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

Before I continue, let me say that I am for the #OpenWeb. The World Wide Web is a gift. It's a miracle that it exists, truly.

But I'm am vehemently, staunchly, against the unification of our social graphs under a single power. Is that a controversial take in the open web religion? Is it blasphemy? I don't know.

Anyway,

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

But right now, our #SocialGraph is fractured. Always has been. No one corporation or entity can connect all the data points we leave scattered across the web. It would take an unprecedented amount of coordination and relinquishing of power.

Over the years many have tried to unify our social graphs with protocols and APIs. Many have failed.

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

It's everything about us because everything about us is logged, analyzed, and distributed for cash all across the World Wide Web. Our lives are so deeply embedded into devices that there isn't much the Internet doesn't know about us.

#OpenWeb #IndieWeb #SmallWeb #Fediverse

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

The social graph is our lives reduced to data.

It's our relationships, our friends, our enemies, our lovers.

It's our likes, dislikes, and indifferences.

The social graph is the food we eat, and the drinks we drink. It's the medicines we take. The drugs we use.

It's our strengths and our weaknesses. Our neuroses, our reactions, and avoidances.

#OpenSocialWeb #Fediverse #SmallWeb #IndieWeb

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

Our Social Graphs, from the viewpoint of capitalism, is the last bit of gold in the mountains of data centers we call the Internet.

A single, unified social layer over the web has proven elusive. Our identities remain plural and scattered.

What is the social graph? I can speak from a marketing perspective. 1/🤷

#OpenSocialWeb #Fediverse #SmallWeb #IndieWeb

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
lo__ ("__ol") wrote:

@fromjason I never expected "concern troll" to rhyme with "patent troll" this egregiously

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
ratfactor@mastodon.art wrote:

Here's today's recycled cardboard project - a little display for my "project stack" so I just see the current item nice and clear.

https://ratfactor.com/cards/stack-display

This is a follow-up to: https://ratfactor.com/cards/project-stack

#TodoLists #Cardboard #CardboardProject #DeskToy

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
djsundog@fedi.reclaim.technology ("DJ Sundog from the *new* toot-lab") wrote:

there is one long, dark alley within each and every cell in your body that, were you to shrink yourself down small enough to turn the corner into that alley, is completely nondescript other than this sound coming through the wall of a nearby structure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnzLconK4Tw

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
technomancy@hey.hagelb.org wrote:

I've been meaning to do this for a while now but this past week I finally got around to starting the nand2tetris course, this time with my 2 kids

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

I bought the book a few years ago, but I found out recently that they've added a free course on Coursera that seems to have all the same materials: https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer/

it steps you thru the process of building up a working computer architecture from the most barebones starting point; if you're interested in learning on a lower level how computers work, I'd highly recommend it--it feels rigorous without being unapproachable

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
esoastronomy ("ESO") wrote:

New instance, new #introduction !

Hi #fediverse ! We’re the European Southern Observatory, and we design, build and operate ground-based telescopes.

One of them is our Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in #Chile. It will have a 39 m mirror, and its rotating enclosure will weigh 6100 tonnes, or about 700 mastodons!

We’re looking forward to chatting with all of you about #astronomy

And many thanks to @sebinthestars for running our former instance!

📷 ESO/G. Vecchia

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

I'm making my bookmarks public on Raindrop dot io. My two most active collections are Websites and Articles. You can subscribe via RSS if you'd like. I bookmark anything and everything I find interesting.

Articles: https://raindrop.io/fromjason/articles-fromjason-xyz-39384569

Websites: https://raindrop.io/fromjason/websites-fromjason-xyz-39386925

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

2007— "The potential is "Orwellian," said Michael Fertik, ... "When you have a lot of traffic that comes from identifiable IP (Internet protocol) addresses that exhibit a lot of trackable behavior, you generate a staggering amount of rather specific information about individual users as well as classes of users. And in many social networks, the greatest part of their value is to identify users by name.""

#Meta #Google

https://web.archive.org/web/20151029160031/http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci%5F7333740

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

Lmao. Wow. Some things never changed.

#Facebook #Meta

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

2011—"For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy."

Fun bit of #InternetHistory.

#Facebook #Google

http://web.archive.org/web/20110514183954/http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-12/facebook-busted-in-clumsy-smear-attempt-on-google/full/

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

I got suckered into the Mac ecosystem when a friend of mine gave me his PowerPC Mac mini because he was getting out of tech, and I actually had no working computer at home (I was burned out on computer touching although I did it at work). I then bought my own Intel Mac, and then Apple obsoleted my computer. I looked at the prices and was shocked into remembering my trash panda ways. So I decided to put Fedora on it and never bought another Mac.

