Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

Someone recently described me as a "left wing nut," I presume for having radical political beliefs like "slavery was bad" and "maybe genocide isn't a great idea" and "hey, wouldn't due process be great for everybody" and probably also "presidents and their advisors shouldn't be hopelessly corrupt and should probably also follow the Constitution," you know, real out there stuff like that

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

(I mean, I also blocked them so I will never see them again, but, you know, that doesn't decrease the sincerity of my statement)

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

Wishing all the people who said "you weren't there, you don't know" when I said "slavery was absolutely awful" a very sincere and hearty go fuck yourself

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

despite being somewhat neglected, there might actually be some corn after all

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

New post: "Seriously, Markdown" https://coyotetracks.org/blog/markdown/

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
ProPublica@newsie.social wrote:

Microsoft is required to regularly provide U.S. officials with its plan for keeping government data safe from hacking. Yet a copy of the tech giant’s security plan obtained by ProPublica makes no reference to the company’s China-based operations.

https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-china-defense-department-cloud-computing-security?utm%5Fsource=mastodon&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=mastodon-post

#News #Microsoft #Tech #Data #China #Cybersecurity #Government #Technology

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
w7voa@journa.host ("Steve Herman") wrote:

Wired - Ant smugglers in the US have been emboldened by widespread government staffing cuts spearheaded by DOGE. https://www.wired.com/story/usda-ant-smuggling-pets-illegal-wildlife/

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

woah, what have we gone back to? https://substack.com/@reallyamerican/note/c-137565074

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

Today in History: First commercial radio station airs in Detroit, Michigan, 1920

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

Today in History: Leon Trotsky assassinated, 1940

Boosted by jwz:
siderea@universeodon.com ("Siderea, Sibylla Bostoniensis") wrote:

Hey, #PatreonCreators! Did anybody else have a weird increase in processing fees?

I'm not talking about Patreon's cut ("platform fee"). I'm talking about is the payment processors' fees (allegedly) that Patreon passes along.

Patreon just announced they're increasing their own cut to 10% for new creators just signing up, but I am an existing creator and that doesn't apply to me. My platform fee was 5.8% for July, which is a touch higher but fine, whatever.

But my processing fee shot up. My January and July were extremely similar in revenues ($466.19 vs $458.50) and patrons (160 vs 162), but the payment fees jumped up over 50%, from 5.8% to 8.8%.

This plus the minor increase in the platform fee means my fees jumped from 11.4% (on the high side of previously previously typical) to the astounding 14.6%.

Any of you seeing something similar?

Boosted by jwz:
ANARCORAXA@todon.eu ("☆ ANARCORAXA ☆") wrote:

Good morning / afternoon / evening / night dear birds of a feather! 🏴

Attachments:

• gifv: A person walks behind a riot cop and sticks an ACAB sticker on the riot cop's back. There are several people and trees in the background.

Boosted by jwz:
paulrickards wrote:

Rate my battlestation!

This is a Sony Anycast Station AWS-G500HD from 2007. It's essentially a Sony luggable PIII 933Mhz PC that runs Linux 2.4.20 with a ton of FPGAs to do the heavy lifting of a video switcher. Plus glorious physical buttons, faders, dials, and removable keyboard. Oh, and a jog wheel.

#RetroComputing

Boosted by jwz:
phire@phire.place ("jenny (phire)") wrote:

AI is the least punk technology there is I will not be accepting further questions

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
catileptic@chaos.social ("Alex Ștefănescu") wrote:

I appreciate the academic and rigorous effort to measure the bullshit that LLMs generate: https://machine-bullshit.github.io/

I just wish we would do away with the rhetoric that we're just aiming to make these models better.

How about no? How about admitting that the premise is poisoned from the start?

How about saying that holding everyone's labor, creativity and expression hostage for the sake of deskilling people and making them precarious is a horrible idea?

#AI #antifascism #antiAI

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
EndIsraeliApartheid ("End Israeli Apartheid") wrote:

Acting US Attorney for Nevada Sigal Chattah let suspected Israeli predator Tom Artiom Alexandrovich flee to Israel.

