Mastodon Feed: Posts

Reblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):

aardrian@toot.cafe ("Adrian Roselli") wrote:

Regular reminder that even vast swathes of the US still have shitty internet connectivity:
“One of Wisconsin's most isolated places is finally getting fast internet”
https://www.wpr.org/one-wisconsins-most-isolated-places-finally-getting-fast-internet

Please consider this when choosing your framework, library, dependencies, third-party services, 9MB background images (looking at you, recent event), fonts, etc. Not everyone is using your high-end system, massive display, and fast connection.

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

futurebird@sauropods.win ("myrmepropagandist") wrote:

Of all the ants I keep only the Eastern Black Carpenters are so committed to going into diapause that they will enter it even if I don't put them in the fridge. The rest of the ants seem inclined to stay up all winter, if at a lower activity level. Maybe because Camponotus pennslyvanicus tends to live in tree trunks that often freeze solid during winter? Or are these other ants more opportunistic?

It's alarming to watch a once voracious colony just stop eating, but girls need to sleep.

Reblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):

attacus@aus.social wrote:

Today I built a silly webpage by hand in a couple of hours. (I’m not going to tell you what it was, except that it was frivolous af.)

I started out by looking for a template, but everything I found was way too involved, so I ended up writing the HTML and CSS from scratch, throwing it in a cloud-hosted directory, and nudging the DNS settings to point there.

This turned out to be a ridiculously nostalgic experience. I built a lot of weird little websites like this when I was about eleven years old, saving the HTML of sites that I liked so that I could access them when the phone line was being used by someone else, and changing pieces around to figure out how it all fit together.

It struck me that:
a) by this measure I’ve been doing web dev for almost a quarter-century now 😳
b) there is nothing stopping me from making websites this way. I can still write HTML and yeet it out there if I want to, no matter what it’s for. Pages load quickly. It’s not fancy. It works. Underneath it all, the web is still there.

If you feel so inclined, I can highly recommend seizing an afternoon, taking a silly webpage idea, and having a play.

#HTML #CSS #SmallWeb #IndieWeb #web #dev

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

this is a *really* interesting piece on modern African artists (unlocked, no paywall)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/16/world/africa/african-artists-ruth-carter-mr-eazi.html?unlocked_article_code=1._kw.OKSu.fXKh_0aJ_B6r&smid=url-share

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

We don't have the text of the argument yet, which is presumably good for Apple because they have serially beclowned themselves in front of regulators over the past couple of years. And you might too if the alternative was losing your grip over billions per year in unwarranted rent extraction!

If you want to help Apple avoid this sort of ritual embarrassment, support @owa . Their work is bringing an end to the anti-web architecture of mobile OSes, and they need your help.

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

Apple's maximalist legal posturing gives away the game: it wants unlimited power to continue to hold the web back, and there's no plausible pro-consumer argument for it. This is just rent extraction, pure and simple.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/11/meta-tiktok-fight-eu-gatekeeper-status-to-avoid-opening-up-services-to-rivals/

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

#SilentSunday

Attachments:

• Two trees in the center, between them a stone house, behind, mountains, and below, green grass.

teller ("Siim Teller") wrote:

Masters of Doom - this is a really fun book for someone who grew up with games like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. Read/listen to it if you love gaming history.

Attachments:

• Screenshot of the book Masters of Doom playing in Audible app

Reblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):

wonderofscience ("Wonder of Science") wrote:

The E/V Nautilus team encounter a Flapjack Octopus off the central California coast.

Video credit: E/V Nautilus

Attachments:

• 7cb325bc1a2195e3.mp4

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

7 months old, but if you watch it, you'll grok why that doesn't mean it's late:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPtQmsjXMuo

Reblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):

MarkHoltom@mastodonapp.uk ("Mark Holtom (aka Kingbeard)") wrote:

Attachments:

• a picture of a teacher and primary children. Teacher: "Where is the capital of England?" Child: "In the offshore bank accounts of the 1%" (remote)

Reblogged by kornel ("Kornel"):

mcc wrote:

There's some C code in the wikipedia page for "Hilbert Curve" and I would like to propose this code be removed from the "Hilbert Curve" page and moved to the "How Not to Comment Source Code" page

Attachments:

• lots of code with very little comments

Reblogged by bcantrill ("Bryan Cantrill"):

billjings@mastodon.online ("Bill Phillips") wrote:

Boy, this talk from @bcantrill is terrific:

https://youtu.be/bQfJi7rjuEk?si=sOg2PqVeJFgwKnk-

Conveys some foundational liberal arts criticisms of the current AI mania through hard engineering problems.

collinsworth@hachyderm.io ("Josh Collinsworth") wrote:

Sometimes I think about how much better the dev world would be if WordPress had just picked Vue—already fully open-source, community-backed just like WP, and not owned by a corporation—instead of going out of its way to pick Facebook, and locking ~half the web into the slow, dated Frameworkstein that is React. And it makes me sad.

fribbledom ("muesli") wrote:

Impressive. AI-generated Mark Zuckerberg looks less fake than real Mark Zuckerberg.

kornel ("Kornel") wrote:

#caturday portrait

Attachments:

• Black cat resting on its rainbow toy

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

When you hear some folks say "React is anti-web", I interpret this to mean that React is a fork of the web, both in syntax and in practice. The fork grows as progress continues on the mainline web. React's assumptions and ecosystem continue to preclude default access to those advances.

