Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

Today in History: Niagara Falls power plant startup, 1896

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

Today in History: First assembly of League of Nations held in Geneva, 1920

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
g7izu@universeodon.com ("𝑮7𝑰𝙕𝑼 𝑹𝙍𝑫") wrote:

Space Weather

GONG far-side solar imagery (also known as magic!) shows a strengthening active region (marked "P100") coming around the east limb in a few days.

Keeping fingers crossed it will provide some fireworks!

Meanwhile a coronal hole will be sending a fast solar wind which will increase geomagnetic activity on Sunday 16 Nov. The NASA/ENLIL solar wind model also shows the CME from yesterday's X4 heading to the west and not affecting Earth at all.

#spaceweather
#g7izu

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io ("Thomas 🔭🕹️") wrote:

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf/115549759176784856

I've now spent 15 minutes staring at clocks and wonder how they break next (site refreshes every minute)

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

this is a fascinating study, and seems like it might provide some food for thought. the dissonance between population religiosity & the increasing penetration of religion into politics is an important fault-line.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/697676/drop-religiosity-among-largest-world.aspx

h/t @wdlindsy

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
justincrozer@fosstodon.org ("Justin Crozer") wrote:

What time is it when you see a cow laying in a field?

Pasture bedtime. 🐮💤

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
jbcrawford@hachyderm.io ("J. B. Crawford") wrote:

my husband made it so the home assistant voice assistant can use full-on ollama to interpret instructions. then he told it to turn the lights on. it's been explaining its thought process for over five minutes now and the lights are still off.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
darkphoenix@not.an.evilcyberhacker.net ("ash :neodog_flag_gf:") wrote:

the radar awawawawas into the distance and from the returning wawawawa it can find objects and their distance

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
mastodonmigration@mastodon.online ("Mastodon Migration") wrote:

🚨silly guy alert 🚨

#caturday

Attachments:

• video: Cute kitty sticking his head through stair railings

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

Texas is showing us the future of American higher ed.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/11/15/texas-leads-the-way/

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

Bonus steamy horses

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

Steamy horses #nature #iceland #photos #horses

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

Steam, mist, and frost make for an interesting combination #nature #iceland #photos

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

For some reason, the town pigeons all prefer to hang out on this specific house #birds

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

For this #caturday, Grása being very fluffy on a fence and a new neighbour who I think lives down the road.

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

Update on my Vivaldi review!

Vivaldi has a Microsoft virus, and I've had to opt-out/unsubscribe THREE times now — I don't want your newsletter, Vivaldi!

https://dbushell.com/2025/11/14/vivaldi-browser/#update-saturday-15-nov

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

“Difficult to claim breach of EEA Agreement as hopes remain of different outcome - RÚV.is”

https://www.ruv.is/english/2025-11-14-difficult-to-claim-breach-of-eea-agreement-as-hopes-remain-of-different-outcome-458865

That the EU seems to be on the verge of tariffing Norwegian and Icelandic silicon metal exports has basically killed off any chance of these countries joining the EU any time soon

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
uglyreykjavik.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Ugly Reykjavik") wrote:

Honestly, it's a shame what's happened to this house. It's really in a great location.#Iceland #photography #naturephotography #nature #landscape #landscapephotography #abandoned #decay #rust

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
uglyreykjavik.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Ugly Reykjavik") wrote:

Apparently, they used to grow vegetables here. Being close to the sea, they also fished and collected dulse, which they dried and fed to the cows.#Iceland #photography #naturephotography #nature #landscape #landscapephotography #abandoned #decay #rust

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁"):
someodd@fosstodon.org wrote:

New #gajim update (#xmpp client) arrived in #debian #sid

Visually way nicer with #WindowMaker

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁"):
erebion@chaos.social wrote:

I really enjoy the reliability of calls with @dino and Conversations.

- quality is quite decent
- calls reliably connect
- have not experienced any interrupted calls
- requires little bandwidth, perfect for developing countries such as Germany

#xmpp

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁"):
Monal@fosstodon.org ("monal-im.org :xmpp:") wrote:

Monal 6.4.14 (Build 1053, PR #1459) released.

To see the complete list of bugfixes and improvements, check our releases page: https://github.com/monal-im/Monal/releases/tag/Build%5FiOS%5F1053

#Monal #ios #macos #xmpp #im #chat #messaging

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

Bad things keep happening and the population of Bluesky is handling it badly. Anybody with a book to sell is “a grifter”. Every theory that differs from yours is “a conspiracy theory”. What little kindness I see in my Bluesky timeline is reserved for the dead, and even then it’s a platform to hate others. The mood of the platform seems to have turned on a dime.

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
servo@floss.social ("Servo") wrote:

October in Servo…

🌳🍃 XPath enabled by default
🗜️📦 Compression Streams too
🦾🍎 native macOS arm64 releases
🤖☢️ Android experimental mode
🪆🤝 new input and zoom API

https://servo.org/blog/2025/11/14/october-in-servo/

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
ludd@mastodon.gamedev.place ("luddite 🇵🇸 computer") wrote:

holy fuck, #linux like, works now

i tried it 20 years ago and it was so bad and broken

✅my random bluetooth keyboard
✅xbox wireless controller
✅mini pc stuff
✅steam worked straight away

why the fuck have i been using windows

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
Em0nM4stodon@infosec.exchange ("Em :official_verified:") wrote:

Saying No and refusing to use unethical tools and platforms can be a powerful way to protest.

