Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

Now About That There Bubble…

In markets that soar,
Bubbles glimmer, then they burst,
Gold seems strong and sure.

(bad haiku in cahoots with https://arghstudios.com Storyteller service)

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

Name the first draft of a brand or title:

I Refuse To Believe This Could Not Have Been Butter

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
bodil@treehouse.systems ("Bodil") wrote:

Well. Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman are now the new owners of Commander Shepard.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/30/saudi-fund-kushners-firm-to-buy-games-maker-electronic-arts-in-55bn-deal

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
jasongorman@mastodon.cloud ("Jason Gorman") wrote:

"Teams that care about quality will take the time to understand LLM-generated code before it makes it into the repo.

But some teams are checking in code nobody’s read, and that’s only been cursorily tested. And, evidently, there’s a lot of them."

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/comprehension-debt-the-ticking-time-bomb-of-llm-generated-code/

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

“Comprehension Debt: The Ticking Time Bomb of LLM-Generated Code – Codemanship's Blog”

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/comprehension-debt-the-ticking-time-bomb-of-llm-generated-code/

Been warning about this for a couple of years now so I'm well into "he keeps crying 'wolf'" territory meaning nobody pays any attention, but it's still going to be a problem.

Boosted by jwz:
weirdsatellite@mastodon.art ("Weird Spy Satellite") wrote:

Manifest #20389 from NROL-82 (CONFIDENTIAL)

1. Quantum Pallets of Runes
2. Sovereign Source
3. Malevolent Fog

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁"):
CoMaps@floss.social ("CoMaps - Hike, Bike, Drive") wrote:

Celebrating 15 Years of F‑Droid!

September 29th marks the anniversary of the open‑source app repository we all love.

Why it matters: F‑Droid’s mission aligns well with CoMaps—both champion Free/Libre Open‑Source Software (FLOSS) and community‑driven innovation.

https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/04/twif.html
Post from 2010: https://f-droid.org/en//2010/09/29/f-droid-is-here.html

Let’s keep building a freer tech ecosystem together!

#FDroid #OpenSource #FLOSS

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁"):
david_chisnall@infosec.exchange ("David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)") wrote:

How to design a GDPR-compliant cookie banner:

1. Have a 'reject all' button that is as easy to press as the buttons that grant consent.
2. Test your site with no consent for user tracking.
3. Realise that all of the tracking bits are unrelated to site functionality.
4. Remove them.
5. Remove the cookie banner.

db@social.lol ("David Bushell 👻") wrote:

noted: post-genocide AI empowerment?
https://dbushell.com/notes/2025-09-30T06:26Z/

I wonder if Svelte is onboard with this? 🤔

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam"):
humdrum@social.lol ("kevin humdrum") wrote:

Go donate to @robb and @adam St. Jude fundraiser and get yourself some awesome stickers. https://tiltify.com/@rknightuk/stjude2025

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

I'm using a random word generator to search keywords in my photos app for fun (I have 50k images 😬).

The word is "linen"

It brought up a screenshot of a blog post that I never published— one where I was trying to immerse the reader but also be meta?... idk lol

#blogging #writing #writer

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

It seems @jono.id is my Anger Translator:

https://www.jonoalderson.com/impolighthouse/

/via @tunetheweb

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam"):
annie@social.lol wrote:

🙅‍♀️ Note to self, these are time sucks and I’m better off when I avoid them:
- unanswerable questions
- unreasonable people
- unwinnable arguments

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam"):
R74n@mastodon.gamedev.place ("R74n - making Sandboxels") wrote:

Steam Autumn SALE: Sandboxels is only 74¢ on Steam for the next week!

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam"):
andrew@thestopbutton.social ("Andrew Wickliffe") wrote:

I am shocked that members of the white liberal intelligentsia who have absolutely no friends of color or trans friends turn out to be shit stains

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
ycombinator@rss-mstdn.studiofreesia.com (":rss: Hacker News") wrote:

Americans Are Using PTO to Sleep, Not for Vacation–Report
https://www.newsweek.com/americans-are-using-pto-to-sleep-not-for-vacation-report-10783162
#ycombinator

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
mcc wrote:

Adler makes a point: Any game excludes people. Every design decision excludes people. The impulse is "exclude no one" but this impulse is wrong, impossible. The question you *should* ask is: Is this game excluding *the same people who every game tends to exclude*? *That* would be wrong.

This point generalizes beyond games. This sort of choice (or attempt to deny the choice) comes up in designing any human thing.

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

All I can add [1] to @pluralistic's latest is that Apple are the primary force keeping us from having powerful, interoperable apps on phones through suppression of the web. It's not an accident, and @owa has the receipts [2]:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/

[1]: https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-antitrust-playbook/
[2]: https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban-persists-even-under-the-dma/

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz ("Colin the Mathmo") wrote:

"Fox News did to our parents what our parents were afraid video games would do to us." -- Quoted by Stephen King without attribution.

(Attribution edited after lebout2canap's[0] comment pointing at the research done on the Snopes site[1])

[0] https://mathstodon.xyz/@lebout2canap@mastodon.tedomum.net/115276538330680393

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stephen-king-fox-news-video-games/

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
jyasskin@hachyderm.io ("Jeffrey Yasskin") wrote:

Apropos of something the #Ladybird founder posted: you can't be nice to people and also accept absolutely everyone into your project or community, because some people (e.g. the ones in charge of the U.S. right now) want to be mean to other people. (Another phrasing is that you can't include both the sheep and the wolves, although that metaphor doesn't hold up if you look any deeper.)

