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jwz wrote:

Ever since I added substackcdn.com to my blocklist, I have learned how many bloggers have solved their "substack nazi" problem by just hiding it behind their own domain.

Spoiler: it's a lot.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
datarama@hachyderm.io wrote:

@Pepijn Also, something very similar to the plot hook actually happened in real life!

Except the boys didn't go Mad Max on each other - they set up a commune where they tended a garden, kept chickens, maintained a permanent fire and even built a makeshift gym. When one of them broke his leg, the others set his leg, divided his work shifts fairly among themselves and tended to his health while he recovered.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months

Boosted by jwz:
mathowie@xoxo.zone ("Matthew Haughey") wrote:

something no one needs: which fascist podcasts are preferred by the people shopping for the same kitchen utensils as me on Amazon

Boosted by jwz:
zzt@mas.to ("[object Object]") wrote:

@axbom @blaurascon and before anyone asks me to recommend an alternative: I recommend running screaming into the woods. that is my recommendation for a search engine. don’t come at me for “being unhelpful”, this isn’t an advice thread but running screaming into the woods and becoming part of nature is the best advice I can give you. you’re welcome and/or fuck you.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
Pepijn@mastodon.online wrote:

Lord of the Flies. A story about a bunch of kids who turn into utter inhumane shitheads when faced with hardship. When first made to read this book I vehemently argued it was unrealistic: a book-with-an-agenda by a religiously conflicted person arguing against the idea of innate human goodness. The teacher at my catholic school gave me a zero as “we’re reviewing the story, not the intention or Christianity”.

I think about it every time the news reports about someone being "surprisingly nice".

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
micahflee@infosec.exchange ("Micah Lee") wrote:

https://isaiprofitable.com

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

I swear StrongDM's AI dark factory propaganda is actually just trying to create a market for their product.

Turns out if you let LLM code agents run amok, you need a whole API gateway to control what they do.

Guess what StrongDM sells.

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
gabrielesvelto@mas.to ("Gabriele Svelto") wrote:

Regarding the Raptor Lake bug I received a couple of messages from confused users that had read articles on Tomshardware and Neowin. They asked about erratas and microcode updates which puzzled me, because that was part of my early investigation into the bug and we know that the failure is not caused by a known errata and microcode updates cannot fix broken CPUs. So why did they ask? As it turns out it was slop. Both articles are 100% slop full of confusing and inaccurate claims.

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
gabrielesvelto@mas.to ("Gabriele Svelto") wrote:

I haven't read either site in ages but I can confidently say that you can stop reading both Tomshardware and Neowin. If they're willing to put out this kind of slop with blatant mistakes in it you can assume the rest of their reporting is also slop, and will likely be either misleading, confusing or flat out false.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
WeirdWriter@caneandable.social ("Robert Kingett") wrote:

beware of EU-washing https://blog.avas.space/eu-washing/ #Privacy #Tech #EU

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
davidgerard@circumstances.run ("David Gerard") wrote:

STOP FINDING THINGS

* WEB PAGES WERE NOT MEANT TO BE FOUND
* YEARS OF SEARCHING yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for PAGES of SEO-OPTIMISED AI SLOP
* Wanted to find things anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called WIKIPEDIA "RANDOM PAGE"
* "Yes please give me ONE HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION of my search. Please give me TEN ADS FIRST" - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged

LOOK at what Search engines have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the ad views we gave them

(This is REAL Search results, given by REAL search engines)

* "None of Africa's 54 recognized countries start with the letter 'K'."
* "Add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce"
* "Understood. No more templates—just direct answers, hyper-focused on exactly what you need."

"Hello Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated"

They have played us for absolute fools

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
scott@carfree.city ("scott f") wrote:

As an ethical AI user, I begin each session by asking the chatbot to give a stolen data acknowledgement. It is an important first step toward justice.

sky@schub.social ("Sky Schubert") wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrlS18DU2jU

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right"):
artemist@mildlyfunctional.gay wrote:

Assisted-by: GNU sed 4.9 <sed@gnu.org>

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
be@floss.social ("illegal instruction") wrote:

I cannot imagine how much it fucks up kids to simultaneously be told "don't plagiarize!" but also "YOU MUST USE THE PLAGIARISM MACHINE. IT IS THE FUTURE WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT"

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
be@floss.social ("illegal instruction") wrote:

When this bubble pops, I fear the worst long term consequences of it will be on today's generation of children whose education it interfered with.

cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right") wrote:

I think it would be interesting to explore the possibilities of having a network of local search hubs via our various library systems. There doesn't have to be a single search service, or to put it another way, let local communities decide how to best tailor their search for themselves instead of relying on a handful of wealthy people with dubious motives using non-union employees deciding for us.

cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right") wrote:

(Yeah, I know it would become a political thing with certain dipsticks tryin' to police whether people have access to knowledge about their own bodies and minds or whether queer folks exist or whether slavery is bad and the people who practiced it were not the nicest folks ever, but we can't avoid those dipsticks. We just have to defeat them as best we can.)

cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right") wrote:

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure we could run internet search as a public service as an extension of library services. 🤔

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right"):
laemeur@mastodon.sdf.org ("LÆMEUR") wrote:

I illustrated this feature for The Hollywood Reporter back in March, but it just came out yesterday: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/the-ai-roundtable-r2-d2-skynet-hal-9000-m3gan-1236572418/

It's a humorous "AI roundtable" with the Terminator, M3GAN, R2-D2, Samantha (from Her), and ol' HAL9000. Short, and pretty amusing.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right"):
trevorflowers@hachyderm.io ("Ol' Dustmouth Flowers") wrote:

Groggy morning thought: A regular event in which people make interesting things the rough size of a business card. Maybe there are casual categories and votes, but mostly it's for fun and community.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
tuftyindigo@meow.social ("Tufty Indigo 🪗") wrote:

Greatly amused that #Confuzzled had the bright idea of putting pronouns on the room keys to encourage people to have them on show, but not all the hotel staff got the memo to offer people the choice, so several people got "assigned she at check-in". And of course they ran out of hes before the early day was over, so looking at someone's key doesn't tell you their pronouns at all.
I feel like the political message here is much deeper than they intended!

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
futurebird@sauropods.win ("myrmepropagandist") wrote:

Signs you have carpenter ants

1. keep finding tiny tools
2. city sends tiny permit to affix to baseboard
3. try to move a book, are told “keep this entrance clear, ma’am” because of “cement delivery coming later”
4. Your dish rack is dismantled “because it’ll be cheaper to rebuild from scratch”
5. no room on the dresser due to like 85 tiny pickups illegally parked there
6. husband keeps hearing high pitched wolf whistles when exiting shower

#antart #ants #carpenterants #drawing #antdrawings

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

If you're an atheist, you can't answer this stupid question, apparently.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/05/24/what-is-the-meaning-of-life/

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SRanLOrW4hQ

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

“Of Course They Booed”

https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/of-c/

> It's this sneering attitude, I'd argue, that is driving so much of the pushback against "AI" and against ed-tech

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
axbom@axbom.me ("Per Axbom") wrote:

If you are considering the Kagi search engine, there are aspects you should be aware of from an ethics perspective.

https://khevans.com/2025/08/21/kagi-ethics.html

”A portion of your fee goes towards Yandex, indirectly funding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Vlad, the CEO, has stated that 2% of their total costs in 2024 goes towards Yandex. He has also stated that there is no intent of changing this.”

”At least other search engines like DuckDuckGo have halted their partnerships with Yandex. Kagi’s refusal to do so and Vlad’s firm support of Yandex is quite telling. If others have ceased partnering with Yandex, why can’t Vlad?”

”It’s worth mentioning that Kagi previously listed the sources they used in their search. It seems that they’ve now hidden that information on that page, seemingly contradictory to their “commitment to transparency.”

”A portion of your fee goes towards Elon Musk’s xAI, of X/Twitter, to support Grok in their AI assistant. Indeed, you can simply not use this assistant, however all paying users are effectively subsidizing the cost of the Grok API calls. There is no way to opt-out of this.”

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
zzt@mas.to ("[object Object]") wrote:

@blaurascon same

I can recommend taking a look at Postgres full text search as a possible backend, as it’s pretty close to what you’d want for a (smaller scale) search index and query language: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/textsearch.html

you’ll need to bring your own ranking mechanism and scraper of course

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
blaurascon@critter.cafe ("Blau :neocat_floof_w_: :therian:") wrote:

me, having basically none of the required skillset and literally none of the required resources: i wonder how hard it is to build a little search engine and crawler bot

Boosted by aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

@aredridel

Discoverability, accessibility and norms-clarity are are at the top of my list of concerns. If you open, just about any man page for just about any program on Unix, you will virtually never find information like "where I can ask questions", much less "what is our CCoC" and "what information generally helps to answer questions".

It is virtually impossible in the default settings to go from "I have a question" to "I have an answer" to "I've improved the docs for the next person."

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

RE: https://meow.social/@oddtail/115422796270229996

"We treat our bodies as sacred in the worst possible way" brilliant line

And it's exactly the primary transphobia I got in my family. It was something I had to unlearn and convince my family to accept, and was kind of a remarkable barrier in an otherwise accepting family.