Mastodon Feed: Posts

Mastodon Feed

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

BER has these new scanners where they don't ask you to take anything out of the bags anymore, but more importantly, they have explicit instructions to ask for a handcheck for photographic film, and the security has a special tray for it, which I really appreciate.

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
ZebraFeatherAH@sunny.garden ("Zeeb") wrote:

Some leaf dragons for #smaugust

At first I wanted to do a bunch of different types of leaves, but was pretty taken with this guy and wound up just doing a few different poses. 🍃

#smaugust2025 #dragon #leaf #MastoArt #fantasy #FantasyArt

Three images of a leaf dragon: 1. The leaf dragon is looking scornfully at a caterpillar 2. An autumn leaf dragon is opening its arms to catch a breeze 3. The leaf dragon is in "incognito mode" crouched down as a leaf

Mastodon Feed

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

Obviously the idea of commentary tracks are not new, but it's the first time I came across a band doing this. Yacht providing commentary about their most recent album:

https://yacht.bandcamp.com/track/new-release-album-commentary

Mastodon Feed

adam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:

Nature’s palette.

A framed display featuring a small woven design in the center, with colored strands outstretched in all directions. On the other end of the strands, samples of the materials used to produce the colored dyes are mounted. The materials and labels are: RED ONION SKIN YARROW INDIAN PAINT BRUSH GROUND LICHEN RED JUNIPER ROOT BLUE PENSTEMON MARIPOSALILY PURPLE LARKSPUR WILD SUNFLOWER GAMBEL OAK BARK BROWN ONION SKIN RED GILIA PURPLE BEE PLANT WILD BLACK BERRIES CANAIGRE DOCK ROOT CLIFFROSE SUMAC BERRIES ROSEHIPS WILD WALNUT SHELLS WILD HOLLY BERRIES WILD BUCK WHEAT PRICKLY PEAR CACTUS FRUIT

Mastodon Feed

adam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:

This Diné (Navajo) pictorial weaving reminded me of the pixel art style commonly seen in early Apple II and Commodore games.

A large pictorial weaving, displaying a busy scene with blue sky and clouds at the top, a thin layer of green mountainous land slightly below that, and a large field of red earth occupying the (majority) space below. All across the earthen scene are various buildings, people, animals, and implements of daily life.
Detail of the pictorial weaving, showing a group of people wearing clothing of different colors. The people are rendered in simple stitches with minimal detail.
Detail from the pictorial weaving showing a couple of trees, a truck, and several horses or donkeys grazing. All are rendered in minimal detail.

Mastodon Feed

adam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:

Some things never really change.

A Roman cinerary urn, bearing an inscription reading: LIVIAE SIBI NEPHIOGENES CONLIBERTAE FECIT MERITAE The very last E is outside of the space with the rest of the text, as the inscriber ran out of room.
Roman Cinerary Urn, 1st century BC - AD 3rd century Marble A Mistake Can you spot the mistake on this cinerary urn? The stoneworker hired to cut the inscription didn't plan ahead. He ran out of room when cutting the last line and had to place the final E atop the decorative band. Gift of R. C. Ballard Thruston and Mrs. S. Thruston Ballard 1929.17.440 a,b

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by aral@mastodon.ar.al ("Aral Balkan"):
simonbrooke@social.trom.tf ("Simon Brooke") wrote:

@NouranKhaledGh's is one of the families in #Palestine I'm trying to help to support. I can't give to many and I can't give much. And giving money won't do nearly so much good for them as stopping the genocide, which surely we must all of us do all we can to achieve.

But while this dreadful siege and famine continue, if you can give aid to those starving in Palestine, please do.

#GazaGenocide
#GazaFamine
RE: mastodon.social/users/NouranKh…

Mastodon Feed

adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële") wrote:

Hard work on the smolweb specs

The #smolweb documentation on the HTML subset is now fully available, and it is in line with the smolweb-validator.

Next milestone: best practices with CSS on smolweb sites

Mastodon Feed

jwz wrote:

Just happened across a comment on my blog from 8 years ago that has aged like fine milk:

"There are no Nazis getting popular votes right now. Hyperbole is not a good way to reason about the world."

Thanks, past "Well Actually" guy, you have always improved The Discourse.

