Mastodon Feed
Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
brandkopf@mastodon.art ("sommerlich.art") wrote:
sketch from this weeks commute.
Mastodon FeedMastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
netopwibby@social.coop ("netop://ウィビ") wrote:
The most succinct and accurate description of the Old Web I’ve seen to date.
Mastodon Feedslightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:
If you're in the press and want the details, @owa has you covered:
https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban-persists-even-under-the-dma/
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jakedel@mamot.fr ("S. Delafond"):
freexian@hachyderm.io ("Freexian :debian:") wrote:
27 Debian LTS Advisories about security updates were released by Debian LTS contributors in August 2025. These included critical security updates for gnutls28, mdebtls, apache2 and openjdk-17 in addition to other security updates. LTS team also contributed to updates for various packages in Debian stable.
Get the full details in our August report: https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2025-08/?utm%5Fsource=mastodon&utm%5Fmedium=social
This work is funded by Freexian's Debian LTS offering. Your organization too can sponsor the Debian LTS (https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/?utm%5Fsource=mastodon&utm%5Fmedium=social) and join the esteemed list of sponsors in the monthly report.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
junesim63@mstdn.social ("JuneSim63") wrote:
"The richest man on earth owns X.
The second richest man on earth is about to be a major owner of TikTok.
The third richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The fourth richest man owns The Washington Post.
See the problem here?"
Robert Reich
Mastodon FeedChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Werewolf ⁂🐧🌱☕ 🎃💀🕸🐺") wrote:
Chris learns Vim
https://video.thepolarbear.co.uk/w/a9sijmZ4GQMA1dk2B3QVDq
Mastodon FeedChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Werewolf ⁂🐧🌱☕ 🎃💀🕸🐺") wrote:
Loud ginger bastard decimates competition at Newton Abbot town crier yell-off
https://freebooter.uk/posts/loud-ginger-bastard-decimates-competition-at-newton-abbot-town-crier-yell-off.html
Mastodon Feedslightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:
Apple's playbook is the same one Big Oil uses: delay is winning.
It's good the EU didn't give away its power to regulate like a common Chuck Schumer, but Apple is brazenly violating the DMA to deny EU citizens real browser choice because it threatens the App Store:
Mastodon FeedBoosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
evmar@inuh.net ("Evan Martin") wrote:
Today I wondered where the word "mipmap" comes from.
Turns out:
> an acronym of the Latin phrase multum in parvo, meaning "much in little"
And then some evocation of "bitmap". Wow!
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:
I finally got a little exercise last night and also saw a disappointing movie.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/09/26/definitely-passes-the-bechdel-test/
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
david_chisnall@infosec.exchange ("David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)") wrote:
I think this needs to be repeated, since I tend to be quite negative about all of the 'AI' hype:
I am not opposed to machine learning. I used machine learning in my PhD and it was great. I built a system for predicting the next elements you'd want to fetch from disk or a remote server that didn't require knowledge of the algorithm that you were using for traversal and would learn patterns. This performed as well as a prefetcher that did have detailed knowledge of the algorithm that defined the access path. Modern branch predictors use neural networks. Machine learning is amazing if:
- The problem is too hard to write a rule-based system for or the requirements change sufficiently quickly that it isn't worth writing such a thing and,
- The value of a correct answer is much higher than the cost of an incorrect answer.
The second of these is really important. Most machine-learning systems will have errors (the exceptions are those where ML is really used for compression[1]). For prefetching, branch prediction, and so on, the cost of a wrong answer is very low, you just do a small amount of wasted work, but the benefit of a correct answer is huge: you don't sit idle for a long period. These are basically perfect use cases.
Similarly, face detection in a camera is great. If you can find faces and adjust the focal depth automatically to keep them in focus, you improve photos, and if you do it wrong then the person can tap on the bit of the photo they want to be in focus to adjust it, so even if you're right only 50% of the time, you're better than the baseline of right 0% of the time.
In some cases, you can bias the results. Maybe a false positive is very bad, but a false negative is fine. Spam filters (which have used machine learning for decades) fit here. Marking a real message as spam can be problematic because the recipient may miss something important, letting the occasional spam message through wastes a few seconds. Blocking a hundred spam messages a day is a huge productivity win. You can tune the probabilities to hit this kind of threshold. And you can't easily write a rule-based algorithm for spotting spam because spammers will adapt their behaviour.
Translating a menu is probably fine, the worst that can happen is that you get to eat something unexpected. Unless you have a specific food allergy, in which case you might die from a translation error.
And that's where I start to get really annoyed by a lot of the LLM hype. It's pushing machine-learning approaches into places where there are significant harms for sometimes giving the wrong answer. And it's doing so while trying to outsource the liability to the customers who are using these machines in ways in which they are advertised as working. It's great for translation! Unless a mistranslated word could kill a business deal or start a war. It's great for summarisation! Unless missing a key point could cost you a load of money. It's great for writing code! Unless a security vulnerability would cost you lost revenue or a copyright infringement lawsuit from having accidentally put something from the training set directly in your codebase in contravention of its license would kill your business. And so on. Lots of risks that are outsourced and liabilities that are passed directly to the user.
And that's ignoring all of the societal harms.
