{"@attributes":{"version":"2.0"},"channel":{"title":"drac.at","link":"https:\/\/drac.at","description":"Ticky's website on the internet","generator":"Zola","language":"en","lastBuildDate":"Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0700","item":[{"title":"A smattering of links","pubDate":"Sun, 22 Mar 2026 13:00:00 -0700","author":"Ticky","link":"https:\/\/drac.at\/posts\/2026-03-22-a-smattering-of-links\/","guid":"https:\/\/drac.at\/posts\/2026-03-22-a-smattering-of-links\/","description":"

Hello and welcome to my first experiment in linkblogging; I\u2019m still deciding on a format for these, but this first one is going to be a bit of a roundup.<\/em><\/p>\n

To those of you who are monitoring my feeds or otherwise reading my site, thank you for the feedback on linkblogging! I am pleased that several of you reached out and I\u2019m flattered to even have readers, let alone readers who will respond to questions! \ud83d\udc9c<\/small><\/p>\n

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How to Ban Conversion Therapy<\/a> by Philosophy Tube<\/h3>\n

Abi delivers a scathing takedown of the trans medical system in the UK in particular, and how it wrests control from patients in the name of continuing to hold power over them. She further provides a pathway to ending these practices decisively. None of us are free until all of us are.<\/p>\n

also on YouTube<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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Why craft-lovers are losing their craft<\/a> by Hong Minhee<\/h3>\n
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The tension between craft and efficiency doesn\u2019t disappear if you remove capitalism from the picture. LLM coding assistants produce faster results whether anyone is being paid or not, and any community, however it\u2019s organized, will eventually have to reckon with what to do with that speed difference. Capitalism gives the harshest possible answer to that question: the slower worker loses their livelihood. But the question itself would survive capitalism. Other forms of social organization might answer it more gently, but they\u2019d still have to answer it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m not sure I fully agree with the assertion that LLM use is inevitable even free of capitalism\u2019s influence, but the story here resonates with me. The tensions and contradictions of worker power in the tech industry continue to escalate.<\/p>\n

I also believe that the speed increase is an illusion; there are many reasons to distrust the output which turn the accelerated speed into a slowdown. I think there\u2019s a blog post in this from me to come; stay tuned.<\/p>\n

h\/t to James Healy<\/a> for sharing<\/em><\/p>\n

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Voyager - Across the Unknown Explores Darker, Colder Space<\/a> by Dia Lacina<\/h3>\n
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[\u2026] on my 9th run of Voyager: Across the Unknown<\/em> [\u2026] it\u2019s finally settling in just how ambitious this game [\u2026] is. [\u2026] It\u2019s safe to say this narrative survival adaptation of a major television property is quite the scope-up in terms of project size and complexity. Voyager: Across the Unknown<\/em> is ambitious. It\u2019s not quite the ambition equivalent of launching a new network with a woman at the helm of a non-Enterprise Star Trek series in the mid-late 90s, but it comes close.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Great piece about one of the most interesting games I\u2019ve played recently. If you haven\u2019t tried it, I highly recommend it. It\u2019s both a loving ode to the series and a wonderful game exploring all the negative space around the canonical narraive of Voyager<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Ageless Linux & the Ageless Device<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Every device carries a printed label:<\/p>\n

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AGELESS LINUX
\nGeneral Purpose Computing Device
\nOS: Debian Linux (RISC-V) \u00b7 Provider: FFwF Robotics LLC
\nAB 1043 STATUS: NONCOMPLIANT
\nThis device does not collect, store, or transmit the age of its user.
\nThis is intentional. \u00b7 \u00a7 1798.500(g) \u00b7 \u00a7 1798.501(a)(1-3)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A thought-provoking form of protest of the wave of age-verification laws, and subsequent debate within the Linux community over compliance. Obviously much of Linux is contributed to by corporate interests, so I cannot truly begrudge the efforts to comply even if I disagree with the laws that are pushing for this. Anyway I want one. Or maybe fifty.<\/p>\n

via jwz.org<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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Age Verification Lobbying: Dark Money, Model Legislation & Institutional Capture<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Meta spent a record $26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deployed 86+ lobbyists across 45 states, and covertly funded a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance (DCA)<\/strong> to advocate for the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA)<\/strong>. But the operation extends beyond Meta.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Meta, a company who stands poised to have a strategic advantage over competitors due to their platforms already collecting age information, have been lobbying to the tune of tens of millions of US dollars, to make age verification a requirement.<\/p>\n

