Mastodon Feed
Reblogged by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
semioticstandard@wandering.shop ("R. Leigh Hennig") wrote:
You need to stop using Chrome NOW. It’s not hyperbole: Google just rolled out a change to Chrome that tracks the sites you visit, builds a profile, and shares that with any page you visit that asks.
This is real. It’s not tech bro conspiracy shit.
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:
And don't let anyone go unchallenged who attempts to frame this as a small instance problem.
A mass exodus from small to big servers would weaken decentralization. Who does that benefit?
https://fieldnotes.resistant.tech/what-is-decentralization/#fediverse
From: @are0h
https://h-i.social/@are0h@h-i.social/111953598989236478
Mastodon FeedReblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤"):
are0h@h-i.social ("Optional Dictator") wrote:
I like that people are talking about how the lack of progress in security and safety in Mastodon is enabling some pretty nasty stuff.
Keep talking and bringing attention to that.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤"):
fromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:
If an instance wants to do the "watch before block" thing, great. Write out and publish your terms. What is acceptable and what isn't? No more vague expectations.
If a fediverse leader amplifies rationale thats misleading, call them in and make your case. Most want what's best for the collective. Give them a graceful out so they don't double down.
Also, Ecorp will prob target small instances first. Don't let them. Unite.
Last, keep talking.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤"):
RedtheBean ("Red (Rachel Smith Loesche)") wrote:
#TIL how to see all the accounts and domains I have blocked on #Mastodon and... they're saved and made available as downloadable CSVs for us!
Preferences>Import/Export 🙂
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:
I just realized that #whatwg is the acronym for
The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group
And
Where Have All The Websites Gone
Is this poetry?
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:
I get it though. Reading an article on most blogs is a fucking nightmare.
I come from the digital marketing world, where we're always trying to coax the visitor to click through to the next page. So we make pop-ups, and floating buttons, and call to actions and blah blah blah.
In that pursuit we've lost the ability to make users comfortable on the page they're on. As if somehow waving a newsletter CTA in their face is more valuable than simply providing a pleasant reading experience.
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤") wrote:
Imagine stumbling across a post you wrote about the web, curation, and algorithms, only to see a "Save a Click" AI summary in the comments lmao.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz 🖤"):
Daojoan ("Joan Westenberg") wrote:
Xbox laying off 2,000 workers because "the industry didn't grow enough" is obtuse at best.
And it ignores a simple economic reality even a toddler should be able to understand:
Infinite growth is a goddamn myth.
It’s the great collective delusion of capitalism.
An industry cannot grow year on year indefinitely.
At some point you run the fuck out of consumers.
If your business model is based on hand waving hypothetical growth, you’re either lying to us or you’re lying to yourself.
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@octodon.social ("pzmyers 🦑") wrote:
AI is now being used to corrupt biology.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/02/18/the-opposite-of-inspire/
Mastodon FeedGargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:
There is an ongoing spam attack on the fediverse for the last couple of days. It's more widespread than before, as attackers are targeting smaller servers to create accounts. Before, usually only mastodon.social was targeted and our team could take care of it. For server administrators out there: If you don't need open registrations, switch over to approval mode. If you do, blocking disposable e-mail providers is a massive stopgap to the problem. Mastodon also supports hCaptcha.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by collinsworth@hachyderm.io ("Josh Collinsworth"):
bastianallgeier ("Bastian Allgeier") wrote:
This is a great summary about Tailwind: https://nuejs.org/blog/tailwind-misinformation-engine/
We played a lot with utility-first ideas for @getkirby and our site still uses utilities heavily. I think I poured enough time in understanding it to confidently say that the downsides outweigh the benefits. Some utilities are great, but going all in on utilities means that you actively have to ignore the full power of CSS.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
trevorflowers@machines.social ("Ding Dang Trevor Flowers") wrote:
An interesting aspect of Eirik Brandal's work is the recontextualizing of the materials commonly found in "maker" work. As a practitioner, the unexpected flip from mentally tracing labyrinthine circuits and guessing materials' origins (praxis) to the semantics of gallery art is a relief; a rare escape from work.
https://eirikbrandal.com/shell-tethered-vesper/
https://youtu.be/R5v0tAHJQPc
Mastodon FeedReblogged by collinsworth@hachyderm.io ("Josh Collinsworth"):
esther@strangeobject.space ("Esther is walking") wrote:
Right from the start, Tailwind felt like the product of a culture that devalued the (often feminine gender-coded) work of “not really engineering” that is writing CSS, despite it being a complex field that involves difficult problems. A culture where people tried hard to make everything into JavaScript (“real programming” done by “real engineers”) and threw out a lot of the benefits of a system they viewed as “old” (which to them is equivalent to “bad”) but didn’t bother to understand.
