Mastodon Feed: Posts

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Continuing with my Montréal era, here are three photos from Parc Jarry, spring, summer, and autumn. The photo of the bloodied gull is one of my personal favourites. The gull had tried to snack on a duckling and all of the duck mamas ganged up and it was lucky to get away with its life #montreal #photos #photography

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

I’ve reached my Montréal years in my impromptu photography retrospective (2016-2019). 2019 was the year where, for a variety of reasons, I knew I wasn’t going to be living there for much longer. These are mostly from Parc Jarry and the Jean Talon market. #montreal #photos #photography

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Also, side-eyeing the people in the industry who DON’T feel betrayed and are treating the tech industry’s overt assault on labour and creative industries as just another day at the job.

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

RE: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/115745770152711683

For some fucking reason, what most here on Mastodon took away from this blog post, where I describe how my own words about sporadic blogs and feeds turned to ash is that they should go and boost the year-old blog post that turned to ash, ignoring the fact that it is now a curse, not a feelgood happy-post

Wtf people?

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Spending the holidays processing just how betrayed I feel by the software and web industry

Basically my career has been fifteen years of hope and promise—some fulfilled, some not—followed by a decade where the industry dropped all pretence and switched to just overtly looting, manipulating, and gouging.

Being a bit angry about it is probably quite reasonable

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

If you don't want to take sides in the fight against bigotry then you've joined the fight on the side of the fucking bigots

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/us/politics/vance-republicans-trump-antisemitism.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.-k8.e9j2.RNd%5FrxY109%5FW&smid=url-share

Boosted by jakedel@mamot.fr ("S. Delafond"):
freexian@hachyderm.io ("Freexian :debian:") wrote:

In November, Debian LTS contributors released 33 Debian LTS Advisories, fixing 219 CVEs across multiple packages. Notable updates included security fixes for bind9, unbound, pdfminer, firefox-esr, thunderbird, and the Linux 6.1 kernel.

In addition, the LTS team also contributed security updates to latest Debian releases and carried out significant work to revamp the LTS team documentation.

Read the full report here:
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2025-11/?utm%5Fsource=mastodon&utm%5Fmedium=social

This work is funded through Freexian’s Debian LTS offering. Consider sponsoring Debian LTS (https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/?utm%5Fsource=mastodon&utm%5Fmedium=social) to support this effort and benefit from it: https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/details/#benefits

#freexian #debianLTS #debian #linux #bind9 #unbound #thunderbird

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

You know, I'm still a bit mad about the picture they put on my Wikipedia article. Back at FOSDEM 2023, some guy walks up to me, asks if he can take a picture. I've been taking selfies with folks all day so I say yes. People are happy to meet me and I don't mind. He takes the picture and leaves. Then months later I find out that blurry, low light, bad hair, bad composition picture is how I will be remembered in the world's most popular encyclopedia.

Boosted by jwz:
twipped@twipped.social ("Jocelynephiliac :reclaimer:") wrote:

Just saw the take that waymo shouldn't be expected to have tested for an edge case like unpowered stop lights.

That edge case that human drivers are required to know from page 34 of the california drivers handbook.

Boosted by keul@fosstodon.org ("Luca Fabbri"):
grumpygamer@mastodon.gamedev.place ("Ron Gilbert (100% AI free)") wrote:

When Twitter collapsed, it was great to see the flood of friends, game devs and other come to Mastodon. Over the next 9 months a lot of them vanished to Threads, BlueSky or just left. I want to thank all people who are still on Mastodon and make it a wonderful place. You know who you are.

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

My very poignant and clear example for how it felt when decentralized social media people told us it was okay that we invited Meta to be a part of the decentralized social media club.

I probably shouldn’t write after 9pm

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@codebyjeff Eminent Domain PG&E. https://www.publicpowersf.org

Boosted by jwz:
jplebreton ("JP") wrote:

@MLNow waymo et al are part of a campaign to replace all public transit with for-profit corporate controlled surveillance and they can't even function in emergencies when they're most needed. the tech is bad and its politics are even worse.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
xgranade@wandering.shop ("Cassandra is only carbon now") wrote:

Maybe another way of putting all this is that if I look at something like an LLM and ask "how can I make it ethical," I wind up with something that is probably pretty ethical, but it no longer resembles an LLM at all. Like, you can't train one at the scale of an individual artist, or on work that you can meaningfully obtain consent for. The "large" in "large language model" is incredibly load-bearing.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
nasser@merveilles.town ("Ramsey Nasser") wrote:

and beyond just the triumph of capital over any alternative, it really breaks my heart that computers are just objectively worse today than they were in the time of Chuck Moore. I try and not be an old man yelling at the cloud about this but we've given up on stability, soundness, maintainability. these are non-goals of modern computing, sacrificed at the altar of shareholder value.

it is wild that an official update of the operating system could break otherwise working code in a way that is impossible to determine even what is happening, let alone what to do to fix it. but this is what we've come to expect. computers break all the time, software breaks all the time, stuff crashes, you restart, whatever. and this isn't even factoring in the incoming wave of vibe-coded systems which make no attempt at correctness.

this isn't what computing was, there were attempts -- serious attempts! -- at developing theory and practice to build systems that were stable and correct in the face of usage and updates. we put half a century into that. and now we live in a kind of collective surrender. it's really depressing. as someone who has dedicated a life to computing, it's really fucking depressing.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
xgranade@wandering.shop ("Cassandra is only carbon now") wrote:

I'm not a huge fan of "don't obey in advance," as it implies that there is a correct and useful point at which one should obey fascists. "Fuck you, make me" or even just "fuck you" work much better.

But goddamn it, "ethical AI" *is* obedience. It is acquiescence. It's the narrative refuge of quisling appeasers. It is an absolutely *vapid* intellectual stance that does nothing but muddies the waters when it comes to the fascist project of enclosing culture with AI.

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
alex@deuill.org ("Marid Vex de Uill") wrote:

@fromjason #emacs ain't too bad either: https://github.com/rnkn/fountain-mode 😄

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
mihaip@hachyderm.io ("Mihai Parparita") wrote:

Playing around with adding BlueSCSI Toolbox protocol support to DingusPPC. Though somewhat roundabout, the end result is that you can transfer files in and out of more emulated machine types on Infinite Mac. As a bonus, it also makes the Macintosh Garden library integration work.

It works for the 6100 running 7.1.2 (https://infinitemac.org/1994/System%207.1.2?saved%5Fhd=false&blue%5Fscsi=true), and you can try to enable it for any other machine via the "Customize…" dialog.

Many thanks for @nulleric for @BlueSCSI in general and specifically for fixes to the SD Transfer app and my DingusPPC virtual device (code for the curious: https://github.com/mihaip/dingusppc/commit/6c002e81e58eb336b345bca27973726fd150c139).

Attachments:

• gifv: Demonstration of transferring files and out of Infinite Mac running System 7.1.2 using the BlueSCSI SD Transfer app.

jwz wrote:

Four way stop versus $100 billion valuation.

It's on its back, baking in the hot sun, but you're not helping, Leon. Why is that?

Also, all the headlines say variants of "Waymo halts service during massive S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams" but what they fail to mention is that it took nearly six hours of these traffic jams before Waymo *finally* decided that the press they were getting was bad enough that they should do the most obvious thing in the world.
https://jwz.org/b/yk0t

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

The iA Writer Template for Screenwriters:

"Fountain supports elements specific to screenplays. Like Markdown, it establishes a set of conventions to use when writing in plain text. Based on that syntax, Fountain will then render a fully formatted screenplay."

Don’t know how I missed this! iA Writer is the best writing app. https://ia.net/topics/ia-writer-fountain-template

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
uglyreykjavik.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Ugly Reykjavik") wrote:

A Christmas card dated 1940. My favourite thing about this card is the poor bird that the little girl almost ran over with her skis. The white dog doesn't seem to be having much fun either.#Christmas #Advent #Iceland #holidays #xmas #vintage #1940s #postcard #illustration #dogs

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
cbarbermd@med-mastodon.com ("Carolyn Barber, MD") wrote:

😀

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
gsuberland@chaos.social ("Graham Sutherland / Polynomial") wrote:

Anna's Archive backed up Spotify. They got 99.9% of metadata, and 300TB of music representing 86 million tracks - original 160kbps OGG for tracks with popularity>0, and re-encoded 75kbps for popularity=0. absolutely wild project.

the metadata in particular is a hugely useful data source. MusicBrainz catalogues 5 million unique ISRCs (like ISBNs but for music releases), whereas this archive has a whopping 186 million.

https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
johanpeitz@mastodon.gamedev.place ("Johan Peitz") wrote:

If people are so keen on using ai to generate art, why not generate sports as well? A good game is a good game - right?

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
Nerts@yiff.life ("fwankie") wrote:

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
InternetEh@dads.cool ("Sid 🇵🇸") wrote:

Brilliant sticker placement, no notes

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁"):
venelles ("Philip Wittamore") wrote:

The latest comment from @adele about Firefox inspired me to write this phlog/log entry.

Firefox and the useless box.

https://spike.nagatha.fr/log/2025/2025-12-21-20-08-Firefox-and-the-useless-box.txt

gopher://spike.nagatha.fr:70/0/phlog/2025/2025-12-21-20-08-Firefox-and-the-useless-box.txt

#gopher #smolweb #firefox

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your merry 'net denizen"):
jesse@chaos.social ("Jesse @39C3") wrote:

The NS (the Dutch train company) was selling some old emergency brakes, and well... one thing led to another, and now I have this in my home 😂

Attachments:

• video: Video of a very small toilet. We see the emrgency brake hanging in there. Big red handle sticking out from the bottom. Text on the body says that misuse is a finable offence, and not to use it in tunnels. A hand moves into view and pulls the handle. We hear a relay click, the lights dim, disco lights activate and music starts playing. The entire toilet is bathed in tiny coloured dots of light. The hand moves in again, and holds the handle for a second. The music stops, disco lights turn off and the regular light gets bright again, returning the toilet to it's normal state.

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

Is there a term for when a platform with a passionate userbase knows that an upcoming decision will be wildly unpopular, so the organization brings in a sacrificial CEO to make the change, then when it's done, brings back the old CEO who promises to make things right but never really does?

Anyway, nothing like that will happen here.

#Fediverse #Mastodon

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

Connor Hayes on #Threads and the #Fediverse:

"“It’s something that we’re supporting, it’s something that we’re maintaining, but it’s not the thing that we’re talking about that’s gonna help the app break out”."

No thanks for all the fish, no press release. Just a paywalled afterthought on a Thursday. https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-147/