Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
MicroSFF@mastodon.art ("Micro SF/F by O. Westin") wrote:

Before the annual bonfire was lit, the witch checked it.

Five fieldmice and one hedgehog were gently evacuated.

Then there were the toxic things. Someone's hatred. Another's regrets. And pain.

It was good they were discarded, but if you breathed the smoke...

She drew them out, for safe disposal.

#MicroFiction #SmallStories #TootFic

Boosted by jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)"):
tao@mathstodon.xyz ("Terence Tao") wrote:

A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: https://mathandai.org/ . We welcome additional signatories (similar to the Leiden declaration), as can be seen on the page. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/09/11/top-mathematicians-are-outraged-by-openais-methods

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

Looking for recs:

anyone know of an android app/mod that's good for setting "modes" that include blocking access to and notifications from sets of apps? I know about profiles, which isn't exactly it but might work, but I just want a switcher where I can go into "audio only mode" and block everything except my audio apps. I am finding plenty of productivity/timer apps but they don't do "modes" like this, don't block notifs, etc.

Seems like there should be some easier way to do this but also am aware that apps controlling other apps is like what they are not supposed to be allowed to do.

Boosted by ireneista@irenes.space ("Irenes (many)"):
mcc wrote:

@ariadne why is there no research into marketing consultant alignment

kornel ("Kornel") wrote:

The aggressive crawling of lib.rs hurts more now that the long tail of crates is getting longer! There are now 23000 new crates published every month! Couple of years ago it used to be 40K per *year*. The growth is accelerating, the total is compounding.

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

@ariadne if we don't solve this problem, someone may develop a marketing consultant so powerful that it destroys all life on earth. indeed the process may have already started

kornel ("Kornel") wrote:

The annoying thing is that scraping isn't a problem with honest bots. I detect them, and for the long tail of crap I serve them stale data cheaply (they get 304 Not Modified bye bye cya later if I don't have the data ready). But this is a bad UX for real users, and doesn't work with the browser-hijacking aggressive crawlers.

So now you'll get some random error pages, occasional shitty captchas, maybe discover a decoy link to a crawler labyrinth, while I have to rewrite queues and caches.

Boosted by isagalaev ("Ivan Sagalaev :flag_wbw:"):
indivisibleteam ("Indivisible ❌👑") wrote:

One year after announcing “Donald Trump is in the Epstein files,” Elon Musk is now expected to spend over $100 million on the midterms to help Trump cling to power.

We can’t match Musk’s money, but we’ve got something he will never have: Friends — and the power of We The People on our side.

kornel ("Kornel") wrote:

The https://lib.rs site is getting hammered by residential proxies (probably browser extensions and "monetized" mobile & smart TV apps). They're IPs from all over the world, normal-looking browsers with JS and cookies.

The problem is they're crawling a long tail of junk, causing a cache miss on every request.

I wanted to show users fresh data on every page, but that hits crates-io and github APIs. I ratelimit my requests, so everything piles up and dies timing out.

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:

The V8 JavaScript Runtime Undermined My Constant-Time JavaScript Library

Six years ago, I wrote a blog post titled Soatok's Guide to Side-Channel Attacks in which I discussed the general topic of side-channels in cryptographic applications, and how to avoid them, with example code in PHP....

http://soatok.blog/2026/09/12/the-v8-javascript-runtime-undermined-my-constant-time-javascript-library/

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

I also see a clearer path to p2p via activitypub, strangely enough. Signed message passing is very familiar territory for p2p, really the part that's missing is just a different notion of identity. Even though atproto is content addressed, its much less clear to me how one might pop it off of DNS and have peers be able to serve as meshy seeds. Probably because ive spent more time thinking how to p2p the fedi, but as with my attraction to bittorrent, I am attracted to structurally simple protocols because they have a lot of hacking headroom.

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
mark_ohe@mastodon.energy ("Mark Ohe") wrote:

“This is fascism with a difference. Its proponents are actively willing an apocalypse, or a wave of interconnected apocalypses brought forth by climate change and financial chaos, to hasten us towards a post-democratic world in which only a rich few survive to prosper.”

New book, End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, 15 September

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/sep/12/naomi-klein-extreme-wealth-has-a-deranging-effect-it-turns-you-into-a-supremacist

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
Elizafox@treehouse.systems ("Elizabeth :therian: :cascadia: 🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

My hypothesis is DHH's backers are performing a Linux power grab. They don't care who runs it. But these people don't do favours on this scale unless something is in it for themselves. The millionaire world is highly transactional. "They're just backing DHH because he's their bud" is just not how millionaires work; it just makes the terms more favourable, but there's quid pro quo. Always.

And if it was just fascism, they'd give the money to Dennis Prager or some other scum who is more mainstream to promote their views.

My suspicion is Omarchy is a Linux power grab and an attempt to do what Canonical did with Ubuntu. Most of the backers want a say in the direction of Linux. Digital Ocean, Dell, etc. I mean Microsoft just raised its OEM fees. Not to mention Omarchy has a fake-gamer aesthetic that they can easily sell to chud LInux gamers.

Think about all the Manosphere people who would run Omarchy especially as a mainstream desktop too. What self-disrespecting Capitalist asshole wouldn't want part of that?

