Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

Aunt Edna? Is that you?

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/01/09/the-more-things-change-the-more-they-stay-the-same/

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

I often ask myself this very question

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
Jdm2@boriken.social ("jdm2 🇵🇷") wrote:

@fromjason you can also see this with the pandemic. Once the Dems saw a benefit against the first Trump admin to embrace and promote public health measures, they went all in.

But it is purely transactional. Once they extract all value by canalizing discontent towards electoralism, they promptly abandon these causes. And we all have to deal with the fallout one way or another.

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

not enough is said about the privilege of being able to pay $200/month (still a subsidised price) for "AI" coding, even $20 is beyond most of the world

but tell me again how AI will be writing all the code in 12 months

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
pomarede ("Daniel Pomarède") wrote:

It's Stephen Hawking's birthday. The occasion to share this fantastic video he produced as part of his Genius documentatry series. Hawking elaborates on our place in the Universe, including our membership to the Laniakea supercluster of galaxies that we discovered back in 2014.

The complete documentary: https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/hawking%5Fgenius%5Fep06%5Ffull/where-are-we-full-episode-genius-by-stephen-hawking/

#StephenHawking #Cosmology #Laniakea #LaniakeaSupercluster #galaxies #astrodon #astronomy #astrophysics #science #cosmography

Attachments:

• video: An extract of a video produced by Stephen Hawking describing our cosmography and the hiearchy of structures to which we belong.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
maxleibman@beige.party ("Max Leibman") wrote:

Oh, no, you found a flaw in the logic of my joke! Now I’m going to prison.

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

Lovely winter scenery.#Iceland #photography #landscape #nature #naturephotography #landscapephotography #abandoned #decay #lake #sky

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

These photos are kind of the "leftovers". Not bad photos, per se, but don't work quite as well as I had hoped they would when I took them. I'll probably need to revisit them at a later date. #photos #iceland

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

Last of this batch of bird photos. A pair of pigeons perch on a street light. #iceland #bird #birds

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

blogged: Death to Scroll Fade!

https://dbushell.com/2026/01/09/death-to-scroll-fade/

— no fun and games this year my blog is getting serious 😐

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
babe@glitterkitten.co.uk ("tiddy roosevelt") wrote:

Fan of my tits? Some are now up in my shop! https://wagtails.art/shop/

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

Cool. Relatedly, the Speaker of the House is a pathetic groveling coward

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/senate-votes-display-jan-6-plaque-house-refuses-hang-capitol-rcna253093

Boosted by jwz:
gsuberland@chaos.social ("Graham Sutherland / Polynomial") wrote:

M

Boosted by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
cloudhop@equestria.social ("Erik McClure") wrote:

Bose recently did an unambiguously good thing, by publishing the API for the audio hardware they were originally going to brick: https://www.theverge.com/news/858501/bose-soundtouch-smart-speakers-open-source

However, I've seen some people say "don't praise Bose for this, they didn't do this until there was backlash".

SHUT UP. Shut the FUCK UP. I'm DONE living in a society where you get dragged through hell if you make a mistake, EVEN AFTER YOU CORRECT THE MISTAKE. I'm so fucking tired of hearing stupid excuses for this kind of puritanism like "they should've known better" NOBODY KNOWS BETTER UNTIL *AFTER THEY MAKE THE MISTAKE*. THAT'S HOW LEARNING *WORKS*.

And before you say "Companies aren't your friend" PUNISHING THEM FOR FIXING THEIR MISTAKES WON'T MAKE THEM DO THE RIGHT THING EITHER. If other people, or companies, see someone get punished for both messing up AND fixing the mistake, they just won't bother at all!

People HAVE to be allowed to make mistakes. They HAVE to be given a chance to improve.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
ebel@moytura.org ("ebel aurora") wrote:

I hope 2026 treats you the way you treat trans women

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
bodil@treehouse.systems ("Bodil") wrote:

I'm watching people in my feed screaming at each other over Firefox's "AI kill switch" this morning with some trepidation.

As far as I'm concerned, Firefox already has an AI kill switch. It's called browser.ml.chat.enabled, I set it to false more or less the day it appeared, it hasn't mysteriously popped back on since, despite angry posts to the contrary, and that's been that for me. It's disabled every "AI" feature I find objectionable. I'd prefer if Mozilla leadership would sync up with reality on occasion and stop deciding to put this paid placement trash into Firefox in the first place, but at least there's a reliable way to get rid of it.

Everything else people have been screaming at Mozilla about? I'm not sure I see the problem. The little model you can download to summarise web pages for you? I wouldn't trust it, and so I don't think it's necessarily a productive use of Firefox devs' time, but at least it's opt-in. The other little model you can download to help organise your tab groups? I don't use it much, but this one seems more practical, and it's also opt-in, despite the occasional angry report of it slowing down people's browsers even without having been downloaded. Liek, bro, maybe try closing a Slack tab or two.

I don't want ChatGPT in my browser, or Claude, or any kind of world burning data centre LLM pretending to be our new AI god. browser.ml.chat.enabled = false does that for me. It would be even better if it wasn't there in the first place. But tiny, focused ML models doing nominally useful things? I not only do not see the problem there, I'd like some of them to be part of the Web platform rather than just the browser. I've been wishing since they launched them that Mozilla would make an API available to web sites out of those translation models of theirs, for instance.

I'm monitoring the situation, as European heads of state like to say, but so far, despite the posturings of their C-suite types, it doesn't seem like any critical Mozilla resources are being diverted away from maintaining the Web platform into AI boosterism. Every new Firefox changelog is delivering on what it should be delivering on, and it's only occasionally that I see a new "AI" feature advertised. Compare that to a product like VSCode, which has been completely consumed by the cancer of slop production with only one in a hundred changelog entries being about building an actual damned code editor, and I'm not feeling all that alarmed about Firefox just yet.

I know this is Mastodon, but sometimes I just wish people would entertain having opinions that can have some nuance in between "burn the world down so the AGI can live" and "Butlerian Jihad now," you know?

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
anirvan ("Anirvan Chatterjee") wrote:

"Trump didn’t tell Congress about the Venezuela attack before it happened. But he did claim to tell oil executives. Let that sink in. The president reportedly informed private oil companies about a military invasion before informing the people’s elected representatives. So who does the government work for, exactly?"

https://heated.world/p/its-time-to-embrace-climate-conspiracy

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
splendorr ("nina splendorr 🌻🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

reminder:

Boosted by jwz:
hannah@posts.rat.pictures ("historic drystone sheep dyke") wrote:

Really starting to get why dante wrote thousands of lines of poetry describing the eternal torture of various political figures of his time

Boosted by NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈"):
fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

It's fucking egregious that state sponsored violence is so commonplace in our country, so engrained in our culture, that you can defend loss of life by simply reminding people that if you make a mistake, if your fight or flight kicks in while being charged at by a cop and you flee, your murder is justified.

A trained cop can murder someone out of fear. But a regular citizen must have the nerves of a navy seal when interacting with a man who can kill you then go on paid vacation.

#ICE

Boosted by NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈"):
zkat@toot.cat ("Kat Marchán 🐈") wrote:

Thinking of starting a list of popular open source software developed using LLMs and by LLM boosters, along with alternatives that can be tried instead. LLM in FOSS should be socially shunned.

Anyone interested?

Update: https://codeberg.org/gen-ai-transparency/open-slopware alright, it's up. Patches welcome! Please send me your PRs at your leisure.

#foss #opensource #genai

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

@zkat Oh no, nushell. 😞

Boosted by zkat@toot.cat ("Kat Marchán 🐈"):
catsalad@infosec.exchange ("Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) :paw:⁠:paw:") wrote:

Ask your vet if cat extensions are right for you.

Boosted by jwz:
netblocks ("NetBlocks") wrote:

⚠️ Update: #Iran has now been offline for 12 hours with national connectivity flatlining at ~1% of ordinary levels, after authorities imposed a nationwide internet blackout in an attempt to suppress sweeping protests while covering up reports of regime brutality 📉

jwz wrote:

Eyeball Landscape.

It has only just come to my attention that the Brazil "eyeball" sequence was actually filmed. I may need to make adjustments to the Peepers screensaver.
https://jwz.org/b/yk1g

Boosted by jwz:
angiebaby@mas.to ("Angie") wrote:

The number of Gestapo in Germany was 32,000. The population was 70 million. That's one Gestapo for every 2200 citizens.

The number of ICE agents is 20,000. The population of the US is 348 million. That's one ICE agent for every 17,000 citizens.

There are more of us.

#USPol

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
indivisibleteam ("Indivisible ❌👑") wrote:

We’re mobilizing across the country this weekend to honor Renee Nicole Good, demand accountability for ICE’s killing of Renee, and make visible the human cost of ICE’s terror: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F8Iu3kLxOuzXax%5FAwrQgiOtggsEtasx4-Wvi9oNavtg/edit?usp=drivesdk

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

RE: https://syzito.xyz/@selzero/115862360219972810

If/when we get a democrat administration again, they'll fear monger crime and set record breaking budgets for ICE and police again, and again we'll hear the rationale that we must do this to court white moderates, and again, we'll demand that Black and brown people fall in line.

This anger we feel today will fade, like the anger after George Floyd's murder, and it'll be the same thing over and over.

How can anyone not get how infuriating that is?

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place ("Tom Forsyth") wrote:

Recent discussion about the perils of doors in gamedev reminded me of a bug caused by a door in a game you may have heard of called "Half Life 2". Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
evacide@hachyderm.io wrote:

Ten years ago, if someone had told me that tech policy bloggers would be calling for ICE to be abolished, I would have thought it very unlikely.

"Abolish ICE" is an increasingly mainstream and extremely correct position.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/08/abolish-ice-before-they-kill-again-impeach-trump-noem-before-they-incite-more-murder/