Mastodon Feed
db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:
i want to be a coffee taster
sip a new roast and then declare what nut, fruit, and sugar it tastes like and then everyone applauds like "wow, he's done it again" 👏
that's some Truman Show job if ever I saw one
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
evacide@hachyderm.io wrote:
I post a lot of stories about cops using Flock to stalk former or current partners, but don't forget that cops also use Flock to intimidate and harass people who try to hold them accountable.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)"):
lina@neuromatch.social ("Lina") wrote:
@jonny
the idea that art/writing/code/etc is capable of being quantitatively reduced to a single value (or even a finite/consistent set of values) that can then be used to objectively compare the "quality" of different works, is such a disgusting flavor of positivist brainrot. the kind of shit embodied in guys who smugly tell fans of pop music that their favorite artists are "objectively bad" because their compositions aren't "complex enough"... and definitely a red flag that they probably hold other shitty views.take coding, which some people (mistakenly) believe is more science/engineering than art/craft. even with some actually-quantifiable metrics (e.g. execution time) that may be relevant to an honest assessment, there will always be even more qualitative aspects (e.g. readability, maintainability, etc) that are both subjective and highly contextual. coding always involves tensions (e.g. efficiency vs redundancy/robustness), and the negotiations and decisions that inform the implementation in code reflect the commitments of the authors and the perceived requirements of the software for its intended use cases. in other words, it doesn't fucking exist in a vacuum. it's impossible to understand a piece of art or code out of context, and gen"ai" can never produce anything with intentionality or that is contextually situated. the ways that we metricize and evaluate creative works often say more about us than they do about the work itself. what is considered and what is ignored reveals the values we hold. of course, nobody saying this is actually performing any analysis to supportt their belief. they're just going off of vibes based on a worldview that devalues human creativity in favor of some capitalist/technocratic ideal of efficiency.
Mastodon Feedneatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:") wrote:
[Taking the temperature. Please boost to help collect more data.]
In light of 1Password’s financial support for DHH/Omarchy, are you making any changes?
For context, see: https://www.theverge.com/tech/988536/1password-dhh-linux-controversy
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
ProPublica@newsie.social wrote:
NEW: Over the “strongest possible” objections of a federal prosecutor handling the case, Trump DOJ officials quashed plans to bring civil rights charges against an ICE agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant and then lying about it.
#Minnesota #Minneapolis #ICE #Immigration #Law #Legal #News #DOJ
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
0lsi.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Whoa 🤯 in Slow-Mo") wrote:
Engineers building a solar farm near the #ArcticCircle got used to hearing “Who the hell builds a #solar plant in Lapland?” The Simo solar park now runs for almost 22 hours a day every summer. In the winter snow reflecting light onto double-sided panels turns out to be a killer feature.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:
“Would you recommend Goodhart’s Law to a friend?”
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
jgordon@appdot.net ("John Gordon") wrote:
Yes, as you might guess, my gym-friend was shocked, but also delighted I asked so they could correct me.
Just passing this on because, as Barack Obamba once said, we never leave high school.
Mastodon Feedaredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:
So the actual practice of mutual support in my community looks like:
- Knowing the semi-official funds for big problems. There's a fire relief fund, and groups who are reliable about getting out the hat for the big problems
- A Discord where people get to know each other
- A tool library, just an informal listing of who has what and enough of a forum to inquire about using something
- Proactively saying "hey, can I drop you a meal?" or "hey, I'm dropping off cookies, want some?" to people.
- People who actively look for opportunities to help in their way. Mine is usually bicycle things, or computer things.
- People who talk about what's in their little free libraries
- People who catalog small resources like classes the library offers or where has open public restrooms
- Where to take donations, and enough chatter that if someone needs something, someone who sees it at a thrift shop might pick it upIt's all super informal, but I keep my eye on the pulse of it because I have conversational habits that let me connect people. That's really all it takes: awareness and connecting people.
Mastodon Feedneatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:") wrote:
I know I can get kind of cranky about AI, but this page doesn’t do any finger-wagging or anything like that. This is just me sharing that I don’t use it and explaining why.
I would love to see more folks making /ai pages that do the same, regardless of stance or preference. We can learn a lot about each other through these pages, even if we do things differently.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:
Just heard from my kid that the “Calamity Mod”, a very popular mod for Terraria, just stopped dead when its lead dev was revealed to be a child predator. As he described it, devs bailed out immediately, contributing artists insisted their art be pulled so they were no longer associated with the project… “it’s been around for a decade and the whole thing just died in six hours.”
