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

What natural property of ape brains turns them into sex predators when given a surplus of resources? Are all rich people rapists?

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/24/am-i-a-conspiracy-theorist-now/

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place wrote:

i wish i lived in a society with too much sex and not enough violence instead of living in society with too much violence and not enough sex

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

consequences can be a p*sser

https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/s/ac9L22L09L

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

consequences

https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/s/EK1pFtiLGP

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
david_chisnall@infosec.exchange ("David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)") wrote:

@sysadmin1138 @kaasbaas @cstross

"This is an iPhone moment" was mentioned A LOT in the early throes of this, with the implication of not getting in on the LLM craze meant you'd be a candy-bar phone seller in an era of smartphones

I really can't understate how much FOMO dominates in big tech leadership. The history of information technology is full of disruptive technologies.

The PC made IBM a niche player and established Microsoft's dominance.

Microsoft missed out on the web (Gates famously called the Internet a passing fad) and let Google become one of the largest tech companies.

Smartphones made Apple from a distant second place in the PC race and a company worth a fraction of Microsoft to one of the largest companies in the world.

Each one of these (and a few others, such as virtualisation / cloud) caused a big company to lose market share to a new player. Sometime catastrophically, sometimes they recovered.

The thing that absolutely terrifies the senior leadership at these companies is that there will be a new thing that will cause a big shift in the industry and they will be in the position Microsoft was on the web or smartphones, or that IBM was on commodity desktops.

These people are typically the living embodiment of the Peter Principle.
Normally, they can do a completely mediocre job and watch the line go up a bit. As long as they don't do too many really stupid things, they're fine. They're in charge of a money fountain and they just need to not spill too much. But occasionally, once or twice a decade, something comes along where they need to actually do something or the money fountain might stop working.

The problem is that they're really bad at identifying these moments. And so they leap on everything that looks as if it plausibly might be such a thing. Normally they only waste a billion or so, and wasting a billion every few years is not a problem for a company making tens of billions in profit every year.

This time, they got into an exciting echo chamber where everyone else was jumping on the same bandwagon and so the personal risk if they were the one who didn't jump and was wrong was very high. The risk (again, to the individuals, not the company) of being wrong in the same way as everyone else is much lower (who could possibly predict that pissing away all of your money on a buggy bullshit generator is a bad idea? Everyone else is doing it! It wasn't my poor management that tanked the value of the company, it was an 'industry downturn', you can tell because all of our major competitors also lost 50% of their share price overnight. Oh, and actually it isn't really a tech industry problem, it's a global recession [caused by a liquidity crunch caused by wiping out $2T in the stock market overnight]).

The last few things that were not actually disruptive technologies (mixed reality / AR / metaverse, Web 3) were similar. One company jumped so all of the others did. No one looked bad when it turned out to be mostly nonsense because no one was the outlier, they were just tracking industry trends.

The weird thing this time is quite how much people are willing to throw money at it without any revenue. It's like a massive game of chicken, except it's the economy not a car that they're going to crash.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
joshuajfriedman.com@bsky.brid.gy ("Joshua J. Friedman") wrote:

To clarify, Judge Xinis ordered ICE not only to transfer Abrego to Maryland but to RELEASE him under ICE's supervision

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
br00t4c wrote:

J6 Pardon Recipient 'QAnon Shaman' Turns on 'Fraud' Trump: 'F*ck This Stupid Piece of Sh*t'

#TrumpPardon #January6th #QAnonShaman #JakeAngeli #Mediaite

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/j6-pardon-recipient-qanon-shaman-turns-on-fraud-trump-fck-this-stupid-piece-of-sht/

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
detachedspork@mastodon.ie ("detached spork") wrote:

If you are in a company where machines are redistributed without being first entirely wiped, I'm here to tell you that you have no idea the number of people using their colleagues' SSH authentication because nobody thought to wipe it.

JUST WIPE THE MACHINES JEEZ

Also stop reassigning old email addresses to new people. New dave doesn't need be to dave@ just because old dave is gone.

This ends today's tech support bitch session

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
newsthump@mastodon.online ("NewsThump") wrote:

NEWS! Please stop calling them the ‘Farage Riots’, demands man behind the Farage Riots https://newsthump.com/2025/07/24/please-stop-calling-them-the-farage-riots-demands-man-behind-the-farage-riots/

fribbledom ("muesli") wrote:

Trump isn't governing, he's trying to set a new Personal Best in the "Ruin a Nation Any%" category.

So far, his run is looking flawless!

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
freedomofpress@freedom.press ("Freedom of the Press") wrote:

🚨 PSA: If you are an ICE or DHS employee and have firsthand knowledge of unreported immigration enforcement activities that you think the public should know, find a news outlet that uses @securedrop and send it as an anonymous, encrypted tip.

Audio, video, documents all accepted.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
johnallsopp@indieweb.social ("John Allsopp") wrote:

In 2012 I spoke at @ffconf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTqIGKmCqd0

@slightlyoff was in the audience and we spent a long walk after talking about this stuff before React was even created.

Some of us could see this coming *miles* away.

Alex did more than anyone to try and give us an alternative path, with the Extensible Web Manifesto,

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/author/extensible-web-manifesto-team/

and Progressive Web Apps
https://conffab.com/presentation/what-comes-next-for-the-web-platform/?gl=nYv144b3XWse

I try not to think about it but it is %^&*ing infuriating the path we went down.

