Jae's Blog

If you haven’t left Telegram behind yet, time to do so.

The CEO of the company, Pavel Durov, posted the following today (archive link with full message):

This summer, Telegram users will gain access to the best AI technology on the market. Elon Musk and I have agreed to a 1-year partnership to bring xAI’s chatbot Grok to our billion+ users and integrate it across all Telegram apps

This time, it’s not a hoax, this is really happening.

At this point, Telegram is on a race to the bottom. Use Signal instead, it doesn’t suck like Telegram.

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Edit: if you want to come to the comments to:

1. Complain that Signal isn’t your use case
2. Complain about how “bad” Signal is
3. Try to chip in with suggestions of random messengers
4. Look for some kind of debate on messengers

Think really hard about it and skip it, it’ll make everybody’s day (including yours) better.

Almost one year after hinting to a return, Solokeys is still dead, as shown by their repos, issues, and discussions never being answered.

Funnily enough, they are still selling those on their website, but that goes without saying you shouldn’t even touch those given the great lack of care they’ve shown in the project.

Another day, yet another chain message.

This time, it claims that Discord has “partnered with a Generative AI company” that created a bot that they “sneak into every server”, which “scrapes art/images on the server to train their AI”.

Because the primary source of this is chain messages (that are basically chain emails 2.0), the claim is in 99% of cases complete utter bullshit.

“But Jae!”, you tell me, “how was I supposed to know?”. That’s the part where you have to do something hard: actually use your brain.

Disproving the whole scare is extremely difficult, and I’ll show that under your very eyes, right now, exclusively on this blog.

First, go on a search engine, Ecosia for instance.

Let’s see what we want to verify, we see that the company is called “Domo AI”, the platform in question is “Discord” and any kind of partnership for a company that size would be announced on a blog, right? Well, let’s input the terms “domoai discord” to get started simply.

Hmm, the first result seems to be an invitation to their Discord, however, would you look at that, the second one seems to be their official website with a blog post. Intriguing, isn’t it? Let’s take the initiative and click on it.

Oh, wow! This seems to be right on the spot, there are even Discord screenshots, let’s start reading then.

So they got featured in Discord’s app directory huh, must mean they have a partnership. Let’s do CTRL+F and search for “partnership” then, that should pretty much answer it.

Clicking the link on the top saying “Blog” brings us back to a list of posts, confirming this one is the most recent.

Goddamn, fooled again. The Discord blog must surely have something then, let’s go back to our trusty search engine, look for “Discord blog” and go there.

Hmm, I don’t seem any mentions of Domo AI on the front page, maybe if I use the search bar to look for “Domo”, it will yield some results?

Aw, dangit! No partnership there either.

I think it’s safe to say, concluding from the data we gathered through this very hard experiment that took us a whooping 10 minutes: the things claimed in those chain messages are utter bullshit.

• Claim: “Discord partnered with a Generative AI company”: bullshit
• Claim: “Discord will sneak a hidden bot on your server”: bullshit
• Claim: “The bot will scrape any image sent in a server it’s in to train itself”: bullshit (more on that down below)

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Now time for a Q&A:

• Q: It was that easy?
• A: Yep, I’m as surprised as you are, chief.

• Q: So, what is Domo AI exactly if not a hidden bot?
• A: Domo AI is a Discord app, meaning it’s a bot any user can add to their account. More than that, apps explicitly need an input to work with, they can’t just scrape anything they can. Apps also explicitly show what permissions they need when adding them to your account.

• Q: But how do I prevent people in my Discord guild from using AI stuff I don’t want?
• A: Easy, go in the settings of the guild, to “Roles”, there go to the @everyone role, search for “app” and disable “Use External Apps”.

• Q: But if it’s misinformation, why did the bot show up when banning it?
• A: You can ban any bot or user without it being present in the guild. See screenshots below, this test guild is empty, only containing me, yet the ban list can have any bot when banned from a userID.

• Q: What’s the issue with this? Even if it’s false, it’s better to be careful.
• A: Here is the whole issue, trusting random sources with information such as this one, even with the best intentions is a terrible practice. All information you see, especially those massively relayed should be verified in some way. Not doing so puts you in a position where you could easily believe disinformation if shared the right way. Even if it “seems real”, take time to search for it, and verify the claims from a direct source, there are a lot of news that “seem real”, but then are completely false, this is how disinformation spreads.

• Q: But <search engine> is rubbish, and I can’t find anything.
• A: Scroll up this post and read again, clearly what I did flew on top of your head.

• Q: You should be less aggressive about this.
• A: No.

• Q: You should STOP trying to prevent me from spreading MISINFORMATION!!! You are ANNOYING and GAY!11!!
• A: OK.

Addendum: looking at it again, the blog post from DomoAI is dated from last September. Looking on Archive.org, there hasn’t been any other blog post since, meaning someone went back on the blog, read it, and either completely misunderstood what was written or decided to willingly spread disinformation.

Time for the monthly music post. On Friday 2nd of this month, there was the Bandcamp Friday, so there’s a bit more recommendations today.

I usually wait for the Bandcamp Friday to do big sweeps of buying music as 100% goes to the artist during that time.

