Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
maggiechapman@mastodon.scot ("Maggie Chapman") wrote:

A massive waste of time and energy.
Not for protestors, but for policing.

The message couldn't be clearer: people are horrified with this UK Government enabling war crimes against innocent populations in Palestine.

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
alfiekohn@sciences.social ("Alfie Kohn") wrote:

A Jewish Israeli citizen studying at Columbia is bemused by having more freedom to criticize his country at home (despite Israel's descent into autocracy) than he has on this U.S. campus which has been bent to Trump's will - and also can criticize any country other than Israel: https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2025/08/08/in-israel-i-protest-my-government-can-i-do-the-same-at-columbia/

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
Fragarach@beige.party wrote:

From someone who has made clear that they'll withdraw service (Starlink, Ukraine) from those states who don't do as they say?

This has to be an absolute No, OfGen!

Musk's Tesla applies to supply power to British households

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3v3333rlp7o

#UKpolitics #UKPower #Musk #Tesla

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
DrALJONES wrote:

Interview: "A Game of Target Practice" Doctors Back From Gaza Share Harrowing Stories of Israel’s Brutality

One day, boys "would be coming in with gunshot wounds to the head or the neck."

The next day, gunshot wounds to the chest.

Then four boys, 13, 14, "all of whom had been shot in the testicles."

This clustering was so striking, "it was inconceivable it could have been coincidence.”

https://zeteo.com/p/doctors-gaza-humanitarian-foundation-target-practice

#GHF #IsraeliCrimesAgainstHumanity #USPol #EuroPol #USCrimesInGaza @palestine .

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan") wrote:

I just had a video conversation on Signal with Nouran (@NouranKhaledGh) and her brother Yousef from Gaza.

Their family is one of countless ones in Palestine who are still alive but unsure of what tomorrow is going to bring. Last night was especially tough with Israel’s renewed bombing. Yousef told me that at least they are still in their own home and that if they’re ordered by Israel to evacuate again that they will not leave what little they have left. He told me “we will die here”.

Please don’t let Nouran, Yousef, and their family die.

We must keep protesting, keep pressuring our governments until they take definitive action to stop Israel’s genocide.

And also, please help Nouran and her family survive in the interim by donating to their campaign:

https://chuffed.org/project/121561-urgent-help-for-ahmads-family

Your donations help them buy food to eat as Israel continues to starve Gaza.

Even if you cannot help financially right now, please boost this to help spread the word.

Thank you!

@palestine

#Palestine #Gaza #aid #fediAid #FreePalestine

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
Aseelsehwel@mas.to ("Aseelsehwel🇵🇸") wrote:

Every Tuesday, we ask for your help to feed my family for a full week.
We need $500 each week to feed my family of 6.
Every dollar you give helps us get through the week.
If you’re unable to donate, please consider sharing — it might reach someone who can help.
Thank you so much for your continued kindness and support.

Here’s the donation link and our full story 👇
@palestine @mutualaid #gaza

0/500$
https://chuffed.org/project/138285-help-sehwel-family-with-their-medical-treatment

Boosted by jakedel@mamot.fr ("S. Delafond"):
freexian@hachyderm.io ("Freexian :debian:") wrote:

Debian 13 “trixie” is now the new Debian stable!

It will be supported for the next 5 years by the Debian Security team (https://security-team.debian.org/) and Debian LTS (https://wiki.debian.org/LTS) team, with up to 10 years of support via Freexian’s Extended LTS (https://www.freexian.com/lts/extended/).

A big congratulations and thank you to everyone who made this release possible!

#debian #debian13 #trixie #debianlts #LongTermSupport #linuxsecurity #freexian

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

This post also touches on the new-under-the-sun transgression that Apple has pulled off against the entire logic of open web standards.

Important to ask: should Apple engineers be welcome at IETF, TPAC, and TC39 while Cupertino undermines competitive autonomy?

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

Several times over the course of my career, specific companies have gummed up the works in web standards, leaving it to everyone else to figure that out they weren't on board with the web continuing to progress. It's bad, and we should learn to spot it:

https://infrequently.org/2025/08/how-do-committees-fail-to-invent/

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

I'm glad people are still pushing concepts like these forward. "The NNCPNET email network":

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1031208/c60b8a7df3952bb6/

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
hazelweakly@hachyderm.io ("Hazel Weakly") wrote:

Ben Recht (@beenwrekt.bsky.social‬ on bluesky) has a nice article on The Bitter Lesson essay, which is here:

https://www.argmin.net/p/the-negroni-variation

I actually don't like the conclusion in the original Bitter Lesson essay. I think it's an astute observation, but I also think that it's misinterpreted by most.

I think the bitter lesson is mostly stating what happens when you misunderstand entropy.

Entropy has very deep connections to information theory, and one interesting thing about entropy is that the more structured your information, the less entropy it has.

In other words: Structuring data removes more information than it creates. What is lost is the latent entropy that wasn't encoded

Many times, that reduction of entropy is desirable. Parsing "any data" would be nearly impossible generically, but parsing a data format can be codified in a library quite directly.

But if you're trying to *understand* data... You want the latent information.

If you're trying to identify an effective way to think about the information required to solve a problem, and you can find a good data structure for that, it can make the problem tractable

Rope data structures and text editing are good examples of that. Very specialized structure, a but generic use

However, if you're trying to encode information in a generic way, you can't constrain the data, or you'll lose more information than you gain.

In a world where we erroneously think we understand the human brain and the nature of knowledge, consistently failing to apply that knowledge... is bitter.