That they are doing this on the sly is really rather telling. Push back against these measures in your jurisdiction.<\/p>\n

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China to help Cuba with solar energy amid US oil blockade and total power outage<\/a><\/h3>\n
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China is offering solar energy to Cuba, an old ally left without power amid the US oil embargo, in a show of strength for Chinese renewable-energy credentials and a sign of Beijing\u2019s economic footprint in Latin America.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

An unequivocally good move here. Cuba is being strangled by the cronies in charge of the US. Frankly, Canada should be making similar moves in solidarity with other targeted nations in our region. No more wars in our names. Fossil fuels are an international security problem.<\/p>\n

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The very serious part-time unofficial hobby of videogame fan-translation<\/a> by Hilltop<\/h3>\n
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In my recent romhacking video I used a thumbnail with the simplest, most direct translation I could find in the script, specifically so that nobody could complain. The line was:<\/p>\n

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\u53cb\u679d\u5c0f\u5b66\u6821\u306e\uff14\u5e74\u751f<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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I\u2019m a 4th-grader at Tomoeda Elementary.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

[\u2026] someone showed up in the replies and tried to argue that the order of the words should be 100% preserved through translation and that it should be the perfectly SOVLfully accurate:<\/p>\n

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At Tomoeda Elementary I am a 4th grader.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Amazing. No notes. So yeah, I don\u2019t talk about localization.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A great writeup about the thankless job of video game translation, and the ways in which people have pushed against the very things that make a good translation, and the infection of the community with latter-day LLM-based machine translation.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still a bit heartbroken over Segagaga.<\/p>\n

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Wikipedia has prohibited use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Text generated by large language models (LLMs) often violates several of Wikipedia\u2019s core content policies. For this reason, the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited, save for the exceptions given below.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A 44-2 decision is a strong signal. Shoutout to Wikipedia editors for fighting the good fight here!<\/p>\n

\n

This is the beginning of me approaching blogging with an eye to making the ephemeral stories I read feel more a part of an ongoing record. Please feel free to contact me<\/a> with any feedback or comments.<\/p>\n"},{"title":"You there! Yes, you with the RSS reader - I need your opinion!","pubDate":"Mon, 16 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0700","author":"Ticky","link":"https:\/\/drac.at\/posts\/2026-03-16-rss-readers-please-give-me-your-thoughts\/","guid":"https:\/\/drac.at\/posts\/2026-03-16-rss-readers-please-give-me-your-thoughts\/","description":"

Hello, dear reader. I am writing to you rather directly because I am thinking about how I approach this blog and I would like to include you in the decision.<\/p>\n

I have on occasion wondered if I should consider adding \u201clinkblog\u201d style posts to this site. With that, I could publish smaller posts which point you towards (and\/or comment on) other interesting things I\u2019ve read online.<\/p>\n

You can see this on many other sites around the web. I figure it\u2019s a good opportunity to highlight interesting and important things in a way that\u2019s perhaps more permanent and accessible than a boost on social media.<\/p>\n

So, as a reader of my blog, let me know your thoughts<\/a>! Thank you <3<\/p>\n"},{"title":"A machine cannot feel embarrassment, therefore it should not be trusted with a critical decision","pubDate":"Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:45:00 -0700","author":"Ticky","link":"https:\/\/drac.at\/posts\/2026-03-16-a-machine-cannot-feel-embarrassment\/","guid":"https:\/\/drac.at\/posts\/2026-03-16-a-machine-cannot-feel-embarrassment\/","description":"

