like I have a young child and nothing would please me more than to put their birthday into the OS and then let them go nuts on the internet doing whatever they want, but my values (no child should be allowed to access a chatbot under any circumstances, roblox should be a crime, but children should be allowed to read wikipedia pages about human anatomy if they want) are just not reflected in our social fabric because all age-related internet stuff is just a series of very frustrating moral panics
while I have a level of sympathy for the california/colorado style of age-verification law, and I think many reactions against it are overheated, at the end of the day we still have to oppose stuff like this because society's ideas of what ought to be age-gated are just wrong on the merits. the goal is to ban access to perfectly normal healthy things like queer communities and still allow kids access to fucked-up dangerous adults-only stuff like catholicism and the president of the united states
pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:
These UMM students are brilliant and can cross flies like pros.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/03/19/kudos-to-my-2026-genetics-students/
fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:
RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/116257260071112037
The media are too in love with the "AI is a sentient being" story hook to ever give it up, I fear.
Whether they care or not, the framing of these types of stories by tech news blogs is priming us Americans to one day demand more things be taken from us.
We're one brown guy pictured near a set of daisy-chained Mac Minis away from politicians openly asking whether or not local computational power is too dangerous for the average American to own privately.
Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
seanm@infosec.exchange ("Sean") wrote:
RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/116257260071112037
More accurate title: Human Meta developer caused security incident by following GenAI advice and lack of secure Meta development controls
This was not a "rogue AI" that misbehaved. The GenAI bot was performing as expected: providing believable, yet garbage and dangerous output.
More importantly, it was a human that performed the actual changes by acting on inaccurate GenAI information and lack of technical controls and policies by Meta. It should be clear by now that GenAI output is not to be trusted, yet this human followed the GenAI output without properly understanding or validating the provided information. Additionally, Meta's development controls and security tools failed to stop the harmful changes from being made by the human.
Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:
I Am Not a Vending Machine for Trauma I am trying to take care of my family and future just like anybody
Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:
A lot of people in tech want me to produce more work but get upset if I talk about what it costs me to produce work, I really hope eventually we can get a little bit better at accepting that social, cultural, psychological work is real work
fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:
Anytime someone calls out movie theaters for being way too expensive, there's always that one comment like "have you tried making your theater-going experience worse in every way to better afford it?"
slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:
ICYMI, all of the arguments the mobile duopolists make to justify their chokehold over mobile software are bullshit, starting with security. Cutting off side loading furthers the coverup of native app insecurity:
https://infrequently.org/2026/01/naked-power/#the-security-argument
MADA hijinks (look it up), nerfing PWAs in Play, and failure to open up WebAPKs is a funhouse mirror of Apple's anti-web strategy.
Portability and interoperability are the duopolist's enemies, so a safe, powerful web is kryptonite.
/cc @owa @pluralistic
fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:
Got my jumbo A4 notebook. I’m excited to take jumbo notes for my jumbo thoughts.
Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
grote@chaos.social ("Torsten Grote") wrote:
Google has news on what you will need to do for still being able to sideload apps:
* enable developer options
* confirm that you are not tricked
* restart phone and re-authenticate
* wait one day
* confirm with biometrics that you know what you are doing
* decide if you only want unrestricted installs for 1 week or forever
* confirm that you accept the risks
* enjoy the few apps that still have developers motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with this
slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:
You might think that Google's latest Android moves are designed to undercut choice and alt OEM/ODM ecosystems that could challenge Play...:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/897420/android-sideloading-unverified-developers-process
But rest assured, there's *plenty* of malware choice inside the walled garden:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/study-reveals-googles-play-store-is-main-distributor-of-malicious-apps
Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
bluewinds@tech.lgbt ("BlueWinds") wrote:
https://mstdn.social/@jschauma/116251321191395352
Replace "senior staff" with "people working in the ecosystem".
People who care and do hard work are being pushed out to the margins everywhere right now. :/
The best privacy money can buy.
