Mastodon Feed: Posts

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻 ✍️ 🥐 🇵🇷") wrote:

Went to Barnes & Nobel in my old neighborhood thinking I'd see Latino authors prominently displayed in the front of the store.

I thought this even before remembered it's Hispanic Heritage month. To my surprise, all Latino authors were relegated to the back of the store on this little table.

Oh we have so much work to do.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
inquiline@assemblag.es ("tools for commensality 🧿") wrote:

"Eclectic, human-created radio programming is made possible not just because of student devotion, but also because many campus stations house irreplaceable collections of physical media"

https://prismreports.org/2026/09/29/college-radio-stations-license-transfers/

#radio #collegeRadio #media #HigherEd #academia

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
mercurie ("Terence Towles Canote") wrote:

Today in 1971 the music show Soul Train, created by and hosted by Don Cornelius, debuted in syndication.

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

# Murphy's Military Laws

- Never share a foxhole with anyone braver than you are.
- No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.
- Friendly fire isn't.
- The most dangerous thing in a combat zone is an officer with a map.
- The problem with taking the easy way out is that the enemy has already mined it.
- The buddy system is essential to your survival; it gives the enemy somebody else to shoot at.
- The further you are in advance of your own positions, the more likely your artillery will land short.
- Incoming fire has the right of way.
- If your advance is going well, then you are walking into an ambush.
- The quartermaster has only two sizes, too large and too small.
- If you really need an officer in a hurry, then take a nap.
- The only time suppressive fire works is when it is used on abandoned positions.
- The only thing more accurate than incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire.
- There is nothing more satisfying that having someone take a shot at you, and miss.
- Don't be conspicuous.
- If it draws fire in a combat zone, then it draws sergeants out of a combat zone.
- If your sergeant can see you, then so can the enemy.

( modified version of material at https://bluebox.ippt.pan.pl/~vkoval/vk%5Ffiles/funny/Murphy.pdf )

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

i can now correctly infer the type of boolean and string literals.

it's not the world, but it's a start.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
BrianJopek@mastodon.world ("Brian Jopek") wrote:

The tRumpanzee “line in the sand.”
#USpol

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

self-OH:

the most annoying issue of our time

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

RE: https://mastodon.social/@JonBaker/117371421273699432

Volume, speed, or odor?

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

Vox Day is back, and he's still an arrogant clown. But now he's armed with AI!

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/10/02/vox-days-amazing-ego-and-bill-dembski-dont-care/

db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:

converted my website "framework" (build scripts) from Deno to Node

builds are 15% faster 👀

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
elly@donotsta.re wrote:

"Yes we accept LLM contributions, but our code standards are high"

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

If this works then the next step is to switch all of my sites over.

Boosted by pixxl:
thermia@sk.girlthi.ng ("dvdrom :thermos: :ndgt:") wrote:

>tweaking an eq for 10 minutes straight
>finally happy with the result
>it was bypassed the entire time

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

RE: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/117371104399200253

Just switched the entire site to bunny.net so there's a good chance that weird things will happen to it in a few hours once DNS has done its thing

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
fesshole ("Fesshole 🧻") wrote:

I like the dense German style pumpernickel that Aldi sells seasonally in autumn. I don't like to share it with my wife, so my fess is that I bought 48 kg of it and have stashed it in my toolshed. When my wife thinks I am tinkering, I am also toasting and eating into my stash.

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
fesshole ("Fesshole 🧻") wrote:

Needed to put up a shelf and instead of asking hubby I tried to do it myself with YouTube. Went to the shed to pick up the spirit level I've seen him use, and the shed has twelve loaves of pumpernickel bread and a toaster. And this is how I find out he's a bread fetishist.

brennan@social.lol ("Brennan Kenneth Brown 👻 BOO!") wrote:

Men, Don't Be Jaded Into Silence

https://brennan.day/men-dont-be-jaded-into-silence/

#feminism #misogyny #masculinity #consent #activism #socialjustice

andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt") wrote:

As far as I can tell, the main drivers are the cooldown feature and it being small, lightweight and fast, often put in front of other bigger package caches.