I\u2019ve been trying recently to articulate the reasons why I don\u2019t think LLMs are a trustworthy technology. It\u2019s a shame that the machine learning profession has largely had its reputation stolen and twisted by LLMs.<\/p>\n

Machine learning is great! Machine learning can help find the good photos in your sprawling photo library. It can be used to find photos of your family. It can react to patterns humans struggle to, and produce useful outputs based on that.<\/p>\n

But LLMs are a different beast altogether. As commonly used in chatbot situations they break one of the fundamental rules of our own cognition; for all of human history, the use of language has been enough to differentiate a real person from an automaton emulating one; you have been able to trust that if you can have a conversation you are speaking with an intelligent being with interiority, thoughts, feelings and emotions.<\/p>\n

LLMs can express all those things, because those things exist in its training data. Every apologetic character from fiction. Every Reddit thread of someone expressing their frustration. It\u2019s all present, but it\u2019s disconnected<\/em>. It doesn\u2019t connect to an actual feeling, thought, or intention.<\/p>\n

An LLM cannot anticipate being wrong. It can express but not actually feel<\/em> remorse, embarrassment, hope, or fear. And that is truly the thing that separates us. And that, I feel, is the thing that makes them dangerous for our brains.<\/p>\n

In a professional context, say if I am asking someone for code review, there is a degree of confidence that their thoughts must pass before they\u2019ll express them. If they\u2019re unsure, they can ask for someone else\u2019s opinion. An LLM has a confidence score for its impulses, but it cannot feel concern for being wrong, for wasting someone\u2019s time, or seek input from a human to confirm or dispel them.<\/p>\n

While it is very impressive that an LLM can take a question and formulate a reasonably coherent, convincing answer, the fact that it cannot want to do a good job, and in fact is trained to be confident above all else, is why I don\u2019t believe this technology is going to stick around for much other than producing enormous quantities of garbage to trawl for ad revenue.<\/p>\n

I am open to the idea that machine learning may get us there one day, but to me LLMs are clearly not the technology that could get us there.<\/p>\n"},{"title":"I think we're going to need to seize the means of computing, folks","pubDate":"Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0800","author":"Ticky","link":"https:\/\/drac.at\/posts\/2026-03-02-seize-the-means-of-computing\/","guid":"https:\/\/drac.at\/posts\/2026-03-02-seize-the-means-of-computing\/","description":"

In the 1970s the Personal Computer was heralded as a great revolution<\/a>, bringing the power of computing to the masses. Democratising it. Taking it from something you had to be affiliated with an institution to enjoy<\/a> to something many people could afford.<\/p>\n

Halfway through the 2020s the Personal Computer appears to be a threatened species.<\/p>\n

Decades of complacency have enabled corporate giants to own vast swathes of the computing market, and increasingly enclose their users with more and more restrictive<\/a> computing platforms<\/a>, and now with the advent of the AI bubble\u2019s reshaping of the computing market<\/a>, they appear to be preparing for a killing blow.<\/p>\n

Gone are the days where a computer magazine would act as a hub for fellow readers\u2019 shared source code, coach readers on how to approach computing problems and even programming. I fear we are in for a decade of the corporate interests pivoting us into owning nothing and enjoying only slop.<\/p>\n

As a long-time Mac user it pains me to say it, but I think we\u2019re gonna have to seize the means of computing. We must be free to use our bicycles for the mind<\/em> lest it be taken from us. macOS has been slowly degrading<\/a> for years now. Windows is way ahead of the curve on this<\/a>. But from this position it feels inevitable.<\/p>\n

You should be able to control your devices. You should be able to repair them. You should be able to upgrade them. You should be able to keep them going longer than the manufacturer would like to keep their profit margins up. You shouldn\u2019t have to rent computing power from a datacentre which is poisoning your fellow human and the environment we share. And in the year where solar is starting to beat coal for the first time<\/a>, we shouldn\u2019t be investing in more dirty power<\/a> to do it.<\/p>\n

Hack your devices. Resist corporate control. Delete corporate bloatware. Run community-maintained software. Host your own services. And teach others to do the same. Keep using that \u201cold\u201d RAM they already sold you. It\u2019s not broken, corporate software is just bloated.<\/p>\n