Codes of conduct (and, generally, social norms) are essential, and one of the possible consequences for a code of conduct violation has to be ejection from the community. (It's super rare in practice, but it has to be available.)

With enough energy, you can heal a lot of the mean people, but you don't owe everyone that investment, and if a person doesn't heal with the investment they have available, their presence isn't compatible with a healthy community.

Any community I'll support has to treat trans people, immigrants, and other groups marginalized for being themselves as the wonderful people they are. Groups marginalized for being awful to other people (e.g. fascists) are fair game.

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

@pluralistic The playbook is clear (and anti-democratic):

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

and @owa keeps receipts:

https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban-persists-even-under-the-dma/

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

Today's @pluralistic is on point, but it's missing one important angle: our fastest path off O&O monopolistic stacks at the app layer is the web. And that's why Apple's doing nasty stuff to subvert it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/28/works-well/

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

Her work is so cool

RE: https://www.threads.com/@hadieh%5Fshafie/post/DPM%5FjVtDJeA

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
sophieschmieg@infosec.exchange ("Sophie Schmieg") wrote:

Random childhood anecdote, posted as individual toot in order to not derail some random joke post about kids these days not being into non-Euclidean geometry:

I have three siblings, spaced two years apart each. All four of us went to the same high school. My youngest sister's math teacher wanted to do a cute little segment about triangles always having inner angles sum up to 180 degrees. It was supposed to take the form of a trial. My sister was assigned the role of prosecutor charging a triangle accused of having an inner angle sum different from 180 degrees. Obviously, taking her role very seriously, she consulted the Schmieg dinner table, and a plan was hatched, involving a grapefruit and a marker. The trial came, and just as the defense had produced what they thought was irrefutable proof that their client was innocent, my sister took out the grapefruit, drew a triangle connecting one pole to the equator using three right angles, and said "So how do you explain this?!?" Leading to the teacher/judge having to explain non-Euclidean geometry to a bunch of 10 year olds.

And to make this anecdote even better, in a different class the same day she had a substitute teacher who didn't know my sister, but seeing the triangled up grapefruit, approached her and asked her "Are you a Schmieg?". Our family name has racked up quite some reputation…

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
LauraJG@deacon.social ("Laura G, Sassy 70’s") wrote:

Your art history post for today: by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Women Carrying Sacks of Coal in the Snow, chalk, brush in ink, and opaque and transparent watercolor on wove paper, 12.5x19.6 inches (32x50 cm), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands. #arthistory #painting #oilpainting #labor

Most people don’t know that before he became an artist, Vincent was a missionary to a coal mining region of Belgium. The story of his time there breaks my heart.

From Judith Moore, “Late nights with Van Gogh,” San Diego Reader, November 18th, 2004:

‘Van Gogh headed as a missionary to the Belgian mining district of Borinage.

What Van Gogh found in Borinage horrified him more than London’s slums. Sweetman: “There were sights to pierce the heart: stables 2000 feet underground where ponies broken with toil spent their wretched lives; worse still, children, girls as well as boys, some only eight years old, filthy and in rags, pulled sledges of coal through tunnels too small for the animals. And hanging over all this was the constant fear of accidents.”

Van Gogh responded by giving away his clothing, food, bed, and finally, he moved out of his comfortable room to live with the miners to whom he ministered. When Esther, Van Gogh’s former land-lady, asked him why he behaved as he did, literally handing out the shirts off his back to be torn into bandages, Van Gogh replied: “Esther, one should do like the good God; from time to time one should go and live His own.” His superiors disapproved Van Gogh’s charities; they chastised him for overzealousness and after six months as a missionary, then-26-year-old Van Gogh was fired.

What a terrible moment! The occasion of his firing feels heartbreaking to the reader. How must it have felt to Van Gogh, who had set such hopes on being permitted to bring the remedy of God’s love to the miners? Sweetman guesses: “He was utterly cast down...he had done everything for God and God had surely rejected him.”

… During the months before he was fired, Van Gogh had been sketching miners and their families. (“I should be happy if some day I could draw then,” he wrote, “so that these unknown types would be brought before the eyes of the people.”) After his dismissal Van Gogh stayed on in the Borinage. He acquired a primer that taught drawing — “clear black-and-white studies of faces,” writes Sweetman, “with anatomical outlines that the learner was encouraged to copy as faithfully as possible” — and gradually, laboriously, Van Gogh taught himself to draw and paint.’

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

As well they fucking should have. Cowardice should be costly.

Disney reportedly lost 1.7 million paid subscribers in the week after suspending Kimmel https://share.google/W3VbvOkOrbKwMMhX8

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

You call that a chicken? Of the woods?

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/09/29/tastes-like-chicken/

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz ("Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿") wrote:

This is magnificent and harrowing: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qGXcDz8PU4A or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGXcDz8PU4A I've long thought we need to break the taboo about questioning what our peers do for work, and what 'markets' corporations choose to fulfil. And, to be clear, BigTech is just another head of the white military industrial complex hydra.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
dthompson@toot.cat ("dave") wrote:

The 2025 edition of the Autumn Lisp Game Jam begins on Halloween! 👻 🎃 Mull some cider, warm up your REPL by the fire, and make a little game with your favorite Lisp dialect!

Sign up for the jam now over on itch.io: https://itch.io/jam/autumn-lisp-game-jam-2025

#lispgamejam #lisp #scheme

Boosted by NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈"):
rbreich@masto.ai ("Robert Reich") wrote: