Tag: published on gemini
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What if Emails were Multilingual?
Wouldn't it be nice if there were a standard for multilingual emails? Oh wait, there is! Let's see how it works, and whether it's (ever going to be) ready for mainstream use...
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Idea: Meeting Spoofer
Coworkers keep scheduling meetings in periods you've blocked-off for no-meetings, head-down focus time? Maybe you should try scheduling fake meetings in those slots instead and see if they respect those any better! (But perhaps there's a bigger cultural issue you oughta look at instead.)
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Roll Your Own Antispam
The Web contact form of a nonprofit I founded started attracting a huge volume of spam, and conventional tools weren't helping. But a little analysis allowed us to block almost all of it without compromising on accessibility, privacy, or the false-positive rate.
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Easy Socialising
This weekend a bunch of old Abnibbers - folks I spent much of my time with 20 years ago - plus their children and dogs came over to visit, and I was delighted with how relatively-effortless it was to hang out with them despite not seeing some of them in-person for multiple years.
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Shared Email Addresses
I've long mocked people who've opted to use email addresses that they share with their partner, or email addresses that are tied to their geographic location... but it turns out that I've been doing the same thing for years, albeit only with aliases.
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Good Food, Bad Authorisation
(BBC) Good Food has started adding "premium" content for which you have to install their app and pay for a subscription. Except the paywall they've put in place is so weak that I fell through it without even meaning to. It's a great - and relatively harmless - example of how front-end-first development is undermining the development of secure Web systems.
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Vmail via FreshRSS
It's been a while since I shared a recipe for enhancing your FreshRSS experience with some XPath Scraping, so I guess it's that time again! Today I'm fetching issues of Vmail, vole.wtf's community-driven newsletter.
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A Pressure Cooker for Tea
I'm told that black tea brewed at 90℃ is bad, but brewed at 100℃ is good. What if we built a specialised pressure cooker that released tea into superheated water at, say, 110℃? Could that be... even better?
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Ranking Every Elevator in the Myst Series
Part of the joy of the collaborative Internet is that people can share their passion. Today's example comes from this YouTuber who's made an hour long video demonstrating and ranking the 35 elevators in the first five games in the Myst series.
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Humans invented Wikipedia, which made accessing information highly-convenient, at the risk of questions about its authenticity1.
Then humans invented GPTs, which made accessing information even more-convenient2 at the expense of introducing hallucinations that can be even harder to verify and check.
Is humanity's long-term plan to invent something that spews complete nonsense that's simultaneously impossible to conclusively deny?3
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Shonky MSPaint-grade graph showing ease of access increasing as ease of verification decreases, with a trend line going through Wikipedia (2001) through ChatGPT (2022) to an unknown future in 2043.
Footnotes
1 I'm well aware that in many subject areas Wikipedia routinely outranks many other sources for accuracy. But the point remains, because you've no idea what the bias of
randomuser123is; even if you check the sources they cite, you don't know what sources they omitted to include. I love Wikipedia, but I can't deny its weaknesses.2 Sure, ChatGPT and friends aren't always more-convenient. But if you need to summarise information from several sources, you might find them a more-suitable tool than those which came before. Why do I feel the need to add so many footnotes to what should have been a throwaway comment?
3 Actually, now I think about it, I'm confident that I can name some politicians who are ahead of the machines, for now.
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Special Roads
Today I learned why some British roads have seemingly-unnecessary speed limit signs, e.g. "70" signs on something that appears to be a motorway.
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Somewhat-Effective Spam Filters
I've tried a variety of unusual anti-spam solutions. Here's how they worked out for me.
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Framing Device
This weekend I repaired an ill-fitting door, which I learned to do by watching my grandfather, over thirty years ago.
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Don't Ask, Don't Teach
It looks like the Tories want to ban teachers from talking about gender identity to children of any age. What is this, 1987 again?
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A completely plaintext WordPress Theme
Terence Eden took my idea for a completely plain text blog, ran with it, and just kept running. Now it's a WordPress theme!