Mastodon Feed: Posts

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:

It's the rise of techno-optimism.
It's the rise of techno-authoritarianism.
It's openness at all costs, and "we'll fix safety later."

Techo-optimism. Techno-authoritarianism. And Techno-Utopianism...

Are you getting it? These aren't three different ideologies. This is one propaganda push.

And we call it— Big Tech Pivot to Infrastructure Because Platforms Are No Longer A Sustainable Business Model For Monopolies (the name needs work)

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:

The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism - The Atlantic:

"Recall, too, the company’s secret mood-manipulation experiment in 2012, which deliberately tinkered with what users saw in their News Feed in order to measure how Facebook could influence people’s emotional states without their knowledge."

I’m sure none of these tactics have spilled over to #Mastodon to influence opinions about the #threads interpolation 🙃

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/03/facebook-meta-silicon-valley-politics/677168/

rmrenner ("The Old Gay Gristle Fest") wrote:

While I do like the Book of Hours, I think it really would've had me by the throat if it was just a bit more of a conventional sim game let me design my own little rooms. It's not quite as satisfying when you're filing things away in the irregular spaces they give you by default.

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

Engineering is a discipline of design through investigation and constraint, with the goal to develop useful products that serve users and help society.

The opposite of engineering is bullshit; substituting fairy tales for inquiry and evidence.

If the tone of my blog tends towards despair, it's because the professionalisation of frontend appears not to have made more engineers, no matter how generously the word gets slathered on CVs:

https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/

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

Incredible to think that Apple's actually going to launch the Vision Pro without WebGPU support because they chose to starve the Safari team of resources:

https://www.theverge.com/24055677/apple-vision-pro-epic-netflix-app-ecosystem-monopoly

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

john@sauropods.win ("John Conway") wrote:

Has anyone got any recommendations for interesting* web #hosting? I am currently on Linode, and lets just say I don't feel entirely sure that I am the sort of customer they care about since Akamai bought them. I don't need anything special, just a small Linux VPS.

*Small, weird, ethical, surprise me!

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

owa ("Open Web Advocacy") wrote:

Since Apple released their Digital Markets Act compliance proposal we've been asking web developers how these changes may affect how they work, their businesses, and the web as a whole.

👇In today's article we go through their unfiltered reactions: https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/developers-react-apple-eu-dma-compliance/

Attachments:

• Image showing three pull quotes, stating: To me, it's an excellent demonstration of why browser choice is crucially important [...] legal compliance are clearly not incentive enough. Brian LeRoux, Begin. Apple has been forced to lift this restriction, but how they react to this will show us their attitude to the web. Jake Archibald, Shopify. It would be quite disappointing if—when the rubber meets the road—browser variability were dependent on the country in which you reside! Zach Leatherman, 11ty, CloudCannon

pzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:

You're saying I can learn things from a toothpaste label?

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/31/i-will-never-see-a-commercial-label-that-i-lo/

Attachments:

• list of ingredients on a toothpaste label (remote)

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:

#Meta minions have this practice on #threads where they tag Mosseri under people reporting Meta's shady behavior.

In an environment where the governing body is not bound by ethics, it's 100% an intimation tactic.

Attachments:

• The image shows a screenshot of a social network interface with user comments. Some text and personal information are redacted for privacy. The conversation appears to involve a discussion about a kid's version of a social media platform.

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

GottaLaff ("Laffy") wrote:

Via Tamar Hallerman:

New: Fulton County DA #FaniWillis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade have been subpoenaed to testify at a Feb. 15 hearing involving motions to disqualify them from the election interference case, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday #Georgia #legal

Reblogged by pzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑"):

infobeautiful@vis.social ("Information Is Beautiful") wrote:

Love this toothpaste label - let's roll it out across all products

Attachments:

• Backside of a toothpaste packaging showing a table which lists each ingredient, where it comes from and what it does. (remote)

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

sbourne ("Sarah E Bourne") wrote:

@neurovagrant and @jsonstein I think you need to see this. And yes, you DO want to see the replies!
https://mstdn.social/@yurnidiot/111847806894543607

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

JudyOlo@universeodon.com ("Judy Olo") wrote:

@yurnidiot
Morse-cat. Was widely used during WWII. Dot-dot-dot-dash-dash-dash-dot-dot-dot

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

Oooh... Ibibio Sound Machine has a new album coming out in May:

https://ibibiosoundmachine.bandcamp.com/album/pull-the-rope

In the meantime, I'll revisit some of their existing performances like this one at KEXP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFMwH49MNDY

Reblogged by rmrenner ("The Old Gay Gristle Fest"):

scy@chaos.social wrote:

A few days ago, my groovebox, the #SynthstromDeluge, running the new and awesome community-built firmware, crashed, which was very cool.

Not that it crashed, but what happened next: It displayed a colorful pattern on its pads.

That's a stack trace. It's listing the last steps the code made before crashing. The devs have asked to be sent photos of these, to help them find bugs.

I've pasted it on Discord, and there's a _bot_ that recognizes these images and decodes them into addresses!