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

Except for a brief, regrettable period where I used a Mac[1], I've always been a bit of a trash panda when it comes to tech. It started back when I was a kid and realized people would often just give away their old computers.

It's always felt a little ironic that my personal tech lags since I work in tech, but there's just tremendous value in the older stuff if it works for you.

[1] See next toot...

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (good kind)") wrote:

You may have heard that globalchange.gov and all the national reports on climate change have gone down.

We got em all on #sciop, a webrip and all the PDFs extracted: https://sciop.net/datasets/globalchange-gov-webrip

Edit: context - https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-national-assessment-nasa-white-house-057cec699caef90832d8b10f21a6ffe8

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
simon@simonwillison.net ("Simon Willison") wrote:

We ditched CGI in the late 1990s because of the overhead of starting, executing and stopping a process for every incoming request... turns out modern servers (plus languages like Go or Rust with a fast startup time) mean CGI isn't such a bad idea any more! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/5/cgi-bin-performance/

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
rosie_108@toot.wales wrote:

Genuinely nothing more sad than those people who hover on social media ready to reply to posts featuring trans folks JUST to misgender them - like not even engaging in discourse, just caps-lock-yelling genders...

Like take a break, people. Have a wank. Drink some water and stop being a massive asshole

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
jerry@infosec.exchange ("Very Hairy Jerry") wrote:

I really don’t understand the push to for a computer replicate what goes on in the human brain. I mean, I know what goes on in mine and it just seems ill advised for a computer to be thinking those thoughts.

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
ScottEdelman@wandering.shop ("Scott Edelman") wrote:

I'd never encountered this Turkish proverb before today, but whoa, it sure explains why Donald Trump is being allowed to destroy America.

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
RikerGoogling@mas.to ("Riker Googling") wrote:

starship main viewer unblock porn

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

One of the challenges of very long lenses is that they tempt you to compose images of subjects that are very far away. But the farther away something is, the more the atmosphere can distort the image. The effects of heat distortion, pollution, humidity, and weather are amplified across longer distances, no matter how sharp the lens is or how high resolution the sensor.

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

Very long lenses like the 400mm, with their narrow field of view, are essential for some compositions (such as this one), but I find I only rarely actually use them. In fact, the longest lens I have for my main medium format camera system is 180mm (which yields the 35mm equivalent view of about a 120mm), and I hardly ever use even that for the most of the photography I do.

For wildlife photographers, on the other hand, 400mm is practically a wide angle.

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

This was captured with a DSLR and a 400mm lens, which contributed to the compressed perspective. The conductor boarding the leftmost train is essential to the composition, I think.

Ewing, NJ ("West Trenton") is the last stop on SEPTA's commuter trains from Philadelphia on the former Reading Railroad's line to northern NJ. CSX freight trains still use the tracks north of the station, beyond the end of the overhead electrified wiring used for passenger service.

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

Commuter Trains, Ewing (West Trenton), NJ, 2010.

All the pixels, no ticket required, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/4377309058

#photography

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

My friend Rob made this and was so generous to gift it to me. #StarWars #DarthVader

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

I just had a nostalgia rush.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/06/they-dont-make-em-like-this-anymore/

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
LauraJG@deacon.social ("Laura G, Sassy 70’s") wrote:

Utagawa Hiroshige (Japanese, 1797–1858). New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Oji, No. 118 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 9th month of 1857. Woodblock print, sheet: 14 3/16 x 9 1/4 in. (36.0 x 23.5 cm); image: 13 3/8 x 8 3/4 in. (34.0 x 22.2 cm), this impression in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum. #arthistory #asianart #woodblock #woodblockprint #printmaking

From the museum: “In the late 1850s, while Japanese color prints were dominated by themes of the fantastic, Hiroshige emphasized the realities of the observed world in his work. However, here he has ventured into the world of spirits. It was believed that on New Year's Eve all the foxes of the surrounding provinces would gather at a particular tree near Oji Inari Shrine, the headquarters of the regional cult of the god Inari. There the foxes would change their dress for a visit to the shrine, where they would be given orders for the coming year. On the way, the animals would emit distinctive flames by which local farmers were able to predict the crops of the coming year.”

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

Are you arachnophobic? Take the quiz!

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/06/im-arachnophobic/