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

This both real and a decent metaphor, so it is time for me to re-tell a story.

Ever heard of The Ping Of Death?

There was a couple of years there - years, hand to god - where you could throw a single malformed or too-large packet across the network at any IP you could see, and if you malformed it just right for its OS, you could crash the machine. You could kill a Windows machine with one line in cmd.exe.

It was bad, but almost nobody knows how bad.

https://mastodon.social/@Natasha%5FJay@tech.lgbt/115719291112552201

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

As an aside: I sometimes wonder how much of modern computing efforts are spent making computers pretend they're something they are manifestly not.

CPUs pretending to be single-thread-single-core devices, so programmers build elaborate dispatch multiplexers on top of them, OSes aping PDP11s for their guest code,. SOCs pretending to be hard drives, etc etc.

There's this wild live-action plato's cave metaphor-psychodrama going on in all of our machines all the time and ... nobody knows that.

Boosted by jwz:
heidilifeldman ("Heidi Li Feldman") wrote:

An of the moment appreciation of Rob Reiner. https://www.whatsalanwatching.com/rob-reiner-was-a-master-who-didnt-care-if-you-noticed/ Do watch the clip from All in the Family embedded.

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
dgar@aus.social ("Dgar") wrote:

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam :prami:"):
nileane@nileane.fr ("Niléane") wrote:

I am in disbelief that the only argument I'm seeing mobilized against age verification laws (and their accompanying social media bans) is “It sucks for privacy!”, and not “why the fuck are we okay imposing a digital jail on every single child?”

Digital privacy matters and it's an important reason why these laws must be repealed at all costs, but let's also please humanize the issue here: social media bans for minors are just another massive chapter in the conservative's playbook to deprive any social class that's not ‘adult white males’ of their bodily and existential autonomy.

That same playbook has chapters we're already familiar with, including staples such as “let's force gay kids back into the closet”, “trans kids shouldn’t be able to decide anything for themselves”, “women shouldn't have a bank account”, and “abortion should be illegal”.

fribbledom ("muesli") wrote:

Some nights Bill Gates boots into Linux, stares at the terminal, and remembers he used to enjoy computers.

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

true history

https://music.apple.com/us/album/temporarily-humboldt-county/292768027?i=292768028

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

yah

https://music.apple.com/us/album/devil-moon/203052564?i=203052653

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

spurious precision in automated email:

“This is the System Mailer Daemon for the storyteller service.
The service was restarted at 2025-12-15T01:59:28.9117128”

gotta fix that
Real Soon Now

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

mood

https://music.apple.com/us/album/how-would-it-feel/382417932?i=382417938

jwz wrote:

XQuartz EGL.

Dear Lazyweb,

Some time in the last ~6 months, eglCreatePlatformWindowSurface vanished from the libraries provided by MacPorts "mesa". Where do I find it? It is not in libGL and there is no libEGL.

macOS 14.7.7, mesa 25.3.1, xorg-libX11 1.8.12.
https://jwz.org/b/yk0d

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
mbjones@social.lol ("Brandon") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@fromjason/115720918933458152

There isn’t any space a “well meaning” white dude won’t try to colonize. Jason shares below the playbook. Speaking as a white dude, we should be quick to listen without defensiveness. Active decolonization makes the world a richer space.

If what we hear makes us comfortable 10/10 times it’s because we know deep down it’s true; rather than blaming the messenger and grasping onto power tightly - let go - learn - lean into new ways of being.

Boosted by jwz:
squinky@teh.entar.net wrote:

@jwz word on the street is that Amazon has free shipping on python asyncio

jwz wrote:

This just in, I have been informed that my stance of, "no, I am not interested in hearing your anecdote about how the Plagiarism Machine saved you some time once" means that I "live in a bubble".

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

I nerdsniped myself and accidentally optimized my nginx-access-log-to-postgres bridge to handle ~40k requests per second on one core of the smallest Hetzner VM with dedicated CPU cores, AMA.

whoops.

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

I really wish they'd all just come at once and not this drip drop bs. You're not fooling anyone.

Also, OP wasn't Black. And it's a capital B. Not that it's matters to you.

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

I can't stress enough that this behavior—the gaslighting, the derailing conversations, being pedantic on irrelevant specifics, making it about yourself, placing the blame squarely on the messenger—this is how white supremacy is upheld.

It's not a group of guys in white robes in the streets. It's not the trolls using racial slurs. It's the everyday people who, when presented with a fixable problem, convinces themselves it's not a problem at all.

This is it. It's really that simple and boring.

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

Conversely, by pretending diversity is not an issue because there are small servers with a notch more brown folks, by coming up with another exercise year after year, at some point we just have to assume that #FediverseSoWhite is a feature, not a bug.

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

Literally nothing happens by admitting this is a problem. No one is calling the diversity police. You're not gonna burst into flames. Life continues. The world still spins.

jwz wrote:

Never change, Yelp.

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

It's seems every year or so, a new narrative takes hold that tries to diminish the #FediverseSoWhite observation. This time it's "actually the Fediverse is diverse you just don't see it"

Seems to me that effort would be better spent thinking of ways to fix it rather than trying to intellectualize it away.

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

That's an uncomfortable accusation. But accurate.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/12/14/ive-been-distracted-lately/

Boosted by jwz:
lolennui.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Amy Ash") wrote:

when u see a book about a penguin with two dads

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

https://mastodon.social/@fromjason/115720247151025906

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

"POC" isn't a magical term you can just wave around so you can insert your ignorant worldview in place of decades of work and guidance from Black and brown activists. That's not how that works

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

The weaponization of social justice language to shut down conversations on white supremacy, or anything about race, is commonplace in communities that don't have conversations about white supremacy.

They want a reaction out of me so they have an excuse.

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

I'm writing a sequel to The Whiteness of Mastodon called:

The white, white, white, whitey white-white-white, white / white, whiteness of Mastodon (part 2) (white)

It's 20,000 words. It'll be my masterpiece.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
nolan@toot.cafe ("Nolan Lawson") wrote:

New post: "The element should actually do something" https://nolanlawson.com/2025/12/14/the-time-element-should-actually-do-something/

A modest proposal for a forgotten HTML element.

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

All my recent books went from hardcover to trade paperback and almost all of my backlist that was in mass market has now migrated to trade. The role of mass market paperbacks is now handled almost entirely by ebooks. I'm okay with this but it is the end of an era.

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/99293-last-call-for-mass-market-paperbacks.html

Boosted by jwz:
NanoRaptor@bitbang.social ("Nanoraptor") wrote:

It's a little known fact that the predator in Predator isn't actually arming a bomb on its wrist computer near the end, but is calling The Police.