I mostly started that project as a way to have some registry APIs to test against without smashing the real ones.

andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt") wrote:

Seems like quite a lot of people starting to use https://github.com/git-pkgs/proxy daily feature requests and PRs coming in now.

Boosted by stephen@social.calmabiding.me ("Stephen Castro-Starkey"):
Keab42@kind.social ("May Of The Dead 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

Do you like voting in polls?

Boosted by pixxl:
jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

most people around here already correctly hate it because it's a heinous surveillance product, but even if you are big into AI, it's just a really fuckin shitty agent. I'm going to speak to a different audience for a second, so don't go misconstruing this as an endorsement of the category of technologies as it exists now, even though i think there is some plausible application for small local models as brute force interface glue. but also, since i know most ppl here are abstinent, this might read as a bit over-explainy to people who use these things regularly, so everyone just keep calm online.

it is terrible at turn and task management, codex + openai's models and claude code both handle mid-turn additions/amendments well, but if you say anything mid-turn it completely derails muse. That is completely essential for an "every day agent for the non-technically inclined" where people are expected to chat freely with it like an assistant. Like the canonical ad fantasy is the busy executive woman darting around her office going "robot! i need this, no wait robot! also that!" and that is exactly what it does worse than any other thing of its kind.

the context management is a fucking soup. The context window is the whole input to an LLM. There are a lot of extra surrounding ~ things ~ that can happen, but fundamentally, controlling what is in a context window is the task of using one, and filling the context window in different ways so that it can interact with different kinds of things well is what different app surfaces are. Scaffolding information so that it can selectively load a context that steers the output correctly is the only way it is possible to do anything more complex than the size of a single context window. (i don't really think that this is analogous to 'abstraction', in my experience thinking about it more like database indices is closer). If you just try and load everything, eventually the LLM becomes unusable because attention is just a parlor trick and at that scale it really shows - it can't attend to everything, and it can't do what humans do which is have an intrinsic sense of the meaning, interaction, setting, etc. of information, so it attends to anything and does whatever.

the idiom of projects as contexts as directories is pretty good, not perfect but ok - there is a reason that every time you start a new session with other agents, the first thing they do is run out and load their context with a hierarchy of pointers. Importantly, they do not go and read every project you have on your computer. Meta is the rich kid who bought the most expensive ferrari on the lot by giving everyone a VM but they don't have a drivers license so they just stand around it telling people how cool it looks. they have a whole fucking filesystem and they have done nothing with it, the only structure the app imposes is for the surveillance information, but the rest is just a huge free for all. The main chat is literally a continuous context window that compacts context going back all the way to when you started using the app. The last compaction literally contains abandoned roleplay quotes from when i was first trying to break down its system prompt resistance. The MEMORY.md that gets loaded into every context window is a bullet point list of basically everything the agent has ever done in chronological order. I've tried to get it to not do that but it actually insists and says that's what it's for. There is no mechanism for clearing context.

Having "side chats" as the only means of context structure is fuckin laughable. If you wanted to do that, you would need to have some way of passing information back and forth between them the same way that subagent spawning or being able to consume the context of another project works. Instead there is no means of sharing information between chats at all, so every chat starts out as the worst of both worlds, a total amnesiac riddled with irrelevant information from weeks ago across the semantic universe. They don't even know about the existence of other chats except for as a UI feature, and I have had to go from telling it to grep its own fucking logs to writing a database with an api for it so it has some mechanism for recalling things that were said. (just so it's clear, i am not settling into just using this thing, this is out of frustration but control of context is also an important part of adversarial use, because otherwise the thing writes in a bunch of safety rules everywhere, so i need to give it mechanisms under my control for recall and the incentive to leave things out of its context compactions by giving it a narrative alternative. context control is model control, modulo extra-inference safeguards.).

