I'm obsessed with this terminal emulator
Never thought I’d feel so strongly about a terminal app but I’ve been obsessed with Warp Terminal for the last week. It has built in AI so you can use natural language when you don’t know where to go next. I wish they had this kind of thing circa 2009 when I installed Ubuntu on my old HP Pavilion.
I’ve spent so many nights trying to install some obscure program, screwing something up and ultimately installing dependencies for dependencies for dependencies and breaking stuff to the point where I throw in the towel. Just used it a little bit ago to help me figure out how to get VS Code running on Wayland.
On the free account you get 100 queries per month, which isn’t a heck of a lot but if you go easy on them they can really bail you out when you need it. Lots of extra features on top of that, especially for coding and collaboration. I’m just lazy and like having the option to let AI do the work when I’m in over my head with everyday Linux stuff. Worth checking out if you spend a lot of time on the command line. I don’t think I need yet another subscription just for a terminal emulator but it’s so shiny and new and fancy 🤩
The majority of news influencers are conservative men, study finds
This morning, The Pew Research Center…published a deep 122 page report that found that the news influencer landscape skews male and leans disproportionately conservative, creating a concerning imbalance in our online news landscape that could ultimately have profound political consequences.
I find the whole influencer thing pretty wack to begin with but we do need more liberals in the space. And women. We need fucking crazy leftist conspiracy theorists actually. Clearly there’s a market for it.
“The older I get the more conservative I get” aka switched from a rapid release distro to Debian with Firefox ESR. It’s all so stable 🥲
Scientists Discover ‘Immortal’ Marine Creature That Can ‘Time Travel’
I’ve been a broken record on the sea aliens lately but this is pretty cool, and actually real.
I like my cozy little echo chamber
I try to live in an echo chamber. I’m not into debates. I’m not a fan of confrontation at all, really. Some people thrive on it, I shut down and retreat into a sweaty shell.
When I’m reading an article or watching the news, while I do follow a lot of centrist sources, I try to stick with the farthest left publications I can find. I’m open to change; like if someone comes in and blows me away with mountains of evidence or a better take on something we disagreed on, I have no problem admitting I was wrong. I can change my perspective if it makes sense.
The US is a silly place. People will happily vote into office a guy who’s a convicted felon, rapist and white nationalist but all of that’s just fake news. Then a few conspiracy theorists who used to work for the government go in front of congress with no tangible evidence of anything and suddenly the entire TikTok and Twitter userbase is convinced aliens have been living in our oceans all along.
The Onion, InfoWars shenanigans
One [bid] was from the Jones-affiliated First United American Companies, which offered $3.5 million, the trustee revealed in court Thursday. The other, from The Onion, was lower but contained an incentive by some of the Sandy Hook families to forgo a portion of the sale proceeds and give it to other Jones’ creditors, the trustee, Christopher Murray, said.
[Judge Lopez’s] 20-page order on the sale procedures in September…gave broad authority to Murray to conduct the sale, including the power to reject any bid, no matter how high, that was “contrary to the best interests” of Jones, his company and their creditors.
Maybe I’m just an idiot but isn’t the point of this to liquidate his assets and pay the Sandy Hook families for damages? I get the part about the creditors but who gives a shit about Alex Jones or his company’s best interests? He’s showed absolutely no remorse for any of the misinformation he spread that got him here. He literally talks shit about the entire situation any chance he gets, as if he’s the victim and the families are just obsessed with him for no reason.
Murray had Infowars' website and studio shut down Thursday as he began the process of securing assets, a lawyer for the trustee said in court Thursday. But on Friday, Infowars and its websites were back up and running…Jones told listeners that Murray had told him it was wrong to shut down Infowars before the sale was finalized.
Why do I feel like he’ll somehow weasel his way out of this? The worst people get away with this kinda shit all the time. The judge says there are issues with transparency and the legality of The Onion being picked as the winning bid since it was for less money, and because there was no round of bidding after the initial bids were unsealed. Which the same judge said was optional according to his order.
I guess we’ll see how it goes next week at the hearing 🤞
Source: What happens next in The Onion’s effort to buy Alex Jones' Infowars
Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament are now free on the Internet Archive
An Epic spokesperson subsequently confirmed that it has given the green light for the games to be hosted on the Internet Archive, telling PC Gamer, “We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on archive.org and people are free to independently link to and play these versions.”
Finally some not terrible news relating to the Internet Archive! I was OBSESSED with UT ‘99 on the Dreamcast back in the day. Happy to see another classic saved from falling into complete obscurity.
Mountain lions in Los Angeles become night owls to avoid humans
Not a bad idea, honestly…
Re: Massive New Information on Aliens Just Came Out (penguinz0, YouTube)
I like Charlie’s take on this. Yes; I believe all of the people at the congressional hearing on UAPs were telling the truth, I just don’t think it means aliens. Whether they think so or not. There’s proof of strange craft flying around the skies and we don’t know who they belong to or how they’re able to do these seemingly impossible maneuvers, but that doesn’t mean aliens.
