Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
Daojoan ("JA Westenberg") wrote:

Nothing makes you sound more like a Beltway ghoul than saying “this won’t play well in the Midwest” about basic human rights

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
sundogplanets ("Prof. Sam Lawler") wrote:

Don't worry, Sam, SpaceX won't ACTUALLY launch 7,000 satellites! (There are currently 10,296 Starlink sats in orbit)

Don't worry, SpaceX said they'd get their satellites fainter than magnitude 7! (They have not https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/link%5Fgateway/2025MNRAS.544L..15M/PUB%5FPDF)

Don't worry, they won't actually start Kessler Syndrome! https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/

Don't worry, they won't actually launch a million AI data centres into orbit!! https://theconversation.com/a-new-space-race-could-turn-our-atmosphere-into-a-crematorium-for-satellites-276366

This is the fucking worst I-told-you-so https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

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

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
byorgey@mathstodon.xyz ("Brent Yorgey") wrote:

I wrote something for my students reflecting on the current cultural and technological moment - a collection of important things I want to say that I'm never quite sure how or when to say in class.

http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/forest/00FD/index.xml

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
chaucerburnt@aus.social ("Chaucerburnt") wrote:

People need to stop asking LLMs "why did you do [thing]?" and treating the answer as authoritative. LLMs do not "remember" their thought processes in that way, and even if they did, the answers would likely not be human-understandable.

When you ask a LLM this question, you're asking it to construct the kind of explanation that a human might give in a similar conversation. Treating this as the *actual* answer is likely to lead you astray.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/claude-powered-ai-coding-agent-deletes-entire-company-database-in-9-seconds-backups-zapped-after-cursor-tool-powered-by-anthropics-claude-goes-rogue

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

I once worked at a company where many people were wrong about obvious things all the time, and my job turned into going to meetings with those people. I got to feel smart and was often correct about obvious things, which was a degrading and ultimately self-destructive activity. If you are correct in every interaction, then you cannot learn or grow. I quit.

Not sure what to do when the people being wrong about obvious things are “leadership across nearly the entire industry”.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mcc wrote:

TLDR

1. My definition of "P2P" or "Federated" is that if server A goes down, servers B and C can still talk to each other.

2. Bluesky/"Atmosphere" fails at this because Blacksky (B) utilizes Bluesky (A) to talk to me (C).

3. In order for Blacksky to avert this, they have to do something unreasonable and expensive.

4. Blacksky someday *will* do this, but will depend heavily on massively overworking Rudy and a few other people. This may someday fail.

5. ActivityPub has problems, but not these

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
jpm@aus.social ("I love this, so I") wrote:

This is unexpectedly popular, so here is A VIDEO!

Attachments:

• video: A platypus doing platypus things in shallow clear water flowing over a rocky riverbed

jwz wrote:

It continues to amaze me that everyone in the Sunset is a single-issue voter, and that issue is wanting to turn a park into a freeway.

District 4 shaping up to be San Francisco's loudest and silliest race:
https://jwz.org/b/yk6w

adele@social.pollux.casa ("Adële 🐁!") wrote:

You know that it is possible to create a #mailbox and an #xmpp account freely without phone number or existing email address?

https://message.casa/

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
xgranade@wandering.shop ("Cassandra is only carbon now") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.world/@signalapp/116478659183004819

This is a good thread. I like how carefully they take responsibility for where they could have done better, and at the same time very clearly state what isn't a problem with Signal.

EmilyEnough@hachyderm.io ("Emily 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

I’m sorry, what?

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

boringext

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

shocking genetic origin of dutch DNA

did a cheese fuck a tulip?

Boosted by jwz:
victorvonvortex wrote:

Traumatized members of the Washington press corps desperately seeking unopened bottles of wine to take with them following shots fired at the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday.

