Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

It's giving Prodigy Fat of The Land mixed with NiN mixed with Kendrick Lamar.

This is such a fun album holy shit.

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

Federal employees to be fully barred from gender affirming care coverage, starting next year https://theneedlenews.com/2026/05/federal-employees-to-be-fully-barred-from-gender-affirming-care-coverage-starting-next-year/

It’s not just kids: Trump’s crackdown on trans healthcare extends into adulthood https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-transgender-healthcare-gender-veterans-federal-employees-rcna346425

DOJ's fight against trans medical care in prison is a fight to erase trans people in the law https://www.lawdork.com/p/dojs-fight-against-trans-medical

From that last one:

> In its briefing, DOJ went on to argue that “the 2026 Policy does not, in the words of Skrmetti, ‘prohibit conduct for one sex that it permits for the other’ but instead turns on ‘the underlying medical concern the treatment is intended to address,’ i.e., gender dysphoria.”
>
> Echoing, while expanding, Chief Justice John Roberts’s disingenuous majority opinion from Skrmetti, DOJ now has made clear that it views — and plans to use — Skrmetti as a free-for-all to go after trans people of all ages by denying that, so far as the law is concerned, trans people exist at all.

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

you will be shocked to hear this, but the bot has just written me a data race. superficially it the approach sounded great, but the code tells a different story.

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
brucelawson@vivaldi.net ("Bruce Lawson ✅ ♫ ♿ ✌️♂️✊") wrote:

'Millions' of pounds saved by replacing Palantir tech in refugee system https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2l2j1lxdk5o - the new system was built by Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in-house staff, delivered on time, and users report it's simpler to use and more accessible than its predecessor. Hooray.

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

One tiny WWDC wishlist item: SwiftUI apis that have an optional bundle: parameter should default to #bundle instead of .main

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
aks@scalie.zone ("Akseli") wrote:

"Maintainer works as designed."

Absolute legend.

https://github.com/jqwik-team/jqwik/issues/709

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

If any of you know of any better alternatives to Ghost, with a similar feature set (except the paid membership, can live without that), then I'm all ears. Otherwise I'm going to have to recommend Ghost

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

Looking over the CMS/blog landscape and it looks like Ghost is still currently one of the least bad OSS options available, despite slop shenanigans?

(As in software that has the features you actually need for a serious website: newsletter or serious newsletter integration, cookie-free analytics that don't suck, rich text editing for non-techie contributors, post types or templates, custom metadata, etc.)

Boosted by EmilyEnough@hachyderm.io ("Emily 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️"):
imbl@treehouse.systems ("criminally faggot") wrote:

we used to think that tech was being invaded by the MBA bros who wanted to take over the domain of the nerds, but the amount of free software graybeards moving to ai has made me realize that 90% of tech nerds were just management wannabes who didnt have the social skills to actually be managers, and now llms are letting them roleplay as MBA bros

the only real nerds were the autistic trans girls the whole time

Boosted by EmilyEnough@hachyderm.io ("Emily 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️"):
KatyElphinstone@mas.to ("K.J. Elphinstone") wrote:

Slide from AutisticNotWeird, Chris Bonello.

#Autism #Neurodivergent #ActuallyAutistic

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
kemona_halftau@sharkey.skydevs.me ("Amber :neofox_flag_trans: (kemona_halftau) :niko:") wrote:

i have exactly 2 requirements for a fedi client
1. it should have an option to hide posts without alt text
2. it should mute notifications from automated accounts

i dont care if it supports emoji reactions, i dont care if it works particularly well with sharkey's half-assed mastoapi implementation, i dont even care if it can do anything other than view posts and show notifications

any recommendations?

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
rob_haines@mastodon.art ("Rob Haines") wrote:

The nigella flowers came out this week in full force. I adore the complexity of these little space stations!

#Photography #Bloomscrolling

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

today I should have a chance to focus I think, which is good, because I badly need it

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
collectifission@greennuclear.online ("Emil Jacobs - Collectifission") wrote:

Luigi is a hero we need more of.

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

dear package registries (npm, composer, etc), i am begging you

require 2FA before someone can tag a release RIGHT NOW

this would immediately stop a huge amount of the open source supply chain attacks we keep seeing

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

Over a decade ago now I wrote "Let's Package jQuery: A Javascript Packaging Dystopian Novella" https://dustycloud.org/blog/javascript-packaging-dystopia/

I got a lot of shit for it at the time, but I feel pretty vindicated as a lot of the points I was making have become more common critiques as peoples' lives have been made difficult by the problems being outlined

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

I startled Mr Rabbit when I went to turn the compost

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
pajuscreations@mastodon.art ("PajusCreations :autism:") wrote:

here’s what the shell (and the wee snail!!) looks like!

(Medium Snail pattern by Megan Lapp, aka Crafty Intentions.)

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

Is this how it feels for involuntary computer touchers reliant on mainstream software? There is no stability. Every update risks breaking things they rely on. They have no control and no understanding as to why. Nothing is dependable for long.

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

Yes!!! Finally crossed under 240. 238.6!

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

I'm reminded of the "The NeverEnding Story" where the Nothing is slowly but inexorably destroying everything as people attempt to flee to ever shrinking areas of safety...

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

Re LB[1]: There's always been a small subset of software that you could rely on to be rock solid and do its job dependably. I considered rsync to be in that group, but hearing about the recent news... Every update now to our systems feels more and more like gambling.

