Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

In my backyard are so many different types of birds. Crows, sparrows, hawks, blue jays, cardinals, sandhill cranes, and at least 20 other species that I don’t know the names of but love.

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

What do you mean "let it snow"? Motherfucker, the snow didn't ASK for your permission, now, did it

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

Madness rules at the upper levels of everything. Avi Loeb is the pinnacle of academia in that sense.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/12/17/avi-loeb-is-nuts/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnSJXcUGD1o

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

OH HELL YES

RE: https://www.threads.com/@sethrogen/post/DSXyCWQFF-C

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

Reported the exact same gambling site ad on YouTube five times today, each time the ad seems to come from a different advertiser in a different country. Odds are that at least half of these reports will come back saying they weren’t violating YouTube’s terms

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
kingcons@tiny.tilde.website ("Brit") wrote:

New post: Make me CEO of Mozilla.

Lol.

https://blog.kingcons.io/posts/make-me-ceo-of-mozilla.html

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

You can't win, Apple.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
skeletor@mas.to ("Inspirational Skeletor💀") wrote:

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

The idea that there is a double-backshot root harm that cannot be defeated ("regulatory capture") is almost always in service of a permission structure for irresponsibility. A way to avoid the hard work of the obvious fixes to justify chasing self-serving goals that cannot make sense unless an abstraction is put in place to obscure direct causal relationships.

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

Programmers are familiar with the idea of abstraction taxes, but underestimate magnitudes. 10-100x improvements are generally ripe for the taking. Why? Fairy tales about option value for comfortable devs.

We need a similar understanding about the dangers of ethical abstraction. Examples: efforts to destroy geopolitical alliances and diplomacy, "effective altruism", anti-vaccine nonsense, opposition to wealth taxes, etc. All justified on theoretical harms, ignoring practical effects.

Boosted by keul@fosstodon.org ("Luca Fabbri"):
MrLovenstein ("J. L. Westover") wrote:

Secret Panel HERE 🔺 https://tapas.io/episode/3658850

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
anatudor ("Ana Tudor 🐯") wrote:

Single element, minimal #CSS (20 declarations and only that many to even out browser inconsistencies), minimal #JS (just updates a custom property value), comparison slider (original image vs. desaturated one) on @codepen https://codepen.io/thebabydino/pen/MWMvxxX

#code #coding #frontend #blending
#web #dev #webDev #webDevelopment
#blendMode

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

“…populism’s appeal has grown in a world rapidly reshaped and destabilized by innovation. The gains to productivity and human flourishing from the information technology revolution have been immense. But we should hardly be surprised that the ride has been bumpy so far… this revolution upends not just physical limits but mental and biological ones. It changes who we are.”

— Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present by Fareed Zakaria
https://a.co/8Kz8DZq

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)