Mastodon Feed: Posts

aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

Oh hey there's three competent web rendering engines now. (Ladybird is actually usable!)

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

To celebrate that TutaCrypt has been formally verified by University of Wuppertal we are having a Tuta hoodie giveaway 🎉

To stand a chance to win, let us why you chose Tuta to secure your emails in the comments below 👇

P.S: We hope you are as happy about our hoodies as we are 🥰

Boosted by andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt"):
gvwilson ("Greg Wilson") wrote:

Alami et al 2026: The Psychological Costs of Artificial Intelligence Adoption in Software Engineering https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03456 "…software professionals experience accountability anxiety, craft identity disruption, meaning and satisfaction erosion, cognitive and workload intensification, and uncertainty distress. [They] manage these costs through practices that restore control, mitigate them through protective and identity-preserving adaptations, or absorb them, carrying what neither can resolve."

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

Plants got eyes?

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/09/05/the-secret-abilities-of-plants/

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

this pattern has happened over and over again in the history of computing…

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/04/technology/open-source-ai-anthropic-openai.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.-1A.jpaC.Sj60Y0O1Afcz&smid=nytcore-ios-share

first, a new technology requires sharing the use of an expensive, scarce, and centralized resource… a “central sever”. gradually, hardware and software become cheap & powerful enough that the locus of operations distributes; the new tech shifts to the periphery and to the “client side”.

example: when I started doing statistics in the early 70s, I went to the campus “Computer Center” to punch in my data and programs and then to run them. by a few years later, hardware had become cheap enough and modems had become legalized and I was able toI purchased my first machine so I could sit at home while remotely keying in & ordering the running of my programs and data. and now? it all happens on my own machine at home or office. same pattern.

this pattern is in the process of being repeated now, but now it is in the context of LLMs emerging as useful software tools. look to the pattern, not the event. think about tomorrow, not last week’s unthinking headlines.

IMHO the rush to build out zillion-dollar centralized data centers for “AI” is a serious error.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
FediThing@chinwag.org ("FediThing :progress_pride:") wrote:

@cygnathreadbare @tante Didn't know about this, EFF did indeed defend Kiwifarms: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/isps-should-not-police-online-speech-no-matter-how-awful-it

🤮

People are getting doxxed and murdered and EFF is more worried about their tech stack.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
flyingpenguin@infosec.exchange ("Davi Ottenheimer") wrote:

@davidgerard yeah, being a friendly face for big tech makes them bad guy PR, and I say that from being inside their sausage making machine many times and smelling the spoilage.

Morgan Mayhem (https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/19/16675704/morgan-marquis-boire-hacker-sexual-assault)

Weev (https://www.reddit.com/user/weev%5Fis%5Fa%5Fnazi/)

Alex Stamos (Facebook, need I say more)

their list of horrible humans goes on and on.

I try to write up what I can but it always seems like their self-promotion is so good nobody has grasped who they really are and why it's so bad for tech. John Stewart maybe did the best takedown yet.

https://www.flyingpenguin.com/the-old-eff-dog-dont-hunt-cohn-of-silence-leaves-x/

Boosted by andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt"):
zekjur@mas.to ("Michael Stapelberg 🐧🐹😺") wrote:

Paper: “Trusting-Trust Attack against an Entire Linux Distribution through Binary Manipulation”

"""
Ken Thompson's trusting-trust attack, in which a compromised compiler backdoors the programs it builds and reproduces the backdoor in subsequent rebuilds of itself, is widely regarded as a threat specific to compilers. We show that it is not. We construct a complete trusting-trust attack around GNU strip, an ordinary build utility that neither inspects nor generates source code, using only manipulations of finished ELF files. […] On a real nixpkgs revision, the attack builds a complete graphical installer without failures and backdoors almost every one of its binaries, enabling arbitrary malicious behavior of the subverted packages.
"""

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24888

andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt") wrote:

This Week in Package Management: 5 September 2026

https://nesbitt.io/2026/09/05/this-week-in-package-management.html

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
valthonis@dice.camp ("The Duke of Fall :d12:") wrote:

Having no documentation for a thing is better than incorrect documentation presenting itself as authoritative.

This is a post about AI.

Boosted by pixxl:
zzt@mas.to ("[object Object]") wrote:

the AI is very good at logic, except that if you feed it a mild, original variation of a logic puzzle it fucks it up entirely in a way that instantly reveals it’s only regurgitating answers from its training data. and this is such a problem for the AI corps that they’ll scrape your variation into their training data too and make very certain the AI outputs the right answer, so it looks like they fixed the AI until you try another variation on the same puzzle.

the AI can finally spell strawberry! specifically. with a really long, weirdly angry answer. because they special cased it in the latest model, and it’s literally just outputting a rant from some anthropic asshole.

