Mastodon Feed: Posts

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

we've got Discord and Instagram and Discourse and Signal and X, The Everything App™ and Patreon and medium and Substack and Craigslist and Facebook and NextDoor and Zulip and Lemmy and Mastodon and Pleroma and Libera and Mailman and Google Docs and, of course, waiting for us in the ink-black abyss at the end of all things, we have Email

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
yaelwrites ("Yael Grauer‪") wrote:

Please don’t call me to tell me BADBOOL isn’t user-friendly; you can fork the repo or pay EOO or Kanary or whatever. This list is for masochists who want to be thorough and do data removal on hard mode.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

this does imply something profoundly hopeful though, both for weathering the storm and for crawling out of the rubble afterwards: we need to build something that addresses this. some of that is probably some software (let's build some groupware during a bubble, the dream of the 90s is alive), but some of it is some kind of scaffolding to address the fact that the problem is we have *too many* places to connect already.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

this is why so many middle-aged people talk it up. they finally have a partner to work on their home-improvement projects. they finally have a "tech friend" that they see more often than WWDC every year. it's finally possible to debug that problem with their smart-home hub; maybe they can even build an app that solves that problem for everybody!

doubly so if they are successful & "independent", either self-employed or entrepreneurial.

this is my cohort and I absolutely hear the siren song.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

so much of what is driving personal AI adoption—that is, outside of corporate control—is the breakdown of community.

writers can't find other writers to bounce their ideas off of. open source maintainers can't find other maintainers to work with. people picking up hobby projects can't find other hobbyists. even when you *can* find people it's an exhausting challenge to make time for integrating into the community. but the chatbot is always only a click away.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
SmartAsABrick@techhub.social ("Will Smart") wrote:

@glyph I'll start this off by saying I have a lot of latitude with the problems I engage with at work, so this advice might not be generally applicable, but I always ask myself "when the bubble bursts, will this still be useful to people?".

Focus on the things you can do that look pro-AI, but are just accessibility things, like having accurate, carefully written non-PDF documentation. Yeah, these help AI, but more importantly they might help a human, too.

Connecting my work with helping people - however thin that connection is - is basically all that's keeping me going. That and the fact that healthcare is tied to employment in the states...

Things are probably not going to go back to the way they were, and that sucks. But I also don't think any of the supposed AI benefits are real enough that the bubble is *not* going to pop. I just focus on what I can do.

Boosted by krig@goto.liten.app:
ploum@mamot.fr wrote:

I’m really convinced that the current artificial intelligence trend will accelerate the evolution of mankind.

For instance, in the movie Idiocracy. it takes 500 years for humans to evolve from 2005 human to full blown idiots.

Well, with ChatGPT, Claude and all the others, I’m sure we can attain that idiocy level on a worldscale in less than 10 years.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
bitprophet@social.coop ("Jeff Forcier") wrote:

Previous toot's technique did work; I have retained my passkeys successfully.

Sub canceled; I have Dropped the #1Password. A sad day.

FWIW, #BitWarden does indeed function as as a half-decent drop-in replacement for my personal needs (multiple vaults, lots of data types, SSH keychain integration, Firefox integration, mobile app) and for a reasonable price. And now there's a self-hosting offramp in front of me, as well, should /they/ decide to enshittify.

#Drop1Password

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

stairboat

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
adhdjesse ("ADHD Jesse") wrote:

Lazy = I don’t want to do the thing.

ADHD = I desperately WANT to do the thing, but I just can’t seem to START doing the thing.

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

I shared a link to "the openai navier stokes solution makes funding basic research look like a bargain" and someone sent me this: dyson had 661 engineers over 6 years write 16 million lines of code to make an AI toothbrush that can shoot water in the gaps between your teeth but not on your teeth.

Can you imagine how much human suffering could have been alleviated by all the money wasted on developing this single AI toothbrush

https://www.dysoncanada.ca/en/discover/news/latest/introducing-camerajet

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
gwynnion ("Nowhere Girl") wrote:

Have you figured out that the anti-trans hysteria has as much to do with bullying cis women into complying with white patriarchal beauty standards yet?

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

copilot points

Boosted by chipotle@mstdn.social ("Watts Martin"):
neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:") wrote:

I worry that some people aren’t taking Omarchy seriously enough. It’s not just another Linux distro. It’s a well-orchestrated campaign to centralize power and influence within the Linux FOSS ecosystem. And it’s working.

Anyone paying attention to DHH and what he stands for can see what’s going on here. When the guy who thinks that brown people don’t belong in society hires the guy who thinks trans people shouldn’t exist, you can see where this is going.

chipotle@mstdn.social ("Watts Martin") wrote:

I don’t doubt Apple has made the new Apple Watch’s “rewind” feature as privacy-minded as it could possibly be, but “let’s make the Watch compete with the Humane AI pin” is a bogglingly monumental failure to read the room.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
0x4d6165@transfem.social ("0x4d6165 (Julie)") wrote:

an annoying pattern I see in Linux/Unix spaces is that people think their preference should be universal and any other preference is "wrong." it's part of why people think our community is arrogant

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

happy 3pm coffee to all who celebrate

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
guilhernunes_@mastodon.art ("guilherme nunes") wrote:

penguin drinking delicious coffee at the ideal temperature

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

random Berzerkeley sculpture

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
hgrsd@hachyderm.io wrote:

I'm looking for well-reasoned, well-written exemplars of good RFC and ADR writing. Do you have any favourites? Any examples of excellent, or even beautiful, technical writing?