What a weird week that I’d admire, even envy a mod community for their moral clarity, solidarity and follow through.
Mastodon FeedRE: https://federate.social/@mattblaze/117204363767984752
I have been cautioning people that “always disable biometrics at the airport” is terrible opsec for a long time, and here we have a great real-life demonstration of my hypothesis
Mastodon Feedneatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:") wrote:
Updated my AI Statement.
Mastodon FeedI've played with a toy fluid sim implementation (eulerian) to see if I can make cool fiery explosions with it and ...nope. It seems that the assumption of incompressibility, subsonic velocities, unavoidable viscosity doom it to be just a fluid sim forever. The best I can do is a splotch of ink.
Mastodon Feedjscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:
Lol, "perceptions"
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6066835-us-government-corruption-record-high-survey/
Mastodon Feedjonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:
The main thing I have been struggling to express for awhile here is this feeling that human created things have a "smooth" space of degradation, where they might degrade or fail, but they fail in ways that are comprehensible in retrospect. "AI" has a discontinuous, jagged, non-euclidean space of degradation, where one meter of error might put you kilometers away
Mastodon FeedBoosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
uglyreykjavik.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Ugly Reykjavik") wrote:
Let's get even closer.
#Iceland #photography #naturephotography #nature #landscape #landscapephotography #countryside #rural #abandoned #decay #trees #window
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
cadey@pony.social ("Xe :verified:") wrote:
If Anubis is "slow" for you, please DM me.
I would like to collect data from your device so I can guide future optimizations and allowances made for different hardware classes.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
CNN@flipboard.com wrote:
MapQuest surges as app taunts Trump over Lake Ontario order
https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/02/politics/video/ebof-doug-berger-map-quest-lake-america-ontario-trump?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypubPosted into Politics @politics-CNN
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
skinnylatte@hachyderm.io ("Adrianna Tan") wrote:
UCSB is hiring a postdoctoral researcher in whale ecology and biology
Looks like a whale of a time
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
jockr ("Jock Rutherford 🌻🥥🌴") wrote:
I rented a car, and within hours, my driver's license was for sale - Ars Technica
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
doctoralex.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("dr alex concorde") wrote:
USAID CUTS causing kid & mother deaths in Nigeria
Aid cuts from major donors like the US & UK risk reversing years of progress on child mortality/maternal health across the developing world.
In Nigeria, 10% kids die before 5, and the country accounts for 29% of total global maternal deaths.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
W6KME@mastodon.radio wrote:
W6CSM and I installed a packet PBBS on 223.580 MHz in the Conejo Valley Amateur Radio Club trailer today, and tonight I'm going to party like it's 1987.
I still love packet. The PBBS is CVARC. Leave a message if you can reach it, in south Ventura County, CA, within reach of the Rasnow digipeater (RASNOW, RASNOG crass-band)
Mastodon Feedjscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:
I went ahead and blocked that account about that TV series.
Mastodon FeedBoosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
valthonis@dice.camp ("The Duke of Fall :d12:") wrote:
RE: https://infosec.exchange/@brian%5Fgreenberg/117201997266526749
Assume every entity that tries to capture your ID or your photo and tells you that they delete it as soon as it's no longer needed, they are lying.
Mastodon Feedkevinevans@hachyderm.io ("Kevin") wrote:
Picked some wild-ish plums, got em soaking in booze for clafoutis
Mastodon FeedBoosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
ehashman@cloudisland.nz ("e. hashman 🇵🇸") wrote:
Long shot but: if you're a 1Password employee and you want to talk about what's happening, DM me for my Signal!
Mastodon Feedjonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:
Hung up momentarily on the discourse re: "human writing/code/art is on average pretty bad, so the median AI output is better than the median human work." Writing on phone to get the thought out without proofreading so sorta rough.
Say the average human craft is something like a pair of worn denim jeans. Its not perfect, it doesn't do everything you want, but its form is honest. You run your hand along the fabric and it holds its shape, continues smoothly where you expect it to. Your finger finds a rivet, the stitching at the seams, a small hole from wear. The hole is only a hole where it is a hole - you know where it ends, so you know to take care and handle it gently around the area. You start to worry and rip it, the rip extends along the grain of the fabric. It degrades in a predictable path. The fabric is a meshwork of thread, an affordance that supports stitching, mending - if I bring the two edges of the tear together and sew them, then they will rejoin, with a seam, with an amended shape, but still rejoin. In their normal use, the pants are pants, and the edges of pathological pants behavior are visible but predictable.
