Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

“Jan 9 (Reuters) - BlackRock (BLK.N), the world's biggest asset manager, said on Thursday it will leave the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, the latest Wall Street firm to depart an environmentally focused investor group under pressure from Republican politicians.”

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/blackrock-quits-climate-group-wall-streets-latest-environmental-step-back-2025-01-09/

Reblogged by jwz:

tubafullofflowers@www.librepunk.club ("Ada") wrote:

Attachments:

• A computer can never be spiteful or horny. Therefore a computer must never make art (remote)

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

brucelawson@vivaldi.net ("Bruce Lawson ✅ (quiet time)") wrote:

"Some of the world’s most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement." https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

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

Meanwhile, sales of the premium and ultra-premium devices that you carry as a developer still represent *much* less than half of the market by volume. That's how you can get Apple breaching $1K ASP while the worldwide average stays at 1/3 that: selling *six* >$250 phones for every iPhone 16 Pro.

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

benschwarz@front-end.social wrote:

🍃 I made a completely free website speed test tool!

You can use it to optimise your pages, no sign up required.

In each test:
- Performance metrics
- Lighthouse Audits
- Third Party script report
- Google Core Web Vitals Dashboard

No money down, fast website 🏆
https://calibreapp.com/tools/website-speed-test

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

Just need to make this super clear: the worldwide Average Selling Price of a smartphone (new, unlocked, not including secondary sales) *has not been higher than the price of Apple's cheapest model* at almost any point in a decade.

Today's cheapest iPhone from Apple cost ~18% more than the global ASP:

Attachments:

• The iPhone SE costs $429, vs a global ASP of $365 (which is an all-time high) (remote)

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

For the Performance Inequality Gap series, I'm gathering new data points in charts that I'd only talked to in prose in previous years. One of those is the difference between the various market segements looks at by price, with the Flagships clocking the new, unlocked cost of the fastest chip in each line, while the lower-end lines capture the mid-tier and low-end segments from various manufacturers.

The blue line that has never bumped above $375? That's worldwide average selling price.

Attachments:

• Each of the Flagship lines represents the new, unlocked price of the cheapest phone containing the fastest chip in each group. Meanwhile, the Budget and Low-End segments try to capture where the offerings in those ranges are from relatively consistent manufacturers over the years at ~$250 and ~$100, respectively. The blue line is the worldwide ASP, not including refurb or secondhand. As ever, the "i" in "iPhone" stands for "inequality". (remote)

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

The thing folks at the low-end are mostly missing out on is performance, which is dominated by combined L1 + L2 + L3 + SLC on-package caches, with process-shrink-driven frequency scaling not far behind:

Attachments:

• By Dec 2024, a fast-ish Android had finally shipped. (remote)
• Yes, you're reading that right. Apple *has* been trouncing everyone else in single-core performance for a decade by adding several multiples of everyone else's combined cache allocations for die space. Just an unbelievable drubbing. (remote)
• Cores and frequencies don't mean squat when it comes to mobile phones. The action is all in the amount of die space allocated to caches. (remote)

Reblogged by jakedel@mamot.fr ("S. Delafond"):

freexian@hachyderm.io ("Freexian :debian:") wrote:

In December 2024, Freexian collaborators were very busy contributing to Debian. These contributions cover tracker.debian.org updates, Salsa CI improvements, Coinstallable build-essential, Python 3.13 transition, Ruby 3.3 transition and more!

You can read all about it in our monthly report: https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-contributions-12-2024/

We thank the organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts (https://www.freexian.com/lts/) and consulting services (https://www.freexian.com/services/) for making this possible.

#debian #freexian

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

wezm@mastodon.decentralised.social ("Wesley Moore") wrote:

I'm curious how widely known these are.

Are you aware of these text editing behaviours?

- Double click to select a word.
- Double click and drag to select text a whole word at a time.
- Triple click to select a paragraph.

Trivia: the first two were present in the original 1984 Macintosh.

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

Every smartphone in LA accidentally received a wildfire evacuation alert | TechCrunch:

"But on Thursday afternoon, a wildfire evacuation alert was mistakenly sent to the smartphone of every resident in Los Angeles County, a region with more than 9 million people."

Oof. https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/09/every-smartphone-in-la-accidentally-received-a-wildfire-evacuation-alert/

Reblogged by jwz:

fraying@xoxo.zone ("Derek Powazek 🐐") wrote:

They'll boil the oceans for the promise of free labor. That's what's driving all the AI bullshit: a bunch of rich assholes who don't want to pay workers.
https://gizmodo.com/41-of-employers-worldwide-say-theyll-reduce-staff-by-2030-due-to-ai-2000548131

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

jdp23@gotosocial.thenexus.today ("Jon P") wrote:

Here's EFF's follow-up post https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/metas-new-content-policy-will-harm-vulnerable-users-if-it-really-valued-free ... including

"It was our mistake to formulate our responses and expectations on what is essentially a marketing video for upcoming policy changes before any of those changes were reflected in their documentation."

No shit.

Jillian C. York said "sometimes people are exhausted and move too quickly and get things wrong" which is true, and I don't attribute any bad intent to her, but then again it's their (organizational) elitism that makes them feel like they have to comment ASAP without taking the time to let things develop a little, and their lack of effectiveness that nobody in the loop said "wait a second ... it's Mark F---ing Zuckerberg, he's almost certainly lying, and he's almost certainly not doing anything in good faith, maybe we should think about this a bit before hittiung publish?"

@so_treu @x4nw

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

Needle (iOS) is a music-based social media platform. I’ve been perusing the feed, discovering new music for the last few days and I like it. It’s cozy and simple to use.

Currently, the app reports no data collection and it looks like it’s an indie developer. 👍

Let’s be friends on there so I can subject you to my music taste. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/needle-music/id1539883285

Attachments:

• Screen shot of the app Needle with a post of a song called Technicolor Beast.

Reblogged by jwz:

rmi@cloudisland.nz ("Rob Isaac") wrote:

Stop calling it Meta. It’s not fucking “meta.” Facebook in a rusty white panel van, parked outside a school with a sign that says FREE CANDY, is about the least “meta” thing that exists.

Reblogged by jwz:

kissane@mas.to ("Erin Kissane") wrote:

I was going to post something else this week, but the structural inability of global corporations to govern platforms seems inescapably relevant.

https://www.wrecka.ge/bad-shape/

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

barnoid@mastodon.me.uk ("Barney Livingston") wrote:

At #emfcamp I was tasked with sticking together the slides for the lightning talks for ease of speaker changeover. One of the talks had about 150 slides, that's 1 every 2 seconds for a 5 minute talk! Surely a mistake, I thought.

I've just seen the result and it's great, high density, stuff:
https://media.ccc.de/v/emf2024-548-lightning-talks-saturday
http://benguin.co.uk/roads/

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

evacide@hachyderm.io wrote:

404 Media continues to do the Lord's work. And furthermore, the data broker industry must be destroyed.

https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

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

aram@aoir.social ("Aram Sinnreich") wrote:

Happy 12th birthday to the defining visual artwork of this era.

Attachments:

• The classic KC GREEN six-panel cartoon of a dog in a fire saying "this is fine" and then melting (remote)

jwz wrote:

Onion vs. Hard Times: FIGHT!
"Gavin Newsom Spotted Dining At Smoldering Remains Of Nobu", "Biden Takes Immediate Action On Los Angeles Wildfires By Sending New Weapons Package to Israel."
https://jwz.org/b/ykf9

Attachments:

• Screenshot

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

weatherwest ("Daniel Swain") wrote:

This increase in atmospheric "thirst" is actually caused by same underlying thermodynamic process driving increases in precip intensity w/warming. In new paper, coincidentally published today, we introduce analogy of the "Expanding Atmospheric Sponge." https://www.nature.com/articles/s43017-024-00624-z

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

weatherwest ("Daniel Swain") wrote:

With #ClimateChange, we see warming but also widespread increases in atmospheric "thirstiness" (i.e., evaporative demand/vapor pressure deficit). A warmer, thirstier atmosphere means (potentially) drier, more flammable vegetation in absence of compensating precip increases.

