Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

Texas may hate education, but the resistance is warming up.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/08/05/texas-hates-education/

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
vicfroh ("Victator") wrote:

#eattherich #composttherich #nobillionaires

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
gedankenstuecke@scholar.social ("Bastian Greshake Tzovaras") wrote:

«I don’t need a stair-climbing wheelchair that costs $30,000 and requires a maintenance crew. I need better doorknobs and or a ramp. But a ramp is boring. You can't make investors have a hard on for a ramp that doesn't connect to the cloud. You can’t give a TED Talk about a ramp. You can’t get venture capital funding for a slightly wider doorframe.»

https://sightlessscribbles.com/disability-dongle/

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
chaotic_evil@jorts.horse ("Florist vs the Anthropocene") wrote:

i'm truly relieved that the prefix dr is gender neutral in english

although i believe the historical reason is that all doctors were assumed to be male

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

And as a reminder, you can see how you’re doing individually here: https://alt-text.social.lol

Anything less than 100% is leaving someone out. 😟

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

This is pretty sad, social.lol folks. It only takes a moment to write some alt text, and it makes your media accessible to everyone. We have multiple visually impaired members and you’re just excluding them entirely. :prami_sad:

I’d like to think we don’t need a hard rule to get people to do the right thing, but maybe we do? In any case, I’ll probably start to reach out to people who aren’t adding alt text over the next few days.

https://mastodon.social/@AltTextHealthCheck/117042846608811957

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

littlegem: so i am still thinking about this idea where programs run as a script to produce the stuff to compile.

this would ease use for scripting, since we could just turn compilation off and holy crap it just works.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
psf@oldbytes.space wrote:

In their article "Malleable Software", Ink & Switch list various ways that modern software applications fail to serve the user:

• Software is too rigid: users can’t tailor it to suit their workflow, except by entering the role of programmers.
• Software applications are overspecialized "avocado slicers", not general tools like "knives", so their lack of tailorability is keenly felt.
• Software doesn’t provide a reasonable learning curve from beginner to expert; in other words, time spent learning an application doesn’t unlock tailorability, instead the end user must learn an unrelated skill like a markup/scripting language or even the tool’s implementation language.
• Software applications are increasingly siloed, so sharing data between apps, let alone orchestrating cross-app workflows, is overly difficult.

These are real problems. From what I can tell, Ink & Switch are software researchers, and view the problems from a highly technical perspective, focusing on novel infrastructure that enables end-user programmability. They pose questions such as "how do we ease users into programming?" and "instead of shipping a dead, static binary, can we ship a living image containing programming tools allowing it to be modified in arbitrary ways while still running?" These ideas are technologically exquisite, but they fail to provide a gentle learning curve.

(cont'd) 🧵

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

https://theconversation.com/todays-arguments-about-disability-benefits-have-been-raging-for-500-years-285633

Disabled people have always worked, but from the time of the Industrial Revolution they have faced increasing challenges. Mechanisation increased the pace of production and often favoured those able to work faster and for longer hours. As a result, many disabled workers found it harder to secure employment or faced worsening conditions. But they continued to organise and demand change.

Well, they say AI is the next industrial revolution...

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

I can't help but wonder if my life would be a lot less tumultuous if I wasn't disabled.

Not even directly because of the disability but rather the difficulty of holding onto work

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@transactualuk/117042053143753443

Crap, it went through?

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
transactualuk ("TransActual") wrote:

Earlier this week we shared a post saying that we would be leaving Mastodon - but after hearing how important this platform is to many of our supporters, we will be staying.

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
cstross.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Charlie Stross") wrote:

My answer is LOL ROFL (dickbrain)

The terminally AI-pilled can't even *imagine* some people have *never* asked stochastic parrots to cheat at their job for them.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social ("Kevin Beaumont") wrote:

RE: https://techhub.social/@Techmeme/117041512465545105

By using Reddit as a trusted source for AI search answers (the default experience), Google has effectively outsourced itself to unpaid Reddit moderators.

Also worth point out - anybody can become a mod on Reddit and open a subreddit. If you wanna influence opinion like a nation state, Reddit's the door now.

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

i didn't make that up btw, that's on wikipedia

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

System F<:, pronounced "F-sub"

Boosted by jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)"):
paddyduke ("Paddy Duke") wrote:

@jonny Back when tokens were still at their cheapest, my CTO (at least) once accidentally spent well over £1,000 in an afternoon by creating a loop in their agentic data analysis tool. They thought it was a funny story for Show & Tell.

They had built the tool explicitly because we *couldn’t afford* to hire a data analyst for a few weeks to do the work.

I couldn’t help but think about what their response would be if someone *accidentally* spent £1,000 on other, non-AI work.

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

Keen to buy access to my other resources and the ability to ask me questions of the back of that? You can do that here:

https://deadsimpletech.com/arca

fribbledom ("muesli") wrote:

Listen, I'm not against AI coding agents. I'm against people using a lightsaber to slice a loaf of bread and then acting surprised when the kitchen table gets cut in half.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
davidallengreen@mastodon.green ("dag") wrote:

NEW

Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood studio system, and the law of contract

The autonomy and agency of an actor taking on a major media company and winning

By me, on the centenary of the birth of Marilyn Monroe

https://theemptycity.com/blog/2026/06/9801/

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

It must be really depressing right now to be some guy named Claude who just really likes helping people with commits

Boosted by andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt"):
sebastian@phpc.social ("Sebastian Bergmann :phpunit:") wrote:

A car manufacturer lists an Android botnet in its open source attribution. The entry gives away how the list was made: by scanning instead of by declaring.

Why a declared dependency list is worth more than a scanned one, and how the PHPUnit PHAR discloses its own contents:

https://phpunit.expert/articles/your-composer-lock-knows-what-a-carmaker-only-guesses.html?ref=mastodon

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

oh shit i've just realised where i can get all my disk space back from - deleting those LLMs i downloaded way back to play with

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

you know what we should have? a certified slop free badge we can stick on websites. a particularly obnoxious one that is funny and will upset ai bros.

andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt") wrote:

Unexpected use case for https://github.com/git-pkgs/proxy - putting it in front of their Artifactory.

I suspect people are using it for edge fan-out without actually paying for Artifactory Edge nodes.

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

Some myrmecologists, both amateur and professional have started to wince away from the term "slavery" when used to describe the way that some ants capture other ants. This is mostly a kind impulse to not mix up the horrors of human slavery with something insects do. I've made the case that the word is probably fine since it's hard to distinguish what humans have done from what ants do.

But, there is another word I *don't* think should ever be applied to ants.

This is the use of "caste" 1/

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

This demonstrates an
observation of the algebraic subtyping community that it is easier to create helpful error
messages from a subtype-inference-based system rather than from a unification-based one.

Uhoh.

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

I solved the daily #CluesBySam, Aug 5th 2026 (Tricky), in less than 15 minutes
🟩🟡🟩🟩
🟩🟨🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩
https://cluesbysam.com

db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:

I could not.

db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:

can I blind one-shot a WordPress theme change on a staging site without spinning up a local dev stack? Let's find out...