Do not minimize the power you have by refusing to participate.

#Privacy #NoAI #DigitalRights #HumanRights

Boosted by jwz:
Phorm@dragon.style ("Phorm The Vixdjinn") wrote:

I know a lot of folks have been going on about it, but Steam's latest hardware announcement has been utterly insane for the day and age in which we live.

Consider that they didn't hype it up with a launch event. They didn't sell a bunch of hype and buzzwords. All they did was release a ~6 minute video that effectively described the hardware and what it would provide, and had a webpage with *actual specs on it*.

They invited a bunch of tech reporters/YouTubers to their HQ, but they let them talk to *engineers*, not marketing people. The discussions focused on real capabilities of the hardware, and actual demonstrations. No vapor and promises. Not glitz and glam.

They made it clear this is all SteamOS driven, and that they have a focus of getting *existing x86 Windows software* running not only on Linux, but on ARM and in VR!!

They aren't pitching a closed ecosystem. They said, outright, "This is your hardware, you can do whatever you want with it".

THEY DIDN'T MENTION AI ONCE.

And they're _already_ making a bigger splash than any competitor ever did, even though those competitors have gobs more money they've thrown at this stuff, and tremendously more staff.

It's flabbergasting. I hope they make enough of an impact with all this that people sit up and take notice.

Boosted by jwz:
jef ("Jef Poskanzer") wrote:

@lmc Ooo excitement in your neighborhood!

Boosted by denschub@schub.social ("Dennis Schubert"):
denschub@schub.social ("Dennis Schubert") wrote:

@kboyd @dveditz @chutten

Hey, look, I get it. I myself am very solidly in the contra-GenAI camp. I blogged about it, I tooted about it - some of my rants stuck on rank 1 of HN for a long time. I run public/non-profit infrastructure and have directly suffered from wild GenAI crawlers. I'd happily state that I think that GenAI is one of the worst things that happened to the open internet. We're on the same boat in that regard.

But that doesn't mean Mozilla is somehow wrong about adding some integrations. Reality is not that simple.

I read quite a few of the posts on the r/Firefox subreddit, and one of my favorite things is to look at all the "Mozilla should just do X" posts. Doing that is kinda entertaining, because you get an endless list of "suggestions", a lot of which actively contradict each other or are even totally mutually exclusive. Driving products like Firefox is messy.

Let's, for the sake of the argument, assume that every single Monthly Active User on Mastodon (722k at the moment according to the server list) is an active Firefox user and has the same opinion ("Firefox should not contain anything related to GenAI"), telling as much in a survey.

You'd now have 0.722 million users saying "no". Firefox has, at the moment, 154.4 million MAU. What that means is that 0.47% of all Firefox users have voted "no". In reality, I'd be even less, because a) not every Mastodon user is using Firefox, and b) not every Mastodon user is actually against GenAI - there are quite a few GenAI users on here.

How would you argue that the responses from those 0.47% of users is somehow representative for not only the current users, but also potential future users, too? You could argue that Mastodon users are all nerds and they probably know best, but we know that's not true because a lot of Mastodon users make absolutely bonkers decisions like toggling privacy.resistFingerprinting against all advice and then yelling at Mozilla because half of the web is broken for them.

Sometimes, especially when talking about adding features, it makes sense to do it, because that means you avoid the risk of users using another product because they're missing it. And sometimes, it might even make sense to cater to a minority. Mozilla is doing that quite a lot, actually, and the two most recent examples are Tab Groups and the new Profile Manager. The vast majority of users only ever have single-digit tab counters, and the vast majority of users will never have a second profile (or just use --profile on the CLI because we're nerds). But it still does make sense to have those features. I'm somewhat confident you'd not call those features a waste of effort, despite both of them taking orders of magnitude more effort and more technical complexity.

A lot of people, like it or not, are using GenAI, and a lot of people are also using the browsers made by those GenAI companies. We don't know how many users, because these companies don't really publish numbers, and even if they did I probably wouldn't trust them, but they exist. I've seen multiple folks really enjoying the chat bot sidebar, for example, and they explicitly liked the way it's implemented where you can easily switch providers as opposed to having a big business deal with one provider and forcing every Firefox user to use that. That's very much "a Mozilla-like approach of doing things".

I'm confident that, whatever GenAI integrations happen, these integrations will not be forced upon people, and just like it is right now, it's trivial to just make them go away. You don't even need some secret about:config flags for that - the chatbot sidebar, for example, has the option to just make the button go away. I'm also confident that those integrations will have the absolute best possible privacy footprint. If that's not the case in the future, then sure, grab your pitchforks, and I'll even join you. But let's at least try to have a reasonable discussion.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
Lana@beige.party ("𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"") wrote:

So let me get this straight

The racist 30-year old Republicans who were revealed in leaked chats to be Hitler worshipping Nazis, those are "just kids"

But the 13- and 14-year old victims of sexual abuse and sex trafficking by Trump and Epstein, they were "young women" who were "barely legal"

Do I have that right?