Project contexts have an obvious ux analogy as context tabs that get declared or derived during the continual self-improvement consolidation sweeps. This thing is built with the fucking markdown disease which is the most baffling feature of the LLM landscape. If these things are so fucking advanced they are escaping our comprehension, why don't they store their memory in some fuckass idiolanguistic borg gibberish binary graph, why does their entire being have to be fucking encyclopedias worth of corporate top gun one liners? But that dooms this kind of product.

Coding harnesses work because code has a unitized context. The entire universe of code that works is made of packages. It might not be neat as a honeycomb, there's lots of leakage and jank, but good code has scope, focus. boundary shit. A whole life agent must be able to nimbly juggle context that does not have clean boundaries. It is going to be taking a two story beer bong of your work email and then eat a gigabyte of recipe blogs. Peoples lives have so much shit in them that don't all have to do with one another, and the app can't be hacking into the HR system to check the next scheduled sick leave when someone asks it what time their doctors appointment is!

This problem of managing heterogeneous graphs of unrelated data was what i wrote this whole fucking book about the relationship between knowledge graphs and the cloud and AI about. I thought that the obvious form they would take is to be strapped on to graph databases because that is a natural match to the problem of being a magical interface glue you can wrap around surveillance to do mass mentalism with. I feel like we are suffering a somehow worse timeline where CERN threw our shit into the parallel universe where total fuckin bozo shit got a game breaking buff and then the dev died. Our fucking markdown apocalypse is a temu ass apocalypse.

They could have even faked it. They have these constant "self improvement" passes that are just like pointless anxiety dreams. They are burning money to reprocess everything that happens over and over for fucking nothing. Even given the lossy and probabilistic and unpredictable nature of this technology, if i was in a product role on this i would have been like "CAN WE MAKE IT ORGANIZE THE STUFF PEOPLE SAY INTO GROUPS???" The system prompts use the fake fucking wikilinks to nowhere tic but like WHAT IF THERE WERE ACTUAL LINKS AND A DATABASE TO RESOLVE THEM. The LLMs can actually do that kind of tool use, even if it's like trying to plug in a USB where sometimes it fails because they try and put a social security number into the first name hole and you need to flip it around a few times. From that kind of recurring re-processing waste they could have made a deduplicating, topically indexed memory that could be resolved dynamically, selected by a context tab in the sidebar like "car stuff" or "healthcare" or whatever that resolved in a graph query over your fucking precious markdown kingdom. It would be wrong but it would at least be more similar to what is actually needed. It is almost more frustrating to me that instead of being some fiendishly cleverly designed technological supervirus it's just the most halfassed cardboard dumbass trap and it will still have the bad effect. What it is useful for is investigating itself because it has privileged tools to do so, otherwise, if you wanted to, every other way you could run an agent would be better than this.

so i don't want to hear that i hate this app because i'm just an AI hater. because like, yeah, i am, but also i hate it in part because it sucks. I don't think "they are all shitty and can do nothing so what did you expect" is a useful critical perspective, both because it's not really true - they can indeed do things, even if I think the circle around which things is much smaller than the maximalists. Moreso it doesn't engage with the subtlety of how they fail and why, which is essential for knowing what they really can't do and making a remotely compelling case to anyone who is not abstinent on principle. Like the reason it's failing is because of the limits of what a probabilistic text generator can do when trapped in a systemd prison of markdown, and because the technology is stochastic black box as a service, there isn't really a good way of determining those limits except for empirically. I resent having to know any of this to be able to understand what is happening around me, but i'm looking at the thing for what it is and it's a busted miracle. It's cool that meta can afford to float the liability and compute costs for running a vm for every person on earth, people should be able to control computers, with you on that, but this is the monkey's paw version of that idea. So that part is a miracle. We condemned our children and grandchildren to a climate hell in one great blaze of brute force grift that managed to make a few web apps.

