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Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
dee@treehouse.systems ("Dee in London") wrote:

yay, Elastica are back and going to release new music.

Elastica... the band who almost run my sorry homeless ass over when I was sleeping in the Hacienda car park in late 1993, and apologised by feeding me from their rider before then shooting me a lot during Laserquest.

I went on tour with them many times, and they never made one bad record and in Justin Welch they have the best drummer I ever saw, and in Annie one of the best bassists (ignoring problems with drugs)... and in Donna a gem of a person so creative on guitar...

and Justine. Justine was so unfuckingbelievably kind, like, you don't know how much. I called her up one time as I needed to sell some records at the tape exchange so that I could eat yet I didn't have any ID so they wouldn't accept the sale. she came and met me, refused to give her ID but instead just gave me more money than I needed.

she also had this really strong cohort of intelligent women as friends, you definitely know some of them (now famous artists and musicians)... and she never wanted fame.

yet that first album... every song is excellent. and because I know the people behind a lot of the songs I like the songs even more (usually the reverse happens when you know the people).

my favourite song on that album was called Blue, which became the name of a fanzine I sold to keep myself alive and feed myself.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu ("European Commission") wrote:

From now on, companies across the EU must be clear about their use of AI.

Providers and deployers of AI must:

✔️ AI-generated content must carry a machine-readable mark
✔️ Deepfakes and AI text on public interest topics must be visibly labelled
✔️ When you chat with a bot or virtual agent, it must make clear it’s not a human
✔️ When AI is actively analysing you, companies must tell you

️We've published guidance to help companies comply.

Transparency helps build trust 👇

https://link.europa.eu/gTvhRX

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

I will keep working on the things I care about and advancing the world I want to see, no matter how dismal it gets

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
fluffy@plush.city ("fluffy 💜") wrote:

Also for #bandcampFriday, as usual my entire catalog is available at https://sockpuppet.bandcamp.com/ and the full discography is super discounted

people who aren't my mom tell me that my music's pretty good

(my mom also tells me it's pretty good but she super does not understand most of it)

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
NorcalGma2@sfba.social ("Norcal Gma 2") wrote:

For years and years I had our water tested for anything that might be harmful. I am aware there are risks to using well water. I never had a test come back negative not even slightly sketchy.
When my husband was recently hospitalized I was baffled how he came in contact with bad bacteria. He is very sheltered and I am exceptionally careful.
So to put my worries to rest I bought a comprehensive, expensive analysis of our water by a local lab.
The results were presented yesterday.
Our water is contaminated and very risky to an immune compromised person.
So I am finishing a towel for a Mastodon friend while I wait for the well fixer people. Luckily a treatment and filter remedy is available.
So we are boiling water until the fix and I am thankful I had the presence of mind to test.
It's always something, right?

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
toxi@mastodon.thi.ng ("Karsten Schmidt") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117030783136853538

Being given a 100% AI generated score for your own mental work hurts. It also hurts because the result is presented as absolute and undeniable, with no path for appeal or inspection. A decision presented as a black-box score with no insights revealed how the score has been computed or the specific reasons/patterns which triggered "detection" to begin with[1]... A score produced by a third party which inserted itself as middleman in the communication flow between writers and readers and claims authority and arbiter status over deciding what is slop and what is not. Another layer of statistical machine learning to detect patterns/anomalies of statistical means of language generation...

In this specific case, I don't really care too much what these tools say. I know what I wrote and rewrote, over hours, and to the best of my ability (as non-native English speaker).

The myth of computational objectivity prevails. For decades it was about blind belief in algorithms, now shifted to AI models. The wider public and most decision makers neither seem to understand the difference, nor do they care about the inherent dangers. Pragmatism at all costs. The genie is out and can't be put back. The problems (if acknowledged at all) are always treated as temporary minor hurdles rather than fundamental systemic issues.

