Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

“AI sceptics” who work on policy and education continue to overestimate the utility of LLMs—portraying it as a potential revolution even as they warn against overhype—simply because they can’t see that generating seemingly coherent text has very little economic value

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

“You can support Pivot to AI’s work! – Pivot to AI”

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/11/29/you-can-support-pivot-to-ais-work/

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

“‘What makes something data?’ by Emily M. Bender”

https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/what-makes-something-data-f6d9f498f312

> As a general rule, you can’t reason about the results of some scientific study based on data without clear information about the data itself

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

new visual regression tester just dropped

https://onemillionscreenshots.com/dbushell.com/screenshot

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

“Jim Nielsen’s Notes”

https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/#2025-11-29T2054

> Say that again? The costs for operational software failures in the US were more than the defense budget?!?

Back in the day, this was called the Software Crisis (capitalised) but today it's just business as usual

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

“Needy programs @ tonsky.me”

https://tonsky.me/blog/needy-programs/

Boosted by jwz:
sharif@fosstodon.org ("Sharif Naas") wrote:

Seen at @dnalounge #dnalounge

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
skjeggtroll@mastodon.online ("Skjeggtroll") wrote:

@datarama @regehr

There is one important question that keeps getting overlooked in all the talk about LLM code generators replacing human developers, and that is "Where's the software?"

Where _is_ the software? If LLMs are actually useful and yields a significant productivity boost in software development, where's all the new software? Where are the more rapid release cycles, the more frequent updates, the long-requested features finally being added? Why has nothing changed on _that_ end?

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
pikesley@mastodon.me.uk ("Guillotines for a better world") wrote:

Sometimes I just get an idea and it won't go away

Edited to add, since this is now doing Numbers:

Fuck the Tories, fuck the Labour party, fuck the TERFs, free Palestine

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

Wealth taxes now.

https://youtu.be/6DXZMXZCY0I?si=4tZCG81u-J5YXl7t

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
Schneems@ruby.social ("Richard Schneeman") wrote:

@yosh something I internalized in the Texas winter storm of 2021: the opposite of "efficiency" isn't "waste" it's "redundancy"

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
thecasualcritic@writing.exchange ("The Casual Critic") wrote:

"The reason billionaires urge you to vote with your wallets is that their wallets are so much thicker than yours. This is the only numeric advantage the wealthy and powerful enjoy. They are in every other regards an irrelevant, infinitesimal minority. In a vote of ballots, rather than wallets, they will lose every time, which is why they are so committed to this wallet-voting nonsense. The wallet-vote is the only vote they can hope to win."

@pluralistic is spot on, as usual.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
jciv ("John Coates") wrote:

Harvard Professor Jack Goldsmith (a Republican) provides details on the obviously illegal order our Secretary of Defense just executed - murder - on behalf of all US citizens.

https://www.execfunctions.org/p/a-dishonorable-strike?utm%5Fcampaign=post&utm%5Fmedium=web

Boosted by taral ("JP Sugarbroad"):
juliusgoat.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("A.R. Moxon") wrote:

We need to start to understand that “respecting people’s beliefs” means giving the people holding anti-society beliefs what they want, which is separation from society. Respect their agency that they want what they say they want. Give them credit for the natural logical effect of their belief.

taral ("JP Sugarbroad") wrote:

Thought of the day: What would #riscv look like if you made #CHERI integral?

1. CSRs could be "capability-mapped". No need for separate CSR instructions. This might be a win or a loss depending on your use case?
2. Traps could generate special sentry capabilities that encode complex execution state. I see a common pattern of per-mode "save" registers for traps. How much of that can we avoid with this? Is LDM/STM an option?
3. Instead of hidden extended registers, could we require pair support?

Boosted by jwz:
jascha@ohai.social ("tomate 🍅") wrote:

We just celebrated Black Friday in memory of Rebecca Black who invented Friday back in 2011.

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

Latest Freebooters podcast: Our new self-hosting podcast site, our latest adventures with bash scripting, and Chris gets caught using AI

https://freebooters.uk/media/20251111-self-hosting-bash-scripting-and-chris-gets-caught-with-ai.mp3

In this episode, Chris and Drew share their latest exploits with bash scripting, talk about KeePassXC allowing AI assisted contributions, and the chaps show off the new self-hosted website....

#Freebooters

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
pixelpaperyarn@masto.hackers.town wrote:

Oh wait. It's been like a whole week since I listened to "Walking in L.A." by Missing Persons. Let me fix that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQF7FDeUePA
#NowPlaying

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

I have, like many people, enjoyed the musical stylings of Led Zeppelin. But I have to say I've possibly enjoyed Robert Plant's turn towards collaboration with other musicians in his later years even more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHL5ApOqMQc

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Enshittification is not the result of your failure to grasp that "if you're not paying for the product, you're the product." You're the product if you pay. You're the product if you don't pay. The determinant of your demotion to "the product" is *whether the company can get away with treating you as the product*.

