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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt ("Natasha :mastodon: 🇪🇺") wrote:

NewScientist: "Antibodies harvested from the blood of paediatricians are up to 25 times better at protecting against the common respiratory infection RSV than existing antibody therapies, and are now being developed as preventative treatments"

This is both so logical and yet absurdly like a science fiction story ...

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516079-paediatricians-blood-used-to-make-new-treatments-for-rsv-and-colds/

#Science #Health

Boosted by jwz:
zzt@mas.to ("[object Object]") wrote:

thx for telling me that everything I have hosted on the web getting repeatedly scraped to death by what would previously be considered a massive attack but is now being carried out by the largest corporations in the world is normal, actually. hope they give us good licensing terms on our data, uhhh no wait their IP, once they’re done killing and buying all the original data sources

Boosted by jwz:
zzt@mas.to ("[object Object]") wrote:

oh good, the “you’re just doing purity culture” thing is already taking hold over on bluesky

so the line is now supposed to be that local LLMs are good and moral and SaaS LLMs are bad, when local LLMs come from the same fucked system that’s also actively making it impossible to buy computing hardware powerful enough to run even a shitty local LLM? is that about right? I’m supposed to clap cause someone with money is running a plagiarism machine but slower and shittier on their desktop?

Boosted by jwz:
davidgerard@circumstances.run ("David Gerard") wrote:

"bayesian" should not be a red flag meaning "Bay Area sex pest" but somehow it is

Boosted by jwz:
xgranade@wandering.shop ("Cassandra is only carbon now") wrote:

No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.

Boosted by jwz:
glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@xgranade "purity culture" is just the way that people to the left of Darth Vader say "political correctness"

Boosted by jwz:
lrhodes@merveilles.town ("⁂ L. Rhodes") wrote:

Among the many things Doctorow gets wrong in That Post is this:

"It's not 'unethical' to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That's just 'a search engine.'"

Apart from the fact that AI companies are particularly malicious in the way they scrape the web, I'd say we accept search engine scraping mostly on the premise that it's done for the benefit of the scraped sites. There's no such principle of mutual benefit in AI scraping — the AI company gets the value of the data scraped and you get bupkis at best, and possibly DDoS'd

Boosted by jwz:
davidgerard@circumstances.run ("David Gerard") wrote:

i knew the archive. today guy was weird but i didn't realise he was a frothing nutter https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

annoying it's so often the only practical option

Boosted by jwz:
jef ("Jef Poskanzer") wrote:

The e-bike that demolished this bus stop must have been going super fast

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
davefischer@hachyderm.io ("Dave Fischer") wrote:

Quick Reference poster for MIT's TX-2.

More here: https://www.rcsri.org/library/tx2/index.shtml

#RetroComputing #RCSRI

Boosted by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

One way to look at this is to say "oh, algorithmic feeds make people more racist" but the way that attitudes are being measured, the entire way that attitudes *work*, is actually showing something different here: what algorithmic feeds do is *allow racists to efficiently find each other*. "platforming" in this context is not allowing people to hear racist ideas, it is allowing people to *build a command and control network for white supremacist violence*.

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
fancysandwiches@neuromatch.social wrote:

"it's ok if you don't get it"

Great example of the type of shit that makes people hate this place. Posted by exactly the person you expect to say it.

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

"'Your tariff taxes wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof," Pritzker wrote in a letter to Trump on Friday. "This morning, your hand-picked Supreme Court Justices notified u that they are also unconstitutional.'"

"'On behalf of the people of IL, I demand a refund of $1,700 for every family in Illinois. There are 5,105,448 households in my state, bringing the total damages u owe to $8,679,261,600,' the governor continued."

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-pritzker-tariff-refunds/

h/t @StillIRise1963

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

thanks to the very interesting experimentation (and useful tools) @simon is playing with, my interest in using Claude was piqued. TBH, I got a *lot* of cleanup work (unittests built, bugs caught, etc etc) using a combination of (1) the Claude desktop application open on my desktop, (2) the "claude" commandline tool running in one terminal window (actually the "Ghostty" application), and a plain shell prompt running in another window (for compiling and testing without Apple memory allocation whining).

TBH, I am impressed both by the coherence of the code analysis and the ease f use.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Not my hottest take, but I'll die on the hill that the phrase "production quality" is a judgement about the speaker, not the code.

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:

The last sip through my insulated cup is always especially cold. It's like my straw found a little submerged cave.

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:

The Internet is roasting AI models' maths skills again. This time for not being able to count to 200.

The last time the Internet made fun of AI’s
trouble with math was when someone discovered none of the models could count the numbers of “r’s” in the word “strawberry.”

OpenAI and Anthropic responded with a public relations campaign to convince everyone their respective models won gold at the Math Olympiad.

I wonder what they’ll cook up for Count-Gate. https://youtube.com/shorts/PHTHEjfJWks

Boosted by ratatui_rs@fosstodon.org ("Ratatui"):
orhun@fosstodon.org ("Orhun Parmaksız 👾") wrote:

A new terminal AI agent just dropped! 🔥

⚙️ **OpenCrabs** — An AI orchestration layer inspired by OpenClaw

💯 Multi-provider support, 3-tier memory, hybrid search & more!

🦀 Written in Rust & built with @ratatui_rs

⭐ GitHub: https://github.com/adolfousier/opencrabs

#rustlang #ratatui #tui #ai #orchestration #openclaw #terminal

Attachments:

• video: 10d1faf4a16f6cf6.mp4

Boosted by NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈"):
bamfic@autonomous.zone wrote:

Sometimes I wonder why this media has such a deep commitment to idiotic both-sides-ism and false balance, then I remember it's been part of the country since the Missouri Compromise and the 3/5ths clause: baked in right from the beginning.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
jaredwhite@indieweb.social ("Jared White (ResistanceNet ✊)") wrote:

@slightlyoff Somehow (most) software engineering culture in the past came to realize that in many cases you can't simply throw more warm bodies at the problems and solve them faster.

Now suddenly we're throwing "cold bodies" at the problems thinking they'll get solved faster. 😵‍💫

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

If you dump in a lot of food or chemicals to achieve short-term results, you *might* be able to juice things in the short run for your fish, but you also buy the consequences of a dynamically unstable system under stress.

So when managers assume that they'll "increase productivity" by adding a machine that generates more code, without taking into account the intertemporal effects of *owning* more code (of lowest-common-denominator quality), they're replicating the KLOC fallacy on steroids.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Owning code requires understanding, and one way we keep our fish tanks habitable is to swim; to do the work of moving code and replicating the mental exertion that keeps our *fingerspitzengefühl* tuned.

Replacing that, or pushing it out of balance, creates a different set of intertemporal effects that can quite easily push the system into crisis.

*Ceteris paribus* about AI, as with frameworks, is wish-thinking; our engineering cultures are what we re-make them to be every day, in every way.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

A conversation with a coworker re-triggered an intrusive thought that I find myself returning to regularly while working in a firm in the grips of AI influences:

Teams and engineering processes are like fish in tanks. There's a careful balance of the nitrogen cycle that keeps delicate organics alive; above a certain pH, it's just not plausible to believe things will keep working. But to understand effects, we have to take into account causes and add the effect of time.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

This leads to an appreciation of the toxicity of short-term incentives.

There's a reason I think very, *very* poorly of managers that lean on date-driven delivery: they are consistently externalising costs in ways that they *can and should* appreciate. That takes the form of high-interest unstructured loans against future product and team capacity.

But far too many engineering leaders assume *ceteris paribus* ("all else equal") will hold.

That's not how the fishtank works.

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:

How ICE became the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency (JAN 2026):

"But ICE’s budget has skyrocketed during President Trump’s second term, becoming the highest-funded U.S. law enforcement agency, with $85 billion now at its disposal."

Dems should’ve sacrificed everything to stop the One Big Beautiful Bill. When the dust settles history won’t be kind to them about how they handled the bill’s passing. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/21/nx-s1-5674887/ice-budget-funding-congress-trump

Boosted by NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈"):
bamfic@autonomous.zone wrote:

@hongminhee old fart over here mumbling something about HTML, XHTML, tag soup, internet explorer, Netscape, CSS, JavaScript, and 30 years of brain damage

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

*sigh* I have in the past been a big fan of Deno. My enthusiasm has waned a bit recently due to a couple issues, but I think this take might be final straw that pushes me into avoiding it by default:

adam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@evan/116100122651925704

She gets it; Evan doesn’t. We either have consistent and reliable security on the Fediverse or we have a giant federated liability. Solutions with a temporary attack surface are not serious solutions.

And “it’s ok if you don’t get it” is an impressive display of dismissive condescension. @cwebber, I don’t know you, but I’m sorry that you were spoken to like that. It’s gross.

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
chris@video.thepolarbear.co.uk ("Chris Were but on PeerTube") wrote:

Caddy: a great alternative for Nginx

https://video.thepolarbear.co.uk/w/gupkDA1SRLdCcY9PKcg1KX

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

long tail