I'm running a session at work to help us improve our writing culture in the face of the seductions of LLMs, and am compiling examples.

#tech #programming #software #opensource #noAI

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
JustinPot@justinpot.com ("Justin Pot") wrote:

pro tip: tell your boss the AI said you’ll be more efficient at home and see which one of their irrational beliefs wins out

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

I know @davatron5000 blogged about it already, but just need to repeat how awesome this is:

https://daverupert.com/2026/08/microlighter/

/cc @mwichary

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social wrote:

I had to attend mandatory training on the use of “AI” in the workplace today and two of the rules they told us are:

1. we can’t use AI to do our work for us, such as by asking it to reach conclusions that we might pass off as our own work, and

2. we can use AI when we have more data than is reasonable for a person to analyze, by feeding the data into an LLM and asking it to identify patterns for us.

When I tried to explain that these are literally the same thing, and that the latter is just pretending to be the sci-version of the former, the instructor got really uncomfortable and changed the subject.

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

ah now, *that* is a tree

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen") wrote:

Every now and then, Beastie Boy's "Brass Monkey" gets stuck in my head, and it's really hard to avoid singing it in front of the kiddo. I really don't want to answer the inevitable questions. 😆

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
datarama@hachyderm.io wrote:

I don't know if the final line - "You are somebody now" - of DHH's "Omarchy Doctrine" is *intended* to have this connotation, but the first thing that popped into my mind is the final stanza of a poem written by the Danish resistance fighter Morten Nielsen, published posthumously in 1945. Here is my (poor, non-rhyming) translation. I've taken the liberty of capitalizing the interesting bit.

Fast bright voices, whirling into the blue
you were miserable, Fatty, but we couldn't understand
Sweaty and fat and stupid, Hell leapt forth
to knock over you and your bike; we stood around laughing.

You sat on the front bench - never cry, just stare, stare, stare
when a frightened and funny substitute asks you to add two and two
First-grade subs saved a fraying discipline
by turning it all against you, who defenselessly became a joke.

When springtime came, for us who were 15 years old
and the trees stood shining over the girls' soft hair
and you came, cautiously and sincerely,
the one who laughed the loudest of us, was her it was all about.

Now revenge is yours! You wear shoulder strap and jackboots
you raise your arm, a light shines in your pale blue eyes
for a human being can take hatred, mockery and threats, but never - no, never! - being laughed at.

YOU ARE SOMEBODY NOW, Fatty, man and party member.
And should we go to the wall one day, your hand will be ready
Ready to smash your brass knuckles into my mouth when you strike.
And now you're out to kill, Fatty, all the cruel years.

(I think every Danish schoolkid still learns it. DHH is almost exactly my age, so he certainly did.)

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange ("abadidea") wrote:

Project Glasswing:

Claiming to have found 26 thousand real vulnerabilities but only 0.8% of them have resulted in a real fix in a real project after five months is dire. They blame it on the human independent review bottleneck, but human experts being paid for their time definitely have a higher throughput than that when working with data that’s actually actionable.

The assigned-at-Claude severity ratings are also dire. It assigns “high” or “critical” to 91% of findings. Most findings in the real world are low or medium. This should be especially true when using a magic machine to shake out every last little issue that was overlooked by humans focused on the biggest risks.

[Edit: I should be more careful and note that this figure is calculated only from findings which have received a second opinion from project maintainers, which is much higher than the 0.8% fixed rate but much less than the entire dataset, so there’s probably bias towards reviewing those with critical ratings first. However, the maintainers found the high/critical rate to be quite inflated.]

Together this implies it’s generating thousands of trivial or nonsensical findings and labeling them HIGH DANGER CRITICAL MUST FIX, and the human independent verifiers are sifting for the rare needle in this haystack worth passing on. This isn’t really an improvement over the high-noise automated scanners we already had

(This is a corporate blog of someone with their own vulnerability management services to sell, so apply an appropriate number of grains of salt to their analysis. Filter keywords: AI LLM Anthropic)

https://www.vulncheck.com/blog/anthropic-glasswing-receipts

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117239484057326836

This stuff is really starting to make me _angry_. Every one of these new "achievements" looks plausible and like Lucy with the football, people I trust keep telling me it actually works and surely this time it's real. And then like clockwork, 3-6 months later, it turns out that the efficacy of this new technique is somewhere between "break even" and "fraud".

They're turning our whole industry, my entire life's work, into a goddamn memecoin pump and dump scam and I just don't know what to do.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@0xabad1dea Even more than my own "adversarial communication" hypothesis what this is starting to remind me of is the proposed concept of chaffing and winnowing <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing%5Fand%5Fwinnowing>. Bots emit the chaff, humans winnow to the actual useful information, nearly all of the useful effort is in the winnowing but the bots get the credit for having "generated" the solution.

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
btr@cpp.org.pl ("btr 🇪🇺") wrote:

My wife started making animations in the spirit of 2000s Flash clips and I couldn't be more proud.
#noai #animation #gif

Attachments:

• gifv: A quick-paced hand drawn animation in which a data center drains all water from a nearby river, drying out the landscape and killing all the trees. Then a Godzilla comes, burns the data center, water and trees go back and finally, "FUCK DATA CENTERS" sign shows up.