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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
Scmbradley@mathstodon.xyz ("scmbradley") wrote:

Was reminded of this paper a minute ago, and I just read it again. Damn, Edsger Dijkstra weirdly relevant for a 40 year old paper.

"The question [of whether machines can think] is just as relevant and just as meaningful as the question whether submarines can swim."

"if computers could amplify intelligence, they could amplify stupidity as well."

"The most crazy thing of all this is that, in all the more spectacular cases, the failure has been predicted, quite convincingly and well in advance. Apparently, the lure of the dream is still so strong that people become to deaf for warnings: the computer represents Babbage’s Dream Come True, and no one wants to hear that the Dream has deteriorated into a fully transistorized nightmare."

"I refer to the wide-spread, but in general unchallenged, belief that making something “computer-aided” amounts to making it better. Computer-aided design, computer-aided management, computer-aided composition, computer-aided manufacturing, computer-assisted learning, computerized examinations, you name it. Under no circumstances the dogma of improvement should be accepted without challenge: in no time we would have computerized jurisdiction."

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867.html

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

DO NOT EXECUTE THIS CODE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE LICENSE
DNE-1.0 - 2025-07-11
====================

https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/gpu-free-ai/blob/main/LICENSE

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

Prismatic dragon

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
Kitty@metalhead.club ("Kit-T :damnified:") wrote:

Looks like the "Verify your fedi account" scam is gaining pace, & evolving to look more real.

Your server admin will not ask you to click a link to verify your account. And no other admin from any other server will either, even if they do look like they could be part of the main Mastodon team. It's a scam.

Please report any post or DM that urges you to click any link to verify your account.

If you've any doubts about your account, now or on any other day, contact your server admin or mod team.

@thomas @SunDancer

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
triz@normal.style ("triz of online :verified_triz:") wrote:

remember riding in the bed of the pickup truck? remember when we didn't have seatbelts or unleaded gas? remember drinking the beer from the enclosure now obsolete? you drank the beer in the car with your dad, and he seemed impossibly strong and knowledgeable, the low dusk light glinting off his sunglasses as you sped onwards toward the location. remember the location. remember the location. the location. what were the coordinates of the location? you used to enjoy knowing them so well

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
jamey@toot.cat ("Jamey Sharp") wrote:

This comedy routine was incredibly sweet and I recommend it, especially if you had or have any connection to the identity of being an American man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fsoWW%5FfZyM

And hey, goodnight, sleep tight, and sweet dreams

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
loriemerson@post.lurk.org ("Lori Emerson") wrote:

I'm trying to help a family here in Boulder raise a bit of money to give their aunt/sister/daughter a funeral - if you'd consider chipping in, we'd all be grateful ❤️ https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-honor-cindys-memory-mssja?attribution%5Fid=sl%3A19d0010b-626b-4fe7-bcb0-858ff8a81586&lang=en%5FUS&ts=1752170017&v=amp14%5Ft2

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
m2m@sonomu.club ("Simone S") wrote:

Tiny post using someone else's words to express something I've grown obsessed with: the inability of capitalism to accept that something might be good enough.

https://minutestomidnight.co.uk/blog/content/

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

So this was mostly a play on the concept of "street photography". The street is the literal subject, but everything about it - the absence of people or any depiction of street life, the use of a heavy, tripod-laden camera, the compositional formality - defies the conventions of that genre.

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

This is a high resolution stitch of three captures with the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 HR Digaron lens, yielding a 230 MP image with roughly the angle of view of a 14mm "full frame" rectilinear lens. The high resolution invites you to look closely for signs of life, but they remain elusive.

While this is literally a photo of the street, it's not a "street photo" at all. The empty nocturnal streetscape is completely devoid of life and human activity, though it hints at sometimes being a bustling place.

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

2AM, Adams-Morgan, Washington, DC, 2023.

All the pixels, none of the street life, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/52991590112

#photography

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
trevorflowers@machines.social ("Trevor Flowers") wrote:

Ok, this is a fun idea. It uses a PC storage LED to generate the sounds of older HDDs.
https://www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker

jwz wrote:

Big Beautiful Bald Boarding.

Bald Baby J.D. Vance Meme Can Now Be Your Boarding Pass: James Steinberg has designed an app that allows you to change the background your digital airplane boarding pass to display a now-infamous image of the vice...
https://jwz.org/b/ykrL

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

Some of you have never realized how cool you are, and it shows.

