Mastodon Feed: Posts

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

blogged: They don’t make ’em like Sublime Text anymore
https://dbushell.com/2026/08/07/sublime-text/

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

oops typo

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

According to Stack Overflow, cargo is the most desired development tool.

yeah, mostly because people haven't pushed it very hard.

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

Me and Drew are playing Div 2
https://live.freebooters.uk

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

reading: "I'm leaving OpenAI to build Jurassic Park"

https://taylor.town/leaving-openai

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

There are contractors doing work on my apartment building and they want me to download their app.

I'm like, No, I'm not going to download your bloody app. Put a letter in my letterbox.

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

Elastica is how I got into tech, they needed to shoot a music video for Waking Up / Connection and a US release... they needed 300 people to turn up at a venue on Regents Street in London to shoot this... in 2 weeks time in 1994.

homeless ass me had gone on tour with the band and had offered to sell their T-shirts for them... and they let me. in the process the fans gave me their names and addresses for more information if it ever came.

I had 1,800 names and addresses, and Justine got in contact and connected me to their management company Chris Morrison Organisation... could I contact these people? quickly?

yes, just buy me 1,800 envelopes, stamps, bits of paper, and pack of biros.

I broke into an empty building, and set to it... I wrote and posted 1,800 letters... and we waited.

on the day 400 people turned up, and we had to turn a lot away... the management company were amazed.

"Could you do this again? We have another band and we would like this capability"

I said no, no way... that broke my back being doubled over writing letters... "You should buy a computer, a computer could do this".

they bought me an IBM 30386... I hadn't told them to buy me a computer! so I needed another squat but this time one with power. I broke into another empty building between Camden and Kentish Town, and stole the power from the hole in the roof that led to the neighbours attic and their light fitting.

I got a book from the library, a BASIC reference book, in alphabetical order... and I built a database... it worked, as did mail merge, printing, and various other things I made. It helps not knowing this is "difficult".

that other band that CMO had... Blur, about to release a track called Girls & Boys

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?"