Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

Bari Weiss is to news what I am to professional football: Someone who does not belong on the field

RE: https://www.threads.com/@hollywoodreporter/post/DSksnE3Dpeg

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
truthaddictvt@masto.ai ("Jenny 😷🇵🇸🔻🏳️‍⚧️☭") wrote:

I enjoy this place these days, but it took awhile to get there, and it doesn't really provide the same thing Twitter or Bluesky do. You have to be a pretty specific venn diagram of dork to get the most out of this place

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
truthaddictvt@masto.ai ("Jenny 😷🇵🇸🔻🏳️‍⚧️☭") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@fromjason/115763803172947099

There's a lot I find annoying about Mastodon, but one thing I do like is how different the vibe is. You're not going to be seen by thousands of people, which people on the other sites see as a detriment (and yeah posting here does often feel to me like tacking a flyer on a community notice board that no one really passes by), but there also tends to be less of an element of performance in posting here, and more sincerity, because you're mainly talking to a handful of people you actually know

kornel ("Kornel") wrote:

Mass surveillance is gross. "AI-enhanced" mass surveillance is even worse, and Flock Safety (funded by Horowitz's a16z & Y Combinator) is exceptionally scummy, insecure, incompetent, and lying about it:

https://youtu.be/vU1-uiUlHTo?t=442

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

These two photos, were taken here in Iceland during a trip to the remains of the WW2 era naval base in Hvalfjörður. The wall belonged to a military hospital #photos #iceland #photography

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

What I do love about #Mastodon and the greater #Fediverse, by the way, are the personalities. There *is* a culture here.

Other microblogging sites have a sort of algorithmic supremacy going on where you trade personality for a ticket to the internet celebrity lottery. No individualism. You pick your niche from a set deck and you play the FYP slots.

Meanwhile, everyday I run into someone who's like "hey I'm star-cake. I'm a queer carrot farmer. I collect Soviet-era camera lenses." Amazing.

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

Wired, TechCrunch, The Verge, Mashable, these American tech blogs sound very old fashioned to me with their never-ending hype cycles, and corporate worship coverage. They've completely lost touch of what Americans want.

Yet nothing is here to replace them. 404 media is doing a great job at investigative reporting. But that's not quite a replacement of consumer tech coverage.

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

Brain Gear Is the Hot New Wearable | WIRED:

"Now there’s a new breed of wearables—built for your head. Instead of tracking your step count, heart rate, and skin temperature, these devices are designed to read your brain waves."

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters https://www.wired.com/story/expired-tired-wired-wearables/

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

I possess a junk drawer that is a nostalgia trap I will never be able to purge.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/12/22/nostalgia-night/

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

This is so funny. Does anyone know anything about the original artist so I can go support them and not this slop version

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
sampo@pleroma.soykaf.com wrote:

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

this is one of those days when I wish you would hurry up

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

Continuing with my Montréal era, here are three photos from Parc Jarry, spring, summer, and autumn. The photo of the bloodied gull is one of my personal favourites. The gull had tried to snack on a duckling and all of the duck mamas ganged up and it was lucky to get away with its life #montreal #photos #photography

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

I’ve reached my Montréal years in my impromptu photography retrospective (2016-2019). 2019 was the year where, for a variety of reasons, I knew I wasn’t going to be living there for much longer. These are mostly from Parc Jarry and the Jean Talon market. #montreal #photos #photography

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

Also, side-eyeing the people in the industry who DON’T feel betrayed and are treating the tech industry’s overt assault on labour and creative industries as just another day at the job.

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

RE: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/115745770152711683

For some fucking reason, what most here on Mastodon took away from this blog post, where I describe how my own words about sporadic blogs and feeds turned to ash is that they should go and boost the year-old blog post that turned to ash, ignoring the fact that it is now a curse, not a feelgood happy-post

Wtf people?

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

Spending the holidays processing just how betrayed I feel by the software and web industry

Basically my career has been fifteen years of hope and promise—some fulfilled, some not—followed by a decade where the industry dropped all pretence and switched to just overtly looting, manipulating, and gouging.

Being a bit angry about it is probably quite reasonable

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

If you don't want to take sides in the fight against bigotry then you've joined the fight on the side of the fucking bigots

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/us/politics/vance-republicans-trump-antisemitism.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.-k8.e9j2.RNd%5FrxY109%5FW&smid=url-share

Boosted by jakedel@mamot.fr ("S. Delafond"):
freexian@hachyderm.io ("Freexian :debian:") wrote:

In November, Debian LTS contributors released 33 Debian LTS Advisories, fixing 219 CVEs across multiple packages. Notable updates included security fixes for bind9, unbound, pdfminer, firefox-esr, thunderbird, and the Linux 6.1 kernel.

In addition, the LTS team also contributed security updates to latest Debian releases and carried out significant work to revamp the LTS team documentation.