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by jwz:
alissaazar@kolektiva.social ("Alissa Azar") wrote:

Feds are adding paint to the ground in front of the ICE facility in pdx but they don’t know how to spell “government”

Image shows a DHS agent watching somebody in a blue shirt painting on the ground the words “US goverment”

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by jwz:
chu@climatejustice.social ("Chu 朱") wrote:

Taiwan is a society that takes mask wearing seriously. I walked into a random pharmacy asking if they had masks. Staff member offered me individually packaged ones and I said "no. A box."

She then took out a big piece of cardboard akin to the colour pallette thing you'd get at the paint store and asked me what colour I wanted.

Respect

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by jwz:
augieray ("Augie Ray") wrote:

"Nice people made the best Nazis. Or so I have been told. My mother was born in Munich in 1934, and spent her childhood in Nazi Germany surrounded by nice people who refused to make waves. When things got ugly, the people my mother lived alongside chose not to focus on 'politics,' instead busying themselves with happier things. They were lovely, kind people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away."

- Naomi Shulman

https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2016/11/17/the-post-election-case-for-speaking-out-naomi-shulman

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by jwz:
kjhealy ("Kieran Healy") wrote:

The most compact, informative, and useful introduction to the Philosophy and Sociology of Science remains Kovar (2001), “Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass”.

Electron Band Structure in Germanium, My Ass Lucas Kovar University of Wisconsin, Madison 2001* Abstract The exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium is found to be a great big lie. My careful theoretical modeling and painstaking experimentation reveal 1) that my equipment is crap, as are all the available texts on the subject and 2) that this whole exercise was a complete waste of my time. Introduction Electrons in germanium are confined to well-defined energy bands that are separated by "forbidden regions" of zero charge-carrier density. You can read about it yourself if you want to, although I don't recommend it. This relation between temperature and resistivity can be shown to be exponential in certain temperature regimes by waving your hands and chanting "to first order". Experiment Procedure I sifted through the box of germanium crystals and chose the one that appeared to be the least cracked. Then I soldered wires onto the crystal in the spots shown in figure 2b of Lab Handout 32. Do you have any idea how hard it is to solder wires to germanium? I'll tell you: real goddamn hard. The solder simply won't stick, and you can forget about getting any of the grad students in the solid state labs to help you out. *Originally published at https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/*kovar/. Archived version available at https://web.archive.org/web/20070622110041/http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html
Figure 1: Check this shit out. Once the wires were in place, I attached them as appropriate to the second-rate equipment I scavenged from the back of the lab, none of which worked properly. I soon wised up and swiped replacements from the well-stocked research labs. This is how they treat undergrads around here: they give you broken tools and then don't understand why you don't get any results. In order to control the temperature of the germanium, I attached the crystal to a copper rod, the upper end of which was attached to a heating coil and the lower end of which was dipped in a thermos of liquid nitrogen. Midway through the project, the thermos began leaking. That's right: I pay a cool ten grand a quarter to come here, and yet they can't spare the five bucks to ensure that I have a working thermos. Results Check this shit out (Fig 1). That's bonafide, 100%-real data, my friends. I took it myself over the course of two weeks. And this was not a leisurely two weeks, either; I busted my ass day and night in order to provide you with nothing but the best data possible. Now, let's look a bit more closely at this data, remembering that it is absolutely first-rate. Do you see the exponential dependence? I sure don't. I see a bunch of crap. Christ, this was such a waste of my time. Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise.

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
mike@thecanadian.social ("Mike Fraser") wrote:

The BlueSky (and by extension AT proto) vs. Mastodon (and by extension Activity Pub proto) debate is starting to get boring. It's simple, one is a commercial product and the other is not. Each has its shortcomings and advantages. If an important differentiator for you are the motives of each projects stewards then you have a fairly clear choice.

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by jwz:
glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@cstross @criffer @jwz it’s a positive feedback loop! Assuming your two upcoming novels are “don’t create the orphan-crushing machine” and “okay you created it but *at least* don’t pull the lever on the orphan-crushing machine” we already know what silicon valley elite’s reaction will be

Mastodon Feed

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

Me and Rosie from a disused railway bridge.

Chris and Rosie taking a selfie from a railway bridge. Also, here's my newest blog post on the #FOSS programs I'm currently using: https://chriswere.wales/posts/desktop-apps-i-use/

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by jwz:
gleick@mas.to ("James Gleick") wrote:

We can expect these same masked thugs to swarm polling places on Election Day. This is one reason Trump wants to eliminate mail voting. https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/115077373058583367

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by jwz:
MissingThePt ("Missing The Point") wrote:

Ghislaine Maxwell must have been sneezing a lot at the end of her interview because she kept saying “pardon me.”

