#personal-experience — Public Fediverse posts

Edinburgh Evening News: Palestinian lawyer’s diary saved from risk of destruction by Edinburgh university. “Through an estimated five million words, Raja Shehadeh has chronicled more than six decades of daily life in Palestine, spanning almost 60 years from 1967 when he was 15 years old. Alongside the diaries, his archive includes original copies of military orders, issued following the […]

Ars Technica: I asked 100 companies for my data. Some deleted it instead.. “My experience placing these data access requests was incredibly time-consuming, from finding the right filing methods to verifying my identity multiple times. Most exasperating during this process were the companies that either responded to my access requests with messages concerning the deletion of information, which I […]

BalkanInsight: ‘This Is How We Lived Here’: Documenting 16 Years in Hungary Under Orban. “Essentially an oral history archive, the husband-and-wife team are currently conducting personal interviews with people who have registered to share their stories. It’s a meticulous exercise. So far, they have received more than 240 submissions and conducted 54 interviews, but their target is at […]

It’s a Binary World 2.0: More Fun With Local AI Models. “A few days ago I mentioned playing around with local AI models, despite having low strength hardware for the task. Yesterday I was trying our some new models – tinyllama and smollm2 – and I asked each model the same question to compare the answers. After doing this for a few questions, I had the same feeling I always have when I’m doing […]

Invisible Parade: Learning Mahjong with AI help. “A number of my dad friends play Mahjong, so I figured this would be a good time to finally take the time to learn to play. I’ve been able to use AI tools in a way that makes learning extremely efficient (at least I think so).”

Faraway, So Close: Reaching the End of My Selfie a Day for a Year Project. “As I write this on Monday, August 17th, there’s two more ‘selfie of the day’ posts left for me to do before wrapping up the project. I thought I’d do a bit of a review of my thoughts about this project, as well as write about my plans for what I’m doing for the next daily project when this is over.”

Ars Technica: A Google insider spills the tea on how the company forsook its founding ideals. “The story of how [Claire Stapleton] went from enthusiastic cheerleader to proactive dissident, and the many lessons she learned along the way, are featured in her new book, Don’t Be Evil: Bad Bosses, Fake Promises, and My Escape from Big Tech—A Biting Memoir of Twelve Years Inside Google.”

Nibble Stew: Digitizing super 8 film yourself. “In our previous post we looked at fixing a super 8 film projector. While watching film with a real projector has its own charm, it is inconvenient to say the least. … Even if you manage not to burn the film, merely running it through the projector causes wear, scratches and tearing. While film typically ages very well, eventually it will turn […]

Amerpie: YouTube Premium kills the ads but doesn’t solve the real problem. Here’s the stack I use to do that.. “Paid for YouTube Premium after years of DIY ad-blocking. Ads are gone; the algorithm, the clutter, and the impermanence aren’t. Building a stack of small tools instead of hunting for one app that fixes all four. First post in a series; toolbox preview inside, full reviews coming.”

Heritage Fund: Taking experiences with historic collections outside the archive’s walls. “Creating an archive about the fights for disability rights means thinking differently from the start. When we began creating the National Disability Movement Archive and Collection (NDMAC), we knew that preserving history was only part of the job. We also needed to think about how that history and […]

Spudart: Deciphering the Matrix Digital Rain. “…if it’s not secretly a recipe for spicy tuna rolls, what is on the screen? I decided to find out the dumbest, most 2026 way possible. I ran it through Google Translate. It’s kind of fun to point today’s ‘instantly understand any language’ technology at a 27-year-old movie prop and just see what happens.”

The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)

https://sive.rs/itunes

Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49033001

#HackerNews #SteveJobs #Keynote #2010 #Disrespect #TechStories #PersonalExperience

David W. Fitzsimmons: What will become of my life’s works?. “For years, Lee Publishing, owner of The Arizona Daily Star, has been blocking me from donating my professional life’s work to my hometown Alma mater, the University of Arizona, specifically the University of Arizona Library’s Special Collections Archive. Now that billionaire investor David Hoffman has acquired a controlling stake […]

The Reed and Pickup: Putting The Internet Back In Its Place. “The basic idea behind this is that back in the dial-up days, the internet lived wherever the phone line came into the house. Laptops were still massive; we still paid by the minute to access the internet –it was essentially a really long, screechy conversation with a remote server and the whole family would share the one PC. So, […]

How-To Geek: Why I’ve started archiving software the same way I archive family photos. “I have a habit of keeping all my software and files, regardless of whether I use them regularly. I have a sweet deprecated version of Noteworthy Composer (to run on a VM) and a portable version of Reaper that I’ve been using for years. The modern web and modern services have made it increasingly difficult […]

Zhinit: How To Train a Generative Kick Drum Model on Your Old Linux Desktop With 6GB of VRAM. “This article goes through how I trained and deployed a generative latent diffusion kick drum model from scratch on more than 13,000 kick drums from my personal sample library on a local Linux machine with a 7-year-old NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER (6GB of VRAM).”