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
whitequark@treehouse.systems ("✧✦Catherine✦✧") wrote:

so if you want a password manager that isn't ran by nazis, check out https://codeberg.org/ChiPass/

Boosted by pixxl:
aesthr@wandering.shop ("Æ.") wrote:

It's so funny how "AI" users when confronted with overwhelming evidence that it erodes their cognitive abilities, claim how *they* are different, totally not like all those careless other users.

Big "I'm not an addict, everyone else is though" energy.

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

@castaway

I solved the daily #CluesBySam, Sep 5th 2026 (Hard), in less than 24 minutes
🟩🟩🟨🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟠🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟡🟩🟩🟩
https://cluesbysam.com

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

There has been a lot of confusion recently around trans employees’ rights at work.
Here’s what you need to know!

https://transactual.org.uk/law/workplaces/

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
cosmiccreature@illusory.ink wrote:

anyone have any business about working at a pet shop? how did suppliers work, what were your most surprising big ticket inventory items, what was fun, what sucked?

boosts welcome.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
lykso@tiny.tilde.website ("Lykso") wrote:

@Pyrrhlin @pho4cexa We need legal and material structures to support this. The four freedoms of free software need to be supplanted with something less naive.

Boosted by andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt"):
Di4na@hachyderm.io ("Thomas Depierre") wrote:

Still want to support your FOSS Supply Chain with money but do not know how?

You can still be the first company to do so with my help! This consultation has not yielded any interest from anyone!

Prove me wrong and support your Supply Chain!

https://www.softwaremaxims.com/blog/no-need-for-sbom

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

oh right, of course! we can do warnings with unsafePerformIO!

Boosted by andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt"):
Di4na@hachyderm.io ("Thomas Depierre") wrote:

If you have ever wanted me to answer some of your questions at work or help you figure something out... You can!

I still have a small consultancy on the side, and I will happily bill you for just a consultation. No need to make it big. Anything from a look at the quality of your codebase with a nice report, helping you analyse your incident management or just help run a postmortem.

Anything.

You can find all my contacts at the bottom of my page
https://www.softwaremaxims.com/consulting

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

I love how several of their video examples are just like "automating gentrification"

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
zzt@mas.to ("[object Object]") wrote:

the AI was a grandmaster chess player until it being horrible at chess became a meme

the AI is an incredible mathematician in countless breathless papers but every time you ask it a basic math question it fucks it up badly

the AI is just a tool until you refuse to use it, then it’s a revolution and we can’t afford to be left behind and using it is required

the AI is an incredible boon to open source, as it fractures communities and generates unsalvageably bad code in quantities so massive it can’t realistically be cleaned up

the AI will set you free, but your access to it is gated by a gigantic corporation that’s losing money at every realistic price point they can charge for the thing

the AI is loved by most people until you look at literally any of the polls we’ve done asking people what they think of AI

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

So hang on. The screenshot test says I can pay 10 cents for a robot to move my mouse to a button?

That can't be right, it must be 10 cents to run the whole benchmark, there are only 1500 samples per run.

But the output tokens are all less than 1000... So either it can move my mouse with fewer than 1 token on average... Or...... 10 cents to move my mouse is really what is being shown here.............

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

“The age-gating of history – Hi, I'm Heather Burns”

https://heatherburns.tech/2026/09/05/the-age-gating-of-history/

> Enter the pearl-clutching brigade, who have deemed real history to be “age inappropriate” content so shocking that it requires age and identity verification to view.

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

“The Name Game – News From ME”

https://www.newsfromme.com/2026/09/04/the-name-game-7/

> How do I know this? Because, as some of you may have guessed by now, I was that guy. I wrote that story.

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

We know we have reached true AGI when a brute force machine can reach 100% on a game that has a small number of discrete states with like 4 inputs without disclosing anything about the testing conditions

jwz wrote:

I agree with this message.
https://jwz.org/b/yk%5Fi

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

if you ignore the obvious syntactic things, you know what lisp macros have going for them? you can ask the compiler questions. like type definitions and stuff. wouldn't that be amazing?

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

“The real AI jobs apocalypse - by Brian Merchant”

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-real-ai-jobs-apocalypse

> But instead of replacing tens of millions of workers, it’s mostly making them miserable.

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

I feel as though the article both too quickly dismisses Rust's macros and seems to present the Lisps' choices here as simply better than Rust's without considering the trade-offs involved

not honestly sure how anyone could think rust macros are good after using lisp macros.