Mastodon Feed: Posts

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

Now that "low-entropy saladoid" has entered my lexicon it will never leave. #SaladTheory

ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕") wrote:

A few photos from when me and @rosie_108 went to Chepstow Castle.

#photo #photography #castle #photos

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
evmar@inuh.net ("Evan Martin") wrote:

New blog post: Theseus, a static Windows emulator
An new old approach to emulation.

https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2026/04/theseus.html

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

"Viewpoint diversity" is not a good way to get the best qualified people on a university faculty.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/20/viewpoint-diversity-is-a-misleading-way-to-say-conservative-welfare/

ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕") wrote:

A new Freebooters is out, and Wing joins us.

Freebooters, food and drink edition, with Wing - The PolarBear Extended Universe
https://video.thepolarbear.co.uk/w/qbDL5gS7Y5RNQ9TMeuAKAx

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
celesteh@hachyderm.io ("Charles ☭ :trans: is a Green") wrote:

When I was studying CS (and music) I took one single philosophy class, in Ethics. But it was offered by the philosophy department to philosophy majors,so it wasn't what I think most people mean when they say programmers should study ethics.

We had two class meetings per week. In the first class meeting, the professor would tell us about a system of ethics. Who came up with it and why. How it solved problems. And we could ask questions about what seemed to be shortcomings and he would give us the answers developed by people working on that system. It was finally the answer to all of our conundrums.

Then in the second session, he would tear it to shreds. He would raise a problem with it, maybe a problem we had raised, and show how the answer given was actually a tautology or logically confused or wrong in some other way. This system did not solve ethics and was in fact an incoherent mess!

The last week of the term, he got into the system popular now with tech oligarchs. They do actually have a system of ethics! (Which I don't recall the name of.) And boy, was it obviously a mess of scientific racism.

All during the term, I would get excited during the intro week and try to find holes. But this one was so obviously going to be eviscerated on Thursday, I didn't even try to point out how it was full of shit. I was llokinf forward to the coming destruction.

Thursday was the course review for the paper or exam or whatever. He let the last one stand.

At the time I thought he might actually be endorsing it and was upset. Later, I thought maybe because it was current rather than historical, counter arguments hadn't solidified.

Only much later did I realise that he had given us the tools to rip it apart ourselves. Indeed, it was the weakest and most poorly constructed of all the systems and we were certainly up to tearing it down.

So when I say CS students should take ethics, I mean, they should take a class like that, where they aren't left with a perfect framework to apply, but the tools to critique frameworks they encounter. They need to be able to spot bullshit. Right now, they are way too credulous of bullshit.

Edit: Effective altruism didn't exist yet. It was the racism stuff left as an exercise.

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

Today in History: Ludlow Colorado, 1914: "Soldiers from the Colorado National Guard and private guards employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I)"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow%5FMassacre

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
da_667@infosec.exchange wrote:

"Execs getting pay raises, while every else plays employment russian roulette to make Q4 look good" in a nutshell

Attachments:

• gifv: 61798e2195bd9ff3.mp4

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
tudbut@social.tudbut.de ("telephone of margaret thatcher [TudbuT]") wrote:

@tef i apologize for just jumping in here but i want to back up just how literal this destruction is. despite me using an ai blocker, my server is now at a constant 50%+ cpu usage, most of which coming from caddy and thus being unavoidable for me unless i write my own reverse proxy too (not too unlikely i suppose, but either way).

i am now experiencing up to 300-something requests per second that are confirmed to be coming from llm scrapers, usually hovering around 185 with regular spikes to 250. that means an average of 16 million requests per day. this translates to over 99.7% of requests to my sites coming from scrapers.

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

i don't want to be all "you are not immune to propaganda" but a lot of these arguments prey on optimism and hope that technology can lift people up

but when you start to examine the rhetoric, like "what if "

or "bad thing? that's a lack of training and dicipline"

it just feels like gun logic in a new outfit

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
tbortels@infosec.exchange ("Tom Bortels") wrote:

@soatok

Meh, the emoji headers are fine. Anyone who reads your stuff and says "ooh AI slop" isn't actually paying attention. Same as the assholes who think furry or gay are somehow a negative - fuck them, they can keep lurking on meta. The people who count care about the crypto and the rep, not the aesthetics and personal lifestyle preferences.