In any case, here are the recommendations:

• Full discography of Cerealbowlsystem: Someone I know from the Resonite community, cool bean, good music, can recommend checking it out.
• Port Rhombus by Squarepusher: last month had a lot of Squarepusher, this one as well. This album was recommended by a friend and plays nicely into the jazzy style I like in Squarepusher’s music, especially when it comes to the second track.
• Graveyard Orbit by BUNKR: this one has been sitting in my wishlist for a while. As you might expect from the title, the style of music reminds me of a spatial action game. This album is a breeze to listen to and I can recommend if you like chill space-y stuff.
• あじたま見聞録② and Dream Chasers by ああああ(AAAA), 翡乃イスカ(Hino Isuka) and 梅干茶漬け(Umeboshi Chazuke): I’m grouping those two albums together because they contain music from rhythm games I used to play years ago. Overall great music albums, perfect if you’re a fan of rhythm games as well (you might have even heard those before).
• Gear 4 by ANORAK: this one caught my attention on the discovery page. Not sure how to describe why I like it, but I do, and recommend it. This album is also very recent, being released on May 1st of this year!
• LEVEL SELECT by Pizza Hotline: one of my favourite discoveries of this batch. I almost ordered the PAL PS1 disc version, but decided not to given all the import and transport fees making it super expensive. In any case, excellent music.
• Horizon by Resavoir & Matt Gold: this one is a pre-order, something I usually don’t do. I was looking for more jazzy tracks and Bandcamp delivered in this album from which the two preview songs being currently available felt like audio candy. I can’t wait to discover what the rest of the album holds.
• Full discography of SQUIDGY: this one was a last-minute addition to my collection. Right before heading to bed, a friend sent a link to the “POKEDEX VOL 1.” album which was an instant match for me. So far, my favourite song in the lot is “✧⊹ARCEUS⊹✧”.

And remember, don’t forget to support the artists you like. There’s a good website to know when is the next Bandcamp Friday, aptly named “Is it Bandcamp Friday?”. Next one will be in August of this year.

You might be familiar with my set of libraries that allows people to run the Resonite Headless Server Software on ARM-based machines.

Well just fresh out of the oven, created yesterday, we now have a guide on how to exactly run a headless on ARM on the Resonite wiki.

While this is not supported officially, there has been a lot of success in getting this working, the last annoying component being SteamWorks.NET.

If you have any improvements for the page, don’t hesitate to put them on the talk page or to edit the page directly!

I’m a frequent editor on the Resonite wiki, meaning I spend quite a lot of time editing pages (duh).

Recently, I’ve discovered the best way of editing the wiki so far, all from my favourite code editor, Sublime Text.

For this, you’re going to need to set up packagecontrol and install the Mediawiker extension.

Once you have the extension installed, head to “Preferences” → “Package settings” → “Mediawiker” → “Settings”.

Copy the default configuration on the left to the right pane, and within the copy, add the following configuration (note that this is mine, so feel free to modify it to fit your needs):

"site":
{
    "Resonite Wiki": {
        "authorization_type": "cookies",
        "host": "wiki.resonite.com",
        "path": "/",
        "pagepath": "/",
        "username": "",
        "password": "",
        "domain": "",
        "https": true,
        "is_ssl_cert_verify": true,
        "proxy_host": "",
        "use_http_auth": false,
        "http_auth_login": "",
        "http_auth_password": "",
        "oauth_access_secret": "",
        "oauth_access_token": "",
        "oauth_consumer_secret": "",
        "oauth_consumer_token": "",
        "cookies_browser": "firefox",
        "preview_custom_head": [],
        "retry_timeout": 30,
        "is_wikia": false,
        "show_red_links": false,
        "preview_sandbox": "",
        "search_namespaces": "",
        "summary_fail_buf": "",
    },
},Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Now to use this, make sure you’re logged into the wiki using Firefox, do CTRL+SHIFT+P, then “Mediawiker: Open Page”, type a page name (for instance User:J4 in my case), and voilà, you can now edit the wiki from the comfort of Sublime Text.

When you save the file, it will ask you to enter a change set description and will sync your changes to the wiki.

Have fun editing!

I have at least 10 posts for this blog in the pipeline, all of which are blocked at the draft stage right now.

So, that’s what it’s like to have writer’s block huh.

Recently, I needed to purchase a new backpack because my old one, some Lenovo one, seriously started tearing and having other issues.

I scoured the web for a bit until I realized HELLOTUX, the ones behind the official Fedora merch, also conveniently make a backpack.

Shipping went really well, it took around a week for the package to arrive to Finland (shipped from Hungary).

Overall, the quality of the backpack is great, and I recommend to anyone wanting to get cool stuff from your favourite distro to get it from HELLOTUX.

As for me, I can finally put the old one to rest, I might have done some horrible things to that poor thing, namely accidentally pouring Pho on it once.

If you’re a Fedora fan, remember that the code FEDORA5 allows you to get €5 off any Fedora item in the basket.

It’s no surprise that I hate how search engines have evolved over the years. Going back 10–15 years, those were really useful and gave you the information you wanted, when you wanted.

Nowadays, results are only slop and ads, which completely defeats the purpose of a search engine.

Well, time to change this. Back a few years ago, I made a small search engine PoC. It never really worked, and the only part that was well-made was the front-end, which someone else made.

I’ve started drafting for a new search engine, that will not be reliant on other indexes, no AI slop, and fully EU-based.

I’ll keep you peeps posted at milestones of development. Expect a proper announcement later, when it is started properly.

I live near the Helsinki airport and can spot planes arriving from the west fairly easily through my window. What I never noticed before is how many planes are arriving during the weekend.

Starting from 06:00 and happening every few hours or so, there’s a whole ballet of planes landing and taking of, way more than I anticipated.

That also means the airband is very active, so that keeps me busy listening to it.