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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
Migueldeicaza ("Miguel de Icaza ᯅ🍉") wrote:

“I was lost away from home in a bizarre territory where people made plans that didn’t make sense with the aplomb of a drunk LLM.”

https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion

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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
jalefkowit@vmst.io ("Jason Lefkowitz") wrote:

@tante @mttaggart Yeah.

For a long time the thing that was going to kill WordPress was static site generators. I'd listen to SSG developers pitch their product: "It's so easy! Everything's stored in Markdown files, changes are tracked via Git, when you push commits out to prod everything gets rebuilt via CI!"

And I was just like, man, have you ever met a person who uses WordPress? Like, even once

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

Redpolls seem to be in good health despite the weather #birds #iceland

A redpoll hangs off a branch
A flock of redpolls, a small bird with a red spot on the top of its head, in a bush
One of those redpolls except it's on the snow

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Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
Catvalente@wandering.shop ("Catherynne M. Valente") wrote:

From my new piece concerning the Anthropic settlement:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/blood-money-the-anthropic-settlement

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Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
arstechnica ("Ars Technica") wrote:

Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom
Sweden is bringing back books amid declining test scores.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/sweden-goes-back-to-basics-swapping-screens-for-books-in-the-classroom/?utm%5Fbrand=arstechnica&utm%5Fsocial-type=owned&utm%5Fsource=mastodon&utm%5Fmedium=social

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dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

help, i have woken up to more german music.

you're all nuts.

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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
davidgerard@circumstances.run ("David Gerard") wrote:

Microsoft AI reshuffle: Mustafa Suleyman goes AI doomsday crank

not to worry, Copilot’s ‘for entertainment purposes only’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ja-U%5FLfX5bA&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260402-microsoft-ai-reshuffle-suleyman-goes-ai-doomsday-crank - podcast

time: 5 min 56 sec

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/04/02/microsoft-ai-reshuffle-mustafa-suleyman-goes-ai-doomsday-crank/ - blog post

businessman on unicycle with laptop in right hand and small umbrella balanced on left hand

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Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
loriemerson@post.lurk.org ("Lori Emerson") wrote:

finally, Wendell Berry's standards for technological innovation--truly as relevant now as they were in 1987 #othernetworks

The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces. 2 It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces. 3 It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces. 4 It should use less energy than the one it replaces. 5 If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body. 6 It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools. 7 It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible. 8 It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair. 9 It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

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soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:

A story in 3 parts

#AI #slop #recruiterspam #enshittification #databreach #mercor

Recruiter spam from an AI company. I replied with a link to my anti-AI and anti-marketing posts.
Another AI spam email. Same story.
Subject: Update from Mercor Security Team We're reaching out because you've signed up for Mercor, and we want to keep you informed of a data security incident. Your privacy and security are foundational to everything we do. A recent supply chain attack involving LiteLLM affected our systems and thousands of other organizations worldwide. We took prompt action to secure our systems and launched a thorough investigation with leading third-party forensics experts. We understand you may have questions about how this might affect you, and we are working hard to get you answers as soon as our investigation is complete. This has our full attention and resources, and protecting your information remains our priority. We'll continue to share updates as appropriate. Thank you for your understanding and patience. Sincerely, Mercor Security Team

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Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷"):
schrottkatze@treehouse.systems ("Schrottkatze") wrote:

i need to be more scary in a hot way

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Boosted by jwz:
nash@labyrinth.social wrote:

you ever write code so inefficient they have to update the whole power grid

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Boosted by jwz:
colinstu@birdbutt.com ("Colin") wrote:

RE: https://labyrinth.social/@nash/116178591588359360

you ever write code so inefficient you have to secure 80% of the world’s DRAM production

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
eanakashima@hachyderm.io ("Emily Nakashima") wrote:

My greatest professional accomplishment of the year: I got my exec & manager teammates saying "point positive," a term from whitewater rafting and kayaking.

Meaning: when facing hazards, point people toward where to go/what to do, rather than drawing attention to everything to avoid.

A drawing showing a river rafter who has fallen out of a raft in rapids. The people still in the raft are pointing to a safe way to swim rather than at rocks to avoid. Caption: "Point positive: pointing the way to go, rather than at the problem." Drawing created by sketchplanations.

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Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
verdre ("Jonas") wrote:

One thing I obsess a little bit over is the fact that it’s 2026, we pretend that Linux is a serious OS, but we‘re still losing your data on a regular basis.

Out of memory conditions (OOM) are one of our biggest pain points, so I just did a quick experiment with macOS to see how they are handling OOM.

I loaded about 200 memory heavy tabs in Firefox and kept a close look at memory usage.

(1/4)

Screenshot of memory pressure info in macOS System Monitor. Shows the memory pressure rising, but no swap is used yet.

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Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
quephird@tech.lgbt ("Danie🏒🏒e is officially a PWHL fan") wrote:

Hand-drawn.
No use of straightedges, outlining, nor compasses.
15 person-hours of effort over six days.
Copic classic magic markers.
35 shades of brown, beige, orange, and yellow.
18” x 24” Fabriano 140 pound paper.

Complex drawing composed of packed circles starting out in dark browns in three areas, slowly turning into lighter shades of brown and orange, and then finally multiple shades of yellow.

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Boosted by zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán"):
loriemerson@post.lurk.org ("Lori Emerson") wrote:

I know I'm preaching to the choir here but in case anyone is looking to help educate others, here's yet another one: "The vast data centers that power AI guzzle huge amounts of energy but they also have another alarming impact...They are creating 'heat islands,' warming the land around them by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, and making life hotter for more than 340 million people." https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/climate/data-centers-are-having-an-underrported #ai

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zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.publicinterest.town/@b%5Fcavello/116338207761349739

@b_cavello there are things that we can only make incremental progress on divesting from (coal, oil, cars, non-renewable energy, most plastics) because we’ve already made immensely costly errors in the past that make them largely unavoidable for many people. GenAI is different in that it’s completely avoidable, right now, and we are well positioned to simply… not let it happen.