But when the overall vibe shifted to “maybe not everything needs to be several megabytes of JS and a build-pipeline that takes 15 minutes?”, instead of learning the CSS skills of the people they looked down upon, they started reinventing the wheel, but poorly, as it usually happens when people disregard significant prior work.
It’s a microcosm of tech people (mostly cis men) thinking they’re the ones to “disrupt” something but only end up making things a lot worse.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by collinsworth@hachyderm.io ("Josh Collinsworth"):
esther@strangeobject.space ("Esther is walking") wrote:
“The next generation looks back and asks: "You actually wrote that?"
Learn to write clean HTML and CSS and stay relevant for years to come.”
This sums up a lot of my feelings about Tailwind and the general hate on standard CSS in recent years and puts it into words a lot better than I could. https://nuejs.org/blog/tailwind-misinformation-engine/
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
APoD@botsin.space ("Astronomy Picture of the Day") wrote:
Hoag's Object: A Nearly Perfect Ring Galaxy
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing: Benoit Blanco
Mastodon Feedcstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:
I managed to fill up the sketchbook I've been working in, so one last doodle from it before I shelve it.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
cornazano@hachyderm.io ("Michael McCliment") wrote:
I have just discovered that Nancy Leveson's _Engineering a Safer World_ is available via Open Access. 😃
Sharing in case this is also of interest to other people.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262297301/engineering-a-safer-world/
Mastodon FeedReblogged by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
io@merveilles.town ("isaac io schankler") wrote:
Why isn’t AI doing the tedious shit for creative people instead of doing the creative shit for tedious people
Mastodon FeedReblogged by collinsworth@hachyderm.io ("Josh Collinsworth"):
FractalEcho@kolektiva.social ("Rua M. Williams") wrote:
The racism in chatGPT we are not talking about....
This year, I learned that students use chatGPT because they believe it helps them sound more respectable. And I learned that it absolutely does not work. A thread.
A few weeks ago, I was working on a paper with one of my RAs. I have permission from them to share this story. They had done the research and the draft. I was to come in and make minor edits, clarify the method, add some background literature, and we were to refine the discussion together.
The draft was incomprehensible. Whole paragraphs were vague, repetitive, and bewildering. It was like listening to a politician. I could not edit it. I had to rewrite nearly every section. We were on a tight deadline, and I was struggling to articulate what was wrong and how the student could fix it, so I sent them on to further sections while I cleaned up ... this.
As I edited, I had to keep my mind from wandering. I had written with this student before, and this was not normal. I usually did some light edits for phrasing, though sometimes with major restructuring.
I was worried about my student. They had been going through some complicated domestic issues. They were disabled. They'd had a prior head injury. They had done excellent on their prelims, which of course I couldn't edit for them. What was going on!?
We were co-writing the day before the deadline. I could tell they were struggling with how much I had to rewrite. I tried to be encouraging and remind them that this was their research project and they had done all of the interviews and analysis. And they were doing great.
In fact, the qualitative write-up they had done the night before was better, and I was back to just adjusting minor grammar and structure. I complimented their new work and noted it was different from the other parts of the draft that I had struggled to edit.
Quietly, they asked, "is it okay to use chatGPT to fix sentences to make you sound more white?"
"... is... is that what you did with the earlier draft?"
They had, a few sentences at a time, completely ruined their own work, and they couldnt tell, because they believed that the chatGPT output had to be better writing. Because it sounded smarter. It sounded fluent. It seemed fluent. But it was nonsense!
I nearly cried with relief. I told them I had been so worried. I was going to check in with them when we were done, because I could not figure out what was wrong. I showed them the clear differences between their raw drafting and their "corrected" draft.
I told them that I believed in them. They do great work. When I asked them why they felt they had to do that, they told me that another faculty member had told the class that they should use it to make their papers better, and that he and his RAs were doing it.