Attachments:

• Figure from Swain et al. 2025. Caption reads: Saturation vapour pressure (solid black line), absolute humidity (dot-dashed black line; assuming 40% relative humidity (RH)) and vapour pressure deficit (VPD) (dashed red line; the difference between saturation and actual vapour pressures, assuming 40% RH) as a function of realistic Earth surface air temperatures. A nonlinear (exponential) increase in the VPD will result from a linear increase in temperature even under the assumption of constant RH.

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

weatherwest ("Daniel Swain") wrote:

What is the primary link between #ClimateChange and wildfire, both in CA specifically and more broadly globally? Vegetation moisture, and therefore its flammability (which includes propensity to ignition, combustion intensity, rates of spread, and etc.). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01224-1

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

jaseg@chaos.social wrote:

TIL that you can just watch cosmic rays hit the Superkamiokande experiment's giant (30m diameter) water tank 1000m below the Japanese alps in real time online:

https://www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/realtimemonitor/

#science #physics

Attachments:

• A screenshot of a data visualization of a single event captured by super-kamiokande. The detectors cover the full cylindrical surface of the device, and there are two shells of detectors, the inner shell, and the more sparse outer shell. The detectors of the inner shell are plotted in the middle of the picture, and the outer shell smaller in one corner. Each of the roughly 10000 detectors is colored by incident photon energy, painting a picture of a clipped cone. (remote)

Reblogged by jwz:

jwz wrote:

@jasonkoebler "Shock and disillusionment amongst employees of Leopards Eating Faces LLC".

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

mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io ("mekka okereke :verified:") wrote:

@aud @thisismissem @esk @dma

Facts.

The above post is much deeper and more profound than it might seem.

I want people to read it again, and really understand it.

When an Open Source or volunteer based initiative offers a similar service to a VC backed startup or publicly traded company, the odds can seem insurmountable, because the VC backed company budgets are astronomical. But... their budgets also include the need to both generate profit, and to grow at an exponential rate.

Customer acquisition is *usually* very expensive. But if you don't also have that same need to generate profit, or grow at an exponential rate, then you can operate at a similar quality, for a fraction of the cost.

"🤷🏻‍♀️ Meh. I don't care about hypergrowth, and I don't care about making a billion dollars." Is ironically, a devastatingly powerful *competitive* statement. It kills giants.

But you have to believe that all this is true, to fully unlock your mind to then believe that you can create something of similar quality. Because if you don't truly believe this, then you instead tell yourself things like, "I don't deserve good UX in my product, because I don't have $200MM in funding." This is self-defeating excuse making.

Mastodon is a unique "business" in that its customer acquisition cost is effectively negative.🙂🙃

Because the most successful Mastodon marketing campaigns, are negative "customer attrition campaigns🤡" paid for and run by their competitors, that drive away their own customers, like Sonic losing his rings. They pay good money to drive their own customers to BlueSky and Mastodon.🤦🏿‍♂️

Reblogged by jwz:

virtualbri@mastodon.online ("Brian Tatosky") wrote:

@jasonkoebler

Attachments:

• Donald Glover, from one of his standup shows, saying "Good." (remote)

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

GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social ("Kevin Beaumont") wrote:

Looking back at it, maybe Myspace Tom was a good friend after all, given he sold the company and just went travelling with his money instead of trying to overthrow democracy.

Attachments:

• 4ed4bea2999954a5.jpeg (remote)

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

scott@carfree.city ("scott f") wrote:

The SoCal fires are utterly terrifying, but I agree with @debcha that "there’s no, 'it’s too late, its over' for anthropogenic climate change. Every molecule of CO2 that doesn’t go into the atmosphere makes a difference. Preventing 0.1 degree of warming makes a difference. Every bit of climate resilience we build together makes a difference."

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

owa ("Open Web Advocacy") wrote:

OWA's 2024 in Review! A huge and special thank-you to all of our volunteers and donors.

We can't wait to see what we can do together in 2025!

https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/owa-2024-review/

Attachments:

• 2024 in Review We review everything for OWA in 2024 and what’s coming up! The whole team would like to thank everyone who joined us by volunteering or donating to fight for the future of the web! With big steps in 2024, we can’t wait to see what we can do together in 2025!