And for what?

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

Sneek peek of the DEFCON Voting Village speaker schedule (subject to change). Join us in LVCC West 222-223 August 8-10.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT7HGHMq3cf-SvACWphEdU98JpaKVlp0yFG9WJTBwybFdgLfIUrGFiEJWC-8RkXqDekY82BivIW25FD/pub

Boosted by jwz:
ana@starlite.rodeo ("ana veronica") wrote:

whenever someone wants to tell me that agi is just around the corner now i can just say "ah yes, but i'm about to learn to wield magic, which will make all of that irrelevant" checkmate loser

Boosted by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

timeline cleanser

Attachments:

• video: 1f631f3b6ad14562.mp4

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
jesse@chaos.social ("Jesse") wrote:

Next time you're having a yak-shaving moment, and you want to find that (great) gif from Malcolm in the Middle, just for once, I'd recommend a children's book instead.

Pettson lives with his cat Findus and wants to bake him a bithday cake. But he's missing flour, so he needs to get some from the store, but his bicycle tire is flat, to fix it he needs the tools from the shed, but the shed is locked, and the key has fallen into the well, and...

Great drawings, very cute:
https://archive.org/details/birthdaycake0000nord/page/n27/mode/2up

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

Yeah no shit pal

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/doj-trump-named-epstein-files-b2794777.html

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

Saint James Infirmary by Snooks Eaglin

https://pandora.app.link/kiBACKtvfVb

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
Nonya_Bidniss@infosec.exchange ("Nonya Bidniss :CIAverified:") wrote:

@chillybot Yes. It's a red team slaughter. Well we are learning something that was a part of life for me in the IC: the whole government runs on trust and expectations of good behavior. We see some other countries expelling, charging and punishing rich and powerful politicians, but in our case we find ourselves in a position I don't think the founders ever thought possible, that all three branches of government--carefully created to be checks and balances on each other--are completely under the control of the worst possible people, who have no care for the constitution and in fact intently want to overthrow the system of government put in place 249 years ago. We have no institutional response to that, there is nothing built in. Our constitution allows for its own demise. The only thing that will change this is a citizen uprising. I personally think we are beyond that because Trump has created / is creating a private army answering only to him. I think a protracted general strike across all sectors is the only lever.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
maggiecatmom@c.im ("Maggie 🐹") wrote:

Those emerald eyes hold a full universe of curiosity! 🐾😁
#catsofmastodon

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
amoroso@fosstodon.org ("Paolo Amoroso") wrote:

SQLite is a remarkable piece of software and I've always been curious about the system and the project. Here are several little known facts about SQLite.

https://avi.im/blag/2024/sqlite-facts

#SQLite #database

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
sop@unstable.systems ("sofia") wrote:

A shitpost that's been brewing in my head for a while now

Attachments:

• gifv: A user types a text message in a non descript textbox. The message eventually says, "Having a computer constantly trying to guesstimate what I’m going to type is fucking annoying." At every step of the way, an imaginary LLM tries to produce a nonsensical, improbable, artificially cheerful and brand-aware autocompletion. The completions come and go faster than you can really pay attention to, and the sockpuppet of a user I'm depicting in this piece of media just has to kinda try and ignore the onslaught of distraction as they eventually manage to finish the sentence. For bonus points, the LLM tries to censor the word "fucking" and replace it with more adwords(TM)-acceptable terms.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
Unixbigot@aus.social ("Kit Bashir") wrote:

Just this ONCE I wish that when scientists find, say, a deep ocean fungus (!) that can eat plastic, that they pause to determine whether it’s metabolism has a concept of “full”.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot

Boosted by jwz:
dnalounge@sfba.social ("DNA Lounge") wrote:

♬️ Just announced: Wed Sep 17, 8pm: DESIRE
https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2025/09-17.html?utm%5Fsource=sp%5Fma
#dnalounge #desire #johnnyjewel #synthpop #italodisco #livemusic #concert #sanfrancisco

Attachments:

• gifv: 086cc2d3f886c441.mp4

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

With Pocket going away and Instapaper announcing Kobo integration, it may be time to dust off my old account there after all. (I've been testing Unread Premium as a read-it-later app, and it’s…fine, but that's definitely not its forte.)

jwz wrote:

We can't have nice fountains.

San Francisco's Vaillancourt Fountain may soon meet its end, despite public outcry: Despite considerable public support for its preservation, San Francisco's 1971 Vaillancourt Fountain is not being included in plans for a...
https://jwz.org/b/ykrs

jwz wrote:

GWAR Concert Goes Viral After CEO of Tech Start Up Caught Having Affair on Analingus Cam.

BOSTON -- Viral footage from GWAR's popular Analingus Cam supposedly shows a tech CEO engaged in a lewd sexual act with his mistress, multiple people in...
https://jwz.org/b/ykrq

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
tantramar ("Chris Mackay 🇨🇦") wrote:

“Work from home”, they said. “So few distractions”, they said. 🤦‍♂️🤪 #CatsOfMastodon #RipleyAndJonesy #JustJonesy #WFH #ChatLunatique

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
AaronDavid@beige.party wrote:

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
sundogplanets ("Prof. Sam Lawler") wrote:

Good morning from the goat-and-llama parade