Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by jwz:
JauntyArt@crispsandwi.ch ("Jaunty Art") wrote:

The company that gave me a content warning against a pole dancing axolotl drawing I did is now trying to sell me sex toys

Boosted by jwz:
dansup wrote:

The Loops For You algorithm isn't some black box, not only is it open source, and will be documented, but people will be able to clear recommendation data at any time, giving you more control 😉

Learn more: https://joinloops.org/our-mission

Boosted by jwz:
glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

it's truly amazing what LLMs can achieve. we now know it's possible to produce an html5 parsing library with nothing but the full source code of an existing html5 parsing library, all the source code of all other open source libraries ever, a meticulously maintained and extremely comprehensive test suite written by somebody else, 5 different models, a megawatt-hour of energy, a swimming pool full of water, and a month of spare time of an extremely senior engineer

Boosted by jwz:
mawhrin@circumstances.run ("flere-imsaho 🇺🇦") wrote:

we're told the confabulation machines are good at summaries.

which is why acm, not asking the authors, rolled out a summary feature for the published papers, to be displayed along the abstract (because why rely on an existing summary written by the authors of the paper when you can rely on a summary from an autoconfabulator).

it went exactly as well as you think it went.

Boosted by jwz:
realhackhistory@chaos.social ("[realhackhistory@home]#") wrote:

You will be visited by three spirits.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
wim_v12e@scholar.social ("Wim🧮") wrote:

The more I dig into "agentic AI" the worse it gets. Not only does a query to a #genAI tool now triggers multiple queries to secondary tools which are also massive LLMs, but then people run several of these concurrently, and run that in a loop.

Combine that with the huge system prompts, and the whole thing explodes in terms of compute requirements.
(1/3)
#FrugalComputing

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

“If economics superseded politics in the neoliberal period—with political parties across the world converging on economic policy—the 2008 financial crisis ushered in a new era in which politics superseded economics.”

— Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present by Fareed Zakaria
https://a.co/ah0iawV

adam@social.lol ("Adam :prami:") wrote:

Yesterday I used that Cloudflare error page generator that was going around to make this: https://neatnik.net/418/

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
laurenshof@indieweb.social ("Laurens Hof") wrote:

lmao, Meta is considering a change to charge for sharing links on Facebook. Under the change, page and professional mode profiles can only share 2 links per month, and you can share more links if you pay for Meta Verified

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/meta-considering-charging-business-pages-to-post-links/808099/

adam@social.lol ("Adam :prami:") wrote:

It worked! We can now pipe blog posts and stuff into IRC, yay!

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
brianbilston@mastodon.online ("Brian Bilston") wrote:

These are a few of my favourite words …

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
mcr314@todon.nl ("Michael Richardson") wrote:

What a shot. Seems to be real, and seems to not be a composite.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap251216.html "Explanation: What’s happening over that tree? Two very different things. On the left is the Andromeda galaxy, an object that is older than humanity and will last billions of years into the future. Andromeda (M31) is similar in size and shape to our own Milky Way Galaxy. On the right is a red sprite, a type of lightning that lasts a fraction of a second and occurs above violent thunderstorms. Red sprites were verified as real atmospheric phenomena only about 35 years ago. The tree in the center is a boab, which may live for as long as a thousand years. Boab trees grow naturally in Australia and Africa and are known for being able to store large amounts of water: up to 100,000 liters. The featured image was captured last month near Derby in Western Australia."

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

From:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/animal-grief/

(I haven't been able to track down a direct source for this. Some references I saw said this was done in 1978, but...)

Anyway, I think about these things when I think about how some people want to create an AGI. We are clumsy buffoons who have no idea what we're doing and what harm we can cause, but we should certainly have more respect for the intelligences around us (including ourselves) before going off and trying to create a new one.

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

I was listening to a podcast where the topic of elephant names came up. You know, the fact that elephants have names for each other. They also brought up this "experiment" (in hindsight it's more of a cruel prank):

"A researcher once played a recording of an elephant who had died. The sound was coming from a speaker hidden in a thicket. The family went wild calling, looking all around. The dead elephant’s daughter called for days afterward. The researchers never again did such a thing."