Boosted by jwz:
ComicContext@mstdn.social ("Comics Outta Context") wrote:

Boosted by jwz:
Lana@beige.party ("𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"") wrote:

I don't know why we're pretending this is complicated. ICE wears masks because we all saw what happened at Nuremburg when the Gestapo didn't.

That's it.

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
vae@social.lol ("Vae Miséricorde") wrote:

a good timezone to you mastodongs!

i am beefing up my FreshRSS instance and am looking for blogs to read, write about in an attempt at a new column, casually become obsessed with and hang on their every word…

blogs about tech, music, data, artisan bread, religious deconstruction, elder millenialism, apple cultivars, cool rocks some guy found, could be anything! could be yours! the weirder and more niche features the better (but slice of life stuff is perfect too)

no algorithm means we gotta actually tell each other about the gems we find! what are your favourites?

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

I try, I try

Attachments:

• video: 9be0986841887a77.mp4

Boosted by jwz:
mu@ni.hil.ist ("無 Mu") wrote:

ICE has been systematically abducting sex workers too. For example, massage parlors, all year, but people are neither defending nor supporting these workers like the street vendor buyouts and "Adopt a Day Laborer" campaigns. From New York to Louisiana. https://truthout.org/articles/sex-workers-are-being-abducted-by-ice-and-abandoned-by-respectability-politics/

Over 90 days in January and February, nearly 1,000 arrests in Queens, New York, targeted immigrant sex workers and street vendors. In Arizona, over 200 arrests were made. In Texas, 11 parlors were closed in February and May under emergency powers that bypass criminal charges. Across 20+ cities this year, police collaborated with ICE in similar raids.

"DecrimSexWorkCA ... has organized ICE patrols, and distributed over $20,000 in emergency relief to undocumented and other sex workers since 2023. Their model is mutual aid, not charity." Other migrant sex worker support mainly comes from other sex workers in other underfunded grassroots groups like Red Canary Song and Trans Immigrant Project.

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

My six year old niece to her cousin: "that's all he (me) writes about- weirdos, nerds, and goofballs."

She has my number.

#blogging #blogger

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

But also, I think there's excessive love for the artifacts and not enough love for maintaining and transmitting the knowledge of how to build the artifacts and the motivations for the existence of the artifacts. But maybe that's just an old may yelling at a cloud thing.

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

This effort with Python packaging kinda feels like that... I can't put my finger on it. Kinda like what they really need is an OS dedicated to Python or something. 🤔

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

I've been in many software development situations where I suddenly realized I was accidentally reinventing something, like TCP/IP or an RTOS or a programming language.

I've also been in situations where I've been handed code where the people involved did the same thing, but they clearly didn't realize that's what they were doing as they kept pushing ahead ignoring available solutions or knowledge and making a horrible undifferentiated mess.

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

I read this article about efforts to... change Python packaging in various ways, and I can't help but feel the effort may be solving the wrong problems. Or mabye all their little problems are an aspect of a bigger one.

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1028299/46df057f821939bd/

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

Far and away the best Painkiller I have had from a plastic cup

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
baskin@kafeneio.social ("baskin :kafeneio:🇵🇸") wrote:

#seems_legit

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

It's interesting how the "openness" religion in the hands of venture capitalists and corporations almost always means deeper centralization.

kornel ("Kornel") wrote:

I got used to 120Hz+ displays, and now 60Hz feels off. It's not visibly bad at all, but scrolling and mouse movement feel less like a physical motion, and more like pixels shifting on the screen. Hard to describe.

Which is annoying, because there are some nice 5K and 6K displays, but 60Hz. It wouldn't have bothered me at all if I didn't use 120Hz first!
Don't get high-refresh displays! ;)

#firstworldproblems

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

The Move Fast and Break Things mantra shows it's ugly head often in the history of the Internet. Particularly when corporations leverage Openness as a Strategy to gain market share and accumulate power.

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

November 2007— Mark Cuban pitches to #Facebook an API that extends past the Facebook domain. He describes what would eventually become Facebook's Open Graph and Graph API, the catalysts to the #CambridgeAnalytica scandal that would occur six years later.

#Meta #OpenSocialWeb #InternetHistory