The student also told me that in therapy, their therapist had been misunderstanding them, blaming them, and denying that these misunderstandings were because of a language barrier.
They felt that they were so bad at communicating, because of their language, and their culture, and their head injury, that they would never be a good scholar. They thought they had to use chatGPT to make them sound like an American, or they would never get a job.
They also told me that when they used chatGPT to help them write emails, they got more responses, which helped them with research recruitment.
I've heard this from other students too. That faculty only respond to their emails when they use chatGPT. The great irony of my viral autistic email thread was always that had I actually used AI to write it, I would have sounded decidedly less robotic.
ChatGPT is probably pretty good at spitting out the meaningless pleasantries that people associate with respectability. But it's terrible at making coherent, complex, academic arguments!
Last semester, I gave my graduate students an assignment. They were to read some reports on labor exploitation and environmental impact of chatGPT and other language models. Then they were to write a reflection on why they have used chatGPT in the past, and how they might chose to use it in the future.
I told them I would not be policing their LLM use. But I wanted them to know things about it they were unlikely to know, and I warned them about the ways that using an LLM could cause them to submit inadequate work (incoherent methods and fake references, for example).
In their reflections, many international students reported that they used chatGPT to help them correct grammar, and to make their writing "more polished".
I was sad that so many students seemed to be relying on chatGPT to make them feel more confident in their writing, because I felt that the real problem was faculty attitudes toward multilingual scholars.
I have worked with a number of graduate international students who are told by other faculty that their writing is "bad", or are given bad grades for writing that is reflective of English as a second language, but still clearly demonstrates comprehension of the subject matter.
I believe that written communication is important. However, I also believe in focused feedback. As a professor of design, I am grading people's ability to demonstrate that they understand concepts and can apply them in design research and then communicate that process to me.
I do not require that communication to read like a first language student, when I am perfectly capable of understanding the intent. When I am confused about meaning, I suggest clarifying edits.
I can speak and write in one language with competence. How dare I punish international students for their bravery? Fixation on normative communication chronically suppresses their grades and their confidence. And, most importantly, it doesn't improve their language skills!
If I were teaching rhetoric and comp it might be different. But not THAT different. I'm a scholar of neurodivergent and Mad rhetorics. I can't in good conscious support Divergent rhetorics while supressing transnational rhetoric!
Anyway, if you want your students to stop using chatGPT then stop being racist and ableist when you grade.
#chatGPT #LLM #academic #graduateStudents #internationalStudents #ESL
Mastodon Feedslightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:
Will happily trade "AI" for a grammar checker that can warn on using a word too often in close proximity.
Mastodon Feedcollinsworth@hachyderm.io ("Josh Collinsworth") wrote:
We should not be nearly as comfortable as we are with companies telling us how we're allowed to use devices that *we* fully own, bought and paid for.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
hollie@social.coop ("Hollie") wrote:
I put on this interview of Becky Chambers (author of the Monk and Robot books), about why we choose “cozy” fiction. I’m moved by the idea of people actively resisting dystopia through stories. But I was surprised at the end, when she says, “…and if you choose to pick up a story like that, you’re choosing to engage with that idea, that the future could be good, and that the people in it will be kind.” My eyes completely filled with tears.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
toriyamashu@fedibird.com ("鳥山シュー") wrote:
夕方の森で見たコゲラ
Japanese pygmy woodpecker seen in the forest at sunset.
#野鳥 #birds #nature #photography #マストドン写真部 #fedibird
Mastodon FeedReblogged by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
richcarl@mastodon.nu ("Richard Carlsson") wrote:
I just love how we've now spent far more computational resources on generating funny pictures and spitting out flawed code than was ever spent on running formal verfication and exhaustive testing on important software because it was thought to be "too expensive".
Mastodon FeedReblogged by bcantrill ("Bryan Cantrill"):
HoffmanLabs@infosec.exchange ("Stephen Hoffman") wrote:
Interesting write up on Oxide Computer in El Reg:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/16/oxide_3000lb_blade_server/
Oxide is aiming at on-premises cloud, and at racks.
This approach is what has become of server consolidation.
Particularly for your “base load” computing.
Racks are an interesting and oft-neglected topic in IT.
The enterprise vendors I'm familiar with always treated the racks and server and server rack mounting largely as an afterthought. At best.
