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

No little green men, and not even any space bugs.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/11/25/aw-shucks-no-evidence-of-alien-microbes/

Attachments:

• Microscopic rods and fibers found in a chondrite (remote)

nadim@infosec.exchange ("Nadim Kobeissi") wrote:

Attachments:

• 3523ea80d1737600.jpeg (remote)
• 9f2852d1e464b279.jpeg (remote)

nadim@infosec.exchange ("Nadim Kobeissi") wrote:

This weekend I was watching the original Dragon Ball (1986) and realized that the Red Ribbon Army is essentially Hezbollah

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

evacide@hachyderm.io wrote:

So much of my job is this over and over again on a loop:

"So what do you think we should do in order to responsibly build the Torment Nexus?"

"You can't. It's a Torment Nexus. Stop it."

"But the Torment Nexus is inevitable!"

"It's not. You could just not do it. You could stop right now."

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

alright i thiiiink I've got these accounts posting from a new location. my guess is that migrating might be a kind of resource-intensive operation given that these bots have non-trivial followings, so I will probably stagger that out over the next few days?

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

If I ever leave a Big Tech job, I might be able to publish some of these "Lewis Black, but for JavaScript" blog post drafts.

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

There's a clear, well-defined JS-industrial-complex pipeline from "you should adopt this SPA-based technology because better user experiences" to "you don't have any choice, despite the terrible user experiences".

Most of it operates by omission. But it's still based on lies, dissembling, and half-truths.

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

Omissions can be prevarication, verging into falsehoods, when they are both intentional and repeated.

In React community, and those of other legacy desktop frameworks, there has been a studied aversion to telling devs what they knew when they learned it wasn't working.

I *begged* FB to share the controls they imposed to keep JS...erm...*enthusiasms*...in line. E.g., not shipping React to mobile (used Inferno while React was trimmed up and CPUs got faster), perf gates, ML-based bundlers, etc.

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

They did not.

And that was most of a decade ago.

As a janitor for frontend disasters, I find it galling that all of this could have been avoided. If only the framework vendors who *knew* their systems weren't working for mobile had the intellectual honesty to tell folks & recommend guardrails

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

okay. actually. doing some napkin math here and I think I'm going to move my botsin.space bots to *this* mastodon instance, at least for now

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

one thought I had: if Gatsby had come out just a few years earlier and thus been on public-domain side of the 20-year chasm created by the Copyright Term Extension Act, its text would've been used for so many cool net art things over the years

Reblogged by jwz:

violetblue ("Violet Blue") wrote:

New Goodreads pre-review for #Covid Safety Handbook, available this week: "The antidote to Covid-19 misinformation and the prescription for being as safe as possible from the virus and the havoc it brings." https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7028578668

Humbled 🙏 We're so proud, and hope you check it out.

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

the other day I saw GATZ, an 8ish hour stage production that includes the entire verbatim text of The Great Gatsby. it was so so so good, both in terms of the staging and (forgive the obvious here) the underlying prose

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

trying to land on a name for my (own) dedicated bot server here... is bot.intersects.art passable?

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

splendorr ("nick splendorr ✨🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

instead of “VC Funding” we should call it “Faustian Bargaining”

ie. “Another company is proud to report they took $61 million in faustian series A bargaining. They assure us that they will be the first company to somehow avoid calamity from this cursed arrangement. We are told they plan to enjoy the riches in the short term and then pass the fated collapse along to someone else down the line”

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

russss@chaos.social ("Russ Garrett") wrote:

Photovoltaic camel

Attachments:

• An aerial image of a solar photovoltaic array. Panels have been omitted in the shape of a camel. (remote)

isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:

So you think you know how #networking works? Riddle me this problem of the lack of connectivity under these conditions:

- Only two apps on my phone are affected, Tusky and Tesla.
- Only on my home WiFi (LTE and many public WiFi work fine).
- Only on my Pixel 5 (wife's Pixel 7 works well).
- Only started happening around a month ago.

What the hell could that be?

Bonus note: my home WiFi is on both IPv6 and IPv4. Not sure if it's relevant…

Any guesses?

