social.gl-como.it

After years of careful observation and listening, I am firmly and deeply convinced that neurodivergence is real.

I have serious doubts about the existence of neurotypicality, though. 🧵

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Paul Cantrell mastodon (AP)

What I mean by that is I doubt there is even one single truly “neurotypical” person on this Earth whose brain is actually average in every important dimension of brain variation.

2/

1
Paul Cantrell mastodon (AP)

In the 1950s, the Air Force realized that planes were crashing because cockpits didn’t actually fit the pilots’ bodies. Wrong size = danger!! They commissioned a researcher to develop a new, more correct set of standard dimensions for the seat, yoke, etc.

That researcher, Gilbert S. Daniels, came up with 10 body measurements that matter to cockpit size. He gathered measurements of several thousand pilots. And the number of people who were at the average for all ten measurements? Zero. Not a single one.

“Average” proved to be a statistical construct, not a thing that actually exists as a person.

99percentinvisible.org/episode…

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Paul Cantrell mastodon (AP)

High-dimensional data has this property: it is extremely unlikely that there will be a data point situated at the exact center.

It’s the high dimensionality that’s important here. One person might be at some sort of average on •one• dimension, but for them to be at the average on •all• dimensions grows exponentially less likely as the number of dimensions increases.

It’s like trying to roll all threes with a set of dice. Odds of that with one die? 1 in 6. Odds with two dice? 1 in 36. Odds with 10 dice? 1 in ~60 million.

4/

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Paul Cantrell mastodon (AP)

Daniels was looking at just 10 easily quantifiable body measurements. How many important dimensions of variations are there in a human mind? How hard are they to measure? How likely is it that even one single “average” mind exists on Earth?? The odds are vanishingly small.

[Napkin sketch: assume there are a paltry 20 dimensions of brain variation. (Surely that’s low.) Assume there’s a 1 in 5 change of being completely “normal” in each. (Surely that’s high.) Even that absurd hypothetical gives a 1 in 11,490 chance that a •single• completely average mind exists in a population of 8.3 billion.]

5/

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Paul Cantrell mastodon (AP)

My general framework for thinking about this stuff:

- Brains vary a lot, in a lot of different ways.

- We have names for a few variations, or common patterns of variation. That can be useful, but it’s hardly complete.

- There’s a wealth of as-yet-unnamed neurodivergences out there.

- It’s all but certain that •everyone’s• mind is atypical is one way or another.

- Comparison with, aspiration to, or forced conformance to the nonexistent “average” mind is unhelpful, frequently harmful.

- Embracing variation is the only reasonable (or humane) approach.

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4

In that story of the Air Force measurements, the research team came up with a completely radical suggestion:

Make the seats adjustable.

WHOA 🤯

“Adjustable seats.” seems to me like a great starting point for thinking about variations in human minds.

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1

None of the above is even proper neuroscience or psychology. It’s just a framing of the question, a way to avoid ridiculous assumptions and broken approaches, a way to avoid hurting people.

Variation is normal. Let’s expect it, design for it, work •with• it — in others, and in ourselves.

8/

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“Make the seats adjustable” is a thought I bring to teaching, for example: Does the context I’m creating for learning accommodate people with all different kinds of minds? What variations am I not accommodating? Can I make some things more individually adjustable to better embrace those variations? Can multiple instructors / learning environments / schools offer the flexibility that I can’t offer myself?

Total adjustability is impossible; infinite flexibility is impossible. But as an ongoing effort, as a •direction•, this work is both feasible and useful.

9/

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Several replies think thoughts along the lines of this one from @dalias, and I strongly agree. The •most• neurodivergent who simply cannot conform to narrow, normative expectations are doing the hard work of creating flexibility for •everyone• (see “curb cut effect”).

hachyderm.io/@dalias/112199018…

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Per replies, something I need to clarify:

We’ve often use the word “neurotypical” to mean “neither autistic nor ADHD.” That might be useful as a shorthand, I guess, but it’s that mode of thought I’m specifically arguing against here: creating a single catch-all category defined as a negative, calling it “normal,” and assuming that it fits most people.