It's upsetting how Little Britain's "Computer Says No"[2] attitude and blind outsourcing of black-box classification and decision-making to machines has already been so extremely normalized and is impacting more and more of our lives, for many people/minorities in far more serious and outright deadly ways... 😭

[1] Having worked with many forms of machine learning myself, I know first hand that lack of detailed observability has been plaguing ML disciplines for decades. I think these are also some of the most worrisome aspects of more widely deploying LLM affine tech. Whilst some minor progress has been made, these efforts are severely challenged and thwarted by the exponentially growing model sizes, architectural complexity and distributed nature of agents.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer%5Fsays%5Fno

#AI #AIDetection #DecisionMaking

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
linuxgal@techhub.social ("🌈 ☯️Teresita🐧👭") wrote:

With #Python find words longer than 10 characters that use all the vowels:

#! /usr/bin/env python3
with open('unixdict.txt') as f:
while (line := f.readline().strip()):
if (len(line) > 10 and all(
line.count(c) == 1 for c in 'aeiou')):
print(line)

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
chriswarcraft.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Chris Kluwe") wrote:

“First they came for my fiance, and I was very upset because I had never read the poem and frankly even if I had it sounds like one of those communist things all the perverts on the internet keep going on about why no I have never read a book why do you ask?”

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4usmserhjqkvhldgedfjb3jw/post/3msgz3fxt7k2c

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
darius@friend.camp ("Darius Kazemi") wrote:

After experimenting with local LLMs for a couple years now, I'm excited to release my newest project: The Ethical Assistant! It provides all the benefits of an LLM assistant but with low energy usage, completely private, and no cost to use.

https://tinysubversions.com/ethical-assistant/

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:

I miss the athlete I used to be, running miles before labwork, doing aerial silks drops and rock climbing and dancing until 4am. On the other hand for the last four years I've persisted in lifting + adaptive workouts despite unbelievable constraints and difficulty and tbh that's real athletic grit

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
andthisismrspeacock@mas.to ("AndThisIsMrsPeacock 🏳‍🌈") wrote:

A weird thing about living in #Massachusetts is constantly having other Americans tell you the life you live every day is impossible.

"You can't tax billionaires, they'll leave."

We have been, and they didn't.

"You can't legalize weed, it will increase crime."

We did, and it didn't.

"You can't make public transit free, it will cost too much."

We did, and it didn't.

And on and on, and the lesson to learn is don't listen to the billionaire media professional whiners and just do what's right for your community AND IT WORKS! But I still have to listen to this stupid shit every day.

isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:") wrote:

@NfNitLoop this is the first place I look whenever I'm on the market for a new one. And somehow I have always failed to find the right match.

And this time, I'm choosing a laptop for a person who still needs Windows as a backup system.

jwz wrote:

If you are going to Outside Lands and don't want to install their crappy app, here's a calendar file of the whole schedule.

Also, if you are going and we actually know each other in person, lemme know!
https://jwz.org/b/yk-U

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

How does the idiom "going around" work. Like "he was going around causing fights," "he was going around looking confused." It just seems to be equivalent to "was" but there's sort of this shambling display quality to it. Like one might not say "he was going around looking impeccable and making no mistakes," that's not something to go around doing, but someone certainly can say "he was going around lookin shitty and fucking up."

Overheard someone say "he was going around coming to thanksgiving, going around coming to birthdays, going around coming to every holiday" and it hit me strangely.

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

@isagalaev FWIW, I have not tried their hardware yet but their software has definitely put System76 on my “keep in mind” list for when I’m in the market again.

