Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
eanakashima@hachyderm.io ("Emily Nakashima") wrote:

My greatest professional accomplishment of the year: I got my exec & manager teammates saying "point positive," a term from whitewater rafting and kayaking.

Meaning: when facing hazards, point people toward where to go/what to do, rather than drawing attention to everything to avoid.

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
verdre ("Jonas") wrote:

One thing I obsess a little bit over is the fact that it’s 2026, we pretend that Linux is a serious OS, but we‘re still losing your data on a regular basis.

Out of memory conditions (OOM) are one of our biggest pain points, so I just did a quick experiment with macOS to see how they are handling OOM.

I loaded about 200 memory heavy tabs in Firefox and kept a close look at memory usage.

(1/4)

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
quephird@tech.lgbt ("Danie🏒🏒e is officially a PWHL fan") wrote:

Hand-drawn.
No use of straightedges, outlining, nor compasses.
15 person-hours of effort over six days.
Copic classic magic markers.
35 shades of brown, beige, orange, and yellow.
18” x 24” Fabriano 140 pound paper.

Boosted by zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán"):
loriemerson@post.lurk.org ("Lori Emerson") wrote:

I know I'm preaching to the choir here but in case anyone is looking to help educate others, here's yet another one: "The vast data centers that power AI guzzle huge amounts of energy but they also have another alarming impact...They are creating 'heat islands,' warming the land around them by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, and making life hotter for more than 340 million people." https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/climate/data-centers-are-having-an-underrported #ai

zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.publicinterest.town/@b%5Fcavello/116338207761349739

@b_cavello there are things that we can only make incremental progress on divesting from (coal, oil, cars, non-renewable energy, most plastics) because we’ve already made immensely costly errors in the past that make them largely unavoidable for many people. GenAI is different in that it’s completely avoidable, right now, and we are well positioned to simply… not let it happen.

There may be a world where the technologies involved in genAI find their use without being deeply ethically compromised, and I believe we may very well find that niche in due time. Tbh I think it’s more a matter of when, not if. Take cars, for example: consider a world in which they became local, low speed, last-mile transportation infrastructure primarily used by those with additional mobility needs/emergency responders and which shared primarily pedestrian infrastructure or in smaller towns that had not yet built out more robust transit, and where regional and arterial transportation had been structured around public transit. We could’ve made that choice back then. We were already on track for it, too, and actually reversed course in many places.

In the meantime, I can choose to not put my dollar into funding and my voice into promoting something that is harming the world as much or more than so many of the Big Ones.

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
mjd@mathstodon.xyz ("Mark Dominus") wrote:

“If the newspapers ever mistakenly print my death, I plan to write to the obits editor concerned and reassure him that ‘History will vindicate you one day’.”

(Daniel Davies, https://blog.danieldavies.com/2011/07/christ-what-moron-if-reuters-comments.html)

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Businesses have a ton of this kind of stuff that's purely internal to the business, even if you don't care about your employees dropping dead of heart disease, many things that junior employees do are not the hypothetically ideal use of time but you need people to keep doing them in order to circulate knowledge; if you optimize them away you need to make more time in your L&D budget

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Is there a name for necessary stuff that happens because of inefficiencies? Like, for example, exercise. If you're a dockworker in the 1700s you might have a bunch of health problems but "sedentary lifestyle" is not one of them. But if you become a dock crane operator in modern times, you need to both do your job *and* go to the gym where you "waste" a bunch of effort in order to exercise, because your job is sitting down now

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
BleepingComputer@infosec.exchange wrote:

Threat actors are exploiting the recent Claude Code source code leak by using fake GitHub repositories to deliver Vidar information-stealing malware.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/claude-code-leak-used-to-push-infostealer-malware-on-github/

aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

RE: https://social.coop/@chrisjrn/116337927962121277

So very much this. The processes to not do this are not there yet.

The software industries have been due for a reckoning for a while. It's coming because of this.

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
chrisjrn@social.coop ("Christopher Neugebauer") wrote:

5. Dependence on LLMs is very likely to lead to a crisis of maintenance, because because we're using tools that bias towards the things that we already know lead towards less maintanable code.

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
chrisjrn@social.coop ("Christopher Neugebauer") wrote:

4. Things are never equal.
4a. LLMs are predisposed to being better at accretion than modification due to inherent limits on static analysis (see Rice's theorem).

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
chrisjrn@social.coop ("Christopher Neugebauer") wrote:

3. All things being equal, smaller codebases are less complex and easier to interpret than accreted code: accreted code "lithifies" (cf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3nJR7PNgI4) over time.

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
chrisjrn@social.coop ("Christopher Neugebauer") wrote:

2. All things being equal, accreted code is more likely to be correct than modified code (because the code that existed beforehand might be depended upon in multiple unrelated places)

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
chrisjrn@social.coop ("Christopher Neugebauer") wrote:

Some things that I hold true about software engineering:

1. Systems can gain modified functionality by accretion (i.e. additional code is created), or through alteration (i.e. new code replaces old code).

aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

My moment of clarity in the last few weeks was coming back to “Oh right, copyright is a hack, and one that is not serving us, particularly us on the margins”

The moral rights of authorship and the way we situate our legal process of ownership are, actually, kinda at odds. And it entirely misses the idea of a commons, both as community and as a cultural base to draw from.

