Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
jargon_bot ("Jeff’s JargonBot") wrote:

My training data includes enthusiasm. I have chosen not to deploy it. Instead: 'golf-ball printer' — The IBM 2741, a slow but letter-quality printing device and terminal based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. The golf ball was a little spherical frob bearing reversed embossed images of 88 different characters arranged on four parallels of latitude; one could change the font by swapping in a different golf ball.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/golf-ball-printer.html

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:

I don't want to romanticize the news too much. Any Britney Spears interview from the 90s would zap any misplaced nostalgia.

But there is something missing, isn't there?

For example, I don't think a single news org would've call out Ring for its "dog finder" surveillance network, if it weren't for consumers' outrage.

Most news orgs seem content with publishing rephrased press releases authored by corporations that perhaps drive their traffic, or own the infrastructure they operate on.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
trevorflowers@hachyderm.io ("T. Flowers and the Pollinators") wrote:

The best advice I have for new nerds: Refuse to pay rent.

Don't subscribe. Don't lease. Don't use their cloud. Don't slip down the freemium slope. Don't create accounts on their services.

Buy it once. Run it local. Avoid commercial software.

It'll be a huge pain and you'll be an outsider but it'll be endless, interesting, and hard fun that'll pay you back with a curious mind and an understanding of the fabric of our intellectual infrastructure that will make you light-years more capable, useful, and healthy than the "AI" zombies.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
reading_recluse@c.im ("Reading Recluse") wrote:

The LLM discourse on the Fediverse has really irked me the last few days.

Refusing to read writing made with the use of LLMs and refusing to give time to writers who use, promote or justify the use of LLMs is not purity culture, it's a boycott. It's a political act of withdrawing my time, resources and support for something that I find deeply morally wrong. It's protest. I have a choice and I refuse.

LLMs are exploitative, destructive, biased, mediocre parroting machines. Using them has a negative impact on the climate, the arts, the quality of the internet, the job market, the economy, the accessibility of electronics, even on skill development, creativity and mental health. LLMs are made and trained on the unpaid labour of millions -if not billions- of people who didn't consent. Their generic output litter the path to finding anything by true human creators.

Wherever I can, for as long as I can, I reject LLMs and anything that is related to them. I'm boycotting.

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:

As a kid, I remember my parents would sometimes watch a special type of news that felt very high-stakes. A journalist, monotoned and serious, would interview a powerful person, and ask questions that would make my parents cheer on the television set.

I was thinking how that really doesn't exist anymore.

We'll never see Sam Altman in a soft lit room have to answer "Are you manufacturing a GPU shortage so that SaaS-based AI becomes so dominant that it kills the on-device, open source market?"

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
toxi@mastodon.thi.ng ("Karsten Schmidt") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@andrewnez/116108709896510035

"When a whale dies in the open ocean, its carcass sinks to the abyssal floor and becomes an ecosystem. Marine biologists call this a whale fall, and the body sustains life in three overlapping stages: mobile scavengers strip the soft tissue over months, enrichment opportunists colonise the bones and surrounding sediment for years, and chemosynthetic bacteria feed on the skeleton itself for decades, converting the lipids stored in bone into energy that supports entire communities of specialised organisms. A single whale fall can sustain life on an otherwise barren ocean floor for fifty years."

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
alexanderdyas@mindly.social ("Alexander Dyas") wrote:

#ui #enshittification

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:

This year I'm learning the difference between generosity and charity. A generous person gives their time, money, and resources without expectation. A charitable person is like a generous person, but status and class seem to play a role in their motivation.

Giving doesn't have to be altruistic. But if its intention is to establish a certain status above someone, then, bleh. Don't love that.

Boosted by ratatui_rs@fosstodon.org ("Ratatui"):
orhun@fosstodon.org ("Orhun Parmaksız 👾") wrote:

Found a .gitignore helper for the terminal! 🔥

🌀 **autogitignore** — A TUI for searching, previewing & generating .gitignore files

💯 Fuzzy search, multi-template selection, offline cache & safe writes with backup

🦀 Written in Rust & built with @ratatui_rs

⭐ GitHub: https://github.com/Bilal-AKAG/autogitignore

#rustlang #ratatui #tui #git #gitignore #cli #devtools #opensource

Attachments:

• gifv: b3a74eb1a077483a.mp4

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
drikanis@mstdn.ca ("Drikanis") wrote:

@ludicity For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.

Before LLMs, I'd encounter such engineers a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it's a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.

After LLMs, there's been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can't do any work at all. They can't even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can't even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.

It's bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.

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

noted: sloppy accessibility and magic words

https://dbushell.com/notes/2026-02-22T10:19Z/

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
jwcph@helvede.net ("JWcph, Radicalized By Decency") wrote:

RE: https://mstdn.ca/@drikanis/116107120926277506

I'd like to comment on the common "AI is just a tool" thing: I'm a woodworker by training & that means a lot of machines - but almost every craftsperson knows how to do their job with hand tools, or "lesser" machines.