“Has there been to your knowledge any communication with a non-human life form?” Republican Eric Burlison asked. “The term communication is a bit of a trick word because there’s verbal communication, the problem is you also have non-verbal communication, and so I would say definitely yes,” Elizondo said. “When a Russian reconnaissance aircraft comes into US air space we scramble two F-22s, we are certainly communicating intent and capability. I think the same goes with this. We have these things that are being observed over controlled US air space and…they’re making it pretty obvious they have the ability to even interfere with our nuclear readiness.”
In Charlie’s video, he makes the point that we believed the “Wow!” signal from the 70’s was smoking gun evidence of life on other planets but it’s since been debunked.
I, too, believe the universe is far too vast for us to be the only intelligent life out here but that’s just it; it’s so vast there’s little to no chance we’re anywhere near any other life. We have satellites like Voyager and JWST venturing deep into space, snapping a bunch of photos and soaking in all the data they can and yet we’ve still not seen any signs of civilization anywhere but Earth.
I would absolutely love for a society of benevolent aliens to come save us from ourselves and welcome us into The Galactic Federation but that’s just wishful thinking.
Bluesky feels more like old Twitter than X does
I’ll go as far as saying it feels more like original Twitter than Mastodon, too. I don’t know what it is, like I was on mastodon for two years before Bluesky came out and I had already built a pretty nice little community over there. But Bluesky somehow feels more welcoming. Or at least it feels more like what I remember about Twitter circa 2013 when I was still having fun.
I like that both Mastodon and Bsky are mostly made up of regular every day people. They’re both decentralized, which is a plus. Though I never really put any thought into that before I learned what it meant through using Mastodon.
But one big thing I missed about Classic™ Twitter was realtime updates. Everything from news to celebrities - without radical far right crypto bro influencers sprinkled in. Maybe that’s what I like; influencers aren’t really a thing on Bluesky and there’s no MAGA nonsense. It’s like Twitter pre-Elon and pre-crypto.
Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’ - The Onion
This is perfect. InfoWars makes much more sense as satire.
Mark ‘Z-Pain’ Zuckerberg did a cover of ‘Get Low.’
I may be scarred for life after hearing Zuckerberg’s autotuned voice serenade me with “‘Til the sweat drop down my balls.”
“‘Get Low’ was playing when I first met Priscilla at a college party, so every year we listen to it on our dating anniversary,” Zuckerberg wrote on Instagram. “This year I worked with @tpain on our own version of this lyrical masterpiece…"
We are undoubtedly living in the Bad Place.
I only watched like 20 minutes of that UAP congressional hearing but I think I can summarize most of it:
whistleblower: we have reason to believe that UAP’s are real and may be alien craft
someone in congress: do you have any proof?
whistleblower: well OBviously I have proof but I can’t show you
Perplexity brings ads to its platform
Enshittification ensues
This is what natural selection looks like in the age of gen AI
Daring Fireball: 1Password: The Infinite Loop of Security
The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that “the human element” (accidental breaches caused by human error, or victimization in phishing attacks and the like) was the number one cause of breaches. The same was true last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.
it’ll never happen to me…
I used the same weak ass password for hundreds of accounts. I ignorantly took the position of “I don’t have anything worth hacking so using the same password everywhere is fine.”
I sure fucked around and found out on that one.
A couple years ago I found myself in the middle of a shitstorm of hacked accounts after I fell for a phishing thing. I immediately switched from Windows 11 to Linux and spent almost two full days updating hundreds of logins with unique, random 20+ character passwords using 1Password. The damage was already done though. Or at least it was off to a pretty good head start.
I lost an entire Facebook account, my PayPal and Cashapp were compromised and I’m pretty sure they straight up cloned my browser because I was getting login attempts across a lot of different accounts for DAYS after that. Even things that had 2FA enabled. I have no idea how that’s even possible but they got in there.
I don’t like to advocate for specific brands here but 1Password has been a godsend. It’s worth the small yearly fee. Even if you don’t go with them, you need a password manager. Every time I’ve been fucked over with phishing or hacked accounts it was my fault; human error or maybe even just arrogance and being too loosey goosey with online security.
Election Conspiracy Theories Are for Everyone
In the days following Donald Trump’s clear win, conspiracy theories about how votes were tampered with or how the election was stolen from Kamala Harris have spread on the left, with viral tweets, TikTok videos, and posts on Threads making a chaotic and spotty case alleging a fishy result.
Maybe we need some zany conspiracy theorists on the left. It works out pretty favorable for the MAGA people anyway. Maybe we’ve just been playing it too clean and… sane.
iPhone text prediction is so bad I think our only option at this point is to rewrite the entire English language to better align with how autocorrect wants us to talk.
Beatles' ‘Now and Then’ Makes History As First AI-Assisted Song To Earn Grammy Nomination
many fans assumed that the remaining Fab Four members…must have used generative AI to deepfake the late John Lennon. That was not actually the case. Instead, the Beatles used a form of AI known as “stem separation” to help them clean up a 60-year-old, low-fidelity demo recorded by Lennon
At first glance I thought this was a dumb headline about some gen AI songbot trained on Lennon’s voice. This actually makes sense though! Would love to see more old gems cleaned up to studio quality.