Read the full report here:
https://www.freexian.com/blog/debian-lts-report-2025-11/?utm%5Fsource=mastodon&utm%5Fmedium=social

This work is funded through Freexian’s Debian LTS offering. Consider sponsoring Debian LTS (https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/?utm%5Fsource=mastodon&utm%5Fmedium=social) to support this effort and benefit from it: https://www.freexian.com/lts/debian/details/#benefits

#freexian #debianLTS #debian #linux #bind9 #unbound #thunderbird

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

You know, I'm still a bit mad about the picture they put on my Wikipedia article. Back at FOSDEM 2023, some guy walks up to me, asks if he can take a picture. I've been taking selfies with folks all day so I say yes. People are happy to meet me and I don't mind. He takes the picture and leaves. Then months later I find out that blurry, low light, bad hair, bad composition picture is how I will be remembered in the world's most popular encyclopedia.

Boosted by jwz:
twipped@twipped.social ("Jocelynephiliac :reclaimer:") wrote:

Just saw the take that waymo shouldn't be expected to have tested for an edge case like unpowered stop lights.

That edge case that human drivers are required to know from page 34 of the california drivers handbook.

Boosted by keul@fosstodon.org ("Luca Fabbri"):
grumpygamer@mastodon.gamedev.place ("Ron Gilbert (100% AI free)") wrote:

When Twitter collapsed, it was great to see the flood of friends, game devs and other come to Mastodon. Over the next 9 months a lot of them vanished to Threads, BlueSky or just left. I want to thank all people who are still on Mastodon and make it a wonderful place. You know who you are.

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

My very poignant and clear example for how it felt when decentralized social media people told us it was okay that we invited Meta to be a part of the decentralized social media club.

I probably shouldn’t write after 9pm

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@codebyjeff Eminent Domain PG&E. https://www.publicpowersf.org

Boosted by jwz:
jplebreton ("JP") wrote:

@MLNow waymo et al are part of a campaign to replace all public transit with for-profit corporate controlled surveillance and they can't even function in emergencies when they're most needed. the tech is bad and its politics are even worse.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
xgranade@wandering.shop ("Cassandra is only carbon now") wrote:

Maybe another way of putting all this is that if I look at something like an LLM and ask "how can I make it ethical," I wind up with something that is probably pretty ethical, but it no longer resembles an LLM at all. Like, you can't train one at the scale of an individual artist, or on work that you can meaningfully obtain consent for. The "large" in "large language model" is incredibly load-bearing.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
nasser@merveilles.town ("Ramsey Nasser") wrote:

and beyond just the triumph of capital over any alternative, it really breaks my heart that computers are just objectively worse today than they were in the time of Chuck Moore. I try and not be an old man yelling at the cloud about this but we've given up on stability, soundness, maintainability. these are non-goals of modern computing, sacrificed at the altar of shareholder value.

it is wild that an official update of the operating system could break otherwise working code in a way that is impossible to determine even what is happening, let alone what to do to fix it. but this is what we've come to expect. computers break all the time, software breaks all the time, stuff crashes, you restart, whatever. and this isn't even factoring in the incoming wave of vibe-coded systems which make no attempt at correctness.

this isn't what computing was, there were attempts -- serious attempts! -- at developing theory and practice to build systems that were stable and correct in the face of usage and updates. we put half a century into that. and now we live in a kind of collective surrender. it's really depressing. as someone who has dedicated a life to computing, it's really fucking depressing.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
xgranade@wandering.shop ("Cassandra is only carbon now") wrote:

I'm not a huge fan of "don't obey in advance," as it implies that there is a correct and useful point at which one should obey fascists. "Fuck you, make me" or even just "fuck you" work much better.

But goddamn it, "ethical AI" *is* obedience. It is acquiescence. It's the narrative refuge of quisling appeasers. It is an absolutely *vapid* intellectual stance that does nothing but muddies the waters when it comes to the fascist project of enclosing culture with AI.

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
alex@deuill.org ("Marid Vex de Uill") wrote:

@fromjason #emacs ain't too bad either: https://github.com/rnkn/fountain-mode 😄

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
mihaip@hachyderm.io ("Mihai Parparita") wrote:

Playing around with adding BlueSCSI Toolbox protocol support to DingusPPC. Though somewhat roundabout, the end result is that you can transfer files in and out of more emulated machine types on Infinite Mac. As a bonus, it also makes the Macintosh Garden library integration work.

It works for the 6100 running 7.1.2 (https://infinitemac.org/1994/System%207.1.2?saved%5Fhd=false&blue%5Fscsi=true), and you can try to enable it for any other machine via the "Customize…" dialog.

Many thanks for @nulleric for @BlueSCSI in general and specifically for fixes to the SD Transfer app and my DingusPPC virtual device (code for the curious: https://github.com/mihaip/dingusppc/commit/6c002e81e58eb336b345bca27973726fd150c139).

Attachments:

• gifv: Demonstration of transferring files and out of Infinite Mac running System 7.1.2 using the BlueSCSI SD Transfer app.