In practice, this means that starting from the React baseline means many months of large-team effort to tune legacy assumptions out of systems and replace them with modern alternatives.

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

Nobody, and i mean nobody, needs to start a new project in the '20s using React. It's legacy tech, built for IE 6/7/8, and its entire ecosystem starts from the premise that we must (in theory) remain compatible with those browsers -- largely though slow and expensive transpilers.

You know who doesn't target *any* version of IE in new projects in 2023? MICROSOFT. Unsupported, full stop.

Starting from those legacy assumptions is like designing computers with only newtonian physics.

Reblogged by kornel ("Kornel"):

sundogplanets ("Prof. Sam Lawler") wrote:

My kids never had covid symptoms, but they did test positive for a few days. I'm mostly recovered, but still testing positive (very faint line). My partner has no symptoms anymore, but is still testing bright-red-line positive, been testing positive for 9 days now.

No wonder covid is spreading so well, the vast majority of people here aren't testing at all (despite free tests!) and wouldn't ever notice when they are positive. "It's just a cold." 😬

kornel ("Kornel") wrote:

I'd be cool if OpenAI tried being actually open, instead of chasing a Microsoft acquisition.

Reblogged by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):

phae@status.fberriman.com wrote:

When setting up a thing to make tshirts on your behalf, one can never be quite sure how they'll turn out.

...

Got one for myself, and it looks good! Phew

https://infrequently.org/stickers for more.

Attachments:

• Lettering on a t-shirt of anti JavaScript JavaScript club (remote)

xor@tech.intersects.art ("Parker Higgins") wrote:

i got a (very simple) flexbox thing working on my ~first attempt and the resulting hubris allowed me to continue tweaking and now i've spend almost two hours trying to get it back to where it was

Reblogged by kornel ("Kornel"):

parismarx@mastodon.online ("Paris Marx") wrote:

When we warn the real threat of AI is how it’s used against people in the present, not the fantasies that some day computers might think for themselves, this is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about: health insurers using AI to deny care.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate-forces-elderly-out-of-rehab-nursing-homes-suit-claims/

#tech #ai #health #healthcare

Attachments:

• UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges For the largest health insurer in the US, AI's error rate is like a feature, not a bug. (remote)

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

Here are a few better shots #Sungazer

Attachments:

• Musicians on stage.
• Musicians on stage.
• Musicians on stage.

Reblogged by bcantrill ("Bryan Cantrill"):

timbray@cosocial.ca ("Tim Bray") wrote:

Excellent: @bcantrill is eloquent on the subject of a corrupt and stupid sports mogul: https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2023/11/18/is-it-worse-for-john-fisher/

nadim@symbolic.software ("Nadim Kobeissi") wrote:

Just finished Resident Evil 4 and that was the single most intense video game experience I've ever had in my entire life

bcantrill ("Bryan Cantrill") wrote:

As an Oakland A's fan, this has been a pretty awful week. But is it, in fact, worse for John Fisher? https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2023/11/18/is-it-worse-for-john-fisher/

Reblogged by bcantrill ("Bryan Cantrill"):

cyberchris@discuss.systems ("Chris") wrote:

@bcantrill

I really liked those examples of concrete, gnarly engineering challenges. Definitely puts things into perspective on what might an AI *actually* need to solve.

Your point regarding the "humanity" that AI lacks, is loosely referred to as "agency" in the AGI space. And yes, most of the popular AI tools (e.g. the usual LLMs like ChatGPT) have *zero* agency!

I don't know if the doomer twitter folks mention this distinction, but yeah, so far I haven't seen much convincing evidence of an agentic AI having anywhere near the ability needed to solve those engineering challenges autonomously.

Reblogged by bcantrill ("Bryan Cantrill"):

mikeolson ("Mike Olson") wrote:

Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill is so much fun to watch. His talks are always interesting, and he usually incorporates an intense cardio workout into the presentation because he gets so wrapped up in the topic. "Intelligence Is Not Enough" is funny and hopeful.

https://redmonk.com/videos/intelligence-is-not-enough-bryan-cantrill-monktoberfest-2023/

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

#Sungazer in Berlin

Attachments:

• Musicians on stage