I fear it\u2019s our only path through this bubble.<\/p>\n"},{"title":"Breaking up with iTunes Match","pubDate":"Fri, 27 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0800","author":"Ticky","link":"https:\/\/drac.at\/posts\/2026-02-27-breaking-up-with-itunes-match\/","guid":"https:\/\/drac.at\/posts\/2026-02-27-breaking-up-with-itunes-match\/","description":"

I\u2019ve been using iTunes Match almost continuously for my music since September 2012. That\u2019s a scarily<\/em> long time. I\u2019d been using iTunes even longer.<\/p>\n

In 2026, I\u2019m finally<\/em> ready to move on.<\/p>\n

iTunes Match, for those unfamiliar, is effectively a predecessor to Apple Music. Rather than a subscription to an entire catalogue of music, it was a subscription to stream your<\/em> music collection. Sounds a little silly, but it did offer some tangible benefits;<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You don\u2019t need to keep your entire library synced to your iPhone1<\/a><\/sup><\/li>\n
  2. Matched tracks could be \u201cupgraded\u201d to iTunes Plus quality if you had, say, an inferior 128kbps MP3 copy<\/li>\n
  3. Easy playback across devices, streamed from the internet; your music follows you anywhere<\/li>\n
  4. You could always download songs anyway; if you were going on a flight you could grab a few albums you planned to listen to and they\u2019d be there for you<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Ultimately, though, iTunes Match was a bit of a dead end, and perhaps Steve Jobs was the last Apple personality to truly care about it. Eventually Apple Music subsumed its features, but the legacy subscription stuck around, largely unmaintained, ever since.2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

    For a few years now we have kept a NAS at home. It\u2019s great! It stores a bunch of our personal files, backups, and other precious data, like our movie and TV show collection. We have a Plex server running off it. Plex led me to think about my use of iTunes Match more, as it offered Plexamp, a quite decent little music player app for Plex.<\/p>\n

    Plexamp, however, just left me wanting more. It had issues on certain platforms, some playback and stability issues, and seemed to be written by people with some degree of contempt for anyone who thought any differently to them about how things should behave.<\/p>\n

    That led me down the path of trying out Navidrome<\/a>. Navidrome is the Jellyfin of music; it\u2019s open source, pretty quirky, and the default user interface is pretty rubbish. But it opens up one particularly intriguing option; it has an entire ecosystem of apps which are compatible with it.<\/p>\n

    With a Navidrome server in place, I am able to pick and choose player apps as I please, and the collection, playback stats, and scrobbling are all centrally-managed. Nice!<\/p>\n

    For Desktop, I settled on Feishin<\/a>, a stylish web and desktop app (yeah, sorry, it\u2019s Electron) which I find fairly intuitive and usable. I\u2019ve run into a few quirks, particularly due to my music library being largely AAC and ALAC from years of iTunes use, but I have confidence they\u2019ll be sorted out. The developer is quite responsive.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

    On my iPhone, I like Arpeggi<\/a>, which is sadly currently only available as a TestFlight beta, but is one of the nicest music apps I\u2019ve ever used. Simple, modern, and reliable. I will gladly<\/em> pay for this once the author is ready to publish it for real.<\/p>\n

    After a few months of running this setup, I was finally convinced; I didn\u2019t need iTunes Match anymore. On the 2nd of February, it expired. And I\u2019m pleased to say that I barely noticed!<\/p>\n

    Well, today, dear reader, I reached another milestone in this journey. I added my first new music without touching the Apple Music (n\u00e9e iTunes) app. FLACs put through Musicbrainz Picard<\/a> for tagging and then transferred to the NAS. Navidrome immediately picked up the new albums, and they appeared like clockwork in Feishin and Arpeggi.<\/p>\n

    And it\u2019s pretty great.<\/p>\n

    Do you have a favourite Navidrome client? Any fun ways you\u2019re using third-party tools? Drop me a line<\/a> \ud83d\ude04<\/p>\n