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Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
mlemweb@social.coop ("Dr. Morgan Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

Hi All, We've got a Hack & Craft today at 2pm ET (18:00 UTC). These virtual community meetings are a cross between a user group and a craft circle, so grab whatever project you're currently working on and join us to chat about free software, free culture, and making things together!

https://bbb.sfconservancy.org/b/chr-4fm-amb-air

I've finally finished building my inset sewing table that I've been working on so I'll be breaking that in at the Hack & Craft!

A sewing table built of pine plywood, 2x4" and 2x6" lumber with an inset opening for my sewing machine to sit flush with the table surface and storage for sewing notions.

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

I haven't quite given up artistic efforts, but I still only draw sporadically. The alt text contains all the details.

Oh I gave up on the blue colored pencil. I felt like I spent more time sharpening the pencil after breaking leads than I did drawing. I went back to a mechanical 2mm graphite. I'm still trying to remember how to use it.

#doodles #yaombaaa

The kiddo asked me to draw Batman, and so I drew the old bald guy wearing a mask in a long sleeved shirt and jeans, arms spread wide with a shower curtain for a cape. The kiddo was somehow not pleased with that. They then asked me to draw Robin, so I added the little bird hovering just above "Batman's" left elbow. The giant snake in the right corner is just because it's fun to draw tubular twisty things like snakes and tentacles and ribbons etc.
Doodle of an aquatic humanoid species. He has a little fish buddy to his right. I apparently named it "Kruc".
Some sort of alien, land octopus creature (although only five tentacles are visible). It has two dark, large eyes and wears some sort of tech gizmo around its neck like a collar.
This is a small thumbnail of a woman looking poised to bring some pain as she loosely holds the handle of a giant mace (of the smashing variety) in her left hand with the mace's head resting on the ground. She's got some solid shoulders and calves. This isn't an especially great drawing (obviously), but I like the pose and potential energy of it. I wish I had the chops to take the idea further. I'd love to see what she's going to do with that mace. I did not go into the drawing with this idea. The drawing started as a very light X on the page, and some more noodling on the shape made me realize it was a person, and probably somewhere in the 60% mark I decided it was a woman.

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right"):
minmi@sfba.social ("MinmiTheDino") wrote:

We took the kids by the MLK memorial in sf today and came upon this quote, which I hadn’t seen before

A plaque which reads “We must rapidly begin to shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. “ Beneath it is the text translated into Korean (I believe)

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

it was always the plan
to put the world in your hand

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

Overall I remain *mostly* disinterested in the fediverse-vs-atmosphere debates, because I am not interested in squabbles over the present but building towards a future. It's hard not to make a bit of side commentary though, I guess.

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

That said, "instance" has become several things on the fediverse, and even though it's not how I have argued things should be, it encompasses several things, including often a kind of community, and also including participatory infrastructure.

I'm not interested in playing the comparison game too much, but there is where we are: ATproto allows for movement across the network, but still does rely on server-oriented sources of authority (and looks like it will get more of it in the upcoming versions of their authorization systems, from what I have read), and the fediverse has developed into a strong sense of server-oriented sources of authority, but is more participatory.

Directed delivery remains an important part of how the fediverse manages to achieve participatory involvement that is still lacking from the ATmosphere's hub-and-spoke-in-practice ecosystem at present. It is how you scale down and wide.

Both could learn from each other, though. Even combined is not the full answer.

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right"):
loppear@social.coop ("Luke O.") wrote:

"What would it take to build a movement to abandon the current internet and start anew? What’s something good that currently requires the production and storage of digital data, that could be rebuilt without it?"

This little conference on Life After Data (October 2026, Georgetown Law) prompt is lining up with so much thinking I see around me right now, in #permacomputing or #solarpunk imagining making other worlds from below.

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/privacy-technology-center/education/life-after-data-the-conference-on-de-datafication/ h/t Robin Sloan

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

The Space Virgins are back talking about a mediocre Stephen King movie from the 80s:

https://video.thepolarbear.co.uk/w/6vAn6HhEUt2JJyxTrRvzUo

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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

The one bright spot of LLMs is that we've learned exactly how morally and creatively bankrupt this industry is, and how fast people are willing to throw away everything they said they cared about for decades - craft, understanding, efficiency, detail, all of it - just to cosplay competence and bandwagon their way to groupthink targets they don't even realize were made up to manipulate them.

