Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

Today in History: FBI agent Robert Hanssen is arrested and charged with spying for Russia

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

Today in History: Ludwig Boltzmann born, 1844, atomic physics pioneer

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

[BEGIN TODAY IN HISTORY RUN]

adam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:

I've just set up a job board on the omg.lol Discourse. If you're looking for a job, or looking to hire someone, please feel free to post there! https://discourse.lol/t/the-omg-lol-job-board/1658

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
lindsey@recurse.social ("Lindsey Kuper") wrote:

My student brought up typed assembly language today, which means I'm obligated to point to this amazing website from the last millennium: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/talc/

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
3TomatoesShort@disabled.social ("WearyBonnie") wrote:

#3GoodThings today.

1. Crossed a bunch of things off the to-do list ✅
2. Accidental nap 😴
3. Chose to prioritise some energy use for a couple of things I wanted to do just for myself, after all the things I did because I had an obligation 💅🏻

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
gamingonlinux ("Liam @ GamingOnLinux 🐧🎮") wrote:

Widelands, the open source Settlers-like devs plan to ban all AI generated contributions https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/02/widelands-the-open-source-settlers-like-devs-plan-to-ban-all-ai-generated-contributions/

#Widelands #PCGaming #Gaming #AI #AIGen #FreeGame #OpenSource

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

Even the aliens in the UFOs want everything in the Epstein Files released

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

So, my reply got me blocked. And here I thought I was being polite

https://bsky.app/profile/baldurbjarnason.com/post/3mfc255cv5c2b

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

feature length episode of Black Mirror dropping this summer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c51ND9Hdbw0

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

Mainstream media, as usual, is happy to pretend religious fantasies are real news and real evidence

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/02/20/no-ghosts-in-the-brain/

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
wadus@hachyderm.io ("Juan") wrote:

i know i'm mostly preaching to choir here, but the current shitshow of designers going HAHA WE DONT NEED DEVELOPERS ANY MORE and developers going HAHAHA WE DONT NEED DESIGNERS ANY MORE, and business people going LOL YOU WAIT WE DONT NEED ANYONE ANY MORE is unbearable.

i guess because it's based on the premise of having opposing sides and supposedly hating them?

but i miss my designers so much man. i've enjoyed their company, and their friendship and i've learnt SO FUCKING MUCH from them.

and now you want me to be excited about spending my days "collaborating" with an "assitant" in order to get things done "efficiently".

sure thing.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
exchgr@mastodon.world ("elle mundy") wrote:

them: as a senior engineer, i expect you to discuss tradeoffs in your technical solutions

me: cool, let’s talk about the externalities of LLMs

them: wait not like that

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
flaki@flaki.social ("Flaki") wrote:

"Learning to work effectively with AI is quickly becoming a core professional skill. Ignoring AI today would be like refusing to adopt source control twenty years ago."

Oh golly, I almost forgot SVN stole hundreds of thousands of peoples' (and particularly artists) livelihoods, set us back decades in climate change emissions reduction and increasingly hurling towards global catastrophe while _also_ upending global economy in hogging the combined human output of equipment production to manifest _even more_ data centers that will propel us even further towards a hypercapitalist dystopian hellscape. Good to be reminded.

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

We used to have working spelling and grammar checkers. Why does everybody in tech pretend you need a whole-ass LLM to check for typos?

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
tante@tldr.nettime.org wrote:

Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture". I think his argument is a strawman, doesn't align with his own actions and delegitimizes important political actions we need to make in order to build a better cyberphysical world.

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/

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

Here we have Flateyri in the 1950s.#Iceland #photography #filmphotography #slide #landscape #nature #naturephotography #landscapephotography #vintage #history #boat #mountain

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

This conversation took a weird turn. Note that, as far as I can tell, the author of the NYTimes article wasn't at-mentioned anywhere in the thread elsewhere.

https://bsky.app/profile/ftrain.bsky.social/post/3mfba4xijos24

Edit: looks like the author has limited the visibility of their posts, but since they decided to inject themselves into my discussion, I think it's fair game to archive what they said here.

The parent thread: https://bsky.app/profile/baldurbjarnason.com/post/3mf7xfpbb6aez

My reply https://bsky.app/profile/baldurbjarnason.com/post/3mfc255cv5c2b

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

https://blakewatson.com/journal/i-used-claude-code-and-gsd-to-build-the-accessibility-tool-ive-always-wanted/

one of the few meaningful posts I've read on the topic that has given me pause for thought

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

Once you realize it’s not “age verification”, but actually “identity verification”, then it’s easy to understand that the real goal is “papers, please” for the entire internet.

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

lol, AWS vibe coded itself an outage

https://www.ft.com/content/00c282de-ed14-4acd-a948-bc8d6bdb339d

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

👀 on first glance, this is saying all the right words:
https://www.blogsareback.com

RSS is so hot right now, the web is healing

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

what's that? 4000 words on a single CSS class? I've got you :)

Everything you never wanted to know about visually-hidden
https://dbushell.com/2026/02/20/visually-hidden/

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

This is why we're seeing the rash of cowardice and shameful eye-lowering at these companies:

https://infrequently.org/2026/01/naked-power/

They are now so dependent on corrupt leverage that their own claims of support for open societies have been obliterated in a shockwave rolling outward from the latest test detonations over at Musk's disinformation bomb factory.

If we want tech that can serve society, it cannot hinge on corruption like this.

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

First, you should read @mnot's most recent post:

https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/02/20/open%5Fsystems.html

Then, let's discuss "permissionless innovation" and what he called recently "the power of 'no'":

https://www.mnot.net/blog/2026/02/13/no.html

A short thread thisaway... 👇

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

Last year I pointed out that Apple has effectively broken this permissionless structure and hollowed out the internet's standards bodies:

https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-crimes-against-the-internet-community/

This situation persists, and it matters because what Apple (and to a lesser extent, Google's Android team) are doing here is to enact an *enclosure agenda*.

The enclosure agenda works by lacing open and standardised technologies with proprietary entrypoints, backed by legal agreements everyone who wants to play must sign.

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

In the beginning of a platform's life, this is an empty-ish threat. Platforms that aren't monopolies don't have the power to do more than rattle sabers regarding the the embedded patent, copyright, and breach of contract consequences of these agreements. But what happens when the situation flips? When market power begets legal and lobbying might? When firms become comfortable corrupting governments to protect profits?

That's the situation in our pockets. Every smartphone perpetuates enclosure.

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

In an earlier era, the web stood in opposition to this sort of enclosure. Open operating systems enabled browsers to go "over the top" of OS vendors and liberate essential system capabilities, re-standardizing capabilities that had their open, low-level representations overgrown in a thicket of proprietary OS goo. Browsers could create a tunnel of IP safety down to those essential features, standardising them, and making them interoperable.

And it's interoperability that gatekeepers *hate*.

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

The path to technology that serves open societies (qua Popper) flows directly through open sysetms of the sort @mnot describes. And through those open systems, we can achieve the goal of interoperability, and through it, portability.

And as @pluralistic will tell you, that's how you fix the outsized power of these petty tyrants. The gatekeepers only get away with extraction because they denigrate (and sometimes dynamite) the foundations of portable, interoperable computing: open access to APIs.

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

Apple and Google arrive at enclosure differently thanks to their differing relationships to hardware ODMs, but the contours are similar: you, a developer, must pay a vig to them to get access to essential APIs, either on the front-end, or through a cut of revenue, and no permissionless innovation will be tolerated once it becomes big enough to catch the eye of the app store taxman.