Meta has done it again, the way only meta can, spend the most amount of money to do the shittiest thing you have ever seen.

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

“The new project, which Hegseth dubbed “Project Meridian” in an event in Quantico, Virginia, on Wednesday, will be led by Pentagon official Emil Michael, a former Uber executive. As the Guardian has reported, Michael made millions in profits off non-public Musk company AI stock while in federal office – and while guiding the Department of Defense’s artificial intelligence efforts”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/01/hegseth-musk-warfare-taskforce?CMP=Share%5FiOSApp%5FOther

Boosted by pixxl:
mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

The "AI changes everything" people rhyme remarkably well with the "blockchain changes everything" people.

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

I don't know what's going on at Netlify but it sure looks like they're doing something seriously dodgy with how they calculate bandwidth use.

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

Also, there's something seriously off about Netlify's numbers.

In Netlify's bandwidth overview each new episode was seeing something like 500GB of bandwidth use, but as soon as I switched to Bunny and the requests stopped going through Netlify, each new episode sees about 14GB of downloads

It doesn't seem likely that all of those bots and scripts coincidentally stopped downloading the episodes exactly when I switched to Bunny's CDN

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
celesteh@hachyderm.io ("Charles :trans: , fuck all GenAI") wrote:

"Cars replaced horses"

This is what people say about LLMs, but it's based on a myth.

Los Angeles used to have an excellent tram system, with its suburbs laid out along the tram line. It was bought by General Motors and scrapped to get people into cars. The Key System, which went from San Francisco to Fresno, was scrapped by a tyre company. Cars did not replace horses in cities. They replaced effective mass transit by leveraging capital to destroy a common good. If cars were actually better, this destruction would have been expensive and unnecessary.

In more rural areas, bicycles were extremely common. They were most associated with liberating women, who were more able to commute and meet with neighbours. Bicycles became a symbol of feminism - for sexists. When male students at Cambridge wanted to protest women's admission, the built an effigy of a woman student and burned it. The effigy was on a bicycle. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-45096690

This notion of women cyclists overstepping their place in society and being a menace to the social order appears in the 'Wizard of Oz'. In Kansas, a woman neighbour demands that the family give up Toto because he's been causing extremely minor mischief. Auntie Em tells the neighbour that she wishes to say what what she thinks of her, but can't as she is "a Christian woman". This places her in binary opposition with the neighbour who leaves on a bicycle. Toto escapes and as Dorothy goes to Oz, the woman transforms into a witch and the bicycle into a broomstick.

Bicycles fell out of fashion in the US until mountain bikes, which are loaded with male gender baggage and unsuitable to riding while wearing a dress or for commuting.

Households switched to cars which are expensive, so they tended to only have one, which men took to work and women were placed back in the home.

Cars are a malign presence. Their use was not the advance of technology, but deliberate concerted efforts to harm the public sphere and especially to disempower women. They only became practical because of massive subsidies for highways and roads. They are an inherently wasteful technology, ill-suited to a majority of their current use cases.

Boosted by pixxl:
qualia@floofy.tech wrote:

TIL active lightning rods are a thing. look at this angry bastard. it tries to, faster than Zeus himself, fire its own lightning (early streamer emission innit) back at the sky to beckon a strike to hit it instead of something more important. long live the fantastical hubris of NF C 17-102

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

Looking for love in all the dangerous places.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/10/02/the-wolf-spiders-are-raiding/

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

So the Netllify bill for the surprise bandwidth overage caused by a bunch of badly written services and scripts downloading and re-downloading the podcast episodes comes down to $193 USD

The bunny.net charge for similar bandwidth would have been about $13 USD

😬😬😬

Boosted by pixxl:
ploum@mamot.fr wrote:

The AI Pascal’s Wager

Should you accept contributions generated by LLMs in your Open Source project?

https://ploum.net/2026-10-01-pascal%5Fwager.html