Reblogged by jwz:

jstepien ("Jan Stępień") wrote:

I made a thing. Please do not hesitate to point me in the direction of more forms to fill. https://wtf-8.xn--stpie-k0a81a.com

Reblogged by jwz:

jalefkowit@vmst.io ("Jason Lefkowitz") wrote:

The future is an AI-generated anime waifu singing a personalized song just for you about why your insurance company isn't going to pay for a kidney transplant

jwz wrote:

Good to see the outgoing Biden regime crowing about the things they are doing in the mad scramble of their last few weeks to fortify the bulkheads against the incoming shitstorm such as [...taps headset...] airline ticket refunds.

jwz wrote:

How to write a progress indicator, pro-style: (It has been a few years, so tried out Kodi again. It is still trash.)
https://jwz.org/b/ykdc

Attachments:

• Screenshot

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

molly0xfff@hachyderm.io ("Molly White") wrote:

social media platform users are going to link offsite. the only question is how obnoxious the platform will make it for them and everyone else.

(For context: Instagram prohibits links in post text. This, plus the incentive to inflate comments, has led to the proliferation of tools where creators instruct their followers to comment with a specific word to receive a link in their DMs— in this case, to a pie crust recipe)

Attachments:

• Screenshot of an Instagram comments section where every comment just says "Pie" (remote)

Reblogged by jwz:

mhoye wrote:

Paraphrased, that reads "At a molecular level, parts of the Covid19 virus look and seemingly behave a lot like cobra venom and rabies."

Turns out being "covid cautious" is just a revealed preference for not wanting strangers to sneeze rabies and snake venom analogues into your lungs.

Wear a mask.

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

This is so fucking nerdy and dumb but I'm the friend people ask which laptop to buy, and I take that responsibility so seriously. 😭

I want to be able to answer "Is Bluesky worth signing up for?"

Reblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):

n3verm0re wrote:

@fromjason Sorry, this isn't an answer to your question, but I wanted to check whether you'd seen Tim Bray's "Why Not Bluesky" piece. Great read if not.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/11/15/Not-Bluesky

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

anetaklamra ("Aneta Klamra") wrote:

#SilentSunday in the #forest

#photography #photo #fotografie #photographie #fotografia #tree #trees #poland

Attachments:

• The color photograph shows an upward perspective of a large tree, giving a sense of its immense height. The trunk, which is rough and textured with deep ridges, rises straight up from the bottom, drawing the eye upwards towards the tree's canopy. The canopy is filled with small, bright yellow leaves, catching the warm autumn sunlight. Above the treetops, the sky is a vivid, cloudless blue, creating a striking contrast to the golden leaves. Interspersed among the bright yellow leaves are also neighboring trees' dark, bare branches. The deep blue of the sky and the golden hues of the leaves create a sense of clean forest air on an autumn day.

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

ommatidia@pixelfed.social ("sabrina") wrote:

#japan #aomori #写真 #マストドン写真部 #photography #photo #naturephotography

Attachments:

• A tree branch adorned with colorful autumn leaves, displaying a beautiful array of warm tones typical of the season. (remote)

Reblogged by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):

LexYeen@plush.city ("Alexis") wrote:

Attachments:

• A low-quality picture of a person in a private home's bathroom mirror, holding the handset of a payphone with the earpiece and mouthpiece pointed towards them, aiming the back of the handset at the mirror - the rest of which is still attached to the handset, and just behind the person. They're looking into the camera, too. There is no obvious way this photo could have been taken, as there are no cameras visible in the mirror. It's captioned with "How we used to take selfies in the '90s." (remote)

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

Can a PDS control which relays index its content?

I feel like I've read everything anyone has ever written about #Bluesky, lol. But I still have questions. In "Bluesky is cosplaying decentralized" the answer appears to be no. However, the post is over a year old now and things change.

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

as it has more & more become coalition-oriented without a longstanding ‘Fearless Leader’, is the Democratic Party doomed to the perils of ‘minoritarianism’?

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000677890883