Mastodon Feed: Posts

andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt") wrote:

Just shipped v0.1.0 of swhid-go for @swheritage with both conformance and performance improvements: https://github.com/andrew/swhid-go/releases/tag/v0.1.0

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

Next someone will say you can't write novels without an MFA or at least a creative writing undergraduate degree and then I will really be in trouble

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

Saw someone here confidently asserting that to be a journalist you needed to go to journalism school and have a journalism degree, which makes me wonder what I was doing for years when I was working at a newspaper, writing newspaper articles daily, having neither a degree in journalism nor having attended a university with a journalism school

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

The impressionistic TikTok. Where I talk about how short videos leave impressions, not observations. #videoproduction #disinformation #medialiteracy #montage #tarkovsky #eisenstein #kuleshoveffect

See the full video that explains how shorter videos can promote misinformation https://youtu.be/92Obxvs-LfY

Attachments:

• video: Baldur talks about the reason why the two different approaches to video have such a different effect.

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

(in this particular case, break up an object into smaller pieces without sacrificing correctness or convenience)

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

just casually writing rust and thinking "you know, a dependent type right there would let me..."

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

“The AI Chemist: To be trustworthy, LLMs need to show their work”

https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/drug-discovery/AI-Chemist-trustworthy-LLMs-need/104/web/2026/06?sc=260617%5Fsc%5Feng%5Fbs%5Fcen

> The problem is they aren’t always right. And if you are relying on them for CADD (rather than as pretty pictures), they need to be.

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

Gonna need to find motivation to Do Stuff today

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
MarcAbrahams@mstdn.science ("Marc Abrahams") wrote:

A song that has new life: "When that Man is Dead and Gone" (1941) - Protest song against Hitler https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDkhzVw0yBs

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
appassionato ("earthling") wrote:

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar el Akkad, 2025

This powerful book is a chronicle of Omar's painful realisation, a moral grappling with what it means – as a citizen, as a father – to carve out some sense of possibility during these devastating times. This is a book for those that have tired of moral emptiness. This is a book for everyone who wants something better.

#books
#nonfiction
#politics

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
ethanhawksley ("Ethan Hawksley") wrote:

I don't like passkeys. Don't get me wrong, passkeys are secure and the underlying technology is great. The implementation, however, just isn't there yet. I wrote up an explanation why on my blog. https://hawksley.dev/blog/i-dont-like-passkeys

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
olivia@scholar.social ("Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ") wrote:

> Computational models in psychology are typically judged by a single standard: empirical fit. [However, it's] misleading as a sole criterion, as the same result can arise [in] different situations: theoretically faithful models, mathematically flexible ones, miscalibrated operationalizations...

👇🏼

Chuang, Y., & Guest, O. (2026). Beyond Empirical Success: Evaluating Theoretical Virtue Across the Computational Modeling Chain. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22708906

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
mawhrin@circumstances.run ("flere-imsaho 🇺🇦") wrote:

there's not many things that get me going so fast as hearing that LLMs are useful as accessibility tools.

they aren't. where they somehow work, they are at best adequate. and it's never done with accessibility as a main goal, usually just something half made-up to make the detractors shut up.

now imagine what we could have, if a promille of a promille, one-millionth of the money put into the autoconfabulators was spent on fucking actually developing accessibility tools.

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

The vast majority of reference counts are low, less than five

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
MaddieM4@raphus.social wrote:

"You see things like WinFS and Nepomuk crash and burn, but live on in smaller ways in things like Spotlight and Baloo. It's easy to see this as proof the ideas were wrong, but they were just ahead of their time, before we had the hardware we have today."

BROSKI. WHO HAS RAM? In es economia? People still fucking hate Baloo and kill it when it uses a bunch of background resources. These ideas have been implemented to the exact limit that the public will tolerate them.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
davidgerard@circumstances.run ("David Gerard") wrote:

@pndc i lost it when i discovered a highly paid ops coworker was not comfortable at the command line

mf what is your job

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

“The death of web development education – Rescuing a field from disappearing”

https://molily.de/web-dev-education/

> Rescuing a field from disappearing

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
lcamtuf@infosec.exchange ("lcamtuf :verified: :verified: :verified:") wrote:

@brothers I have a collection here, for your perusal: https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/elec%5Fstock/

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
skinnylatte@hachyderm.io ("Adrianna Tan") wrote:

There is a bottlenose dolphin called Bubbles who is so irritating and ungovernable that a whole research paper was written about him

Bubbles chases fish around until they vomit, so he can eat it

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.74270

#Marine #Dolphins #Science

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

there we go. making magic comments work in the log-load transform was indeed easy.

all that's left is fancy logic around indentation and word-wrapping.

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
Elizafox@treehouse.systems ("Elizabeth :therian: :cascadia: 🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

People will defend copyright to death because they labour under the delusion artists need it to get paid, or whatever. All I hear is "I support oppression because someone might hypothetically make money."

