Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
jfred@jawns.club ("Jonathan Frederickson") wrote:

@cwebber I dream of a Guix-based ocap OS for phones/tablets/laptops

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

"I really love your peaches, want to shake your tree"

RE: https://www.threads.com/@moby.dick.rb2/post/DcLqv5vmwVZ

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

Allow me to point all y'all to the devastatingly negative review of Redshirts in Kirkus, which calls the novel "sophomoric" and concludes "Check the date. If it isn't April 1st, you've been had."

Anyway, the book was a New York Times best seller, got shouted out by Tom Hanks on social media, won the Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Novel, and has been optioned multiple times for film/TV.

So, yeah, don't sweat the bad reviews.

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-scalzi/redshirts/

RE: https://www.threads.com/@anianneowens/post/DcMb0UGCXjM

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

@cwebber "these noodles taste like NURBS"

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

But if you allow yourself to resolve your moral contradictions and compromises by saying "well it's not really a compromise at all, I figured out how to beat the system" then you end up here, getting yourself Orbed https://skepchick.org/2025/05/adam-conover-ruins-his-own-reputation/

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

What am I watching and also, gross but not wrong

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
Robinbannks ("Robin Bannks") wrote:

So Far

CSNY release their first compilation/best-of album on August 19, 1974. They released this album after that monster summer stadium tour in 1974. The band didn't want to release a "greatest hits" album after just two albums, Graham Nash called it "absurd." It's sold over 6M albums. So far. #CSNY #sofar #70srock #classicrock #davidcrosby #stephenstills #grahamnash #neilyoung #rock #rockmusic #music #musicsky #musiciansky #jonimitchell

https://robinbannks.com/2026/08/19/so-far/

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

RE: https://flipboard.com/@salon/news-politics-vjnjnsc9z/-/a-iahIuU9nTyWkuZxgdmGCrw%3Aa%3A3199680-%2F0

“Having a babysitter makes the 80-year-old president look even older and weaker than he already is. The over-the-top response revealed how sensitive Trump and his staff are about his visible aging, and how much it ties into their larger anxieties about his rapid decline. “

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@Itchy/117121750976210620

JFC

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
ml@ecoevo.social ("Megan Lynch (she/her)") wrote:

"The Trump administration announced Tuesday it is rolling back a rule prohibiting logging and road construction in undeveloped parts of national forests, including more than 4 million acres of federally managed forest lands in California.

The change could open some of California’s most remote backcountry to new roads and development — even as U.S. Forest Service research shows that roads are a major source of wildfire ignitions in the state’s national forests."

https://calmatters.org/environment/wildfires/2026/08/trump-california-forests-logging-roads/ #USpol

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
3TomatoesShort@disabled.social ("WearyBonnie") wrote:

I can't believe Moose is still waiting to be adopted, he's so gorgeous 🥰

Moose - Large Male Irish Wolfhound x Great Dane Mix Dog in WA - PetRescue

https://www.petrescue.com.au/listings/1207435

> At just 3 years old, Moose is a gentle giant with plenty of love to give. Like many dogs, he can be a little unsure when meeting new people, but give him a few minutes and you’ll discover a...

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
ErikUden@mastodon.de ("Erik Uden 🚩") wrote:

On September 3rd 2018 #OTD the first person who has ever introduced me to technology, Ahrend Ihnen, has sadly passed away.

He meant a lot to me, because when I was in 5th grade and just began at my new school, the Ulrichsgymnasium Norden, Ahrend Ihnen, despite own club and school rules advising otherwise, was okay with me joining the Computer Club at this young age, otherwise also known as « Computer Steuern Maschinen » or CSM / Computer Control Machines.

There, at the age of 10 or 11, I was first introduced to the basics of electronic circuits (diodes, transistors, cables, + and -, etc.) as well as the basics of programming on computers from the 90s running GWBasic on floppy discs :computerfairies:. Yes, my first programming language was basic on a floppy disk storing a few hundred kilobytes.

From then I was part of the club until at least 10th grade, which is when I moved to San Jose, California for a year, where I continued such work in the Robotics Club of Willow Glen High School in 2019 - 2020.

Of course many things that began my interests in science and technology can easily be traced back to my father, who has done scientific experiments with me and my sister as soon as I could walk, however a substantial amount of credit ought to be given to Ahrend Ihnen whom I hold dearly in my memories to this day - I am very convinced that without him and his perseverance with explaining the most fundamental physical and IT concepts to me, which I had a very hard time understanding, without this help he provided, I would not be running this Mastodon instance, or any web services here today.

I believe he would be proud to see what has became of the many people he educated, tutored, and mentored.

If you know a person like Mr. Ihnen in your life, feel free to comment your thoughts about them. I don't want him and people like him to ever be forgotten!

