Mastodon Feed: Posts

Mastodon Feed

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

There is no need to begin your critical writing by saying "Well, I know AI has great uses, for example, in medical technology…" or "Surely it's going to change society…" or "It will take care of drudgery…" before your "but,"

If you're not an oncologist with experience using "AI" to spot tumors, you don't actually *know* that it has great uses for that. Nobody knows if it's going to "change society", so you don't have to react to baseless claims from "futurists". You can just… not.

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
ThompsonArt@mastodon.art ("Aled Thompson") wrote:

Green European Woodpecker

Prints available here -
https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/thompson%5Fart/european-green-woodpecker-2025/

A green European woodpecker, pointy bird with a red cap and green wings, perched on a branch

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
brianbilston@mastodon.online ("Brian Bilston") wrote:

Today’s poem is called ‘Why You Should Never Ever Follow Your Dreams’.

Why You Should Never Ever  Follow Your Dreams   I followed my dream, only to find it was the one of me,  in the playground, with no underwear on. Brian Bilston

Mastodon Feed

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

There is a human tendency to grant our interlocutors empathy by default. This can be weaponized by bad-faith actors trying to move the overton window.

Someone says "AI can do X" and it's uncomfortable to say "no, I already know it can't" or even "prove it". You hear it over and over again from a hundred "journalists" acting as stenographers for big tech, and you feel like you have to grant that position grace.

You don't have to fall for it *AND* you don't have to be mean about it.

Mastodon Feed

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

"GitHub AI Credits*" 💀

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/github-copilot-is-moving-to-usage-based-billing/

* redeemable at participating locations only, no cash value, ToCs apply

Mastodon Feed

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:

(It was not one of my boards. Phew!)

Mastodon Feed

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:

It's always a little unsettling to walk into work on a Monday morning and be greeted with the odor of burning electronics. "I sure hope that's not one of my boards!"

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
dreid@wandering.shop wrote:

RE: https://masto.ai/@phoronix/116476120066302561

Canonical's ability to do something stupid that will annoy their users and also being late to the hype party is remarkable.

Mastodon Feed

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:

I think for once we should put aside putting aside the ethical concerns...

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
falseknees ("False Knees") wrote:

Intelligent

2 Blue Jays conversing in a spruce. First Jay asks "What if we aren't the only intelligent species in the universe? What would they be like?" The second replies "Let's see... they'd need to be good at problem solving, and to have advanced communication skills, a social structure, self-awareness..." "... the ability to fly?" continues the first Jay. "That goes without saying!" exclaims the second. The first states confidently "And a strong beak, of course". To which the second responds rhetorically "How could you do anything intelligent without a strong beak?"

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁!"):
vitex@f.cz ("Vitex") wrote:

@adele

#Ubuntu #Debian #packages ready to download and install

https://repo.vitexsoftware.com/pool/main/s/smolfedi/

smolfedi package found in repository package browser

Mastodon Feed

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

my migration from this instance to @zkat@fedi.zkat.tech seems to have frozen, and my followers have stopped migrating. Anyone know how to get this unstuck? The latter is a GTS instance.

Boosts welcome!

Mastodon Feed

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

The era of proof abundance

oh god, it is absolutely cringe hearing supposed legends talk this way about bullshit generators

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:

And while you're waiting for the book, here's my newsletter: https://www.fightforthehuman.com/

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:

And was just reminded to post this, lol, here's my book!!! The Psychology of Software Teams, it's coming out in July, you can already pre-order it at some online retailers, and it has a WHOLE CHAPTER on "The Performance Paradox" to help you become a *resilient* high performer :)

https://www.routledge.com/The-Psychology-of-Software-Teams/Hicks/p/book/9781032963389

Mastodon Feed

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

I have been fortunate that even before I was a full-time novelist I was making a good living doing freelance and consulting for companies on writing/editing matters. My whole professional life has been as a writer. What helped (and still does) was that I was not precious about what I would write. As long as it did not run against my personal ethics, and you would pay me my rate, I would write it for you. That was basically my first 20 years as a writer.

RE: https://www.threads.com/@spirit.horse.tarot/post/DXo28L%5FFDMQ

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
wdlindsy@toad.social ("William Lindsey :toad:") wrote:

"Could we please take a moment to remember that the largest, bloodiest, violent attack on any Washington institution in modern memory was actually led by…Trump. On January 6, 2021, he incited an assault on the Capitol that resulted in multiple deaths, scores of injuries and even a call for assassination of Trump’s own Vice President."

~ David Rothkopf

#WHCD #Trump #media #violence #Jan6 #insurrection
/5

https://davidrothkopf.substack.com/p/five-uncomfortable-truths-about-the

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:

I have said and will continue to say most people have zero idea what it's like for scientists in the US right now.

We sat at an outdoor table the other day with a brilliant older queer scientist friend and ran into several scientist friends including one who worked at govt agencies on science funding. It is like having conversations after an apocalypse. So many people lost, labs folded, international postdocs gone, lines of work canned. DEI work going undercover, forbidden words erased

Mastodon Feed

Gargron ("Eugen Rochko") wrote:

Male fragrance sections at shops are always so sad. Would you like to smell like you just downed a bottle of gin, like a leather couch, or like you were sitting on the wrong side of a campfire? Women get all the nice fruits and flowers. This stuff shouldn’t be gendered anyway like most things.