North Oaks, Minnesota is the only city in the United States that is not on Google Maps Street View. YouTube documentarian Chris Parr, who grew up not too far from North Oaks, set out to change that earlier this year....
https://jwz.org/b/yk4s
Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
nedbat@hachyderm.io ("Ned Batchelder") wrote:
TBH, my first thought when I read the news about OpenAI acquiring Astral was, "there goes my productivity today"
Obviously I have a lot of feelings about OpenAI acquiring Astral but I am going to try not to do much Discourse today, on account of there's not much to do about it and everybody's feelings are probably pretty raw at the moment. I am also going to *try* and wait to have much in the way of commentary until there's a better picture of what concrete influence the acquisition will have.
Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
skinnylatte@hachyderm.io ("Adrianna Tan") wrote:
GDS is hiring a lead designer for gov.uk
Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
hynek ("Hynek Schlawack") wrote:
And while we're releasing, here's a double-feature, mostly to avoid GitHub Actions complaining about deprecated actions:
- https://github.com/hynek/build-and-inspect-python-package/releases/tag/v2.15.0
- https://github.com/hynek/setup-cached-uv/releases/tag/v2.4.0
If you sometimes have trouble building your #Python packages in CI and would like better introspection and debugability, definitely check out build-and-inspect-python-package!
Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
xgranade@wandering.shop ("Cassandra is only carbon now") wrote:
The main reason I was fine using uv was that it did a very good job of following the PEPs when they existed, and giving clear, transparent reasons for not doing so when they made exceptions (like why they didn't adopt pylock.toml).
Other than PDM, though, there's just so little in the way of Python package management tooling that does a good job of bootstrapping and for declaratively managing venvs.
Boosted by jwz:
nikitonsky@mastodon.online ("Niki Tonsky") wrote:
@rakhim more like
Boosted by jwz:
nocontexttrek ("Star Trek Minus Context") wrote:
Tinder to AI your dick pix.
In a feature the dating app says is set to roll out in the U.S. later this spring, Tinder plans to access users' camera rolls to pick photos and determine what they're into. "It's up to you to figure out what you're...
https://jwz.org/b/yk4q
Boosted by jwz:
malvarma@tiny.tilde.website wrote:
@sidereal @davidgerard why do we gotta make everything about money. can't we appreciate ai out of sheer love for impersonal corporate email replies? can't we recognize the unquantifiable value of generating software bugs at rapid speed? is it wrong to enjoy not knowing if a chatbot response contains any true information at all? not everything needs to make business sense!
jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:
The market has lost 10% of its value since Bondi yelled about it being at 50k, can we impeach all of them yet
Boosted by Mastodon:
_elena ("Elena Rossini ⁂") wrote:
📝 New post 🚀
"Openness, transparency and reach: three reasons why public institutions should embrace the Fediverse"
mentioning @europeanspodcast @haubles @aral @Gargron @tferrer @rstockm @samvie @EUCommission
#SocialMedia #FOSS #DigitalSovereignty #SocialSovereignty #policy #BigTech #Fediverse #TheFutureIsFederated #RSS #SocialWeb
Huh. That's a new one for me. I think the machine rebooted overnight but this notification didn't show up for an hour or two after login…
jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
"A Brussels court ruled Tuesday that the retired diplomat, Étienne Davignon, must face war crimes charges over the killing of Mr. Lumumba. The ruling was the culmination of a criminal complaint that Mr. Lumumba’s children filed 15 years ago and a milestone in Belgium’s decadeslong effort to reckon with crimes committed during its brutal rule of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mr. Davignon is the only surviving member of a group of Belgian officials who prosecutors say organized the kidnapping and murder of Mr. Lumumba, as part of a coup against the newly elected government shortly after Congo gained independence from Belgium in 1960. Belgian officials saw Mr. Lumumba as a rabble rouser who might tilt the country toward the Soviet Union."
And with that, we have published the final meetup talk video. Thanks again to all of the presenters and to our community for engaging. You shape the future of Typst! ❤️
Separating styling from content is what makes #Typst documents tick. But what if you want to tweak styles once you applied a template? Compiler dev Laurenz shares his vision for how fine-grained building blocks could be the solution.
jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:
Fetterman has got to go