The average AI craft might be some kind of alien LED-laden fast fashion garment. Cheaper, higher tech, maybe even more adventurous and exciting. They aren't pants per se, its not exactly clear how its intended to be worn. You can put your legs through some of the holes and it covers most of your body, but instead of a fly there's a long conical sleeve you have to knot closed. There are collars around the knees. Hundreds of belt loops ring the entire waistline, for redundancy, in case any of them gives out. it is advertised as having twice the pockets as normal pants. Some are sewn shut and have no pocket in them at all, and as you reach into one of the open ones, you find it has two openings in the bottom. The pocket is a hand size pair of pants sewn into the pocket, which itself has four pockets you can fit just the edge of your pinkie into. Each of the features in isolation is plausible, and it certainly comes with a lot more of the elements of clothing, but as a garment it doesn't make a lot of sense - like it was designed by something that had never worn clothes before.
You run your hand along the material, some areas are pliant, stretchy, as expected, but invisibly it transitions to a chalky texture that crumbles and gives way. There doesn't seem to be any pattern to this, and as you stand up you find the chalky residue has stained your couch. When you crease it, it becomes dangerously sharp, and so you need to make sure to avoid bunching or handling it too roughly. The first time you unzip the zipper, it separates neatly in half into what at first seems like two pieces, but on closer inspection is a single Möbius strip, you can't fathom how it would have ever been zipped in the first place. Tightening your belt, you hear a distant tear in a part of the fabric you didn't know had tension on it. Attempting to stitch it is futile, each time a needle pierces it, the fabric seems to deflate (unclear that it was holding air at all) and decay around the puncture.
reaching for a word, AI output is.... Punctate? Human art, craft, code, writing is a surface where neighboring elements belong with each other, support each other. They have a history of creation that aligns with use, and desire paths get cut along the way - you hang a hook to hold your keys by the door because experience says you need them when you walk out the door. You finish the thoughts you started several paragraphs ago, building them into a larger idea. The AI output can produce isolated things at the scale of a context window that appear well crafted, but there is no joinery, the edges are sharp and invisible. A thousand counterfeit odd-sized legos jammed haphazardly into a sack. They degrade poorly, suddenly, and in ways that are difficult to imagine any human work would. The LLM book is a hundred two page, five paragraph essays whose table of contents insists tells a story, but each chapter appears to have been written without having read the others, full of odd repetition, conflicting, superfluous argumentation, ending with a confident flourish as if each is the end of the book.
So if the argument that median AI output is "better" than median human output isn't being made cynically, then what it betrays a profound shallowness about the ability to evaluate "quality." The code is well formatted, commented, comes with things that appear to be tests, but doesn't compose into a coherent work. The prose is grammatically correct but makes a readers skin crawl and imparts no intended meaning. The vibe coder just makes more code to cover over the shallowness, widening but never deepening similarly to how the fast fashion shopper buys a new pair of pants every week because laundering the old ones destroys them.
The deeper irony is that "total continuity" is the thing that LLMs provide as an interface and as a UX - every button already exists, and no error state is terminal. The utterly forgiving nature of being able to talk your way out of any spot, the constant reassurance that every idea is right, is exactly the affordance space that people argue is the UX virtue of LLMs. Maybe the punctate sense of local "quality" that collapses on contextual inspection is made up for by the process of creation in the mind of the AI user - the appearance of unity, completeness, is not provided by the thing that is produced, but by the means of producing it, and it is never actually experienced by itself. The natural extension of "generate an email so it can be summarized by the recipients LLM" - materials, objects, works, have a disembodied, delocalized nature that is always expected to be "filled in" by the recipient. The bugs in the software aren't bugs if they're being used by something with infinite brute force tenacity and without need for intuition. The story doesn't need to be coherent when it will be completed by each reader's personalized reality model.
That's the only way I can make sense of people claiming that the LLM output is "high quality", assuming its a truly experienced and believed feeling, which you must in order to understand how someone might believe something that seems incomprehensible to you.
Mastodon Feedslightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:
Good news (after a fashion); this DHH/1PW thing has crossed a cultural blood/brain barrier, and now DHH is toxic even to politically influential normies:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:nvfposmpmhegtyvhbs75s3pw/post/3mukxhyqegs2q
Mastodon FeedBoosted by pixxl:
atax1a@infosec.exchange ("mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)") wrote:
the entire tech of the LLM is built entirely on exploitation and you can't fix that by jacking yourself off about "open models"