[1] My favourite of these is actually very old. The hyphenation algorithm in TeX trains short Markov chains on a corpus of words with ground truth for correct hyphenation. The result is a Markov chain that is correct on most words in the corpus and is much smaller than the corpus. The next step uses it to predict the correct breaking points in all of the words in the corpus and records the outliers. This gives you a generic algorithm that works across a load of languages and is guaranteed to be correct for all words in the training corpus and is mostly correct for others. English and American have completely different hyphenation rules for mostly the same set of words, and both end up with around 70 outliers that need to be in the special-case list in this approach. Writing a rule-based system for American is moderately easy, but for English is very hard. American breaks on syllable boundaries, which are fairly well defined, but English breaks on root words and some of those depend on which language we stole the word from.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
emilymbender@dair-community.social ("Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)") wrote:
Ever get the sense that AI boosters seem to take all the wrong lessons from speculative fiction?
Join us for the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live stream, in which @alex and I get to dig into all of that with @roseveleth !
Monday, September 29, noon Pacific
https://twitch.tv/dair%5Finstitute
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
jalefkowit@vmst.io ("Jason Lefkowitz") wrote:
"If Trump has been right about anything, it is that there is a deep rot in the upper echelons of American society, among people who have been put in positions of power and leadership. Trump understands that many of these people are weak, that their public commitment to civic principles can crumble under sustained pressure. In many cases, those folding have had ample resources to resist Trump’s shakedowns but haven’t been brave enough to do so. They are, in a word, chickenshit."
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
neurovagrant@masto.deoan.org ("Ian Campbell 🏴") wrote:
*stares in empathy and relatability*
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
hmmmm... if the prices of gold-oriented funds are any indicator, it looks like investors have been hedging against a stock bubble bursting ever since Herr Trump got back into office
Mastodon FeedChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Werewolf ⁂🐧🌱☕ 🎃💀🕸🐺") wrote:
IceWM - on Debian Linux - desktop tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUAjV3YIoEE
Mastodon Feedadam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:
I don't talk enough about the incredible work that St. Jude does for children with cancer and their families. I think I take it for granted that people already know, but maybe not everyone does.
Sometimes it's not about the cure, because right now, not all cancers can be cured. Sometimes it's just about having more days.
If you have a couple of minutes, pull up https://atp.fm/657 and skip to 7:22. Listen to Thomas's story. 😢
Mastodon Feedadam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:
We're down to a handful of days in the St. Jude fundraiser that @robb and I are doing, and just shy of $4,000 to meet our goal of $50K raised total since we began doing this in 2023!
I've been donating half of everything omg.lol earns all month and will keep going through Tuesday. Also between now and Tuesday, you can use coupon code STJUDE at checkout to save 25% on your omg.lol address purchases or renewals!
And you can give directly here for stickers! https://stjude.omg.lol ❤️
Mastodon FeedChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Werewolf ⁂🐧🌱☕ 🎃💀🕸🐺") wrote:
I wasn't expecting this, but using the #Linux CLI #Mastodon tool Toot, is a really nice way to catch up on my Fedi feeds.
It also seems really scriptable, so maybe I can find some interesting things to do with that.
Mastodon FeedGargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:
Matching hats not included! #Plushtodon
Mastodon Feedslightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:
The failure of the tech press to think critically about what Apple says is an ongoing scandal. You don't have to like "the other guys" or think they're better to acknowledge that horse-race coverage makes us all dumber:
Mastodon FeedBoosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Werewolf ⁂🐧🌱☕ 🎃💀🕸🐺"):
0laura@mastodon.de wrote:
liberals will be lined up against the wall and still make smug comments pointing out how trump totally owned himself by admitting that hes technically pro fascism by banning antifa.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Werewolf ⁂🐧🌱☕ 🎃💀🕸🐺"):
feliks@chaos.social wrote:
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
wackJackle@norden.social ("Weltzeitgeist") wrote:
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
neauoire@merveilles.town ("Devine Lu Linvega") wrote:
The Image at the End of the World: Communities of practice redefining technology on a damaged Earth, by @l03s
https://researchportal.lsbu.ac.uk/en/publications/the-image-at-the-end-of-the-world-communities-of-practice-redefin
#permacomputing #uxn
Mastodon FeedChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Werewolf ⁂🐧🌱☕ 🎃💀🕸🐺") wrote:
For anyone in the UK wanting to sign the .gov petition against compulsory ID cards.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Werewolf ⁂🐧🌱☕ 🎃💀🕸🐺"):
cstross@wandering.shop ("Charlie Stross") wrote:
BRITS: This parliamentary petition is rapidly closing in on a million supporters. Please consider signing it:
"Do not introduce Digital ID cards
We demand that the UK Government immediately commits to not introducing a digital ID cards."
Mastodon Feeddb@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪡") wrote:
I'm not against a UK digital ID system but technically it needs to navigate around blockchain, "AI", US companies, whatever Tony Blair is scheming today, mass surveillance, and not ostracising the homeless further.
We're getting "Login with Facebook", aren't we?
Mastodon Feeddb@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪡") wrote:
a week until Ghost of Yōtei and then Silksong is in the bin!
(post credits content be damned!)
Mastodon Feedslightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:
Wrote this up. It makes me so, so tired to see the tech press fumble the basics day in, day out. I wish the @404mediaco crew had space to cover this. The Verge *et. al* are dropping the ball badly: