Mastodon Feed
jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
I need to scan a snap or two from those days of silver crystals, chemicals, and darkrooms.
Mastodon FeedMastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
truth in posting: I volunteered with the San Francisco chapter of the"Rainbow Coalition" in the late 1980s & through the 90s. we turned out the camera ready copy for the newsletter at night in an office where I worked (New College of California), because I had keys and the office had a Mac with QuarkExpress page layout software and a laser printer.
Quark would let us chop pages into “tiles” and print them, and then we would physically paste them together into camera-ready newsprint-size sheets for the photo offset folks. painful, but it worked and we got a semi-pro product out. #SMH
Mastodon Feedjsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
RIP, Rev Jesse Jackson… a tireless advocate for the disenfranchised and the poor, Jesse Jackson “walked the walk” and struggled for jobs & justice his whole life long. his light has gone out of the world far too soon.
💔
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:
The Jackson I remember.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/02/17/jesse-jackson-has-died/
Mastodon Feedadam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:
“America is more like a quilt—many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the Black, the Arab, the Jew, the Woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt.”
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:
If you can't understand gene duplication, you're never going to understand evolution.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
concretedog wrote:
KLAXXON! #SOURCE issue 4 "Airwaves and Airplanes" is out! Good grief that's taken a while! Anyway in this issue we have a beginners tutorial for the fabulous @gnuradio we also get started with #OpenVSP which is #NASA's #opensource vehicle sketchbook and it's rounded out with a look at a new @FreeCAD workbench, Detessellate which helps reverse engineer Mesh to #CAD files. We've also tweaked a few things on the website! https://sourcemag.co.uk/
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
lrhodes@merveilles.town ("⁂ L. Rhodes") wrote:
Gen AI is an expensive way to create text and images. Right now, much of that cost is being subsidized and hidden, but it will eventually need to be paid. Because charging the actual cost will likely negate most of the value proposition of genAI, the companies that run the big models are focused on altering the social and economic context so that there are big external costs to opting out. E.g. getting companies to fire staff makes it difficult to pivot back away from AI because hiring and training replacement staff can be difficult and costly. Hence, the huge rush and hysterical sense of urgency around adoption: the demand for profitability is an approaching tidal wave, and they need to lock entire industries in before that wave hits.
That's why resistance IN THE PRESENT counts for a great deal. Right now, we have the approaching wave in our favor, and they're counting on cultivating enough dependence before it hits that we'll have no choice to accept the actual costs. The closer they get to locking society into dependence on hyperscale AI systems, the more difficult it becomes to opt out of even the plainly dystopian uses of the technology. And the longer we "wait and see," the less say we may ultimately have in how this technology shapes our society.
Mastodon FeedToday we're sharing the first in a series of three posts from our leadership team, starting with @mellifluousbox discussing our mission, and priorities for 2026. Stay tuned this week for more.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2026/02/connecting-the-world-through-thriving-online-communities/
Mastodon Feedjscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:
HELLO THREADS PEOPLE
I LIKE YOU
BUT NOT, LIKE, IN A SEXY WAY
THAT WOULD BE WEIRD
JUST, LIKE, IN A WE'RE PALS WAY
THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO KNOW
OKAY BYE
PS HERE IS A CAT PICTURE
Mastodon FeedBoosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
bontchev@infosec.exchange ("VessOnSecurity") wrote:
Economics in one lesson.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
polyfloyd@hsnl.social wrote:
Omg, I think I have successfully setup a Matrix Homeserver 😱
I have heard that it is hard to set up Synapse, but NixOS did a lot of the heavy lifting here
Mastodon FeedBoosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
emilymbender@dair-community.social ("Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)") wrote:
RE: https://dair-community.social/@DAIR/116081868712992909
Merch! Merch! Merch!
Mastodon Feedbaldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:
I can only think of a few major offsetting forces:
- If the EU invests in replacing US software, bolstering the EU job market.
- China might have substantial unfulfilled domestic demand for software, propping up their job market
- Companies might find that declining software quality harms their bottom-line, leading to a Y2K-style investment in fixing their software stacksBut those don't seem likely to do more than partially offset the decline
Kind of hoping I'm missing something
Mastodon Feedbaldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:
If the model impact is largely fictitious, meaning this is all a scam and the perceived benefit is just a clusterfuck of cognitive hazards, then the financial bubble pop will be devastating, tech as an industry will largely be destroyed, and trust in software will be zero, collapsing the job market
Mastodon Feedbaldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:
If the models increase output but are flawed, as in they produce too many defects or have major quality issues, Akerlof's market for lemons kicks in, bad products drive out good, value of software in the market heads south, collapsing the job market
Mastodon Feedbaldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:
If you model the impact of working LLM coding tools with no bottlenecks, then the increase in productivity massively increases the supply of undifferentiated software and the prices you can charge for any software drops through the floor, collapsing the job market
Mastodon Feedbaldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:
If you model the impact of working LLM coding tools (big increase in productivity, little downside) where the bottlenecks are largely outside of coding, increases in coding automation mostly just reduce the need for labour. I.e. 10x increase means you need 10x fewer coders, collapsing the job market
Mastodon Feedbaldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:
Getting a bit depressed as, no matter how I slice it, basic economics would seem to indicate that the software developer job market is largely fucked no matter what happens now. No matter whether the LLM tools work or not and no matter what happens to the bubble
(short thread)
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
marymessall@mendeddrum.org wrote:
I'm a woman in science, and I have ordered stuff from Adafruit before. But knowing you're using AI to design it DOES make me less likely to order from you in the future. Not because "women shouldn't use tools," but because AI is not a trustworthy tool.
Tell me you built a house with a glue gun instead of a nail gun, and I won't want to buy the house. Nothing to do with the gender of the person holding the glue gun.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
doriantaylor wrote:
in the 90s reeves and nass published a book (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo3618528.html) arguing that people treat computers like other people
@mralancooper noted (in his 1999 book, which is how i know about it) that computers are assholes, so you're bound to pick up asshole behaviour if you hang around them too much
(and now computers are lying sycophants so that's probably great)
(said book btw: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0672326140)
Mastodon FeedBoosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
PavelASamsonov ("Pavel A. Samsonov") wrote:
“AI can make mistakes” might as well be the slogan of our era. Even boosters admit that you need to spin the vibe code slot machine a few times to get a jackpot.
An employee with that degree of consistency would be fired.
So how do we redirect some of that unlimited grace from machines to humans?
Mastodon FeedBoosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁"):
rohitfarmer@fosstodon.org ("Rohit Farmer, Ph.D.") wrote:
@adele I was introduced to Gemini using pollux.casa. I had my capsule hosted on it before moving to my own server. I can vouch for this service.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
vmbrasseur@social.vmbrasseur.com ("VM (Vicky) Brasseur") wrote:
Saw a Linkedin post from someone saying their job is now being a (headcount-unlimited) manager of agents who program things poorly but can be reprimanded and fired easily.
They saw this as a fantastic thing. I honestly felt ill reading it, partly because previously I'd believed this person ethical. I was wrong.
"They do bad work but I can yell at them and 'fire' them easily" is a structurally unsound basis for building products, regardless of the medium used for that construction.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
tante@tldr.nettime.org wrote:
RE: https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/02/17/big-tech-greenwashing-report/
Ketan Joshi, who has been on the beat for a long time, actually looked into the story of if "AI" can "solve climate change". Conceptually as well as evidence based.
"We found that most of the ‘benefit’ tends to relate to older, smaller and leaner forms of machine learning, what has been called ‘traditional AI’, while we also know that most of the new harm is likely stemming from consumer generative AI over-deployment."
Super worth reading and sharing around.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
hdv@front-end.social ("Hidde") wrote:
one of biggest icks with AI hype from companies like Microsoft probably comes from my experience with their regular features in their regular software.
Like, I am manually copy pasting events in Outlook because it cannot share a subscribed calendar with my colleagues, why would I trust an org that ships UX like that to do magic?
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
fdroidorg@floss.social ("F-Droid") wrote:
The #FDroid website has a new banner on top to remind visitors that #Google did not change course and #Android will be locked-down in under 200 days.
If you care about the freedom to control your devices and care about the privacy of you data, please contact your representative and make your voice heard.
https://keepandroidopen.org/ (thanks @marcprux) has the resources to guide you.
We know users will rarely visit the site so the Client(s) will get a banner soon too.
Thank you for your support!
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
dockerr ("El Dockerr") wrote:
Running out of DSP slices on your FPGA? I’ve been experimenting with Low-Rank Approximations for 3x3 Convolutions to solve exactly that.
My latest project replaces standard matrix multiplications with learned, hardware-friendly bit-shifts.
The result:
• 33% reduction in DSP usage (2 Muls instead of 3)
• <1% error (SSIM > 0.99)
• Ideal for SWaP-C constrained edge perception.https://www.dockerr.blog/blog/lowrank-hardware-approximation
#FPGA #VHDL #EmbeddedSystems #ComputerVision #EdgeAI #OpenScience #Engineering
Mastodon FeedBoosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:
All watched over by machines of loving grace but it's all the creatures big and (especially) small we have coevolved with that keep this tiny oasis of life in a vast cold universe thriving.
Mastodon Feedadele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁") wrote:
🌟 Pollux is one of the main stars in the Gemini constellation.
🏠 Casa means home.pollux.casa = your home in the Gemini constellation.
Free Gemini capsule hosting. No server to manage.
You can get:
- gemini://yourname.pollux.casa/
- Also on https:// (for friends not on Gemini yet)
- SFTP to upload your content
- Free to leave anytime, take your capsule with youThe whole thing runs on a small Intel NUC in my home:
Celeron N2830. 4GB RAM. ADSL.110 capsules. Still going. 🚀
Because the SmolWeb doesn't need big iron.
What would you name your capsule on gemini://pollux.casa/