Mastodon Feed
Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
index@this.weekinsecurity.com ("~this week in security~") wrote:
Papers, please: Age verification laws threaten everyone's online security and privacy
Laws that require adults to upload their driver's licenses or passports to access apps, websites, and VPNs will make the entire web less safe.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
verge ("The Verge") wrote:
Marc Andreessen is a philosophical zombie https://www.theverge.com/tldr/897566/marc-andreessen-is-a-philosophical-zombie
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz β€οΈ π» βοΈ π₯ π΅π·") wrote:
I can hear the keynote now. Tim Cook on stage proclaiming that Apple talked to power users and what they really want are private, secure models that run locally.
They spend 20 minutes talking about some custom enclave for AI to run. Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) is a new buzzword, so, something like that.
Then, Apple talks software
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz β€οΈ π» βοΈ π₯ π΅π·") wrote:
The new MacBook Ultra has a beefy baseline to help justify RAM prices. Touchscreen 16in, 128gb memory, 1TB storage, M6 Ultra (or Pro), stock. Big fuss on efficiency.
Besides the Touchscreen, updated design. More "coffeeshop rugged." Think Apple Watch Ultra.
But what makes the MB Ultra different is the target demoβAI "power users," a different kind of pro, if you can stomach it.
Mastodon Feedratatui_rs@fosstodon.org ("Ratatui") wrote:
We've just surpassed 20 million downloads on crates.io! ππ¦π₯³
Mastodon Feeddysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:
i don't believe this for a second, but the rumours are that zen6 performs faster at 2ghz than zen5 at 5ghz
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz β€οΈ π» βοΈ π₯ π΅π·") wrote:
So, Apple goes all out in typical Apple fashion. First, and perhaps least obvious, is a touchscreen.
Not super important to my overall point but we're speculating and having fun.
Apples been doing R&D on AI that can make UIs on the flyβdesigning the best interface for the task you give it, or the task it's showing you how to complete. The Liquid Glass concepts starts making a bit more sense here, too. Liquid Glass for a "liquid" interface.
https://venturebeat.com/ai/apple-researchers-develop-ai-that-can-see-and-understand-screen-context
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
xgranade@wandering.shop ("Cassandra is only carbon now") wrote:
@glyph Onion's "worst person in the world made a point" headline and dril's "you don't got to hand it to them," now on stage together for just one night!
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz β€οΈ π» βοΈ π₯ π΅π·") wrote:
The next few years are going to be interesting.
Let's say Apple releases an M6 MacBook Ultra that targets AI power users.
Now, forget for a moment your distain for the term "AI power user," lol, and perhaps for Apple, and speculate with me.
Because we have a big war of competing interests. Microsoft/OpenAI, Anthropic are pushing for centralized compute and proprietary cloud-based AI. Meta for cloud, too, but "open source" AI. Out of the giants, only Apple, really, are pushing for on-device AI
Mastodon Feedwe live in a world where Jonathan Haidt and Thomas Chatterton-Williams are both still broadly taken seriously as intellectuals, there's no way we are getting sensible regulation of social media any time this century
Mastodon Feedlike 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
Mastodon Feedwhile 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
Mastodon Feedpzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers π·") 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/
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz β€οΈ π» βοΈ π₯ π΅π·") 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.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz β€οΈ π» βοΈ π₯ π΅π·"):
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.
Mastodon FeedBoosted 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
Mastodon FeedBoosted 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
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz β€οΈ π» βοΈ π₯ π΅π·") 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?"
Mastodon Feedslightlyoff@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
Mastodon Feedfromjason ("fromjason.xyz β€οΈ π» βοΈ π₯ π΅π·") wrote:
Got my jumbo A4 notebook. Iβm excited to take jumbo notes for my jumbo thoughts.
Mastodon FeedBoosted 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
Mastodon Feedslightlyoff@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
Mastodon FeedBoosted 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. :/
Mastodon FeedThe 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
Mastodon FeedBoosted 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"
Mastodon FeedObviously 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.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
skinnylatte@hachyderm.io ("Adrianna Tan") wrote:
GDS is hiring a lead designer for gov.uk
Mastodon FeedBoosted 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!
Mastodon FeedBoosted 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.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jwz:
nikitonsky@mastodon.online ("Niki Tonsky") wrote:
@rakhim more like
