Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[Noodles]

Discord is a truly horrible user experience. It's complete ass, rotating ass and distilled ass and baked-on crusty ass. It's SAP-level bad. Why does anyone use it?

I like discord, but ONLY because I literally only acrually follow one group of friends. Sorry VVO, its not you, I tried.

If I have to try to keep track of 2 or more servers, the whole thing feels like it just falls apart.

It doesn't help that I have gotten so used to the sort of "omni sharing" of social media, I can't remeber if I shared "Story X,Y,Z" with group A,B, and/or C already. That sort of thing.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I tried to use it for a software project and I had to quit the project because I couldn't bother opening it and I had no idea what was going on without it.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I mean, they're using Bing? SRSLY?

Yep - any search engine site that isn't using Google as their backend is using Bing, with only a very few exceptions (like Ecosia that Noodles mentioned).

AND actually I'm wrong. Bing hasn't fixed it. DuckDuckGo fixed in on their own site, but on Bing proper the first result if you search for Neocities is still a malicious phishing website and the real Neocities is not in the results at all.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Microsoft's stock takes historic $440 billion loss after quarterly report

Microsoft can now claim to have experienced the second-largest single day stock decline in history, wiping an absurd $440 billion in market value from the tech giant. The drop is only behind that of NVIDIA from last year, who experienced a similarly deep shock when China's efficient DeepSeek AI model implied that you didn't need as much NVIDIA tech to have a capable chatbot as previously thought.

Microsoft's share price dropped a whopping 5.37% today, and is down almost 14% for the month of January 2026 so far. The stock continues its downward trajectory, which largely began this past summer.

Microsoft's earnings are up across the board - including quite a bit in Azure, it's cloud division and the biggest part of its business by far. Despite that, investors are losing confidence that Microsoft's enormous AI expenditures and reliance on OpenAI are going to get returns.

 

[Isabeau]

htfcuddles (@htfcuddles.mmfcomic.com)

Do you remember when people were saying "I think my phone is listening to me, i'm getting ads for stuff I spoke about" and people said "They arent listening to you, they're just this good at predicting your interests"? Well, it happens they were doing exactly that...

bsky.app

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-voice-assistant-lawsuit-settlement-68-million/

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

> $68 million

Peanuts. That's one day's net profits. That's not a penalty, that's a cost of doing business.

 

[Free]

So the failed Starliner mission was a "Type A" mishap, huh? That's what they classified the Shuttle Challenger and Columbia accidents, as well as the Apollo 1 fire. There's no worse kind, according to NASA.

NASA chief classifies Starliner flight as "Type A" mishap, says agency made mistakes

The most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware."

arstechnica.com

NASA on Thursday announced it has formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a “Type A” mishap, an acknowledgement that the test flight was a serious failure.

As part of the announcement, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent an agency-wide letter that recognized the shortcomings of both Starliner’s developer, Boeing, as well as the space agency itself. Starliner flew under the auspices of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, in which the agency procures astronaut transportation services to the International Space Station.

“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. “It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

“It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”

"Take off your engineer hat and put on your management hat."

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Wikipedia has blacklisted Archive.today as a source and is in the process of removing or replacing almost 700,000 links to it across Wikipedia, after Archive.today's owner launched a DDOS attack against a blogger who speculated a couple of years ago about the site owner's identity.

In the course of discussing whether Archive.today should be deprecated because of the DDoS, Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS. The alterations were apparently fueled by a grudge against the blogger over a post that described how the Archive.today maintainer hid their identity behind several aliases.

...

In emails sent to Patokallio [the blogger] after the DDoS began, “Nora” from Archive.today threatened to create a public association between Patokallio’s name and AI porn and to create a gay dating app with Patokallio’s name. These threats were discussed by Wikipedia editors in their deliberations over whether to blacklist Archive.today, and then editors noticed that Patokallio’s name had been inserted into some Archive.today captures of webpages.

Archive.today is not the same as archive.org; a.k.a. the Internet Archive or Wayback. Completely separate site. But it does much the same thing, archiving webpages and keeping them available when the originals have been altered or gone offline. Except it has altered some of its archived webpages as part of its revenge campaign against this blog poster, so it can no longer be considered reliable.