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

~ this is not protocol wars please do not make protocol wars happen in my mentions ~

When our instance goes down or gets sluggish or something isn't working, people can just like... Put a message in our chat of a few dozen people. And then one of us can go look at the server and see what's going on and fix it. The worst case scenario is that our members temporarily lose access, but everyone else on fedi is fine. I'm happy to do the work, I have learned a lot from doing it, and I really enjoy keeping the lights on so our lovely members have an independent means of reaching the world.

when bluesky goes down, there's nobody to contact, and its just down for some unknowable subset of everybody. My account is on Blacksky (and org I think is rad as hell and doing it right), so I try to go access directly from Blacksky. That sort of works, I can see things, but now interactions from bluesky-hosted accounts are buggy, coming in and out of existence. I don't think the bug comes from Blacksky, its from bluesky, but I can't really know, and there's nobody to tell.

This is really the thing that keeps me from being more involved and interested in atproto - the feeling of just being along for the ride. For all its faults, the thing activitypub does is situate you within a group of people you get to know and are responsible for each other. There is some way this could be done with atproto, but I haven't seen it done yet. I don't mean it has to be fully vertically integrated so one group runs everything for its members, though that is a highly legible organization, just that the pieces are known, knowable, run by people you know, and you have some material stake and say in how they work. I like what I'm seeing from Blacksky in that direction, and maybe in a few years we'll see hundreds of independently run and moderated communities. We have that here, now, for all fedis faults, and until I see it elsewhere that's the thing that keeps me here.

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
maxine@brain.worm.pink ("maxine ✦") wrote:

omarchy user = immediate block

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
mattmay@mstdn.social ("Matt May") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@verge/117259017019721108

It is far better to read this as an attempt to block DeepSeek and the other cheaper-but-still-capable models from the US market, allowing OpenAI/Anthropic to cut way back on the model training that costs them billions.

They want to do to LLMs what their own behavior did to RAM/GPUs: raise their prices not because they're any better or faster, but by forming a cartel that controls production so they can charge whatever they like.

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

Thatcher was right in a contingent sense: there is no such thing as "society"...if you hoard brain and soul-damaging amounts of wealth.

But for the rest of us, it can be great. Recommended, even! I'm guessing all of these folks miss it dearly. We should light the exit, hang bunting over the door, and offer some cake and conversation.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
aud@spectre.asta.lgbt (":: Asta :: [New Server]") wrote:

@glyph In between the docs and your help, I got it working! And I've avoided locking on crawling, I'm pretty sure (well... I haven't *tested*, explicitly, but you know)!

I think? I can probably simplify this but it's Good Enough For Now; I ran into problems with playwright having a wee hissy because something, somewhere, internally with playwright was going wonky. So doing this `await Deferred.fromFuture(asyncio.ensure_future(lousy_playwright_call()))` sorted it out. This is probably the only situation I'm going to be using this type of nasty library anyway; the comments on the code show my... distaste for having to use something like playwright at all...

https://codeberg.org/Astatide/balsalm/src/commit/5ae31ae5b55ba38c7dba68f61cd0ec92151a2b76/src/tir/crawler/crawler.py#L221

Also, while I did have to do some finagling, in the end the conversion to using the asyncio reactor was indeed quite trivial; just had to make sure I fired up a loop manually, as I didn't have one before

https://codeberg.org/Astatide/balsalm/src/commit/5ae31ae5b55ba38c7dba68f61cd0ec92151a2b76/src/tir/app.py#L6

ALSO super happy to hear that helping me is the "WEEE YAY INVINCIBILITY!!" fun version of help 😂

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

We should organise homecoming parties for billionaires that donate (or pay tax) to duck under $1BN in wealth. Little get togethers, maybe with some store-bought cake, cheap (but nice) drinks, and welcoming would-be friends that just want to get to know who they really are (or want to be).

"Welcome Back to Society Socials," if you will.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
grimalkina ("Cat Hicks") wrote:

I think if your workplace makes you take a personality test you should have the legal right to make your workplace take a psychological environment health test

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Leaders have more power than random individuals, that’s why they are leaders. That also means they have more responsibility. It is the literal *job* of candidates to convince people to vote for them and mealy-mouthed appeasement does not and has never worked.

Get mad at them first.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

If you want to get up in some trans person’s mentions today for hypothetically protest voting, maybe take that energy and, instead, call a campaign or an elected and tell them to get their shit together and stop sanewashing the talking points of genocidal maniacs.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

James Talarico throwing trans people under the bus is a WAY more overt, more harmful, and less ambiguous tactical error than some random trans person getting disgusted with him and protest voting or staying home.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

Given my best analysis of the US political system, I think that for any random trans person, it’s probably a strategic error for them to vote against shitty transphobic dems. But you know who should have a better strategic analysis than me or some random trans voter? PEOPLE RUNNING FOR OFFICE.

Boosted by brennan@social.lol ("Brennan Kenneth Brown"):
johnny@lazygeek.cafe ("Johnny :bb_bub: ") wrote:

I should get back to writing. :win3_write:

Trying to read through stories on fanfiction.lol to be supportive of other amateur writers. I tend to shy away from stuff about fandoms I know nothing about. Problem is, that’s most fandoms. :blobcatshrug:

Gonna try reading them anyway. Maybe I’ll find something I should become a fan of. :blobcatreading:

Boosted by jwz:
cstross@wandering.shop ("Charlie Stross") wrote:

The hype cycle and inflated claims about AI this autumn are getting so bizarre that I feel it's only a matter of time before they out-gonzo the opening of the 1992 SF novel "Steel Beach" by John Varley:

"In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.

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

I suppose my timers don't block video games.... :neocat_thonk:​

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

I'll tell you this though despite being tired I do not want to sleep

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
erininthemorning.com@bsky.brid.gy ("Erin Reed") wrote:

If Talarico’s comments and stances cause people not to vote for him then he should make better comments and take better stances.

I accurately report on those comments and stances, that is my job and my role in my community.

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

Mastodon is fun once I silence the news and doom!