[1] https://narrativ.es/@janl/116656659069842703

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
fogti@chaos.social ("Έλλεν Εμίλια Ά.ζ.") wrote:

@zl2tod @hailey sure https://codeberg.org/fogti/rsync-nai

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
jfkimmes@tinycyber.space wrote:

@peter According to this Elsevier report [1] the EU publishes *more* than the USA and they have similar amount of citations (EU is without UK and Switzerland btw).

I haven't looked into this in detail but if only look at "scale" then "no where close" is definitely false.

[1]: https://sciencebusiness.net/news/universities/how-eu-research-stacks-against-world-three-charts

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
eamon@social.coop ("Eamon") wrote:

There's tremendous value to being a strict LLM Abstentionist in the current political climate, whether or not there are any "valid use cases for LLMs" (there are—not nearly as many as most people think, but sure, more than zero) or the LLM was "created ethically" (to my knowledge no such model exists, but yeah, it's technically possible that someone has or will eventually build one).

Tech workers especially who refuse to interact with this technology are telling their coworkers and employers that ethics and morality are more important to some people than convenience and profit. This is a bold stance to take during good times—and downright foolhardy in the current job market—but the more people who draw the line here, the better the outcomes will be for literally everybody on the whole planet (except, perhaps, for some billionaire investors).

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
simon_brooke@mastodon.scot ("Simon Brooke") wrote:

@urlyman I wrote about this five years ago. It's not a pretty scenario, but on our current trajectory it's our almost certain future, and within the lifetime of people now living.

https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2021-11-15-the-everyone-dies-event-class/

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

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@whitequark/116654444798985436

Le sigh. Et tu, rsync? :(

[Update, OpenBSD has it’s own version: https://cathode.church/@meena/116654702820939443]

[Update2: OG rsync is already borked: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390]

For the uninitiated, rsync is one of the very few tools in computing that you used to be able to trust to work every time and not surprise you.

That trust is gone now.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
smallcircles@social.coop ("🫧 socialcoding..") wrote:

@ingo_wichmann

I don't think it is enough to call for just open source at this point. Big Tech is built on open source and LLMs wouldn't be what they are today without open source.

We need FOSS that (in-the-large, emergent) responsibly contributes to societal progress, and the starting point for that is that proper healthy environments exist to give the extra amount of attention and detail to focus on the entire supply chain and software lifecycle. It is not enough to just do the coding, create the tech, and dump it into society. Externalities must be better addressed.

For all that to be possible the conditions must be created where people can sustainably work on FOSS, eek out a living in it if they want to. Right now FOSS is inherently unsustainable except for the privileged who can spare the time and money to work on it, and a happy few who have a job in it.

Call should not just be "use FOSS" but "adopt FOSS and help sustain responsible FOSS ecosystems".

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116316524763055082

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
superrr@social.tchncs.de ("SUPERRR Lab") wrote:

There’s an overwhelming amount of information out there about AI – here are some of our current favourite resources:

_Mystery AI Hype Theatre 3000

This podcast dives into the AI hype, with special guests and an unapologetically, extremely well-informed, critical take on AI.
https://dair-institute.org/maiht3k/

@DAIR

(1/5)

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
sodiboo@gaysex.cloud ("sodiboo :pride_heart:") wrote:

I've heard the sentiment that "personal data is highly radioactive", in that collecting it at all has unforeseen consequences.

a famous example from history includes census data on Jewish people in the Netherlands being used in the Holocaust; and how significantly fewer French Jews died because France simply didn't collect that data.

but there's a specific example I recall, about a more subtle element of this. I can't find the original source for this; searching for a good half an hour yielded nothing last I tried. but the story is about how even seemingly innocuous and necessary data can be used to draw correlations and deduce much more sensitive attributes.

the details are a bit fuzzy, but paraphrasing, it goes something like this:

there was a power company, who wanted to charge people more accurately for their utility use. previously, I guess they were just playing a flat rate? not sure. so, the power company went out to every home and installed an electricity meter. to measure the power usage in that home. they collected this data, for the intent of calculating the bills and probably also to better anticipate loads on the grid and plan more efficiently. the power company now has statistics about the power usage of any given home over time. surely nothing could go wrong here.

during the holy month of Ramadan, Islamic homes fast during the day. again, the details on this are a bit fuzzy, but i understand kitchen appliances to be very power hungry, so it seems plausible to me that this directly translated to abnormal power usage. perhaps significantly lower during the day, and significantly higher after sunset.

and an employee at the power company notices this anomaly in the data. "why are so many homes acting unexpectedly for 30 days a year?". and they realize that this is Ramadan. and they realize that. "oh shit. we've accidentally created a very accurate dataset of every muslim home in this region. oh fuck."

(I'm not sure what the deal was with installing the meters? maybe they had meters already but upgraded them to "smart" ones that phone home? again, for the legit purpose of better anticipating grid load or whatever, this was not an unnecessary thing to collect, and yet, the dataset encodes a highly sensitive attributes that you absolutely do not want to collect)

what power company was this? whose words am I paraphrasing? this story didn't just like, spawn suddenly in my mind palace, did it? I strongly recall the phrase "personal data is radioactive"/"information is radioactive" or some variation on those being used in the source I've heard it from. specifically the adjective "radioactive" I'm very confident about.