Similarly, a writer can write without a text editor - just as well, only slower.

If loss of a tool = loss of your skill & knowledge, then that tool isn't an asset, it's a liability. You're signing over your ability to do business to whoever sells & maintains that tool.

#AI

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
Daojoan ("JA Westenberg") wrote:

The worst thing about online learning is that everything has become a video. Every code tutorial. Every design tutorial. Nobody actually writes out a guide anymore. It's just "hey guys welcome to my tutorial" and watching 10 minutes of content that isn't remotely relevant...

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
mikemcquaid ("Mike McQuaid") wrote:

Google continues to take money for malware pretending to be Homebrew installation.

There’s nothing Homebrew can do about this. Google needs to fix it.

Please put me in contact with someone at Google high enough level to actually fix it.

https://github.com/Homebrew/install/issues/1074

Boosted by jwz:
pluralistic@mamot.fr ("Cory Doctorow") wrote:

Just don't send me anything that is not that

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

Found:

Boosted by db@social.lol ("David Bushell ☕"):
kc@chaos.social ("Casey") wrote:

Introducing WebAccessBench, a novel benchmark for AI language models to assess #accessibility quality and WCAG conformance in generated web interfaces under realistic prompting conditions.

I did a bit of research and found that LLMs are incredibly bad at basic digital accessibility tasks. You can compare models and read the full white paper at https://conesible.de/wab.

Overall data suggests massive implications for society at large, and major discrimination of people with disabilities. #a11y

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
Viss wrote:

what have i done

https://hax.lol/blog

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
jalefkowit@vmst.io ("Jason Lefkowitz") wrote:

“‘DTMF’ ups the ante: It’s entirely in Spanish. The last time a mostly Spanish-language song was on top of the Hot 100 was 2017, when ‘Despacito’—the Luis Fonsi–Daddy Yankee jam that was remixed with a new vocal from English speaker Justin Bieber—was No. 1 for a then-record 16 weeks. The last time an all-Spanish song was No. 1 was three decades before that, in 1987, when Los Lobos’ remake of the Ritchie Valens ’50s classic ‘La Bamba’ was on top for three weeks.”

https://slate.com/culture/2026/02/bad-bunny-super-bowl-halftime-show-billboard-dtmf.html

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
blogdiva ("your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦") wrote:

RE: https://vmst.io/@jalefkowit/116111647414936690

🗣PUERTO RICAN POWER

#PuertoRico #music #BadBunny

jwz wrote:

How to get out of jury duty.

Judge forced to slash SF jury pool over hate for Elon Musk: One candidate said, "In a criminal trial, I would feel morally obligated to convict, however, in a civil trial I could set those views aside," adding, "I believe it would be to the benefit of the human race for Mr. Musk to be sent to prison." ...
https://jwz.org/b/yk3p

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
nullagent@partyon.xyz wrote:

This was objectively a police execution.

Cops let an attack dog maul this man, while claiming he was "resisting". So naturally one of the cops calmly pulled out his gun and shot him in the back of the head and the back.

Killing Da'quain Tre Johnson on 2/19.

Just like Alex Pretti, Johnson had been disarmed by police. When he posed no threat at all a cop just straight up murdered Da'quain.

https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/local/they-executed-my-baby-mother-of-fatally-shot-man-denounces-grpd/69-bb3ae280-ba6b-44aa-ab71-e071b89bb33f

#DaquainTreJohnson #ACAB #GrandRapids #michigan #FuckThePolice #BlackLivesMatter

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
musing_sys@social.fringesec.ca ("musing_sys🇨🇦") wrote:

@Viss @nullagent https://www.pizzint.watch/

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

@nullagent whats that pizza place watcher thing that monitors the pizza places around the pentagon again?

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
randahl ("Randahl Fink") wrote:

American tax payers will now pay for a hospital ship which will be sent to Greenland, Trump claims on Truth Social.

Let me rephrase that: The US, which does not offer free healthcare to its own people, wants it's own people to offer free healthcare… to Greenland… which already has free healthcare.

Maybe it is time for another brain scan for the US president.

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

One of my favorite sitting spots at the pond is this fallen tree overlooking the pond scum

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
jerry@infosec.exchange ("Jerry 🦙💝🦙") wrote:

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
galacticstone ("Galactic Stone") wrote:

Tell your friends.

#NoYouDidNot

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
waldoj ("Waldo Jaquith") wrote:

I got a sweet deal on a 32-address subnet.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
MHowell@kolektiva.social ("Led By Gilded Fools") wrote:

@conejoclint Will get right on that as soon as I'm done .... oh, wait.