Christ it's embarassing.

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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

The fact that we're willing to rely on LLMs to generate code knowing that it only mostly works because that code has been generated before thousands of times is not an indication that stochastic models are good, it's a massive, punishing indictment of computing as a field.

Using an insanely huge expensive model to quasi-reproduce work that's been created thousands of times already isn't productive or efficient. It's a symptom of profound failures of language, practice, process and imagination.

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Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
lproven@vivaldi.net ("Liam Proven") wrote:

Giant Banana Pulled Over in Montana: Driver Says Cops Have Stopped Him 100s Of Times

https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/06/18/giant-banana-pulled-over-in-montana-driver-says-cops-have-stopped-him-100s-of-times/

For 15 years, Steve Braithwaite has driven a 23-foot banana across the country and, on Wednesday, just like hundreds of times before, he was pulled over by law enforcement. "They always find a reason to pull me over," Braithwaite said.

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

@NanoRaptor been growing MSG crystals (deliberately). Beautiful and uncannily umami!

white-translucent crystal on black backdrop. "feathery", lacking for better vocabulary - not classically well-grown clean cube-shape
my fingers delicately holding what looks like a crystallized half-eggshell with greebley edges

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Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
NanoRaptor@bitbang.social ("Nanoraptor") wrote:

While moving, I found a bottle of soy sauce probably there from when I moved in 15 years ago at the back of a kitchen cupboard.

Tipped it out and in the bottom of the bottle were little rocks - salt crystals. They're beautiful - and they taste amazing.

A photo of four large salt crystals, golden coloured and like little cubes of transparent gold. Three of them are groups of cubes joined together, and one is a single slightly rectangular cube by itself, all with wonderfully ninety degree angles on them.
A photo of four large salt crystals, golden coloured and like little cubes of transparent gold. Three of them are groups of cubes joined together, and one is a single slightly rectangular cube by itself, all with wonderfully ninety degree angles on them.
A photo of two large salt crystals, golden coloured and like little cubes of transparent gold. They are groups of cubes joined together, all with wonderfully ninety degree angles on them.
A photo of some large salt crystals, golden coloured and like little cubes of transparent gold. Three of them are groups of cubes joined together, and one is a single slightly rectangular cube by itself, all with wonderfully ninety degree angles on them.

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Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
NanoRaptor@bitbang.social ("Nanoraptor") wrote:

Soy sauce generated salt crystals sitting on an iPhone torchlight.

#art

A photo of a batch of soy sauce generated salt crystals sitting on top of an iphone torchlight, looking like crystal gold lit from within.
A photo of a cubic soy sauce generated salt crystal sitting on top of an iphone torchlight, looking like crystal gold lit from within.
A photo of a batch of soy sauce generated salt crystals sitting on top of an iphone torchlight, looking like crystal gold lit from within.
A photo of a batch of soy sauce generated salt crystals sitting on top of an iphone torchlight, looking like crystal gold lit from within.

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

=_=

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Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
arstechnica ("Ars Technica") wrote:

The UK will scan asylum-seekers’ faces for age checks—despite knowing the tech is flawed

Tests of age-verification technology show the risks of life-altering errors.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/the-uk-will-scan-asylum-seekers-faces-for-age-checks-despite-knowing-the-tech-is-flawed/?utm%5Fbrand=arstechnica&utm%5Fsocial-type=owned&utm%5Fsource=mastodon&utm%5Fmedium=social

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Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
Binks@kind.social wrote:

@hi_cial @cwebber As far as I can tell they never fully confirmed what happened, but speculation was that they picked up UV-C lights (used for sterilizing germs, cheap at that point in China because they were heavily bought for COVID) instead of UV-A (typical safe uv lighting). If that's the case, technically it was infinitely brighter in that very dangerous spectrum than the sun, as one of the things the ozone layer does is filter out all of the sun's UV-C before it reaches the surface.

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

There are no instances in ActivityPub either. There's only actors.

The instance'ification came outside of the work on the spec, though it did start with the particular shape of how sharedInbox was defined. I wish I had pushed harder for sharedInbox to retain the actor-like properties I believed were important, rather than the implicit-routing that Mastodon pushed for. My biggest regret.

Nonetheless, even then, there's still no "instance" in AP, in terms of the spec. In terms of the fediverse, the way it became, that's a different story.