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

whataweek dot jpg

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

So, turns out the Gram text editor is indeed a usable fork of Zed and baking consent into its design – only installing stuff you explicitly allow, for example – genuinely makes it a better app, at least for me

https://gram-editor.com/

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
timnitGebru@dair-community.social ("Timnit Gebru (she/her).") wrote:

I don't think people understand the extent to which this has been a decade plus long billionaire funded campaign (obviously Thiel is involved). We've tried to ring the alarm about these eugenicists but it is too easy for them to get parroted by the mainstream media.

https://bylinetimes.com/2026/08/18/the-peter-thiel-linked-race-science-network-that-penetrated-cambridge-university-and-targeted-jason-arday/

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
Horisevaharju@piipitin.fi ("Horiseva Harju :heart_nb:") wrote:

RE: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/117118246868644096

20 years ago, normal people avoided technology and techies would jump on the newest gadgets as soon as they could.

Now, normal people buy smart toasters & coffee mugs while every techie I know is on the verge of retreating to the forest

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
toxi@mastodon.thi.ng ("Karsten Schmidt") wrote:

Great article about the loss of diversity induced by recommender systems (including LLMs):

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same

"A world that keeps removing the unlikely also removes the things that could have become the next likely. Ecologists have known this for a long time already and even priced it: they call it the insurance value of biodiversity, the standing reserve of rare species that cost energy and contribute nothing, until the climate shifts and one of them turns out to be what survives. A monoculture is efficient right up until the weather changes."

https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperature-zero-for-culture-why

Related: In my 2013 EYEO talk I used the Tower Of Babel as metaphor to talk about polyglot, diverse culture as key long-term survival strength (not punishment!) and to address the growing lack of diversity and rise of monocultures in creative coding fields, back then largely caused by centralization effects of popular frameworks (e.g. Processing, OpenFrameworks) and their social attractor effects restricting the practice and surrounding educational efforts to mostly a single family of (C-based) programming languages whilst completely disregarding other approaches, techniques and influences.

My main argument was (and still is) that diversity of languages and programming approaches (functional, imperative, object-oriented, logic, declarative...) is an important factor for long-term cultural survival and robustness, something I've also been warning about being increasingly under threat by LLM-based coding. The latter is accelerating the monopolization of existing tools/frameworks, due to their over-representation in training sets and therefore offering more "stable", usable LLM solutions, leading to diversity collapse and making it increasingly hard for new contenders to establish themselves. Also wrote more about that previously...

#Average #Diversity #Robustness #Survival #Culture #ProgLang #LLM

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

RE: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/117121551758921843

“Bastian Greshake Tzovaras · On 'scaling up' and being the right size”

https://tzovar.as/scaling-up-and-on-being-the-right-size/

> Rather, we should ask ourselves: What is the cost of trying to scale like this and become so big?

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

“Bastian Greshake Tzovaras · On 'scaling up' and being the right size”

https://tzovar.as/scaling-up-and-on-being-the-right-size/

> All of which is to say: In the context of your community-driven projects, you will very likely not be able to change the scale of it, without also changing some or even a large number of the organisational norms that affect it.

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

(I also didn’t get the chance back then to do my usual “no touching!” spiel, but it was all well-meant and I took it in that spirit.)

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

“The End of an Era - Hugh Howey”

https://hughhowey.com/the-end-of-an-era/

It used to be that I was the online publishing pessimist and Hugh was the optimist, to the point where a decade ago at a publishing conference in Berlin, after I'd delivered a particularly downer talk, he walked up to me afterwards and gave me a hug

But now he's more pessimistic than I am by a substantial margin and I’m not sure how to process that

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
Catriona@tech.lgbt ("Cat!") wrote:

Redditors be like "Oh, you didn't magically know that 40 years of experience would be bucked and that the PS5 price would go up instead of down? Wow, you're sure fucking dumb."

They didn't even say it to me but I hate that person. Everyone hates that person. That person is a cunt.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
august@transmasc.social ("august 🇲🇰🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

federation is still a bit weird. wanna interact (like, boost, reply) with this post so it gets better?

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
warandpeas ("War and Peas 🧿") wrote:

This comic was banned on Webtoon for nudity

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

some of you have never won a round of slappers only license to kill in the complex and it shows

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

lol

i mean, this is a lot software nowadays and it's massively concerning when you think about it...

but also lol

https://tipiirai.com/writing/bun-rust-rewrite-worries

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

here's your monthly reminder that Git is not GitHub, you can walk away 🙃

https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/zkxwbgr0cnmx

Boosted by neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:"):
bw@social.lol ("Blake Watson :prami:") wrote:

I really love this post from Michelle Barker about the joy of building a website as a human for humans (my words lol).

https://blakewatson.com/links/2026-08-18-little-websites-everywhere/

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

3rd time this year I've found an acquaintance going full Gastown, and I am legitimately just close to tears knowing what this 10k-line README.md likely portends. but it would be exhausting to even *begin* to explain, there is no possible intervention

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

I legitimately cannot wait until we can get "custom agentic workflow stack" listed as a symptom in the DSM