Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
EmilySchnall@mastodon.art ("Emily Schnall✨Commissions Open") wrote:

He forgot it was casual friday

Boosted by jwz:
SeanCasten ("Sean Casten") wrote:

The United States Secretary of Defense (aka, Major Pete) is either (a) openly celebrating Nazis and planning to destroy the US government from within or (b) a punk-assed internet troll trying to look tough to offset his gross deficiencies. Neither is good.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
SeanCasten ("Sean Casten") wrote:

Must read article from Zeke Faux about Justin Sun, the guy who paid Trump $75M to get an SEC investigation against him dropped so he could continue to run his money laundering operation. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-09-26/crypto-billionaire-justin-sun-went-from-pariah-to-trump-moneyman

Boosted by jwz:
sundogplanets ("Prof. Sam Lawler") wrote:

Here's the official Global Meteor Network camera video of the reentry of Starlink 1066 on Monday night/Tuesday morning from Lucky Lake, Saskatchewan! This video is courtesy University of Western Ontario and Defence R&D Canada.

I counted 13 pieces in the video, how many do we think made it to the ground and are sitting on canola stubble east of Saskatoon?

Attachments:

• gifv: Starlink debris slowly flying across a starfield. It looks like a clump of comets. Video courtesy University of Western Ontario and Defence R&D Canada.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
msbellows@c.im ("M.S. Bellows, Jr.") wrote:

The most dangerous man on earth is billionaire defense/spy agency/surveillance contractor (and JD Vance's sugar daddy) Peter Thiel. Here's more reason to believe that:

He is giving secret (!) lectures claiming that AI is God's chosen weapon against evil and anyone who opposes AI is literally helping the Antichrist (which he previously has said might be young environmentalist Greta Thunberg).

This isn't a metaphor; he means it literally. This from from a "Christian" who made his billions helping spy agencies, governments, and private companies spy on citizens using facial recognition, AI, and huge secret data collections (which is why he named his company Palantir after the technology JRR Tolkien's evil wizard Sauron used to spy on people and manipulate their beliefs). One of his products, "Palantir Gotham," is an intelligence tool used by police in multiple countries for "predictive policing" (ie, identifying who will commit crimes instead of merely those who already have committed crimes, as in the Tom Cruise sci-fi film "Minority Report").

But he thinks Greta Thunberg is the Antichrist, not himself. And he owns JD Vance. And he's a huge Republican donor, including to Donald Trump.

Pay attention. And be afraid.
https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/technology/article/palantir-founder-peter-thiel-antichrist-lectures-religion-qzmpth35t?fbclid=IwdGRzaANC0NBjbGNrA0LQy2V4dG4DYWVtAjExAAEeQi1s68xH44kwo3aV5HOtxF45%5FacTjXZ5NBDzBJO4lH3%5FWJxDF7xTwMtQhP4%5Faem%5F8j%5FVCSxdHf3AChGM18whxg

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
c0nsid3rate@infosec.exchange ("considerate") wrote:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/24/robo-lickspittle/#just-not-evenly-distributed

"The more isolated they get, the stupider they get. No one's telling them no. Sergey Brin has gotten unmistakably stupider since he stopped going to Town Hall meetings where Google's once-valued engineering staff got to criticize the company."

Yes, the real ethical concern with AI is not that it is going to take away jobs, but that sycophant LLMs will drive us all into madness and lead us to be as stupid as billionaires who pay people to tell them what they want to hear 24/7.

Thanks so much for your persistence on topics like these, @pluralistic. Confirmation bias (on steroids) -- in all its forms -- will likely be the death of us all.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
combs@mastodon.art ("Chris Combs (he/him)") wrote:

Here's my first permanent public artwork, "Periscopes." When you look through its bulbous lenses, you see scenes that might seem faraway, such as heron stalking their prey; but all of the footage was filmed (by me) within 10mi of its site at Buzzard Point in southwest Washington, D.C., USA.

I worked with a team to install this artwork yesterday. Steelwork by Steven R. Jones.

#MastoArt #electronicart

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
cmconseils ("Laura Manach :bongoCat:") wrote:

Offering a Medieval emotional support dragon for everyone who needs one✨

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
brandkopf@mastodon.art ("sommerlich.art") wrote:

sketch from this weeks commute.

#art #mastoart #pencil #deutschebahn #sketchbook #symbolism

Boosted 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.

slightlyoff@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/

Boosted 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.

#debianlts #freexian #apache2 #openjdk17

Boosted 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

#Oligarchy #Media #SocialMedia

ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Werewolf ⁂🐧🌱☕ 🎃💀🕸🐺") wrote:

Chris learns Vim
https://video.thepolarbear.co.uk/w/a9sijmZ4GQMA1dk2B3QVDq

ChrisWere@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

slightlyoff@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:

https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-antitrust-playbook/

Boosted 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!

pzmyers@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/

Boosted 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.

Boosted 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

Boosted 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."

🎁 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/freedom-trump-threats-kimmel/684358/?gift=Je3D9AQS-C17lUTOnl2W8FW1ydqUk%5FR57YcZrQwrWL8&utm%5Fsource=copy-link&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcampaign=share

#USPol

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
neurovagrant@masto.deoan.org ("Ian Campbell 🏴") wrote:

*stares in empathy and relatability*

jsonstein@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

ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Werewolf ⁂🐧🌱☕ 🎃💀🕸🐺") wrote:

IceWM - on Debian Linux - desktop tour
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUAjV3YIoEE

adam@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. 😢

adam@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 ❤️

ChrisWere@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.

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

Matching hats not included! #Plushtodon

slightlyoff@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:

https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-antitrust-playbook/

Boosted 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.