38-year-old Alexandrovich was arrested after agreeing to meet who he thought was a 15-y/o girl to engage in “sexual contact.”

Alexandrovich sent pictures of himself to the undercover detective via his phone, spoke about engaging in sexual activity with her, and stated he would bring condoms to the meeting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c81N7ob5u3I

🕎 🇵🇸 ☮️
#Gaza #Palestine
#Press #News

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
oliverknabe@berlin.social ("Oliver Knabe") wrote:

"Another farmer, Muhamed, shared through tears at a recent seminar that every morning before he leaves for his fields, he says goodbye to his wife and children as though it might be the last time. This is because of the settlers. “Each day I fear I will not come home alive,” he told Palestinian and Israeli activists who stood with him. CfP activists Jamil and Sayel were there, and the weight of that daily fear hung heavy among everyone present." #Westbank
#CombatantsForPeace

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
LillyHerself ("LillyLyle/Count Melancholia") wrote:

Simple solutions are always the best.

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

People are starving in Gaza, you fucks. Talk about not having taste. Read the fucking room. https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/115059906348542852

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

What is Hasbara? Learn about Israel’s “Ministry of Truth.”

https://www.972mag.com/hasbara-why-does-the-world-fail-to-understand-us/

#hasbara #israel #genocide #ethnicCleansing #apartheid #settlerColonialism #Gaza #WestBank #Palestine #StopIsrael #FreePalestine

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

Analysis: Three favourite false claims of Israel Flunkies:

1. "Modern Palestine, even the term Palestine, didn't exist until the British invented it."

2. "Ok, ok, it did exist, but it was never an independent state."

3. "Most of the Palestinian Arab population in 1948 consisted of foreign-born immigrants from the surrounding Arab countries."

Why they're false:

https://substack.com/inbox/post/171030316

#Hasbara #USPol #EuroPol #PalestineHistory #IsraeliLies @palestine .

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

We’re Struggling to Survive!

Famine is slowly killing us. Prices have skyrocketed (20 times higher than before) and we can no longer afford even the basics.

I’m asking for your urgent help to secure food my family.

Please share this post.

Your support can help us stay alive 🇵🇸

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

Attachments:

• video: 7db4cab02cca5779.mp4

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

Every Tuesday, I ask for your help to feed my family. We need $500 each week for my family of 6. Every single dollar makes a real difference 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 👇

133/500$
https://chuffed.org/project/138285-help-sehwel-family-with-their-medical-treatment

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

The smell of gunpowder fills the skies of Gaza from the intensity of the bombardment.
@palestine #gaza #gazaunderattack

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële"):
anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz ("Anthropy") wrote:

A Snickers is about 570Wh, which is like eating a very sizable ebike battery's entire charge in one go.

A Big Mac slightly tops that with about 650Wh. A slice of pizza is about half that with 340Wh.

Meanwhile, fruits like apples/bananas are in the ~100-130 watt-hour oversized twice laptop battery ballpark, and a cup of greek yogurt is about the same, so a big cup of fruit-filled yogurt is still less calories than a big mac or snickers!

A full english breakfast can be over 1kWh! Quickcharge ⚡⚡

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële"):
anthropy@mastodon.derg.nz ("Anthropy") wrote:

I propose replacing calories with watt-hours.

- Almost same value (1 kilocalorie / Calorie is ~1.1 watt-hours)
- more intuitive for people who use electricity
- never the confusion between calories (science), Calories (food, which is technically kilocalories), kilocalories, and 'kilo Calories' (which is technically megacalories)
- you get to feel more like a robot with your 2.5kwh power consumption a day which may feel like validation to some creatures on this fediverse
- become powered by cake

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële"):
joyce@hcommons.social ("Joyce Lionarons") wrote:

This is for people over 65 only. Please boost for reach.

How often are you in pain?

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële"):
fabio@manganiello.social ("Fabio Manganiello") wrote:

In order to please the requests a large publisher (Axel Springer), #Germany may be on the verge of making ad-blockers illegal - and, worse, anything that modifies a Web page before or after rendering.

Axel Springer has an open lawsuit against Eyeo (the maker of Adblock Plus).

Publishers or Big Tech companies waging war against browsers and extensions culprit of blocking their juicy ads+tracking revenues aren't anything new. But this time the argument is a very dangerous one.

The argument is that the source code of a website (its HTML, JS and CSS) is copyrighted content intended to be rendered as-is on a client's device.

Therefore ad-blockers, by intercepting or blocking requests made through this copyrighted content, or modifying the DOM it renders, are breaking copyright laws.

In 2022, the Hamburg appeal court ruled that Adblock Plus did not infringe the copyright of websites, but rather it was merely facilitating a choice by users about how they wished their browser to render the page.

Unfortunately, on July 31, the German Federal Supreme Court partially overturned the decision of the Hamburg court and remanded the case for further proceedings. The BGH (as the Federal Supreme Court is known) called for a new hearing so that the Hamburg court can provide more detail regarding which part of the website (such as bytecode or object code) is altered by ad blockers, whether this code is protected by copyright, and under what conditions the interference might be justified.

The statement that a website as a whole, including its 3rd-party integrations (such as ads/trackers SDKs), is copyrighted content intended to be rendered without modifications only on the clients supported by the author is an extremely dangerous one.

It goes against everything that HTTP and HTML have always been.

Not only it would make ad-blockers illegal, but it'd make anything that alters the flow of an HTTP session illegal.

Think of things like Greasemonkey scripts to change the style of some webpages. Or accessibility extensions that modify the contrast and font size of a page. Or things like Firefox's Reader Mode, often used by blind people to distill webpages before feeding their content to a screen reader. Or even just inspecting and manually modifying the DOM of a Web page through the browser's dev tools.

And what if I do the blocking on DNS level, through something like Pihole? Would a DNS block towards a domain I don't want to be rendered on my devices be illegal too?

If I acquired some content in a legal way (e.g. through an HTTP request to an openly accessible website), then I'm free to do whatever I can with that content, for personal usage, once it reaches my device.

Imagine a law that makes it illegal to install another OS on a computer or phone that you regularly purchased.

Or use alternative clients to render your chats.

Or use a text-based browser with a minimal JS engine to access a Website.

A law that wouldn't just imply a void warranty in these cases - just make them straight out illegal, as in "copyright infringment" illegal.

It would be the biggest blow to the way the Internet is built - around open protocols open to all kind of implementations and messages open to all kind and manipulations on each step of the route.

It would set a very dangerous precedent towards an over-reaching definition of copyright that could also mandate on what devices and under what condition some HTTP content should be rendered (and it's not such a far-fetched dystopia: look no further than the DRM implementations).

And it would violate other EU laws (like the DMA) which are exactly meant to foster accessibility, inter-compatibility, freedom of implementation and modification of online content acquired through legal means.

And what's most ironic is that blocking ads or modifying the CSS of a webpage may amount to copyright infringment, but massive scraping done by AI models may not.

https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2025/08/14/is-germany-on-the-brink-of-banning-ad-blockers-user-freedom-privacy-and-security-is-at-risk/

Boosted by jwz:
MLNow@sfba.social ("Mission Local") wrote:

Venerable S.F. dive bar in Tenderloin evicted by sheriff’s deputies with ‘shields & batons’

The Tenderloin’s Edinburgh Castle Pub, a Scottish bar and music venue on Geary Street in San Francisco, has shuttered after being foreclosed on, according to the bar’s owner, Tay Kim. Sheriff’s deputies “came with shields & batons” to close the business on Aug. 6, according to Kim. When Mission Local visited the former location of the pub 10 days later, its door was ajar but the outer gate was shut, sealed by a thick chain and padlock.

https://missionlocal.org/2025/08/edinburgh-castle-pub-closed-dive-bar/

Boosted by jwz:
billyjoebowers@mastodon.online ("billy joe bowers-8647") wrote:

I don't trust Gavin Newsom, but he's out there doing it.

You don't want Gavin Newsom? Do more than him. Sitting around criticizing aint doing it.

The same people that are always screaming that Dems aren't doing anything always have a reason why it's bad when Dems do anything.