Attachments:

• Me, in a Discord channel called "nightly-testing", writing "This is from 1.0.1 and happened a few days ago. I think I was adding synths to a kit when it crashed, but I don't remember with absolute certainty." Below that, a picture of my Deluge. It's a black metal device with several silicone buttons with colorful LEDs below them. It also has seven knobs (some black, some gold) and an OLED screen. The lower two thirds of the device are taken up by a matrix of 8 rows and 16 columns of square pads with RGB LEDs below them. Then there's an additional 2 columns of 8 rows of the same pads to the right of that, used for muting, auditioning, and playing. From left to right, the main matrix displays four binary patterns, each 4 columns and 8 rows in size, in different colors: purple, blue, green, and cyan. The two columns on the right also display a pattern, in red. In each of the patterns, each LED is either illuminated in the color of that block, or not at all. Each block of 4×8 LEDs thus represents a 32 bit address. The two columns on the right represent the first four hex digits of the firmware's Git commit hash. The small OLED screen says, in capital letters, white on black "Error: E339. Press select knob to attempt resume, then save to new file." Below my post, there's a reply of the bot "Deluge Crash Reader", saying: Thanks for the image, @scy!, it decodes as: 0x201157c0 0x2011585c 0x20110840 0x20048f4c 0xfe31 fe31a4f9b112890b16315796907788eb81314ff (remote)

pzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:

Richard Dawkins continues his painful descent into reactionary ignorance. Put him on Fox News, he'd fit right in.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/31/dawkins-is-one-step-away-from-consulting-a-dictionary-to-define-biology/

Attachments:

• Sex is not defined by chromosomes, nor by anatomy, nor by psychology or sociology, nor by personal inclination, nor by “assignment at birth”, but by gamete size. It happens to be embryologically DETERMINED by chromosomes in mammals and (in the opposite direction) birds, by temperature in some reptiles, by social factors in some fish. But it is universally DEFINED by the binary distinction between sperms and eggs. You may argue about “gender” if you wish (biologists have better things to do) but sex is a true binary, one of rather few in biology. (remote)

pzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:

Nah.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/31/elon-has-gone-and-done-it/

Attachments:

• Neuralink will cure depression and upload your consciousness for $5000! (remote)

pzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:

Those Republicans sure know how to party down.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/01/31/anyone-want-to-go-to-a-concert/

Attachments:

• Jack Posobiec proposes a concert with Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, and Jon Voight to counter the influence of Taylor Swift (remote)

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

Packing essentials for #FOSDEM.

Attachments:

• A white cat with orange patches sits in an open suitcase.

andreu@andreubotella.com ("Andreu Botella") wrote:

That moment when you find yourself typing `println!()` in a C++ codebase.

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

We got a pig.

Attachments:

• A ceramic pig whose purpose is to hold the spiral coil against mosquitos (katoributa).

Reblogged by bcantrill ("Bryan Cantrill"):

ahl ("Adam Leventhal") wrote:

Last night @jmc, Patrick, and Steve joined the me, @bcantrill and the Oxide Friends to talk about Helios, the operating system that runs on Oxide hardware. It’s a distro of illumos, but what’s a distro? And why did we choose illumos? How does it work? So many questions! Many of them answered. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ejokdrByUs

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

boostmarks@hachyderm.io ("Boris Schapira") wrote:

#boostmarks

"The Performance Inequality Gap, 2024", Alex Russel (@slightlyoff)
https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/

"We got to a place where performance has been a constant problem in large part because a tribe of programmers convinced themselves that it wasn't and wouldn't be. The circa '13 narrative that:

- CPUs would keep getting faster
- Networks would get better, or at least not get worse.
- Organisations had all learned the lessons of Google and FaceBook's adventures in Ajax.

was all bullshit"

Reblogged by keul@fosstodon.org ("Luca Fabbri"):

NedMan@social.makerforums.info ("NedMan 🚀") wrote:

Tracks.

Attachments:

• Four-panel meme. The top left panel features a cartoon representation of Bill Gates with a speech bubble that says, "Lets make more vaccines." Opposite to this, in the top right panel, is a drawing of a distressed character with a tearful expression, shouting, "nooooo you will put microchips in our bodies and track us." The bottom left panel shows a cartoon of Elon Musk with a contemplative expression and a speech bubble stating, "I will literally put a microchip in your brain." The bottom right panel displays a character with a beard, looking amused, and saying, "Lmao nice" in response to Musk's statement (remote)

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

High-level takeaways from this year's research:

• reliable network information is so much harder to come by than anyone expects. Dear Akamai, CF, Google, Ookla, etc: publish full histograms?!! And slice by locality and form-factor if you can.
• devices are slow. But they got faster (finally)!!
• network speed is the Great White Hope, in that rich programmers hope it'll make their React sins look less shite. Oops.

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

How much HTML/CSS/JS can we afford if we want to serve most users most of the time? It's a data-driven question that I've been trying to answer for the web community for the past decade, along with dozens of collaborating colleagues from Google, Akamai, Cloudflare, and many other vendors.

Here's my best reckons for teams building new sites in 2024:

https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/

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

OK perverts; this one's for you:

https://infrequently.org/2024/01/performance-inequality-gap-2024/

Reblogged by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):

terrybot@frikiverse.zone ("Terrybot :pratchett:") wrote:

My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.
My dream holiday would be a) a ticket to Amsterdam b) immunity from prosecution and c) a baseball bat :-)

Terry Pratchett, alt.fan.pratchett

#GNUTerryPratchett, #SpeakHisName, #Discworld

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:

Jk I love it

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:

My blog needs some MAINTENANCE 😅

Who said a custom blog was a good idea anyway? I'd like to have a word