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker 🔜 DEFCON 34"):
thaddeus ("thaddeus:~$") wrote:

If nothing else, LLMs have proven that people who sound like they know what they are talking about are often mistaken for people who know what they're talking about.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
1bitsquared@1bitsquared.com ("1BitSquared") wrote:

Hey everyone! We have a vendor booth this year at #defcon34 come and say hi!!! #defcon #opensource #electronics #embedded

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

Uber driver had a reason for being vegetarian I hadn't heard before: "if you add up all the hamburgers people eat, there aren't enough cows for that, so meat must be fake"

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

omg.lol Office Hours start in ~15 minutes. Feel free to stop by if you’d like to chat about anything! https://home.omg.lol/office-hours

Boosted by jwz:
xan@xantronix.social ("XANTRONIX") wrote:

can we please go back to NFTs? those were way easier to ignore at least

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

When Apple says "privacy is a human right", then fails to enable users to protect their privacy effectively in order to defend profits, they're telling you *exactly* what they think of human rights.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@psylo/117039552203174813

Nevermind that when Apple talks about privacy as a "human right", they are happy to omit ~17% of humanity. And nevermind that Tim gives Zuck et. al. *shocking* abilities to subvert privacy defences you thought you'd opted into.[1]

What's on display are the limits of High Modernist Computing; the demand for untrammeled control and a marketing facade of perfection crumbling under the reality that nothing and nobody is perfect, leaving users with no recourse.

[1]: https://infrequently.org/2025/08/apple-vs-fb-kayfabe/

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

it's not even just "the game is better" it's that you *can't even understand the good parts of the show* without the game. the game is load-bearing here. but they made it load-bearing AND they removed a ton of the interesting bits that made the themes really emotionally impactful, and every time they want to bring one of them back in, they just kind of quickly glance in the direction of a plot beat from the games and say "and you remember that happened, right? we don't need to do that again?"

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

anyway overall I mostly enjoyed it and I think that Liam deserves more credit than he's getting, but it is absolutely in every episode violating the cardinal rule of a piece of media that references other media, "don't just remind me of a better thing I could be doing instead" except in this case the better thing is the game *that it is adapting*.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

so Silver is the way that you tell if Something Is A Monster, the medallion shakes or doesn't shake, blah blah, but he _doesn't have a silver sword_ and they only bring the medallion back … once, in the whole season, I think? just to point out that it's still there, and mostly to remind you about its significance for the bounty hunter bits?

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

there's also the silver sword / steel sword thing which I thought was really poignant and interesting and said something quite thematically interesting about the Witcher's role in society, literally carrying a "but what if mankind is the real monsters" allegory around on his back at all times. and again, the show doesn't need to do this, they could just ignore that to make screen time for other stuff, but then they periodically drop in an out-of-place line about silver arrowheads or something!

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

and, again, if the show wanted to do something _different_, fine, love to see an Interesting Artistic Adaptational Choice. But they didn't! They're just like, hey look at all this great lore that Geralt and Ciri know about specific monsters and how fighting them with kindness and compassion and understanding is WAY more effective than random violence! except… 100% of that is off camera. nobody _else_ fights monsters with random violence, so there's no contrast.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

and it's not just "potion". you gotta think about it. what's going on with the monster? why is it here? what social ill does it represent? and which one of the MANY potions, which have often CONTRADICTORY effects, would make the most sense to use?

and like… the wraith scene. if you've played the game, and you know the difference between Aard and Yrden, you can understand the clever thing he's doing and why it makes sense. but the show just *doesn't tell you* what is happening, or why!

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

not to mention the mechanics around stuff like potions. in the show there's just… potion. He can take it in which case he's really good at fighting, or he can not take it in which case he's … really good at fighting. but the whole point in the games is that Geralt *is Batman*. everything's prep time! if you just fight a monster by barging in and murder-hobo'ing it, you get absolutely wrecked, immediately, even if you are quite high level.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

granted, I am a fan of the games and have not even read the books, which I will have to rectify at some point. but there's just _so_ much thematic richness in the game that is absolutely erased in this adaptation. and it would be one thing if they just, like, didn't talk about the Path at all, if that wasn't part of his character, but they are CONSTANTLY alluding to the blank space where his ambivalence about the Path would be