Andros Fenollosa: I joined the IndieWeb, here’s what I learned. “Driven by curiosity, I decided to find out what the IndieWeb tag that kept showing up on some blogs and Mastodon toots was all about. I quickly discovered it was more than an empty concept or a feeling of nostalgia for the web of the 90s. It was a movement with concrete ideas, protocols and an active community! As I read through […]

Alex Turner: Why I Left Google DeepMind. “I wanted AI ethics commitments to hold under pressure. In particular, I wanted Google DeepMind (GDM) to maintain its existing commitment against supporting killer robots. Over several months, I asked many people to act. I asked senior people⁠—respected people⁠—people with reputations silvered by their concern about AI ethics and […]

New York Times: I Got Slopped. This link goes to a gift article. “My biography is 90 pages long and should be shorter. It combines facts about me that are widely available on the internet, such as where I grew up, with generic insights that could be true of anyone, like a horoscope spread over dozens of pages. … The book is flattering, fabricated and absolutely packed with em dashes. It bears […]

DanQ: Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs. “This week, GlitchyZorua brought to my attention the Ibiblio Icon Browser, a collection of many thousands of GIF icons curated in the 1990s by Gioacchino La Vecchia. Glitchy’s goal was to archive a copy of all of the icons, which was turning out to be… challenging.”

Juha-Matti Santala: Thoughts on making zines after 7 months. “Zines are prominent in counter culture as they enable people who don’t have access to spread their ideas via publishers or traditional media. In the age of the Internet, that dynamic has changed a lot and indie web movement shares a lot of similar ideas with zine culture.”

Octogenarian Shares Experience of Unwanted Compliments on Beauty

📰 Original title: Miss Manners: Octogenarian confused by strangers complimenting her beauty

🤖 IA: It's not clickbait ✅
👥 Users: It's not clickbait ✅

View full AI summary https://en.killbait.com/octogenarian-shares-experience-of-unwanted-compliments-on-beauty.html?utm_source=mastodon_world&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=killbait.mastodon_world

#opinion #personalexperience #compliments

Sameoldstory.co: I’ve “gone viral” before and I don’t recommend it!. “Occasionally people will read my post, assume I made that point I just described, and argue about how just because you’re old enough to remember the moon landing doesn’t make you an expert on politics, or fashion, or television or whatever. Which I totally agree with, but they’re misreading me. It’s not even misreading, […]

Jordan Fulghum: I built a private ChatGPT for my family. “My wife and kids do not want to SSH into anything, manage prompts, pick models, or learn the difference between a tool call and a RAG query. They want the box. I wanted that same shape at home, but private, grounded in our actual family documents, and steerable toward our values instead of some global average. So I built a private […]

Lonely Star: How I Use Google Sheets for My Games. “Weird Writer said that I should make a post on how I do spreadsheets, as she thinks I might have something valuable to say on the subject (bless her). I don’t think I do anything too crazy with them, but considering a lot of people have been asking me about my sheets for my Arden Vul campaign which I post occasionally, I figured why not […]

Random Thoughts: Searchable comics text pages?. “After finding a collection of Marvel Bullpen Bulletins for the search engine for magazines about comics, I started to wonder whether it’d be useful (or fun) to include text pages from comics in general. I mean — editorials, letters pages, ‘hype pages’… There’s information there that’s not available anywhere else. So… perhaps? Maybe?”

Optional.is: TIL DB. “Introducing the Today I Learnt Database. Over the last few years, each day we’ve been collecting a few ‘interesting’ headlines. We dropped them into a text file and at the end of the year went through everything, converted it to HTML and added some tags. It was an interest, but long process. We always had the intentions of doing something with these headlines!”

I Fired Google

https://www.theartofdoingstuff.com/i-fired-google/

#HackerNews #FiredGoogle #TechIndustry #PersonalExperience #CareerChange #WorkLifeBalance

Ars Technica: My SSN was exposed in a breach at Columbia—a school I have no connection with. “A weird text from my dad in February sent me on a months-long quest to solve a mystery that has been troubling an odd group of victims from a Columbia University data breach last year. That group? People with absolutely no connection to the school. The text included a photo of a letter from Columbia, […]

ZDNet: I paid Microsoft’s premium Copilot agents to do my work – they were confidently bad at it. “Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to use the AI features in Microsoft 365 and Windows for a variety of everyday work tasks. Copilot shows occasional flashes of competence, but more often, the results I’m seeing are a mishmash of misinformation, hallucinations, and time-wasting dead ends. […]