Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

Gotta meet with the boss

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/20/kash-patel-fbi-russia-trip-01005078

Boosted by jwz:
cmconseils ("Laura :bongoCat:") wrote:

Boosted by neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik"):
nsmsn@social.lol ("Nick Simson") wrote:

I’m ordering some of these from David’s shop and you should too.

https://shop.selfhelpartpublishingempire.com/product/follow-me-sticker

Boosted by neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik"):
binarydigit@social.lol ("BinaryDigit :AOL:") wrote:

Practicing with Kirby :kirby_yay:

https://binarydigit.art/post/822683152910893056/kirby

#art #procreate

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

Arrived home after a weekend away and was informed that I would not commence work before paying the scritch tax. Silly me. How could I forget.

Boosted by neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik"):
jason@social.lol ("//Jason") wrote:

A) Making good people better.
B) Making shitty people worse.

I could be wrong, of course, but I feel like I see "AI" doing a lot more of column B..

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
matildalove@wetdry.world ("Matilda Love") wrote:

instead of "autistic masking" it should be called cloaking. á la star trek. it eats a lot of power, you can't use all your systems while you're doing it, and you only ever need it to get through enemy territory alive

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
cmb@cathode.church ("Cosmic Meow Background") wrote:

ok party people, it’s time. please sign up for the glasgow campaign so that we know ny’all are interested: https://www.crowdsupply.com/fully-automated/glasgow-interface-explorer-revd

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
ixi@mastodon.online ("IXI") wrote:

From 19-20th July the Oceanside Freestyle Skateboarding Contest 1986 was held.

"With a little bit of practice" and to the frustration of his competition 19 year old Rodney Mullen would again dominate the discipline and continue to "build the house skateboarding lives in".

"After inventing the flatground ollie he went on to unveil kickflips, backside flips, heelflips, 360 flips, double flips, impossibles, darkslides, and onward."

Without him "skateboarding would still be in the dark ages."

Attachments:

• video: Final 2 minute run, short interview ("With a little bit of practice") and after-credit footage of the young Rodney Mullen, featuring a plethora of 80's freestyle tricks like Ollie Airwalk, handplant variations and flips. From 1986's Thrasher Magazine's Oceanside article: "Rodney Mullen is, well...so many things have been written about him that I'm not even going to bother. If you don't know about Rodney by now then you probably can't read anyway. Basically he skated pratically flawless. The tricks this guy does are pure state of the art. I won't go through them all, but will say that he has developed an ollie air-walk that will make your head spin. And to finish his whole run off, how about 30 or so one-wheeled 360's? Needles to say, Rodney won. Many are starting to wonder if he is even from this planet."

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Folks, I say this with love, because it has been an issue for several media personalities whose work I really enjoy and appreciate:

An audience can forgive scuffed video but you really, really need to get your audio situation sorted out if you want people to keep watching & listening.

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

okay, tonight i will try it at something completely different - poisoning me.

i was out of ideas for dessert, now i'm not and... wish me luck? 😅

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
andrewt@mathstodon.xyz ("Andrew") wrote:

Some drawings from the #emfcamp urban sketching session (if you can call it urban)

#emf2026

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
collectivedrift@tldr.nettime.org ("Collective Drift") wrote:

Next event: The Performative Archive: LLMs and Material Culture
When: 30/07, 18:00
Where: Lauschangriff, Rigaer str. 103, Berlin

Large language models (LLMs) operate as “performative archives” which actively reshape the cultural and technical dimensions of discourse. Hidden within vast troves of training data (human cultural production) are complex relational patterns.
In this talk, we will explore how LLM architectures extract these relations, which are mapped into geometric objects within complex mathematical spaces. By doing so, this technology is able to extract its discourse generating capability from selected sections of our cultural history, materially and politically centralizing knowledge, skills, and expressions of human culture. By making the naturally distributed linguistic production amenable to corporate control, LLMs decontextualize and project human expression into private capital circuits.

Hope to see you there!

#berlin #technology #llm #politics #AI

Boosted by keul@fosstodon.org ("Luca Fabbri"):
jscholes@dragonscave.space ("James Scholes") wrote:

I just went to an author's website, found the audiobook I wanted, pressed the "Apple Pay" button, and got a DRM-free download link without typing in a single field. It took less than two minutes to go from deciding to check out the book to having it loaded into BookPlayer.

This is how things can be. It's a marker of how rare this sort of experience is that it felt like magic.

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
esparta@ruby.social ("Esparta :ruby:") wrote:

Why We Can't Have Nice Software, by Andrew Kelley
https://andrewkelley.me/post/why-we-cant-have-nice-software.html

In this 2024 article, Andrew (Zig creator) takes a lot of excellent points and all of them pass the time challenge. A sample:

> LLMs are a way to make software take orders of magnitude more computational power, electricity, and human labor, while delivering a product whose extremely volatile quality is impossible to assure. The work will never be completed; it will only create the need for ever more labor.

Boosted by EmilyEnough@hachyderm.io ("Emily 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️"):
hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange ("Lesley Carhart :unverified:") wrote:

Having an in person international or national event in America? Are you weighing factors like lodging and transport? Cool stuff to do? Here’s a map to consider if any of your attendees may possibly, even remotely be LGBTQIA. And you care about them.

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

That is one ugly-ass statue of a big ol' racist.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/07/20/ugly-man-ugly-statue/

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

A generalized desire to understand how the objects and systems around you work, regardless of whether or not that knowledge can actually be applied

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

@cwebber If you have conventional opinions, all you have to do is find a community full of people with unconventional opinions and hang out exclusively there. Then, when you voice your mainstream opinions, you can cast yourself as an unconventional free-thinker. This way you get *both* the practical rewards of being in step with the mainstream *and* the emotional rewards of feeling like a special, unique snowflake!

Boosted by jwz:
mcfadden ("Brian McFadden") wrote:

FDA: It's not explosive diarrhea. You had an unscheduled fecal disassembly.

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

I am a model, you know what I mean
And I do my little turn while getting arrested
Yeah getting arrested, getting arrested, yeah
I do my little turn while getting arrested

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org ("NetBSD Foundation 🚩") wrote:

Added hb68k, a new port targeting home-designed and home-built computers designed around Motorola 68000-based processors, often distributed as DIY electronics kits.

https://freshbsd.org/netbsd/src/commit/5VZn8FqRGWpDGcOG

"I'm working with other 68k-home-brewers to get support for their systems integrated."

Boosted by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
tgpo@social.linux.pizza ("1hitsong") wrote:

#Burnout is very real y'all.

There are sooooo many people willing to complain about something, and sooooooo very few willing to help improve it.

Boosted by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
tgpo@social.linux.pizza ("1hitsong") wrote:

Important information regarding #jellyfin project leadership changes.

https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-project-leadership-changes

How does this impact the #roku client that I work on?

It doesn't. We're pretty insulated from changes like this. We program, test, merge, and release the Roku client ourselves, so no impact to us there.

#opensource #homelab #foss

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
LauraJG@deacon.social ("Laura G, Sassy 70’s") wrote:

By Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak (born 1933), Elegy III, 1997, oil on canvas, 47 1⁄4 × 50 1⁄4 inches (120 × 127 1⁄2 cm), private collection, ©️Samuel Bak. #arthistory #painting #oilpainting #HolocaustRemembrance #holocaustsurvivor

This work hearkens back to the engraving Melencolia I, by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). I will share the print as a comment.

From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: ‘[the] Vilna Ghetto, in Lithuania… in 1941 the artist Samuel Bak, only a child, found himself confined, along with his parents and tens of thousands of other Jews from the city of Vilna, or Vilnius. More than 50,000 perished there. Of his extended family, Bak and his mother survived.

His talent was evident early on. The Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever, who fought in the partisan resistance and rescued Jewish cultural artifacts with the Paper Brigade, met young Bak in the ghetto, saw how gifted he was, and helped exhibit his art. But Bak was more than just a prodigy: even under such hostile conditions he had an irrepressible need to create. Besides food and water, he desperately sought paper and pencils. He drew on whatever he could find. Recalling this yearning, Sutzkever once wrote, “this boy harbored something much stronger than those who set out to exterminate our people.”…

The artist has said his work imparts “a sense of the world that was shattered, of a world that was broken, of a world that exists again through an enormous effort to put everything together, when it is absolutely impossible to put it together because broken things can never become whole again. But,” he continued, “we still can make something that looks as if it was whole and live with it.”’

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

7-Zip plugged a serious vulnerability last month, but the program doesn't have an auto-update feature, meaning users must manually install the latest version. https://www.pcmag.com/news/free-archive-program-7-zip-can-be-hacked-with-a-malicious-file

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

RE: https://social.lol/@neatnik/116937256119844964

Office hours are here! Check the link below for details. This is open to all omg.lol members and the time is yours to use as you wish!

https://omglol.news/2026/07/20/office-hours-are-here

bcantrill ("Bryan Cantrill") wrote:

We're back! Today on Oxide and Friends, @ahl and I are going to talk to DigitalFilm Tree's Ramy Katrib about the past, present, and future of digital storytelling -- and what that future means for the infrastructure that underpins it.

Join us live at 5p Pacific:

https://discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=1520174255017431100

Recorded and syndicated as always!

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
michelleful@scicomm.xyz ("Dr. Michelle Fullwood") wrote:

I've been making a linguistics puzzle game where you decipher a language (which happens to be German) using shared etymology, shared cultural knowledge and pattern matching.

It's called German Is A̶w̶f̶u̶l̶ Easy and the first five levels are up! No German knowledge necessary, and feedback is very welcome.

https://michellefullwood.com/languages/german/is-easy/

#etymology #linguistics #puzzles #LearnGerman

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
bd808 ("Bryan Davis") wrote:

It is happening! 10 years after the first serious discussions I know of about organizing at the Wikimedia Foundation, the US direct rank-and-file workers of the WMF have formally demanded recognition of a bargaining unit. I could not be more proud of all of my past and present colleagues who toiled and voted to get us to this milestone. Next stop: collective bargaining!

https://wikiworkersunited.org/announcements/2026-07-20-us-demands-voluntary-recognition/