Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
DoomsdaysCW@kolektiva.social wrote:

@BlueDot Looks like #Nigeria and #Venezuela need some FREEDOM!

#MAGA #USPol #WorldPol #Oiligarchy #Freedom #USA #Venezuela

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
SuffolkLITLab@esq.social wrote:

TL;DR: The Commons women and equalities committee has halted its use of X following backlash over the AI tool Grok, which generated inappropriate images of women and children. This decision highlights growing concerns about digital safety and the need for regulatory actions. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/07/commons-women-equalities-committee-stop-using-x-ai-altered-grok-images #law #tech #legaltech ⚖️ 🤖 #autosum

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
josephcox@infosec.exchange ("Joseph Cox") wrote:

Grok is being used to remove clothes from random peoples' photos. Journalists think they got the chatbot to 'apologize'. What are you doing? An LLM cannot apologize. It doesn't know what is happening. Journalists doing this is a form of AI psychosis. Full ep here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT9lEyHnZIk

Attachments:

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Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
timnitGebru@dair-community.social ("Timnit Gebru (she/her).") wrote:

Friends, at a time when science is under attack and people are economically hurting, the scientific community should work to make access easier not harder. @ACM, Association for Computing Machinery, is doing the complete opposite by introducing paywalls that didn't exist.

Features that were previously free and open to the public are now "Premium
Access" features.

If you are opposed to this measure, join me in signing this petition asking the ACM to stop.

https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/restore-fully-free-and-open-access

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁"):
jpfox@m.g3l.org ("Jean-Pierre Morfin Cholat") wrote:

#ispconfig 3.3.1b1 (beta) brings #Debian 13 #Trixie support including #Dovecot 2.4 (new config file format)

https://git.ispconfig.org/ispconfig/ispconfig3/-/releases#3.3.1b1

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

404 Media: The People Tracking America’s AI Data Centers (YouTube) https://youtu.be/zT9lEyHnZIk

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
emilymbender@dair-community.social ("Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)") wrote:

Anthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI", especially given all the boosters and AGI-cult members peddling their nonsense about imminent artificial minds. New from me & Nanna Inie on Tech Policy Press -- how to spot & revise away from anthropomorphizing language applied to "AI":

https://www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-talk-about-how-we-talk-about-ai/

fribbledom ("muesli") wrote:

3D printing in 2030: When you missed the "Skip Ad" button between layers 137 and 138.

#3dprinting

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
bluegirlpdx@federated.press ("Em") wrote:

@jsonstein @tarheel the tossed away here broke me.

fribbledom ("muesli") wrote:

I've invented Vibe Time: currently Monday 7am, emotionally Saturday 8pm.

Need that feature for all my social contacts.

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

A lot of Mormons do believe in magic, so we should consider the possibility that there was a magical transformation.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/01/07/in-which-i-defend-ai/

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

Thank you porkbun.com for not insulting me with a "Maybe later" option!

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

sans-slop software

it's so easy to impress me now, literally the only thing I look for is lack of "AI" features

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
quixoticgeek@v.st ("Quixoticgeek") wrote:

Another to add to the list of things ruined by sparkling autocarrot.

A wedding. Well actually not legally a wedding anymore, cos sparkling autocarrot.

https://nltimes.nl/2026/01/07/court-zwolle-rules-couple-married-chatgpt-written-ceremony

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
uglyreykjavik.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Ugly Reykjavik") wrote:

A reflection of time.#Iceland #photography #landscape #nature #naturephotography #landscapephotography #abandoned #decay

Boosted by jwz:
andrewstroehlein ("Andrew Stroehlein") wrote:

"Why is the government posting on a deepfake child porn site?"

That's the question to ask them, journalist friends.

Boosted by jwz:
EricAlper ("Eric Alper") wrote:

Boosted by jwz:
dotstdy ("Josh Simmons") wrote:

Do CEOs Dream Of Electric Cocaine

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@zzt In 1998 leading up to Zero Day I spent *months* trying to get us to do a dual release of (let's say) "HEAD" and also "branch 3.2".

It did not go over well.

Apropos of nothing archive something something org.

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@xgranade @zzt There was a beautiful moment when a reporter asked Bill Gates to his face "what core functionality of the Windows operating system is Internet Explorer for Mac?" and he actually started spinning around with smoke coming out of his ears.

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@glyph I hate that they have also taken the phrase "model collapse" from us. That should only be used to describe what happens when you party too hard with Duran Duran. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSMbOuNBV0s

Mastodon wrote:

Not sure where to start with Mastodon? Here's some new year coverage from @TechCrunch that provides a great overview. 🫶🏻

Want to learn even more? There's a fantastic community ready to help you level up your Fediverse skills. 🎉

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/01/what-is-mastodon/

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

A few more raven photos from earlier this week. #photos #iceland #bird #birds #raven

Boosted by jwz:
jwz wrote:

@zzt Here's another example, extremely Mozilla-related.

