt
  
• Has only 1 copy of the above post: https://www.newscientist.com/feed/home/
  

I forget whether I filed an issue on this before, but can you tell me where I should do that?

@prologic@twtxt.net the confusion over these words is rampant 🤦‍♂️

@Planet_Jabber_XMPP@feeds.twtxt.net

The benefits of blockchain implementation across multiple sectors are well-documented

WTF are you talking about? The only thing well-documented about “the blockchain” is that it sucks and its primary use case is creating Ponzi schemes.

@prologic@twtxt.net are you trying to reinvent cloud computing?!?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de oof that’s bad

@prologic@twtxt.net hmmm, I might.

@New_scientist@feeds.twtxt.net 😐

Release jq 1.7rc1 · jqlang/jq · GitHub

Renewed activity on jq after five years. This RC looks nice!

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no happy birthday!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @mckinley@twtxt.net I believe the resurgence in availability of municipal WiFi is largely driven by the surveillance capabilities it offers. Every person who has WiFi enabled on their phone can be tracked throughout the city as their phones ping various base stations; a lot of folks aren’t aware of just how much information can be slurped out of a phone that isn’t locked down just from its WiFi pings. I know this happens in Toronto, and I was familiar with a startup in Massachusetts that based its business model on this very concept. I can only assume it’s widespread in the US if not throughout the Western world.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org this is excellent advice that I will almost surely heed!

I have new batteries for it now but I have no motivation to replace them. 😩

@phoronix@feeds.twtxt.net

For those fond of the COBOL programming language

😆

@prologic@twtxt.net I’ll second this–I find it very hard to read too.

The hottest 21 days ever recorded on Earth were the last 21 days.

There are climate scientists saying that this summer will be the coolest summer of the rest of our lives. It won’t get cooler.

They can say that with confidence because Earth’s energy imbalance–the difference between how much energy comes in versus how much is radiated back to space–has been positive since around 2010. Prior to that, the balance would shift negative sometimes, so Earth would radiate a bunch of energy back into space. Not anymore. Earth is an energy sponge now. And net positive incoming energy means temperatures go up.

Climate disaster has been here for awhile, but it’s kicking into high gear now. This will not change until we take drastic action.

@prologic@twtxt.net Well, you can mute or block individual users, and you can mute conversations too. I think the tools for controlling your interactions aren’t so bad (they could definitely be improved ofc). And in my case, I was replying to something this person said, so it wasn’t outrageous for his reply to be pushed to me. Mostly, I was sad to see how quickly the conversation went bad. I thought I was offering something relatively uncontroversial, and actually I was just agreeing with and amplifying something another person had already said.

@prologic@twtxt.net attacking the person, not the idea. It’d be like if you said “yarn is better than mastodon because it isn’t push based” and someone who disagreed with you said “well you think that because you’re an idiot” or something like that.

I’ve only been using snac/the fediverse for a few days and already I’ve had to mute somebody. I know I come on strongly with my opinions sometimes and some people don’t like that, but this person had already started going ad hominem (in my reading of it), and was using what felt to me like sketchy tactics to distract from the point I was trying to make and to shut down conversation. They were doing similar things to other people in the thread so rather than wait for it to get bad for me I just muted them. People get so weirdly defensive so fast when you disagree with something they said online. Not sure I fully understand that.