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
adapalmer@wandering.shop ("Ada Palmer") wrote:

Sussex seabed shows recovery five years after trawling ban. Five years after bottom trawling was banned across more than 300 km² of seabed off southern England, early signs of ecosystem recovery are emerging. Mussel beds are re-establishing, fish populations are increasing, and conditions are improving for kelp forests that had declined by 96%. Oceanographic
#ShareGoodNewsToo https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/sussex-seabed-shows-early-revival-five-years-after-trawling-ban/

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

Someone should do an ethnography of the AI fanbase. It would be truly fascinating. Even my informal survey of the space is wild.

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

turns out being told "you're right!" 30-40 times a day is roughly equivalent to being kicked in the head by a horse 3-4 times a week

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

I wish I could walk into a plethora of webs right now.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/20/screaming-for-joy/

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

If you ever want an insight into who actually runs Iceland, find one of our few investigative reporters, get a few drinks in them, and convince them to tell you some of their stories

Find someone newly retired and you'll discover that the abuse goes back decades

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

If you have access to Berlinske and can read Danish, they've been covering the Icelandic oligarchy that runs this place, whose notorious "monster department" ("skrímsladeildin") then tried to intimidate their journalist

https://www.berlingske.dk/internationalt/pludselig-vibrerede-telefonen-under-kritisk-historie-om-islands-fiskeindustri-du-er-i-store-store-problemer

This "monster department" has been alleged in the past to have attempted to frame reporters, made death threats, intimidated whistle blowers, stalking, etc

The stuff that's been alleged publicly is a fraction of what's rumoured.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
jmccyoung@mstdn.social ("John McChesney-Young") wrote:

My Venus flytraps are blooming and this is the first flower to open. #carnivorousplants #bloomscrolling

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

i tried passkeys once, never again

they worked the first day after setup, the next day they completely vanished. Who to blame, me, the browser, the OS? One website acted like passkeys were never an option when I returned.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
camertron@ruby.social ("Cameron Dutro") wrote:

There's this Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin's dad says that if we actually wanted more leisure time, we'd invent machines that did things more slowly, and I think about it all the time.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
janl@narrativ.es ("Jan Lehnardt :couchdb:") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tef/116434852505143872

This thread is worth your while, especially if you’re on the fence about “AI”.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
jneen@unstable.systems ("jneen collective") wrote:

half the point of programming-tool design is to reduce the need for hypervigilance on the user.

if we're designing tools that require you to be *more* hypervigilant, legitimately what use are they?

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

https://bsky.app/profile/happybusman.bsky.social/post/3mjvzzxayus2p

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

I have been warning about the term "digital sovereignty" and how it is right-wing coded and probably can't be salvaged for non-right-wing politics.

The German fascist party AfD now created a European foundation to push their fascist politics further. The name: "Sovereignty Foundation".

Even though tactically it might feel like it makes sense to use the term to get funding, you are integrating right wing politics into your thinking and speaking.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
SecureOwl@infosec.exchange ("Mike Sheward") wrote:

Side note, if you want to see how common of a pattern this is, and I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier, go search Github.com for 'deleteduser.com', lots of examples of delete functions from apps there that do this type of thing.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
SecureOwl@infosec.exchange ("Mike Sheward") wrote:

I wrote up this cursed discovery with more details:

https://mike-sheward.medium.com/deleteduser-com-a-15-pii-magnet-c4396eb21061

#infosec

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
SecureOwl@infosec.exchange ("Mike Sheward") wrote:

i was quite surprised to discover that no one had registered deleteduser [dot] com, and was curious to see how many emails i'd get if i registered it, assuming many orgs 'delete' logic probably just overwrote the email address with blahblah@deleteduser.com or similar.

The answer, is at least 3 different orgs in the hour that I've owned that domain and been listening for email.

And yes, all of those emails contain the actual PII of the person who has been 'deleted' :-D

#infosec

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

“OpenAI Staffers Horrified When Senior Leadership Hatched "Insane" Plan to Pit World Governments Against Each Other”

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-staffers-horrified-insane-plan

Missed this when it was originally published, but it explains why they were so intent on cratering public sentiment with constant doooooom predictions.

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
smeg@assortedflotsam.com wrote:

Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop
https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/

#claude #ai #llm #privacy #cybersecurity #spyware #fuckai #stopai #dataprivacy #anthropic

Boosted by jwz:
tef wrote:

the worst bit? i still like machine learning, i still think stochastic approaches can have benefits

but if i wrote software that pushed vulnerable teenagers to suicide, or enabled people to sexually harass strangers with pornographic forgeries

i would take a step back from the keyboard and ask my good buddy hans, "are we the baddies"

or at least, i hope i'd ask those hard questions