If you are using copyright to make money? You are using an oppressive system to make money. That is how I see it. I am kind of tired of pretending otherwise.

We should structure society where we do not need copyright to make money.

Copyright didn't exist most of human history. And the sky did not fall. The introduction of copyright didn't stop people from being poor or from being exploited, either.

Copyright does not stop big companies from exploiting small people who cannot afford to fight back. I know this because I know people who've been ripped off by Big Media and have gotten a pittance for it.

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
Elizafox@treehouse.systems ("Elizabeth :therian: :cascadia: 🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

I may hate OpenAI and Anthropic but honest to God my hatred of copyright is more intense.

I lived through the 00's, when copyright enforcement involved big companies suing literal children and grandmothers, when Big Media tried VERY hard to make it so you would literally lose Internet access after infringement as well, and then adopted compromise positions like "six strikes" because the "zero tolerance" policy was politically rancid. In Germany, you can still get a demand letter from a rights holder demanding payment if you're caught pirating. This was the model they wanted in the US: the right to shake you down at any time, just because they believed you infringed.

And don't think for a fucking minute big content wouldn't try it again the moment they see an opening. People have started pirating again. Think about who is in charge. They could very well succeed this time.

This is the system that shook people down for years for "Happy Birthday" until a grassroots movement successfully challenged the copyright on an old technicality, but they patched those rules long ago, so works going into copyright since the ~80's will never have that technicality again.

You might think that copyright is some secret weapon against OpenAI. It is not. They will change the rules again, just as they changed the rules repeatedly to stop Mickey Mouse from going out of copyright, until the rules became too ridiculous.

I don't want to live in a world where content can disappear because someone sent someone a DMCA notice.

No, I refuse to support the tools of an oppressive system to fight another. Not at any cost.

Copyright is not pro-artist. Copyright is not pro-expresssion. Copyright is value extraction. Copyright is a means for Capital to extract more from the masses and give nothing back. It is a means of oppression.

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

Spontaneous agreement that everyone makes way and helps if needed the person with the baby or the person in the chair is one of the main things we have to be doing together on this earth

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

Had another "humanity at its best" moment on transit today. The b/d lines were all fucked up today, rail blocked in the critical area, so there was a full on line discontinuity where LA metro needed to hoist people between stops by bus. We learn of this via an inaudibly quiet announcement upon arrival to the end of the line and need to fend for ourselves. Hundreds of people exit the train and mutually direct each other via raw information diffusion to a shuttle. Its full. There was a family with a baby from out of town freaked out, needed to hit a commuter rail. We had the entire bus stop clearing the way for the baby, and an entire bus car of people consulting with them on how to beat the detour. I swiped them through, someone else swiped them out, and they made it. The antisocial city provides for each other when we need to

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

@soatok well said, and thank you for the hard work.

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

Incentives make people predictable.

All I want is for queer people to be able to talk to each other and form relationships privately. Even if the government decides to expend resources persecuting them. Having automatic key verification makes attacking the existing E2EE work much more expensive, which makes queer people safer.

But I'm not doing all that for myself. My life has reinforced the same harsh lessons as far as I can remember: Love, relationships, and sex are for my betters. Why would anyone want me? Lmao

And I'm not going to farm social capital or career achievements out of this work: my legal name will never be attached to any of this.

My point with all this is to say:

I think the fact that I have nothing to gain is going to break the brains of a lot of my haters. So expect some amusement to come out of their reactions. It won't all be frustrating.

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

If this does come to pass, I'm not going to sweat it, though: any decision, at that point, is completely out of my hands.

On the paid audit point, I will neither impoverish my household and go into debt to pay for a checkbox on some smug asshole's list, nor crowdfund such a vanity project from the kind folks that welcome me in this space.

At the end of the day, my work is a proposal and provided "as is", and Mastodon and other ActivityPub folks can take it or leave it.

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

As I wrote in July, I expect to start wrapping up the outstanding planned Fedi work soon.

https://soatok.blog/2026/07/15/the-long-tail-of-work-left-until-activitypub-has-e2ee/

I expect an uphill.battle getting any traction or adoption. Lots of committee bikeshedding and gatekeeping. It will be stupid and frustrating and exhausting. Don't be too surprised if the Matrix or XMPP folks jump in to try to make life harder. Like, "you should require a paid cryptography audit before you consider adoption, like Matrix did years ago" kind of bullshit (with the expectation that I also personally fund it). And even when that quagmire is over, I fully expect message board discussions to be full of stupid FUD arguments that will convince non-technical people to believe weird shit about my work or my character.

I fully expect these behaviors because it serves their self-interest, and existing power dynamics in the FOSS space.

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

Being a Lewdite, though? S-Tier.

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

you may enjoy this motivational anecdote about compilers; this sexy guide to touching a computer for the first time; or this processor reference manual