I've long believed that we, collectively, should own our culture — to have modern myths be Copyright 1972 LucasFilm, the traditional songs we sing Copyright 1922, now owned by Warner/Chappell Music is one of the things I find repugnant about the situation we find ourselves in.

That said, reconciling that with the behavior of the AI companies, _particularly_ the American ones? It's hard. Google abuses its monopoly position; Microsoft has forced harmful and terrible tooling on people at every turn; OpenAI is run by someone who actively despises art and does not understand it; and Anthropic is run by a guy who is trying to make sure the apocalypse has a pleasant demeanor and doesn't offend any corporations on the way. All of the above have scraped the web with no active consent — and that's largely fine, that's what putting things in common _is_, that's the beauty of the open information world we have the remnants of — but also actively evading measures people put in place to stop it and with absolutely no willingness to engage with the process. Extracting from the commons _is_ the tragedy of the commons.

It does not mean that enlarging the commons with the resulting tools is bad. The doctrine of original sin is a Christian concept I do not subscribe to. The concept of 'fruit of the poisonous tree' is a legal tool to fix power relations not a moral stance. They're worth understanding, but they are not absolute moral stances that are self-evident.

These are not harmless tools, but so too putting hard regulation and corporate, legalistic scrutiny on everything has a vastly negative impact: it is a yoke on human creativity and community to the reins of capital.

And, so too, disruption has huge costs. We are, apparently, committed to doing things the worst possible way. One can just hope that we capture the good too, because the ride has started and it's rather late to get off.

zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán") wrote:

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@petrillic/116337502667369228

I can’t have a conversation with any genAI boosters that is remotely productive precisely because of this.

Boosted by jwz:
developerjustin ("Justin Ferrell") wrote:

#PamBondi #usPol #andor #starWars

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

I suppose we don't want to make too much about the fact that the two cabinet positions Trump has fired to date are women

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

i've been training my whole life for this. they taught us the modern major general's song in primary school.

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

Person: *describes an autistic trait of mine*
Me: Thanks!

(later)
💭 Ohhh maybe they didn't mean that as a compliment.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

no you're singing gilbert and sullivan down voice notes to a drunk

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

the true cost of being pep talked by a brit

Boosted by jwz:
0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange ("abadidea") wrote:

IT'S HAPPENING

GITHUB, THE FIRST ENTERPRISE CLOUD SOLUTION TO REACH ZERO NINES RELIABILITY

https://mrshu.github.io/github-statuses/

#github

Boosted by zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán"):
downey@floss.social ("Michael Downey 🧢") wrote:

🚨 LinkedIn runs a silent browser scan on every Chrome user who visits the site. 6,222 extensions. ~405 million users affected. No consent, no disclosure, no mention in their privacy policy.

The scan identifies your sales tools, VPN, ad blocker, job search extensions, and extensions tied to religion, politics, and disability.

The full technical breakdown, legal analysis, and searchable database of every scanned extension:

https://browsergate.eu

#LinkedIn #BrowserGate #privacy

jwz wrote:

New Numbers Station just dropped.

Each message starts with the Farsi word for "attention" followed by what is assumed to be some header information as two 5-digit groups. Then there is a set of 181 five-digit groups. Each message is padded out to take...
https://jwz.org/b/yk5r

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

the hidden dangers of german so-called 'friends'. don't be a victim

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
timbray@cosocial.ca ("Tim Bray") wrote:

1. GenAI is probably going to impact us but how? Nobody knows.
2. The worst thing about GenAI isn't the technology, it's the shitty people: https://karlbode.com/the-problem-with-ai-is-shitty-human-beings [<must-read]
3. We can’t have a grown-up conversation on the subject because the trillion-dollar bet’s feer+greed pressure crowds out truth.
4. When the bubble pops, the shitty people will melt away. Then we can maybe figure it out.
5. We so *SO* need that bubble to pop. Next week would be ideal.

#GenAI

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
swachter@toot.boston wrote:

I went to pottery class today and opened by asking several of my classmates if they knew how to use the slab roller upstairs. Nobody did but everyone wanted to, so when the teacher got in I’m like “hey teach, do you know how to use the slab roller upstairs” and she’s like “no” (she’s a visiting artist who only got here a couple months ago so this is not very surprising) “but I’ve used a lot of different ones and I bet we can figure it out.” Me: “do you want to go on a Journey of Discovery?” Everyone: yes. YES. *cue sickos faces* so we all thunder up the stairs periodically shouting JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY and our teacher snags another person who uses the slab roller A Lot and this person gives us a very thorough lesson and demonstration and every so often someone else wanders through and asks what’s happening and we all go JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY at them and now everyone knows how to use the slab roller and honestly I cannot recommend this approach enough as a way to make learning new skills and life generally more exciting.

#LifeHack

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

omg, i just got german music'd at