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by jwz:
Ttubretep@mstdn.social ("Ziggy Sawdust") wrote:

Hugh Joseph Ward
#pulp #pulpart

Mastodon Feed

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

The answer is bleedingly obvious: forbid IABs and/or force native apps to use the system-provided browser-overlay systems -- SFSafariViewController and Android Custom Tabs -- where your choice in browser and customisations will be respected. But they don't.

Mastodon Feed

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

...and it's the proprietary APIs from app stores that make it so hard to escape one ecosystem for another. The entire point of the exercise is to subvert interoperability, and to do *that*, it's necessary to keep the anchor apps happy. Which is why Apple and Google let FB spy on you via the web.

Apple isn't defending your privacy, it's trying to retreat just far enough into the hedges that it hopes you don't notice how it dangling FB and TikTok to take the fall.

Mastodon Feed

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

Instead of taking you to your browser, FB's IABs loads pages in a knock-off browser which doesn't respect any your privacy preferences (nevermind a11y customisations, etc.).

Extensions? Gone. And because FB has code on every top site, that's enough.

FB's tracking is so pervasive in modern web pages that it doesn't need to exfiltrate data from the IAB to track you. It just needs to keep you away from your *real* browser, where it might not be able to join up clicks/taps.

Mastodon Feed

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

All of this is facilitated by Apple and Google. It's their SDKs and policies that make this not only possible, but wildly profitable for FB (and TikTok, etc. etc.). Denying you browser choice keeps the big app vendors in the app store, which helps Apple and Google corral others into app stores.

Mastodon Feed

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

I want you, a tech-literate person, to internalize one deep fact: Apple vs. Facebook is, and always was, kayfabe. In reality, Apple is (and always was) Facebook's chauffeur; holding its coat while it surveilled everyone. How to be sure? IABs:

https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/in-app-browsers-the-worst-erosion-of-user-choice-you-havent-heard-of/

Apple facilitates mass surveillance through native apps from Facebook, both directly from in-app activity, but much more insidiously, through "in-app browsers" that FB tacks onto every link you tap. And these things are *rank*.

Mastodon Feed

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

IABs are, for FB's purposes, "ad-blocker blockers". Cheat codes for the enterprising panopticon proprietor. You installed a browser, then added an anti-tracking tool to it? And you click "do not track"?

Apple sold you up the river. And the mechanism is as simple as it is disgusting.

Mastodon Feed

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

idiocy, wasteful idiocy

https://www.perplexity.ai/page/trump-halts-work-on-orsted-off-J99k40B8TPKea%5FzqIIMZlg

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by jwz:
StefanEJones@dice.camp ("Stefan Edward Jones") wrote:

@jameshowell @glyph

1997. I-Con SF convention on the SUNY Stony Brook campus.

We put Vernor Vinge and grey eminence of SF Frederik Pohl on a panel about the Singularity.

Before it started, Pohl asked "What is hell is the Singularity?"

I filled him in.

Right there, in front of Vinge:

"What a load of crap. Here's what's going to happen. We're going to burn through our resources, ruin the environment, civilization will collapse, and the survivors will despise us."

Mastodon Feed

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

♬️ STAR CRASH: CHROMA SEA + HOST BODIES at DNA Lounge tonight: Sat Aug 23, 8:30pm!
https://www.dnalounge.com/calendar/2025/08-23d.html?utm%5Fsource=sp%5Fma
#dnalounge #starcrash #chromasea #hostbodies #nolashade #indieelectronic #downtempo #chillwave #technopop #livemusic #concert #sanfrancisco

Attachments:

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by jwz:
glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@criffer @jwz The reality of that outcome is a billionaire looking into their magic mirror, saying “mirror mirror on the wall, should I oppress and murder the poor” the mirror says “yes absolutely boss. You are so smart” and then they collapse onto a nearby fainting couch and say “oh no! Woe is me! My consciousness has been commandeered by a malevolent overmind!” before getting up and saying “oh well, nothing for it” before pulling the lever on their orphan-crushing machine

Mastodon Feed

jwz wrote:

Huh, why is my / disk full?

Oh:
-rw-------. 1 root root 1104886787 Aug 23 12:29 /var/log/php-fpm/error.log

That's just 6 days worth of AI-scraping bots.