 

[Isabeau]

Goodness, the framing of it, and the images they chose for the bs post and also the article.

You need to subscribe to read article, but not to see the comments under the article on the site.

WIRED (@wired.com)

Gay men have long been rumored to run Silicon Valley. WIRED investigates. https://wrd.cm/4tINIyb

bsky.app

 

[Free]

Goodness, the framing of it, and the images they chose for the bs post and also the article.

You need to subscribe to read article, but not to see the comments under the article on the site.

WIRED (@wired.com)

Gay men have long been rumored to run Silicon Valley. WIRED investigates. https://wrd.cm/4tINIyb

bsky.app

Something delaying them on their piece about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?


EDIT: Getting around Wired's paywall

The problem with conspiracy theories, even offensive ones, is that they are rarely wholly invented.

I'm not sure I'm all that offended by the story. There's some effort to derail reading it as anti-LGBTQ. but I'm dumbfounded with it starting off by claiming "No one can say exactly when, or if, gay men started running Silicon Valley" - which is laughable, with the "or if" part immediately putting to question the point of writing about this.

Sure, there were gay men in high places: Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois, the list went on.

But she doesn't go on. The piece is certainly long enough for her to go on a bit more about this list.

But the illustrations... GOD.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

LOL come off it. I'm sure some percentage of Silicon Valley executives are gay just because some of any set of people is gay, but Silicon Valley isn't run by a "gay mafia", it's run by a fash mafia. Every single one of those companies couldn't wait to ditch their LGBTQ-acceptance initiatives and Pride-pandering to get in good with the Administration.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I'm actually salty that an in-joke among folks of non-traditional sexuality at Berkeely back in the '80s has turned into a slur.

 

[Free]

This is pretty interesting. And not a good look for "audiophiles."

Audiophiles Can’t Differentiate Audio Signals Sent Through Copper, Banana, and Mud in Blind Test

The test was simple, the files were clean, and confident listeners still ended up guessing.

A blind listening test on the diyAudio forum put an unusual claim to the test. Could listeners tell the difference between audio signals sent through normal copper wire, a banana, or even wet mud? The answer, based on submitted results, was no.

The setup was simple, the files were lossless, and the test was open to anyone willing to listen carefully. But most guesses still landed near random chance.

 

[Casey Pelous]

This is pretty interesting. And not a good look for "audiophiles."

Audiophiles Can’t Differentiate Audio Signals Sent Through Copper, Banana, and Mud in Blind Test

I read that test a day or so ago. It's a little sketchy --- nothing in the rest of the signal chain was very "hi-fi," so, it's a funny stunt, but doesn't really prove much.

That said, I worked in a few high-end sound studios. One of them was where Steely Dan recorded a lot of Aja and it doesn't get any audiophile snootier than that album. Speakers were wired with good ol' 12 ga Monster wire; about the cheapest speaker wire you can buy at Best Buy. The microphone cables were nothing special -- Belden stuff, as I recall. So, if that's the wires Aja went through to get made and it's one of the Holy Grails of audiophilia ... I think you can see where I'm going.

 

[Essence Lumin]

I read that test a day or so ago. It's a little sketchy --- nothing in the rest of the signal chain was very "hi-fi," so, it's a funny stunt, but doesn't really prove much.

That said, I worked in a few high-end sound studios. One of them was where Steely Dan recorded a lot of Aja and it doesn't get any audiophile snootier than that album. Speakers were wired with good ol' 12 ga Monster wire; about the cheapest speaker wire you can buy at Best Buy.

Yeah, 16 ga should be fine for reasonably short runs. 12 is so thick and inflexible it can be hard to work with.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Yeah, 16 ga should be fine for reasonably short runs. 12 is so thick and inflexible it can be hard to work with.

The ol' place has been spiffed up a bit since it changed ownership, but that's the same control room.

 

[Free]

I think you can see where I'm going.

Sure. Aja sounds fantastic through a banana.

 

[Veritable Quandry]

You get better fidelity through a plantain.

 

[Casey Pelous]

You get better fidelity through a plantain.

Only one from the Plantain region.