8/

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
MichaelWhelan@mastodon.art ("Michael Whelan") wrote:

BEYOND THE VEIL (2023)
Acrylic on Canvas - 6 ¼” x 6 ¼”

This began as an abstract color experiment. I had no particular subject in mind until I recalled a drawing in my sketchbook. Staring at a darkly swathed figure earlier that day, I felt that she’d been waiting for a painting to float into. 1/2

#leftoversandpalettegremlins #sciencefiction

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
laemeur@mastodon.sdf.org ("LÆMEUR") wrote:

I need testers!

I've created an SVG-based drawing/note-taking app called SKRIBBLOR, and I need some Android-using artists to join the closed beta so I can get the darned thing into the Google Play store.

Not an Android user/artist? No problem -- you can use the Web version here: https://skribblor.app and let me know how it works for you and your devices.

I'll post more about it in coming days, but here's my little video time-lapse call for testers:

Attachments:

• video: A time-lapse video of someone drawing a trench-coated man in a subway car. There's text over the video making an appeal for beta testers.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
nolan@gts.thewordnerd.info ("Nolan Darilek") wrote:

Was surprised to learn that there are apparently no command line tools for poking around the Linux accessibility tree, so I made Acsh, the Accessibility Shell. With Acsh you have both a CLI and REPL, in which you can do things like:

/> ls # Lists all top-level apps
/> cd firefox-1.26 # cd into Firefox, with tab completion. REPL only
/firefox-1.26> cat 0 # Get more information on the first child by index, if you're fine with the possibility that index might change before the command is processed--not likely at this level. Paths are referenced by name or index
/firefox-1.26> watch 0 # Get stream of events for the first child
/firefox-1.26> search -r button ok # Find all OK buttons in this Firefox instance
... # and more

The future, though, is probably acsh mount. This makes the accessibility tree available as a FUSE mount under ./a11y by default. ./a11y/README.md gives a better overview of the layout, but in brief, directories are apps/accessible objects with their children as subdirectories. Properties are either files containing their raw values or .json files with richer structure. There's an events.json.sock Unix socket in each directory below the root that lets you watch events for an accessible object and all its children, and you can use standard filesystem tooling to search/filter/stream. It's probably slow because there's no caching--it's meant to be a debugging/introspection tool, after all. I'll probably rename this to acfs and drop the CLI/REPL soon--it was great for prototyping and the idea to use FUSE only occurred to me after I realized I was slowly re-inventing all of a filesystem anyway.

Thoughts? I'm sure it has bugs, but what doesn't? https://dev.thewordnerd.info/nolan/acsh

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
meg@fediscience.org ("Megan ⚘") wrote:

New video of Florence and the Machine performing "One Of The Greats" live for World Cafe. I like the lyrics of this song and the arrangement on this version.

#Music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfXsFODg6cc

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
rg9119@mathstodon.xyz ("Ron Garcia") wrote:

In case you too ever wondered why networks of nodes and edges are called "graphs":

[![Text From "The pioneering contributions of cayley and sylvester to the mathematical description of chemical structure" "Of the 342 papers written by Sylvester during his lifetime, only two relate directly to chemistry. Yet, these two papers, both of which appeared in 1878, have proved to be of great importance in the evolution of mathematical chemistry. The first was a short note [20] published in Nature under the title “Chemistry and Algebra”, and the second was a massive paper with three long appendices [ 281 which appeared in the inaugural issue of the American Journal of Mathematics. In both these communications, Sylvester’s purpose was to point out the many parallels that exist between chemistry and algebra. He felt that the two disciplines were not nearly as antithetical to each other as many had supposed, and that they could be harmonized by the use of an appropriate mathematical formalism. Sylvester proposed the introduction of a common graphic notation which derived from his earlier work on invariant theory. ... It is interesting to observe that in his papers 20,281 Sylvester made the first use of the terms “chemicograph” and its shorter cousin “graph” in his discussion of structural formulas. These terms clearly derive from the “graphic notation” of the chemists of his time, the expression then commonly used to denote the structural formula. The word graph is thus of chemical origin, a fact not widely appreciated by either chemists or mathematicians today. "]4

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

I've also been thinking and working on possible RSS based, and RSS-like social networks feeds.

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
ErickaSimone ("Ericka Simone") wrote:

#music
#WeirdAl

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

Done a lot of work on the back end for https://freebooters.uk and gemini://freebooters.uk

All FB podcast episodes are available on gemini and the web.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
georgetakei@universeodon.com ("George Takei :verified: 🏳️‍🌈🖖🏽") wrote:

During WWII a German vessel fired upon sailors floating in the sea after the Greek vessel Peleus was sunk. The officers were tried and convicted in the Peleus War Crimes trial.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
exchgr@mastodon.world ("elle mundy") wrote: