Had a bit of an emotional rollercoaster at Confuzzled but definitely some great times. Now dealing with that post-con re-entry into normal life, augh... where's my coffee...
@B22_SSS That's a bit vague for me to be able to really answer... mostly I would just say that it's a very big and very busy convention, with all the positives and negatives this brings. There are a lot of events, a lot of diversity, some big dances and a greater likelihood of knowing someone attending, but it can also get very overwhelming and crowded.
Just to show that I was indeed at AnthrOhio 2026, a photo of me and Big Blue, taken by Chris B. Critter. I was absolutely dead tired at this point, but ran into them on the way back to the room in the wee hours of Sunday morning.
In _The Incandescent_ by Emily Tesh there is a department photocopier that is possessed. The bulletin board behind it has a notice: DO NOT EXORCISE THE PHOTOCOPIER. The demon in the copier is small, weak, and stupid, and if it is cast out something larger and more troublesome may take up residence.
There is a very brief and delightful scene at the beginning in which the protagonist needs something copied and must negotiate with the demon. It demands biscuits!
Con retro: Had an absolute blast this Confuzzled. Managed to spend time with great friends, went to some fantastic panels (Furtography!) and some absolutely brilliant game-show events (Spelling Beeps and Would I Lie to You, gosh, brilliant!).
Better food options. Despite the intense heat and not suiting as much as I have previous years, we got through it. Very little negative to say outside the multiple fire alarm incidents during (and after) the con.
There’s something I really like about characters that feel simple in the best way possible. This was a drawing for M1KH4, who stops by at my artists alley table to ask me about art, opinions, advices and so, I really like talking about those topics so whenever you see me at my table feel free to do it! This was worked on during FWA’s Artists Alley. Traditional. Color pencils and color markers (Ohuhu)
A quick doodle of Paco made with a cheap ballpoint pen and colored pencils (Blanca Nieves brand) inside a school notebook.
This piece means a lot to me because it represents the origin of everything. Back when drawing wasn’t about making masterpieces, building a career, or worrying about whether something was “good enough”, or even thinking if robots were going to replace us. It was simply about the joy of filling pages with the way we saw ourselves. When we’re kids, the future feels far away, the past barely exists yet, and all that really matters is the present moment.
Made during my online panel “Like in 1998,” while staying at my parents’ house, a fact that also adds a lot of meaning to this piece.
The original with its frame (which I consider it is also part of the piece) will be on display at Anthrocon's Art Show, if you get to be there check it out!
Things are winding down a little, had a really nice closing ceremony watch-a-long in the room with friends and packing a few bits away.
Light will be out in her cool (as in style, definitely not in temperature!) outfit again for the dead dog later. Wish me luck and wish us room in the fursuit lounge, as it’s gonna be one long and extremely warm party! Can’t wait! #cfz #confuzzled #cfz2026 #Furry #fursuit #unicorn
@Dairishgoat This is a whole new head from scratch by Seabunny Studios. I also now have proper arm sleeves so I can wear short sleeved clothes easier with her.
The original Essorille suit is still active, around and will be out and about at some events and such too. This is another more furry take on Light and is built in a different way (more like a traditional suit head).
friendly reminder than friendica is more feature complete, has more correct protocol support, has been around longer than, and will be around longer than your fediverse software. and it's a dedicated LAMP application.
every other project will be imploding because of politics or bad design or burnout while friendica will be having another release where they patch the livejournal connector and get 1 step closer to supporting databases other than mysql
i'm now finding out that friendica is developed primarily by a Guy with a selfie pfp from austria and someone with rainbow dash as a pfp this project will never die it's got the fucking perfect committer combo
Extro loved books so much that eventually he ended up inside one himself.
An acrylic painting made directly over a softcover book for Extro. Inspired by an older piece I painted years ago featuring a red panda.
I never showed on my galleries how it looked that other book framed, but it was a very cool display designed by a local framing shop, I had to ask them to frame this one as well with same technique.
You can see the final frame display, as well as a short video where I show how it was the painting process of this piece, on the first comment of this submission on my Telegram art channel: https://t.me/panda_paco
I also shared scanned version, high resolution files, a longer video showing the process, and also many more pictures I haven't shared on my galleries yet, and you can join my Telegram group channel, and get some exclusive merch from time to time. All this at supporting my job month by month on Patreon or Ko-Fi, this helps me a lot to keep creating: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/pandapaco Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco Thank you!
Official Art Channel 🇲🇽 Clean cute artist. Full-Time Panda. Here to paint some smiles. https://linktr.ee/panda_paco Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco Ko-Fi Shop: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco/shop Stickers channel: @pacostickers
For the first time in my life, the tech industry has tried to push something that most people look at and say “nah, I’m good” and they are FREAKING OUT about it. In their heads, they are gods, they know what’s right, their work is inevitable and righteous, and they don’t know how to process people saying no. Keep saying no.
What I find most surprising is just how many businesses are willing to hand over the keys. Everyone is dumping everything proprietary into corporations with proven track records not to have a problem with data theft.
You hire people and you can control them. You hire a model and you control nothing. They don't know if this will cost more than people in a year. They don't know how safe it is.
When everyone speculates there is no other possible outcome than a crash.
@odoben Not any one specific thing (except maybe the recent couple of commencement addresses where the graduating students loudly booed the speaker for mentioning AI…) More of a pattern I’m seeing with surveys saying how much young people hate AI, Microsoft backpedaling on Copilot, general hostility over all, and yet companies keep pushing it harder and harder.
We need a new "Left Behind" book series where AI fans have all uploaded their brains to a computer to achieve the next level of consciousness, and the rest of us get to rebuild the world without them.
@patterfloof I was contemplating whether you could incrementally slow down the processor speed until the system process maybe 1 thought every 1000 years. Much more efficient use of energy while we clean the rest of the world up!
@laveur @atkelar We need to somehow encourage VCs to be more human-centered in their support of tech projects, to invest in humans rather than machines (especially plagiarism machines).
@laveur The "C" in VC is probably preventing that. You can't get to the top of the financial world if you still have anything left that resembles empathy.
@atkelar Yes! Companies always downsize because human capital is the most expensive thing on a balance sheet. Well usually it is. There have been reports that human capital is cheaper than the amount of tokens that are needed...
@laveur @atkelar The "C" doesn't require you to strive to be the top of the financial world. That's just the current, unsustainable focus. Capitalism kind of requires a healthy consumer base for long-term sustainability, and replacing everyone with AI is not exactly conducive to that.
A lot of business decisions are currently focused on just making the next quarterly report look good and not the long term. I don't know how you change that attitude.
Not hiring sociopaths for CEOs would be a good starter, but why are they getting placed in these positions in the first place?
For those not at CFz, say hello to new Light suit! Made by the awesome Seabunny Studios!
She’s been out and about at the con a bit, so feel free to say hello! She’ll be complementing and not replacing the existing Light! 💙 #cfz #confuzzled #cfz2026 #Furry #fursuit #unicorn
Every time I see a software licence agreement containing the heading "Term and Termination", I wonder if Jane Austen might have had a day job as a corporate lawyer.
A family portrait from the early days of a country still trying to become itself. A coyote family that left behind the only home they knew, carrying their entire lives in a wooden wagon with the hope that somewhere farther ahead there could be something better waiting for them. I liked the idea that this image could have been found many generations later, after their journey had already become part of the family’s history. A moment preserved before they even knew if they would succeed.
This piece was drawn entirely in pencil and framed inside an old thrift shop frame that somehow already felt like it belonged to them, I think this gives part history to the piece.
Created for the display on the Furlandia's conbook, which theme is “Wild Wild Furry West.” The convention is held in Portland, Oregon (it will be my first time in Oregon). You may get to see the original one at the Anthrocon's Art Show.
I also recorded the process on video. You can go and watch it on the first comment of this submission on my Telegram art channel: https://t.me/panda_paco
And there is a full version of that video that you can watch on a post that is exclusive for monthly supporters on Patreon or Ko-Fi, as same as full resolutions of all my drawings and the chance to see my drawings before I post them on my galleries. You are also contributing to keep my dream of living out of creating art. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/pandapaco Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco Thank you!
Official Art Channel 🇲🇽 Clean cute artist. Full-Time Panda. Here to paint some smiles. https://linktr.ee/panda_paco Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco Ko-Fi Shop: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco/shop Stickers channel: @pacostickers
This is great! I love the B&W. It fits the time period.
It's fascinating that their clothing looks new and they're all smiling. It's obviously at the very start of their journey, and nobody had died of dysentery yet.
¡La campaña para llevar #TADC a la televisión está en marcha! ¿Y qué mejor manera de mostrarle a los directivos que lo queremos hacer realidad que dándole amor a esta publicación? ¡Vamos a darle todo nuestro apoyo!
The parking attendant paused by the double-length bay. Intended for mobile homes and cars with trailers, it was currently occupied by a sleeping dragon.
No parts of it extended beyond the lines, and the paper ticket was clearly displayed, impaled on a horn.
As a millionaire living my best life, I recognize the struggles many face. I want to help by giving $𝟏𝟓,𝟎𝟎𝟎 to the first 20 people who message me ‘𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐈𝐄𝐅.’ On my Telegram @manager_50k It’s a small gesture, but it comes from my heart. God bless you all✨🕊️
just use docker bro bro, just use the docker just do docker run my-server bro just run this docker compose bro bro, is super easy, just run dis dockerfile bro just use this container that bundles in caddy and traefik bro using a database is easy bro, just run the postgres docker bro just one more container bro just pull this one other container bro bro
for the love of god give me a single binary or tarball that I can ./server --port 8080, if your 'simple' service needs a whole os in my os to work is not really simple
The opposite of "economies of scale" is the "lavishly small".
This is my favorite part of DIY: getting to do things no professional would ever dream of. Fancy materials, time squandered on little perfections, etc.
Sometimes the good stuff only costs 10 cents more. A business isn't going to eat that and they'll pick the cheap shit.
Repaki being effortlessly rad, since red pandas just show up, look cool, and somehow make the whole scene feel more alive. I really like coloring red pandas, they are so bright! Well, this is a red panda/fox. Foxes cause the same effect tbh!
A picture for Repaki done at FWA’s Artists Alley. Traditional. Color markers and pencils over toned tan mixed media paper.
I already shared in advance many pictures not only that I did during FWA but also many more that I'm going to post in upcoming days, you can watch them in full resolution and also support my artistic career, supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi, I truly appreciate it: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/pandapaco Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco Thank you!
It's the annual "change my work password" day. (Yes, I know, don't tell me, tell the IT department.)
For credentials I'm going to type a lot, I still prefer a short password full of strange characters to a long passphrase made of words. It's more effort to memorise, but once that's done, it's faster to enter than a long passphrase – a benefit that lasts the rest of the year.
My current memorisation technique involves a recurring timer. Every N minutes, an alert goes off, and I stop whatever I'm doing, run 'su $USERNAME -c "echo ok"', type my password, and make sure it did echo "ok". I do the password change first thing in the morning, and over the course of the day, increase the period between memory checks, from 5 minutes down to 15 or 30, so that it moves from short-term to long-term memory. If I find I've forgotten it in one of these tests, I'm allowed to look it up, but in every test I must first try it from memory and _then_ find out what I got wrong. And then retype it right.
I like this technique because it's simultaneously practice at remembering the password, and practice at typing it quickly and accurately. Even the "do it right now, interrupting whatever else you were doing" aspect is deliberate: it trains the skill of remembering the password _even while distracted_, which is actually necessary, if e.g. you need to 'sudo' something in a sudden emergency that's taking up most of your brain.
Reinforcing the new password periodically over the course of the first day is generally enough that when I come to log in the next morning I can remember it even after a night's sleep. And then I'm over the hump.
But one problem I still haven't solved is remembering, the next day, *that* I changed my password. It's still common for me to type the old one three times running before I realise what the problem is!
my memory is really bad and forcing me to remember a new password is deemed to fail. That's why most people's password is asdf123 and I don't blame that technology mistake on them.
If they read the academic documentation, they know. After reading the NIST recommendations that says forcing password change is useless, they compromized and changed mandatory change from 3 months to 6 months 🤷. Everyone is just reusing the same password and adding numbers because that's the only password memorization scheme that works on the median person who has dozens of passwords to remember.
I had a habit of using single words or short phrases in non-English languages (Icelandic, Latin, Klingon (yes!), Dutch, to name a few) with the appropriate non-alpha bits thrown in to satisfy the stupid parser... _and then I'd stuff them in my password manager_, whose master passphrase is under MY control, and accessible from my phone as well as the desktop... as an SRE I'd use sudo often enough to get it in my head by EOD if I changed it in the morning, and, given advanced warning, I made sure to never change it on a Friday... that way the muscle memory has time to sink in before the weekend.
The real problem was coming up with a good one in the first place - easy enough to type, complex enough to satisfy the idiots who wrote the standards... the thing that really gets me is that while _allowing_ numbers and specials is one thing, _requiring_ one of each class really cuts your pattern space... taking you from a choice of 92 different values for each character to 30, 26, and TEN choices respectively for three of'em. (Assuming Little Bobby Tables rules aren't in play, which further reduces your specials count...) (OTOH, if you say, "must contain _at least three_ of upper, lower, number, symbol" that makes it easier for you and harder for the black hats... 😈 )
when you're finished the day before, imagine doing something drastic/noticable/unpleasant to your keyboard for a minute or so.The more convoluted and visceral the better. (You poured coffee all over the keyboard, then lit it on fire so that it smells of charred roast and is blackened to ash. Also somehow still sticky to the touch.) That memory should pop to mind when you arrive in the morning, which you can use to remember the change.
My new password problem is that my brain stores it in the tactile memory section after I used it a couple of times and then if I have to type it in on keys instead of touch pad or vice versa I suddenly lose all concept of it.