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
ploum@mamot.fr wrote:

Mozilla has a new CEO who:

- Has been at Mozilla for less than a year
- Has no prior open source experience (but well in "fintech" and "real estate")
- Has a MBA (aka "brainworm diploma")
- Is all-in on AI

That’s exactly the kind of bingo profile the whole community has been waiting for.

adam@social.lol ("Adam :prami:") wrote:

It did not, in fact, work, but this reply should. Maybe. Hopefully.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
sunpig@mastodon.scot ("Martin Sutherland") wrote:

@slightlyoff Similar sentiment from Prof Marci Shore in an interview a few months ago: “Without a distinction between truth and lies, there is no grounding for a distinction between good and evil.” (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/16/why-a-professor-of-fascism-left-the-us-the-lesson-of-1933-is-you-get-out)

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

The spiders will feast tonight!

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/12/17/the-spiders-will-feast-tonight/

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

Google is genuinely criminal here. These services and these ads are illegal here. Online gambling has skyrocketed over the months this ad carpet-bombing campaign has been going on, and Google has largely turned a blind eye to it throughout.

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

Currently intentionally disabling my ad blocker on YouTube just to more easily report all of the gambling site ads that Google has let run rampant on the site in Iceland. Currently gambling services are carpet-bombing ads at most users in Iceland, usually targeting only by location and time

Last time I tried this, half the time Google came back with something along the lines "this betting site for money is not a gambling site and so not in violation of our terms" which was obvious nonsense

adam@social.lol ("Adam :prami:") wrote:

If I’ve set things up correctly, this Mastodon post should wind up in the #feeds channel on omg.lol’s IRC server via EchoFeed. We’ll see!🤞

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
wdlindsy@toad.social ("William Lindsey :toad:") wrote:

"This afternoon, Trump announced he would address the nation tomorrow night.

Then, at 6:46 this evening, he posted on social media: 'Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before—Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.'"

#Trump #war #Venezuela
/2

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

got the memory leak blues

Code flows like water,
Bits and bytes slip through my grasp,
Frustration echoes.

[ courtesy https://arghstudios.com/ ]

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

RE: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/112127447270321395

In the year since I published this post, this has turned into something of a curse.

(I know, I know. "I told you so." Yeah, some of you did.)

Turns out following a broad cross-section of the long tail of tech and web dev, that previously was low volume and mostly driven by passion and interest, only works until a big chunk of that long tail goes all-in on "AI" boosterism

Seeing nonsense "AI" fluff spread like mold through my feed reader over the past few months has been thoroughly depressing.

Boosted by denschub@schub.social ("Dennis Schubert"):
vonExplaino@mstdn.social ("Colin M") wrote:

No, you’re not a “prompt engineer”, you’re a sloperator.

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

I was gonna write "piece" but thanks iOS for the recommendation lmao

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
nixCraft ("nixCraft 🐧") wrote:

The new Mozilla CEO says he could block ad blockers in Firefox and estimates that it would bring in another $150 million, but he doesn't want to do that. Lmao. This guy has really lost the plot. Is he issuing threats to the users of an open-source project? Boy, what a disaster.

https://infosec.press/brunomiguel/is-mozilla-trying-hard-to-kill-itself

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

A couple of years ago, if I had come across a misguided post from somebody with community traction, there was a decent chance I’d try to put together a thread or post with enough context to explain why it was misguided

They almost always got cause and effect the wrong way around. As in, the thing you think caused something else actually came after as a response to it

But posts like these are coming in so frequently on my social media and feeds now that it’d be a full time job to cover them all

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social ("Low Quality Facts") wrote:

Capitalism works. And it's easy to understand. We invest our money in Nvidia so Nvidia can produce more Nvidia chips that Nvidia will sell to Nvidia.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
QasimRashid ("Qasim Rashid, Esq.") wrote:

ProPublica reports a dystopian horror. Without USAID funding to help buy food for refugees, the World Food Program was forced to prioritize families based on need, determining that only half the population would get food.

Innocent people literally got a stamp on a card at random to let them know if they would live or if they would starve to death. Not because the world lacks resources—but because its stricken with greed.

All this blood is on the hands of Trump, Musk, & feckless Republicans.