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
FayeDrake@furry.engineer wrote:

@jonny @davidgerard I salute you for fighting the good fight

“Lulz I can run this on all of your stuff and there’s nothing you can do about it it’s inevitable” finally being met with “you _do_ realise the slop cannon is full of trivially exploitable holes, and the only thing stopping us from exploiting them are the social contracts you’re currently burning as fuel, right?”

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

Little. Yellow. Lovely.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/06/20/an-evening-discovery/

eastern cobweaver

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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
uglyreykjavik.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Ugly Reykjavik") wrote:

A beautiful old gate that seems no longer in use.

#Iceland #Reykjavik #photography #streetphotography #nature #landscape #naturephotography #landscapephotography #flowers

A pretty white gate surrounded by flowers.

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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
jasongorman@mastodon.cloud ("Jason Gorman") wrote:

The growing trend for AI-accelerated Big Design Up-Front is founded on a category error about the nature of the design process.

And faster BDUF isn't going to help. Quite the reverse, in fact.

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/06/20/the-solution-to-bduf-isnt-faster-bduf/

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Boosted by jwz:
jef ("Jef Poskanzer") wrote:

#algae

green bumper-sticker sized image with white text saying "We have always been at war with algae"

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

The Space Virgins are back talking about a mediocre Stephen King movie from the 80s:

https://video.thepolarbear.co.uk/w/6vAn6HhEUt2JJyxTrRvzUo

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
eestileib@tech.lgbt ("eestileib (she/hers)") wrote:

My kid and I are trying to get something done with an airline that requires talking to a person.

On our third roguelike pass through the phone tree, it asked whether we wanted to "talk to an agent", and my kid immediately said "no", meaning we had to start again.

I asked why, and my kid says "we're trying to find a person, not an agent".

That's what, less than three years for my kid to associate the term "agent" with "having my time wasted".

Good work AI industry.

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Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mrencyclopedia@retro.pizza ("Mr. Encyclopedia") wrote:

Another AI argument: "I'm studying Japanese and asked Claude to make flashcards based on the grammar points in my Japanese textbook, and it did in minutes what it would have taken me hours"

What if I told you that the act of making the flashcards is studying? When I went through the Naval Nuclear Program I went through a very similar process of making flashcards for all the things we would be tested on. I never actually had to use the cards. Making them was all I needed to do to sufficiently remember.

There is no way to optimize your way out of the learning process. It always takes the same amount of effort in the end.

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Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
baralheia@dragonchat.org ("Baral'heia Stormdancer ΘΔ🐲") wrote:

The more you can minimize your usage of - or outright quit using - these services, the better. Nothing will change if you keep giving them your visits and ad revenue. Don't feed the beast if you can help it, y'all!

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neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik") wrote:

All maintenance is complete!

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Boosted by NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈"):
Lana@beige.party ("𝐿𝒶𝓃𝒶 "not yet begun to fight"") wrote:

"when did Star Trek get woke??"

In the very first episode of Star Trek: the original series, we see a white Captain reporting to his black Admiral boss, a black woman on the bridge just a couple years after Jim Crow was abolished, wearing a short skirt (a symbol of feminist liberation at the time), a Japanese helmsman on the bridge only 20 years after the internment camps, a Russian crewmate on the bridge during the Cold War [edit: actually did not appear until Season 2 but the point stands], and the foundation of the modern concept of queercoding.

In the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we see male crossdressing crew members, a female officer on the bridge in charge of security, a literal ship's counselor stationed at all times on the bridge, a single mom raising her teenage son on her own while juggling a full career in medicine, a blind mechanic whose "disability" is shown to be a strength, and an angry, all-powerful godlike being who is revealed to be simply a petulant child masquerading as a deity.

In the very first episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9, we see a black man gain a powerful command position, respect the hell out of the customs of a religion he didn't understand, show respect and equal treatment to members of three other alien races he didn't understand, appoint a female guerilla fighter who defeated imperialist fascists to a position of authority within his administration and defer to her judgement in areas of her expertise, accept his friend's gender change, and tell his son he loves him.

Star Trek has always been woke. You just grew up to be a bad person.

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Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("The Luddites were right"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

"There are colors that I want to show you, but I can’t. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can’t show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can’t capture them, and your screen can’t display them. No game you’ve ever played has contained them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent from the digital world.

Most of them are cyans."

https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-colors-your-screen-cant-show-you/