Back in the Triassic, let's say 1996, there were a bunch of puddingheads at my company who wanted to introduce C++ across the Mozilla codebase. Many of us (who were right) said "this is unnecessary and will needlessly destabilize our cross-platform product. No. NFW. Please no...? OMG no...?") and it happened anyway.

Now imagine those same idiots had some press release say "but we will have a C++ kill switch. That customers can turn on."

adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁") wrote:

Already 50 mailboxes on https://message.casa/

Create your own to get your email address and instant messaging account

#xmpp #mailbox #email #smolweb #smolnet #smallweb

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

So, during winter here in Hveragerði steam frosts on the plants in needle-like ice formations when it's cold. I'm guessing this can happen wherever humidity and frost combine, but it gives the plant life next to the river a unique look #photos #iceland #winter

Boosted by jwz:
davidgerard@circumstances.run ("David Gerard") wrote:

@mdavis @firefoxwebdevs

The Firefox AI "kill switch" is not "complicated" except insofar as it's incoherent. it's not "undisclosed nuance" except insofar as it's incoherent.

the "kill switch" doesn't exist.

this is important to keep in mind. once you remember that NONE OF THIS EXISTS, you will realise that every one of the dilemmas you posit is an imaginary problem that follows from incoherent postulates.

e.g. "AI kill switch purists" is not a coherent postulation because the "kill switch" does not exist.

the "kill switch" is a hypothetical proposed in this post:

https://mastodon.social/@firefoxwebdevs/115740500373677782

the "kill switch" is a proposal to satisfy the demand for an opt-in by providing an opt-out. you might think that's a failure to respect the question, and you might even begin to suspect the proposal was in bad faith.

note that Jake, in presenting the kill switch and calling it a kill switch and getting it into all the papers as a kill switch, says he's uncomfortable with the name he's publicised it as. you might think that's oddly incompetent for literally a PR (devrel) person.

the concept as presented imposes multiple false dilemmas.

the LLM stuff should *incredibly obviously* be an extension. this is the purest possible opt-in, despite jake's past attempts to muddy the meaning of "opt-in".

making it an extension is also eminently feasible. There is literally no technical reason it needs to be a browser built-in.

this suggests the reasons are not in any way technical. some person with a name, who has yet to be named, dictated that it would be a built-in. so that's what Mozilla is going with.

why Mozilla went hard AI is entirely unclear. this would have been late 2024? we have no idea who was inspired with this bad idea nor why they were so incredibly keen to force it into the browser.

nor is it clear what Mozilla will do for external LLM services when the AI bubble runs out of venture capital and pops in a year or so, most of the chatbot APIs shut down and whatever remains is 10x the cost at least. but that's a problem for 2027's bonus, not 2026's.

note how the poll provides no option for "no LLM functions built-in to Firefox", in a pathetically transparent attempt to synthesize consent. jake wants to use this poll as evidence of what the user base wants, deliberately leaving out the option he knows directly a lot of them want.

and in conclusion:

1. solve the "kill switch" naming problem by branding it the "brutal and bloody robot murder switch with an option on the executives responsible".
2. make all this shit an extension like they should have a year ago.
3. and your little translator too.

Boosted by jwz:
zzt@mas.to ("[object Object]") wrote:

mozilla: we just don’t know how to satisfy our users’ demands for “no AI”, after all what is AI? translation? spellchecking? TLS? if we start slopcoding features will they demand we disable those too? so many gray areas!

firefox users: if it’s not core browsing functionally make it an add-on that isn’t installed by default. and then consider not writing the add-on if it turns out nobody wants it.

mozilla: I know what I’ll do! I’ll write a poll where one of the options is 🤷, that’ll fix it!

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
zkat@toot.cat ("Kat Marchán 🐈") wrote:

RE: https://toot.cat/@zkat/115850353329435324

My conclusion so far after this really great discussion: We need to stop leaning on licenses almost entirely, and refocus our attention on collective power and collective action.

Organize as developers of Community Software and start finding ways to exert influence on bad actors by having knock-on effects: you misbehave with one project, you get shunned/unsupported/blocked by the entire community.

To do this, we would need to stop acting as isolated islands of individual projects, and more as One Big Faction. We need to talk to each other. We need to make decisions together and have the difficult discussions about what we'll accept and what we won't, and how far we're willing to go to do something about it. There's even opportunity to share and pull resources and time.

Community Software would need to be a big Covenant that we hold ourselves to, that all are welcome into until they threaten the good of what we have built together.

Boosted by jwz:
randahl ("Randahl Fink") wrote:

Important thread: It is not foreigners eating your cats and dogs. It is private equity companies buying up all the vet cliniques, raising prices and forcing families to put down their pets, because treatment would ruin their economy.
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115850320786991662