@nachtet yes, I've heard that from a few other people too. Seems fairly common. Happily I don't have that problem myself – the finger shapes are associated fairly strongly with the characters, for me, so even if I temporarily forget what the characters are, I can remember them again _by_ imagining my fingers going through the motions.
we change the passwords way more often, 3mo I think, and we have 2 (long story). I dump them in a password manager they gave me, whose main password does not change, and do a little dance every time I need to enter them. Nothing I do requires snappiness.
Wouldn't simply counting it up help then? You basically can keep your password, as it does not make sense to change it in the first place. It only gets longer one character (0-9). Or even not longer at all if the last char already is a number.
Maybe writing a Mastodon post all about changing my password will fix the incident in my memory so that I remember not to type the old one the next morning?
What I think about every time I hear the phrase “legitimate concerns”Join my mailing list:http://bit.ly/MattGreenMailingListFor more information on my work s...
Starfield at the alley, holding onto a very specific collection of totally normal books that definitely don’t contain dragons, dice rolls, or suspiciously complicated character sheets.
Done for DFStarfield at the FWA's Artists Alley. Traditional. Color markers and pencils.
The new Star Fox art style is perfect, you guys just can't appreciate high art.Making this video was pretty simple all things considered. It was just a matte...
I would have been 6 at the time. I (very vaguely) remember learning about it at school, probably 2-3 years later. A while back (oh god it was 20+ years ago now) I visited friends in the Portland area (hi @Thumper ) and was very surprised when a mountain on the horizon turned out in fact to be the fabled Mount St Helens which I'd known about my whole life but never knew exactly where it was or realised I'd ever actually see it with my own eyes! But to the folks I was visiting it was just a normal thing in the background, and we didn't go to visit it more closely or anything.
Detective Koda is on the case… unless you distract him halfway through by snacks and honey.
Done during FWA's Artist Alley, color markers and pencils over toned tan mixed media paper. The best part is that Koda himself stopped by my table to pick it up in person! I love when they do that! You can check it out that picture of him on the first comment on this submission of my Telegram art channel: https://t.me/panda_paco
And you can go and see all the drawings I did during FWA before I post them little by little on my galleries, at supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi, this helps me a lot to keep creating art and living out of this. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/pandapaco Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco Thank you!
Official Art Channel 🇲🇽 Clean cute artist. Full-Time Panda. Here to paint some smiles. https://linktr.ee/panda_paco Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pandapaco Ko-Fi Shop: https://ko-fi.com/panda_paco/shop Stickers channel: @pacostickers
this is not a hall of shame. the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers. hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.
Sorting out stuff for the tip and I notice a chip that looks like maybe an EEPROM or something inside the old alarm system box. The little blue sticker makes me think it's firmware or similar and the date is the same year the house was built (or at least, sold to its first owner), 1989. (On the other hand, do EEPROMs have that many pins - maybe it's a CPU? I have no idea.) Is this something anyone would be interested in dumping and archiving? I don't have the knowledge, equipment or, frankly, interest, time or energy to get into this myself but if anyone else in the UK is I could post the chip to you.
@Jencen - Please don't call me Derg Yes, it's the alarm system box that used to be mounted under the stairs, it had wires going to PIR sensors, sounders, etc. I ripped it out when I put the hanging rail in. I doubt it has been used in an extremely long time as the 12V lead acid battery inside was down to 0.03V or something like that. Yeah, I tried to peel up the edge of the label to see if there was an erase window but it didn't seem like it.
Put this nostalgic Sonic-inspired music mix on for work, studying, reading, planning, and calm background focus on a rainy day. This long-form instrumental k...
And after listening to another couple of videos from the same channel and finding they are all just an endless string of variations on the exact same melody, with the same riffs and flourishes and bridges and things coming up over and over again, and the things that at first made me think "ooh, I like this" getting repetitive, I have to conclude the whole channel is just stochastic parrot junk. They've uploaded 94 half-hour-plus tracks since starting less than two months ago, and I can only assume it's all autogenerated variations on the one Sonic track. *sigh*
We've had machine-learned OCR for a good 40 years. It didn't require massively parallel GPUs, huge datacenters, or even what we'd consider powerful machines to train, since they only needed a few hundred samples.
A common educational sample I did maybe 20 years ago was training to OCR digits. Any desktop could converge the training pretty quickly from a human comprehendible data set size. I don't remember how many neurons it used.. under 100 IIRC.
Not all machine learning is the overly massive stuff we see today. A lot of expert systems were very responsibly trained. It's the push for general that's killing everything.
: @shetani
: @Squika
@l4p1n
Awwww thank you so much! ❤