Mastodon Feed: Posts

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

Lefties doing harmful protests? Stop it, you creeps.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/04/17/a-bad-way-to-protest/

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

The people urging me to be violent, they just get blocked with a shrug.

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

At that point, the *best case* is a constitutional crisis. That at least exposes who's on what side, and provides a potentially peaceful path for resolving it.

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

In particular, I think if we're rounding people up, denying them trials, and sending them en masse to concentration camps in foreign countries, we've fallen into authoritarian rule, whether congress and the courts are OK with it or not.

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

In other words, hairsplitting over whether we're in a "constitutional crisis" as a proxy for whether we've turned into an authoritarian state is a fairly meaningless exercise. We can have an authoritarian state without a constitutional crisis if, for example, congress and the courts just go along with authoritarian rule.

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

I think of a constitutional crisis as a very specific thing, only one of a number of ways the rule of law and democracy can collapse.

I think we get a constitutional crisis when we have a fracture that the constitutional framework can't correct, such as the executive branch refusing to obey or enforce the rulings of the judiciary. (We seem to be heading directly there).

But that's not essential for authoritarian rule (where we're also heading).

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

https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/next/next-with-kyle-clark/air-force-remove-articles-about-first-female-thunderbird-pilot-dei/73-436b25e3-7f79-4de3-989a-4384b5c58b04

Boosted by jwz:
markarayner@mas.to ("Mark A. Rayner") wrote:

And so the publishing world began.

#fakefact #MaundyThursday #easter #humor #humour #books #book #writing #writingcommunity

kornel ("Kornel") wrote:

Apple loves pasting with formatting. Thanks to a remote clipboard bug, I've seen *peak* paste with formatting.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
researchfairy@scholar.social ("The research fairy") wrote:

Piecemeal implementation of full communism through expanding municipal library programmes

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

Captured on a short hike with a small mirrorless camera, 35mm lens, lightweight tripod, and enough neutral density for a roughly 30 second exposure.

Flowing water is a subject that lends itself to motion studies that reveal what our unaided eye can't see, controlled by exposure time. At 1/3000 sec, every drop of water freezes in place. At 30 seconds, we see smooth, cloud-like structures that obscure individual perturbations. Only at around 1/30 sec does the camera see what we do.

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

Tanner Creek, OR, 2011.

All the pixels, none of the need to be outdoors, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/5892599507

#photography

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

Protip: If your "faculty executive recruiting" firm spams me to pitch its services because you think I'm the chair of the "McDevitt Computer Science and Law Department" (a mangled version of the name of the endowed chair I happen to hold), I'm going to suspect your firm isn't very good at this stuff.

jwz wrote:

Update: Bezos got a crosswalk too! Collect them all.

Boosted by jwz:
stavvers@masto.ai ("Another Angry Woman") wrote:

@venite imagining an alternate universe where humans are divided into groups based on how green or yellow their shits were when they were a couple of weeks old

jwz wrote:

[ I click on a Daily Beast link, against my better judgement ]
"Oooh, staffers walk out of Bobby Brainworms speech, that sounds juicy!"

[ I look for corroborating articles from actual journalists ]
"Two staffers walked out of the room where the speech was being broadcast on TV."

Ok then. Fight the power.

jwz wrote:

Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!

Narc dot AI: American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas...
https://jwz.org/b/ykms

Boosted by jwz:
kims@mas.to ("Kim Scheinberg") wrote:

Per WaPo:

"Asked about the Abrego García case yesterday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ... called it a “distraction” and shifted focus back to the lawsuit he was announcing against the administration’s trade policies."

Newsom's the second Dem to call Abrego Garcia a "distraction" (the other did it anonymously). These are deeply broken and misguided people

Fuck Newsom and every other R in sheep's clothing (Adams, Cuomo,) whose only real interests are maintaining the spotlight and "winning"

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

Here, you deserve a flower today.

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

I mean, he's okay I guess

RE: https://www.threads.net/@housewifeplus/post/DIhet89A2X3

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
barquq@tenforward.social ("mint") wrote:

can't remember where I saw it but "Using AI in education is like using a forklift in the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you" is a solid quote

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
ansate@social.coop ("Melissa Santos") wrote:

I'm on the data job market, and I want to hear about your jobs, especially the weird and interesting ones!

I have been working in Product Analytics as a Data Scientist/Analyst with some light modeling the last few years. I have a PhD in Applied Math and can lean more into math - or I could lean the SQL direction for an Analytics Engineer role.

20+ years exp including being the only data person at small companies

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amsantos/

No AI, No Crypto

#GetFediHired #FediHire #PleaseBoost

Boosted by jwz:
RadicalGraffiti@todon.eu ("Radical Graffiti") wrote:

"Yes we can"
Mangione sticker spotted in Berne, Switzerland

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
W1PAC@mastodon.radio ("Patrick W1PAC") wrote:

Fielding questions on the Boston Marathon ham radio Google Groups... and astounded by the people who want to bring extra equipment.

It's a public service events folks, not a POTA activation.

#amateurradio #hamradio #HamDrama #BostonMarathon

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
W1PAC@mastodon.radio ("Patrick W1PAC") wrote:

@vk6flab https://www.rac.ca/rac-will-not-attend-hamvention-this-year/

chipotle@mstdn.social ("Watts Martin") wrote:

While I'm liking Purelymail so far, its server-side spam filter has so far had a 0% success rate: everything it's put in junk has been good, while the one actual piece of spam I got, it missed. Re-installing SpamSieve, I guess…

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

gawd, I love this graphic https://mastodon.world/@flogzilla/114353644313474318

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
flogzilla@mastodon.world ("Flogzilla") wrote:

adam@social.lol ("Adam Newbold") wrote:

My two favorite shiny objects on my desk right now. (cc: @robb)

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
dumpsterqueer@superseriousbusiness.org ("tobi is writing bugs :terminal_cursor:") wrote:

hey @dansup, I had a look at fedidb the other day and noticed a few oddities it might be worth you and/or the team taking a look at:

• numbers are constantly going down, I believe because you're wrongly omitting instances that have an open robots.txt file, and so you're probably dropping entries from your database (https://github.com/fedidb/issues/issues/55). This gives the misleading impression that the fedi is rapidly bleeding out (see screenshot), but that's probably just because there's something wrong with the scraper / database.
• some softwares are missing entirely, like snac and gotosocial (https://github.com/fedidb/issues/issues/58, https://github.com/fedidb/issues/issues/49); in the latter case it was my understanding you'd added gts again after you added proper robots.txt support (https://mastodon.social/@dansup/114023569148179068) but it seems it was quietly dropped again at some point
• loops.video shows exactly the same mau as it does registered users, this seems like a bug as it's basically impossible for that to actually be the case, and it puts loops.video way higher in the "top servers" list than it probably should be

are there plans to fix these issues? It's my understanding that you've been working on fedidb stuff again because you posted some screenshots a whole ago iirc, but in the meantime perhaps it's worth pausing scraping again like you did a few months ago, and adding a notice to the top of the page that work is in progress to fix things?

one reason I'm asking is that currently on every gts instance homepage with closed registrations we link to fedidb as a "this instance is closed but you can use these tools to find an instance that is accepting registrations" sort of thing, but it's not great to link to a website that doesn't show GtS at all and has stats that look a bit bananas