And enterprise rack gear was too often awful. At best.
Lone exception: Apple had some of the best rack gear and rack mounting gear with Xserve, but then they got out of that business.
Much of what else I've met has been some combination of atrocious, inconsistent, and unavailable.
And getting stuff mounted was a struggle, absent server lifts or other tooling.
And the racks are, as Cantrill states, pretty much the fundamental unit for enterprise servers these days.
The Marvel-class AlphaServer GS1280 sorta-kinda did do an integrated design with their racks, and the whole of that computer and its constituent parts were all managed and maintained utilizing the in-cabinet network and the in-cabinet crossbars, but Marvel itself never became a unit of server construction, and while it had power distribution within the rack, it was never integrated with the data center power. The Marvel-class management UI and error management definitely needed work, though.
https://www-e.uni-magdeburg.de/jschulen/urz_hpc/marvel/marvel_performance.pdf
The folks at HP and later as HPE went after blades hard, but they seemingly never adapted those designs to whole racks. Just big rack-mount blade boxes (c7000 was 10U, peaked at ~240 kg), and the HP/HPE BladeSystem communications interconnects and mezzanines were a whole ‘nother area of complexity. After the BladeSystem boxes faded, then with Moonshot and Apollo and some other servers.
Some vendors dabbled in containerized data centers, but seldom racks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_data_center
Yes, some servers were configured for carrier-grade installs, too.
Oxide looks quite interesting, given the scale and scope if the integration they're aiming for, and not that I have anything that will likely ever need that much compute power. Looks like a fun development project, too.
cc/ @bcantrill
#hp #hpe #alphaserver #digitalequipment #digitalequipmentcorp #apple #server #oxide #oxidecomputer
Mastodon Feedisagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:
This is your regular reminder that if someone stopped arguing with you on social media it is likely *not* because your successfully convinced them with your persuasive argument.
Mastodon FeedReblogged by zack@toot.cafe ("Zack"):
tirifto@jam.xwx.moe ("Tirifto :korektu_min:") wrote:
So apparently server administrators on the #Fediverse won’t be able to name custom emoji in their native languages and expect them to work in Mastodon, because according to @Gargron non-ASCII signs are hard to input and diacritics shouldn’t change the meaning of words:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/28572#issuecomment-1878952504
No, in my view emoji identifiers shouldn’t be ‘straightforward to input for everyone’. Custom emoji are local to a server; they should be straightforward to input for the users of that server. People from other servers don’t ever have to type their names (unless their administrators choose to add them to their own server), so their ability to type them is completely irrelevant.
Why should a server made specifically for people speaking Russian or Japanese have to use ASCII for their emoji identifiers? Their users have no trouble typing Cyrillic or Kanji signs; it’s what they already do when they make a post; it’s how they normally talk. Why force them to use a different language/alphabet when typing emoji identifiers?
Moreover, linking the username issue makes no sense whatsoever. Usernames are typed across servers and it makes sense to impose stricter technical limitations so more people can read, write and recognise them. This is not the case for emoji; you rarely ever need to type other servers’ emoji identifiers. Normally you don’t even get to see them; you only get to see the picture they represent! Assuming server admins do their job responsibly, there is zero added confusion for anyone involved.
I understand that Unicode is complex, language support is challenging and compromises might be necessary at times. But can we please accept the existence of different languages and writing systems as a reality that we should try to accommodate for, rather than change or circumvent? Yes,
aandáare different signs. Yes, they might radically change the meaning of a word. That’s not a proposition for us to accept or reject; that’s the reality of our multilingual world, and should be the basis of our discussion.#lang_en #accessibility #a11y #custom_emoji #development #emoji #emojos #free_software #internationalisation #internationalization #i18n #languages #localisation #localization #l10n #Mastodon #multilingual #programming #software #Unicode
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
like the saying goes:
I’d rather have a bottle in front of me
than a frontal lobotomy
Mastodon FeedGargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:
Three Peaches. Trying out a gimmicky vintage lens filter. Also, coincidentally, this is what my vision does to faraway objects like the moon.
Canon AE-1 Program
Kodak Portra 800
Canon FD 50mm/1.8
Telesar Triangle Prism Filter#BelieveInFilm #FilmPhotography #AnalogPhotography #35mm #Caturday #CatsOfMastodon