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
partim@social.tchncs.de ("Martin Hoffmann") wrote:

And another court found Germany’s border checks to be unlawlful.

A law professor was checked when returning home from the conference “40 years Schengen Treaty” and, presumably overwhelmed by the irony of it all, sued.

This is important since this is the first case after the reform of the Schengen border codex in 2024 – and the court still found the reasons for reintroducing border checks insufficient.

This was a decision by a lower court, will likely be appealed, and is expected to eventually wind up at the European Court of Justice.

Until then, the federal government sees no reason to stop its unlawful behaviour.

German news report (thanks, @mikey179): https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/rheinland-pfalz/urteil-grenzkontrollen-zwischen-deutschland-und-luxemburg-rechtswidrig-100.html, full decision: https://vgko.justiz.rlp.de/fileadmin/justiz/Gerichte/Fachgerichte/Verwaltungsgerichte/Koblenz/Entscheidungen/Nr%5F10-2026%5FVOE%5F3%5FK%5F650-25%5FKO%5FUrteil%5Fvom%5F27.04.2026.pdf

Mastodon Feed

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

The new American university model of education.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/27/a-stifling-ignorance/

see no knowledge, hear no knowledge, speak no knowledge

Mastodon Feed

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

i am re-reviewing graphing libraries in javascript and so far i've got

  • huge
  • crap
  • by a company advertising ai bullshit
Mastodon Feed

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
bkardell@toot.cafe wrote:

Web Serial stuff experimental in Firefox 🤯

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SerialPort/writable

Mastodon Feed

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

i did also get fairly far with making avx-512 insert routines for the HOT when i last touched it. i think it might even be possible to do the core of the insert and delete procedures in constant time for each node layout. the original insert procedure from the HOT paper is a branchy, loopy mess (and lo and behold, it advertises itself for read-mostly workloads!), but fortunately it seems largely amenable to simdification if you've got avx512 (and thus predication) available.

if everyone had avx-512, the code required to implement the HOT in C would probably be quite small. you might not even hate to maintain it. but already you're going to need a portable branchy loopy mess, so that's two versions. throw in support for a few more cpus, each with harshly increasing restrictions on what you can do and it becomes a mess quite quickly.

Mastodon Feed

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

I know that quarters on cruise ships are cramped, but this is ridiculous.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/27/spiders-in-spaaaaaaaace/

Spider that went to space

Mastodon Feed

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

what am i doing? oh remember that silly idea to generate code that does an optimal node lookup for each node in a data structure? well as it turns out one of my friends has done that already and it's not completely impractical.

anyway i was looking at how we could shave reading a HOT node down to fewer versions of the code that would need to be generated. maybe we could get the entropy small enough that we could reasonably just generate all of them in advance?

well, if you compress the entropy enough, we can do it with our current setup and not need the code generation at all! i've now managed to do that in full for avx512 even with arbitrary string keys, i only need 4 versions for 4 node types! this is of course only possible because AMD had fixed their slow pext/pdep by zen 3, before they supported avx-512 at all, otherwise i would have a real mess on my hands

avx2 is harder owing to the lack of predication and the smaller register size, but if i manage to figure it out, it's only 5 versions. SSE is a fairly abysmal 9 versions - incredibly tedious to write but maybe workable. i say maybe, because this doesn't account for the mess induced by the vast number of ways you can implement pext/pdep. even if i only go back as far as zen 2 (which i'm currently using, so i will go back at least that far...) i'll have to provide twice as many implementations.

next year will be the 10 year anniversary of zen, maybe i can talk myself into believing that this is old enough that noone would give a shit about older hardware. i wouldn't be talking about no support, just it would fall back to a portable algorithm and be probably quite slow. it would certainly save implementing SSE versions...

Mastodon Feed

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

The Nightlife EP immediately takes me back to 2011. One of my all-time favorite albums by one of my all-time favorite bands., Phantogram.

Album cover. "Nightlife Phantogram". Image appears to be a zoomed in image of strings hair maybe?

Mastodon Feed

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

I'm worried that I might start liking birds, even birds that might eat spiders. Do I have to pick a side?

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/27/learning-about-birds/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgnfICVvRYM

Mastodon Feed

Boosted by pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷"):
LunaDragofelis@void.lgbt ("Luna Dragofelis ΘΔ🏳️‍⚧️🐱") wrote:

Gender segregation in public toilets and changing rooms is a weak and cisheteronormative substitute for well-designed stalls with actual privacy.

Mastodon Feed

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

i've had a look in agner fog's spreadsheet and frankly i'm none the wiser - zen 5 doesn't exactly look like a speed demon either and he doesn't list his methodology for masks (and then frankly it'd be useful to see at least 2 figures - mask on and mask off (and probably at least mask half full as well)).

meanwhile, i have calculated the worst case for doing it on the cpu and it looks like it may or may not be better, depending on how masks are processed, provided we know the size in advance. there are some means by which i can know the size in advance, of course (the simplest being padding to the worst case size with inert data).

overall i wouldn't say it's looking promising for avx512 gather intrinsics, but again i'd have to write a benchmark.