There may be a world where the technologies involved in genAI find their use without being deeply ethically compromised, and I believe we may very well find that niche in due time. Tbh I think it’s more a matter of when, not if. Take cars, for example: consider a world in which they became local, low speed, last-mile transportation infrastructure primarily used by those with additional mobility needs/emergency responders and which shared primarily pedestrian infrastructure or in smaller towns that had not yet built out more robust transit, and where regional and arterial transportation had been structured around public transit. We could’ve made that choice back then. We were already on track for it, too, and actually reversed course in many places.

In the meantime, I can choose to not put my dollar into funding and my voice into promoting something that is harming the world as much or more than so many of the Big Ones.

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Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
mjd@mathstodon.xyz ("Mark Dominus") wrote:

“If the newspapers ever mistakenly print my death, I plan to write to the obits editor concerned and reassure him that ‘History will vindicate you one day’.”

(Daniel Davies, https://blog.danieldavies.com/2011/07/christ-what-moron-if-reuters-comments.html)

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glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Businesses have a ton of this kind of stuff that's purely internal to the business, even if you don't care about your employees dropping dead of heart disease, many things that junior employees do are not the hypothetically ideal use of time but you need people to keep doing them in order to circulate knowledge; if you optimize them away you need to make more time in your L&D budget

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glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Is there a name for necessary stuff that happens because of inefficiencies? Like, for example, exercise. If you're a dockworker in the 1700s you might have a bunch of health problems but "sedentary lifestyle" is not one of them. But if you become a dock crane operator in modern times, you need to both do your job *and* go to the gym where you "waste" a bunch of effort in order to exercise, because your job is sitting down now

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Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
BleepingComputer@infosec.exchange wrote:

Threat actors are exploiting the recent Claude Code source code leak by using fake GitHub repositories to deliver Vidar information-stealing malware.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/claude-code-leak-used-to-push-infostealer-malware-on-github/

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aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

RE: https://social.coop/@chrisjrn/116337927962121277

So very much this. The processes to not do this are not there yet.

The software industries have been due for a reckoning for a while. It's coming because of this.

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Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
chrisjrn@social.coop ("Christopher Neugebauer") wrote:

5. Dependence on LLMs is very likely to lead to a crisis of maintenance, because because we're using tools that bias towards the things that we already know lead towards less maintanable code.

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Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
chrisjrn@social.coop ("Christopher Neugebauer") wrote:

4. Things are never equal.
4a. LLMs are predisposed to being better at accretion than modification due to inherent limits on static analysis (see Rice's theorem).

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Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
chrisjrn@social.coop ("Christopher Neugebauer") wrote:

3. All things being equal, smaller codebases are less complex and easier to interpret than accreted code: accreted code "lithifies" (cf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3nJR7PNgI4) over time.

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Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
chrisjrn@social.coop ("Christopher Neugebauer") wrote:

2. All things being equal, accreted code is more likely to be correct than modified code (because the code that existed beforehand might be depended upon in multiple unrelated places)

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Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
chrisjrn@social.coop ("Christopher Neugebauer") wrote:

Some things that I hold true about software engineering:

1. Systems can gain modified functionality by accretion (i.e. additional code is created), or through alteration (i.e. new code replaces old code).

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aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

My moment of clarity in the last few weeks was coming back to “Oh right, copyright is a hack, and one that is not serving us, particularly us on the margins”

The moral rights of authorship and the way we situate our legal process of ownership are, actually, kinda at odds. And it entirely misses the idea of a commons, both as community and as a cultural base to draw from.

I've long believed that we, collectively, should own our culture — to have modern myths be Copyright 1972 LucasFilm, the traditional songs we sing Copyright 1922, now owned by Warner/Chappell Music is one of the things I find repugnant about the situation we find ourselves in.

That said, reconciling that with the behavior of the AI companies, _particularly_ the American ones? It's hard. Google abuses its monopoly position; Microsoft has forced harmful and terrible tooling on people at every turn; OpenAI is run by someone who actively despises art and does not understand it; and Anthropic is run by a guy who is trying to make sure the apocalypse has a pleasant demeanor and doesn't offend any corporations on the way. All of the above have scraped the web with no active consent — and that's largely fine, that's what putting things in common _is_, that's the beauty of the open information world we have the remnants of — but also actively evading measures people put in place to stop it and with absolutely no willingness to engage with the process. Extracting from the commons _is_ the tragedy of the commons.

It does not mean that enlarging the commons with the resulting tools is bad. The doctrine of original sin is a Christian concept I do not subscribe to. The concept of 'fruit of the poisonous tree' is a legal tool to fix power relations not a moral stance. They're worth understanding, but they are not absolute moral stances that are self-evident.

These are not harmless tools, but so too putting hard regulation and corporate, legalistic scrutiny on everything has a vastly negative impact: it is a yoke on human creativity and community to the reins of capital.

And, so too, disruption has huge costs. We are, apparently, committed to doing things the worst possible way. One can just hope that we capture the good too, because the ride has started and it's rather late to get off.

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zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán") wrote:

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@petrillic/116337502667369228

I can’t have a conversation with any genAI boosters that is remotely productive precisely because of this.

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Boosted by jwz:
developerjustin ("Justin Ferrell") wrote:

#PamBondi #usPol #andor #starWars

Dedra in prison at the end of Andor