In other words: the only algorithms that scale universally for understanding complex systems work by exploiting entropy rather than by exploiting knowledge representations

That, to me, is the true bitter lesson: Acknowledging that humans and knowledge are complex in a way that resists codification

Boosted by jwz:
ikonha@zeroes.ca ("Ikon Hannunen") wrote:

DC Sandwich resistance.

Look at these doofs tryna catch him 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Attachments:

• video: A dude tosses a footlong at a goon and outruns their asses

jwz wrote:

Github is now a subsidiary of the MICROS~1 Spicy Autocomplete division, so I guess it's time to re-up my "LOL Github" I-told-you-so post from 2018, since in those intervening 7 years you have all learned nothing.

Anyway, good luck with that! I hope your migrations go really well.
https://jwz.org/b/yks-

Boosted by jwz:
CptSuperlative@toot.cat ("Captain Superlative") wrote:

Reminder: Americans who didn't vote for Harris voted for all of this.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
aka_pugs ("Tom Lyon ✅") wrote:

Happy 75th, Steve Wozniak!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve%5FWozniak

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
housepanther@goblackcat.social ("House Panther :verified_paw:") wrote:

None other than the OG himself! #fuckice

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

@fromjason Ah, whew!

Of course, definitely do copy over docs, photos, apps you use.

I tend to keep a copy of the old computer around for as long as possible (either ON said old computer, or on a backup drive somewhere). After some $longTime has passed, anything you don't miss, you don't have to worry too much about.

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

@NfNitLoop this is great advice! I actually started the migration when I got the laptop and then canceled it because it was taking too long and I was being impatient. I was considering starting it up again and letting it run through the night, but I kinda like the idea of starting fresh.

Good insight, I think that's exactly what I'm going to do

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

@fromjason Like 🤯 crazy wrong configurations for a computer. We tried to `brew install` things again. It installed more x86 tools. Because the migration tool had migrated the x86 version of Homebrew. And of course, Homebrew never fathomed they'd need to check: "Is this x86 binary still in fact running on an x86-native operating system?" so it just assumed that was the correct architecture and continued downloading & (re)installing x86 binaries. 🤦‍♂️

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

@fromjason 😬 I know I’m late, but I recommend never running a migration tool for a computer. A new laptop is a great chance to start fresh, but migration tools are often written to “bring everything”, including cruft and misconfigurations and bugs.

Last week I helped unfuck a coworkers laptop because the Apple migration tool had copied x86 binaries onto his m4 laptop. He’d unknowingly been running everything through Rosetta emulation, which worked well enough until it spectacularly didn’t.

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

@skyfaller I was just wondering if just such a tool existed, and you’ve shared multiple. Thanks!

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

Oh fuck off, #Reddit

https://www.theverge.com/news/757538/reddit-internet-archive-wayback-machine-block-limit

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

DM: Roll for interoception.
Me: (rolls D20) 2!
DM: so how do you feel?
Me: … bad?
DM: Yeah. That’s about all you know.
Husband: can you try using more words?
Me: I use 1 manual self-inspection counter to think about it.
DM: I’ll allow it.
Me: it’s like … brain fog? Like …
DM: roll for interoception again.
Me: 7!
Husband: (Expectant Gaze gives +2 aura of Make An Effort)
DM: you search through the brain cobwebs and find a clue
Me: it’s like… hurt-y? Here-ish? (Gesture) Oh! I have a headache! 🤦‍♂️

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
sam@social.coop ("Sam Whited") wrote:

Since GitHub is now just an AI intake pipeline, now seems like a good time to try starting code hosting co-ops again; anyone in the Americas want to start a cooperative Forgejo instance?

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

Waiting at the Apple store for my phone to be repaired, watching one of the staff patiently and kindly explaining to an older customer about SMS phishing scams.

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

On one hand it'd be easy to make a joke about U2 releasing statements, on the other hand, it's at the point where U2 feels its actually important to release statements

https://pitchfork.com/news/u2-release-statements-on-israel-and-gaza/

denschub@schub.social ("Dennis Schubert") wrote:

LLM bros: "woooow LLMs are so cool you can just use natural language to ask questions and they'll respond with useful stuff!"

me: *asks a question while providing the LLM the relevant context I'm working in, receiving total nonsense as a reply*

LLM bros: "nuuuh-uhhh you're holding it wrong 😤"

y'all need to listen to yourselves a bit more. ah wait, you can't, your context-window isn't large enough to properly self-reflect, eh?

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

Sister was like- you're actually pretty good with words

And I was like- well I am a writer, I have the bank account to prove it

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

The Threads interpolation was a broad-day heist. They covered it with rosy blog posts, and comments meant to confuse and drain your energy. You remember two years ago, they were all under our posts putting in the work.

Why or how these major tech blogs never caught on to all this, I'll never know.

Never stop talking about it. It'll come to light.

#Fedipact #SocialWebFoundation

From: @ophiocephalic
https://kolektiva.social/@ophiocephalic/115011235861054411

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
patatas@social.patatas.ca wrote:

@ophiocephalic @chewie just watched this keynote, and it’s kinda telling that he doesn’t once say the words “surveillance” or “power”. The talk got close, when he mentioned privacy, but bizarrely his take was that big actors are somehow more trustworthy, which like, has he been following anything in the news for the past decade plus?

Then the snarky answer about ‘not getting popular so our hearts don’t get broken’ was also pretty shocking. He clearly has no desire to grapple with the contradiction between, on the one hand, wanting his protocol baby to rule the world, and on the other hand, the fact that he’s invited surveillance fascists into the room.

I suspect he’s after a big payday; he couldn’t even help himself from talking about Ethereum, whose Ethereum Foundation has already paid him and Tom Coates a pretty tidy sum to do what amounted to a book report on E2EE encryption.