#Winegate #BrokenPress #WHCD

Boosted by jwz:
devxvda@mastodon.ie ("Dr.Nick") wrote:

Your occasional reminder that cornflakes were developed to stop people from wanking

Boosted by jwz:
kottke ("kottke.org") wrote:

Moderna developed an mRNA Covid-flu combo vaccine and it’s been approved for use in the EU, “but it continues to be shelved in the US, where it was developed”. https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/04/europe-not-us-first-to-authorize-modernas-combo-mrna-flu-covid-vaccine/

Boosted by jwz:
gilduran@journa.host ("Gil Duran") wrote:

My first book, "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and The War On Democracy," will publish on August 18.

It tells the true story of how a small cult of venture capitalists embraced a grim prophecy in which technology will destroy the United States in the 21st century.

And they worked to make it true, pushing their ideas all the way into the core of the Trump regime.

My book is being published in the USA, UK/Commonwealth, Italy and Poland.

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

can recommend a balanced dinner of pie and crumble actually

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

Or, even more complex, that we only learn to talk to each via the languages of performance demonstration. I have seen a lot of situations like this where people do indeed value your problem-solving and your effort but we live in such output and performance-focused cultures we only use that language

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

So many folks in my tech community have been very successful at a path they set out for themselves. One of the unfortunate difficult risks of this is that it does tend to make you gather people around you who only value you for the exact type of success you've chosen to try to achieve

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

So I'm dragging my feet getting one of those fancy shmancy "smart" phones because... I don't wanna do business with those fiends... But because everyone else around me has made poor choices, I am now finally getting dragged in by network effects.[1] Anyway, makes me wish there was a Qubes OS for Android or something. Just stick that gross surveillance tech in a vm and tell it lies about myself...

https://www.qubes-os.org/

[1] I'll stop whining about it.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
timbray@cosocial.ca ("Tim Bray") wrote:

Existential Comics publishes every Monday, and rarely misses:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/652

Boosted by zkat@toot.cat ("Katerina Marchán"):
grork ("Dominic Hopton") wrote:

Tired: “Dogfooding”: Using the software you work on with unbridled happiness and glee, no consideration what it is
Wired: “Catfooding”: Looking at the software and saying “Fuck that shit. I ain’t using that”, and then going for a nap.

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

i don't need a tool to delete the production database for me, i'm quite capable of doing it myself.

chipotle@mstdn.social ("Watts Martin") wrote:

New post: "Soylent Confessions" https://coyotetracks.org/blog/soylent-confessions/

Soylent is frequently held up as a poster child of everything wrong with Silicon Valley, which makes it hard to admit that I liked it.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
sethmlarson ("Seth Larson") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@andrewnez/116478133377243019

Workflow security continues to be a common cause of compromises of open source projects.

If you're using GitHub Actions and don't want this to happen to your project: use Zizmor and treat the findings seriously, especially insecure triggers and user-controllable template injections.

https://docs.zizmor.sh

#github #actions #security #oss #opensource #python

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
lrhodes@merveilles.town ("⁂ L. Rhodes") wrote:

FOSS is more than just a way of organizing labor and distributing software. It makes possible a vision of computing as a broad, collaborative social activity, an impromptu latticework of individual people contributing their knowledge, creativity and work into a communal pool of resources that can be built upon and directed toward diverse human ends. Even apart from the technical damage being done by a tidal wave of vibecoded contributions, AI threatens that vision by eroding its social component.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
jplebreton ("JP") wrote:

Newsom is a bad parent for letting his son become a chud by immersion in fascist incel influencer media but really this is the centrist ideal at work: hold infinite grace and understanding for everyone to your right, hold the line hard against anyone to your left. This is also what makes him a terrible candidate for 2028: regular people don't have DC centrist blinders and can clearly see a refusal to understand power and capital as they really are and a refusal to fight for anyone.

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

eventually inventory shortfalls couldn't be covered and it got out. people were arrested. they even recovered money from the accountants, even though miniscribe had broken into their office and changed the numbers on their reports!

yes, they did that, did i mention how hilariously fucked it all was?