That doesn’t stand up to empirical scrutiny, and I don’t think it’s particularly healthy or helpful.

11/

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A lot of conversations about neurodivergence take the form of the first image below. I’m arguing to adopt the framing of the second image instead (except 100- or 1000-dimensional instead of 2-dimensional).

We’ve identified a few clusterings in a space of extraordinary and beautiful variation, and given those clusterings names. How useful those names are! How little they capture, even so! How much variation remains unnamed! How much variation must exist within every human being!

12/

1

There is variation in everyone, but society / context / environment makes that variation more burdensome for some than for others. “Neurotypical” is not a thing that anyone •is•, but rather an archetype that human systems are designed for / evolved around.

When we recognize that “neurotypical” is an archetype and not an actual person, we can reach the same insight that the Air Force reached: you don’t build things to some single optimal set of “normal” dimensions; you make things more adjustable, flexible, accommodating of variation.

/end

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Aaron mastodon (AP)
Wow, this is an awesome thread! I didn't know this stuff even crossed your mind, and then you suddenly just lay it all out and obliterate the silly assumptions people make. As someone who does fit (a bit awkwardly at times) in the clusters we have defined as ADHD and autism, I really appreciate this perspective!
Paul Cantrell mastodon (AP)
@hosford42
I’ve never found either autism or ADHD diagnostic lsits to describe me all that well, but I’ve certainly spent enough of my life feeling •divergent• for this all to be on my mind! (I often use the phrase “my as-yet-unnamed neurodivergence.”)
Aaron mastodon (AP)
Like many autistic people, I have encyclopedic recall for things that interest me -- neurodivergence being one of those topics. If you ever want to explore possible matches for your particular neurodivergence, I'd be happy to share that collected information.

@hosford42
That’s a kind offer! I don’t really feel like I’m in need of a diagnostic label: I have a pretty good sense of how my brain works, and I’m quite comfortable with it and generally able to navigate the world both effectively and happily. Now 13-year-old Paul probably could have used that…!

(I’ve heard mention of some people arguing for “giftedness” as a form of neurodivergence in itself, and although that term really gives me the ick, I suspect the category may be a good fit. Among other things: “encyclopedic recall for areas of interest” describes me too! I remember doing one autism self-diagnosis where the entire first section on “giftedness” was all, “yup, yup, oh wow, yup! Maybe I am…” and then the •all• the subsequent sections were just “nope, nope, nope, not that either, nope….”)

Aaron mastodon (AP)
Yeah, the "twice exceptional" thing really complicates the picture.

this is very much my reasoning for why I don't fully buy that cis het people exist. I mean practically speaking they do and they're the majority, but the ideals might not actually describe anyone.

I think even if you were to try clustering things, it would be multiple clusters, not one big cluster around the means of all the parameters.

Adjustable seats is a great metaphor for freedom in general. You can't paternalistically design society for everyone even if you wanted to.

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@thomasjwebb ikr, no one's idea of utopia is identical to that of another's, hence nobody wants someone else's imposed on them.
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Aaron mastodon (AP)
@cmthiede @thomasjwebb Why every sci fi story about a utopia is also a sci fi story about a dystopia.
CM Thiede mastodon (AP)

@hosford42 @thomasjwebb That just made me realize that for as chilling Elysium was for me, it's likely to have made others equally aroused thinking about having so much power.

#Elysium #Dystopia #Utopia #Movies

@thomasjwebb
Strong agree. I’m cis het on paper — yet have enough gender noncomformance to have caused me personal pain and distress in my peer interactions, and to have forced me to fight hard for my own gender identity against the current. I don’t feel entirely comfortable claiming the banner of “queer” because that word importantly captures hardships I’ve never known and struggles that are not mine…but I’ve always felt more at ease in queer-friendly spaces, because I know that I too am more likely to be safe and accepted there too.
Aaron mastodon (AP)

"Autigender" was an interesting word I learned in this space. I'm cis het male, sure, but I very much do it *my* way, not the standard one. I'm not performatively male. I'm just me, and that happens to line up mostly with those descriptors most of the time.

@thomasjwebb

RE: hachyderm.io/@inthehands/11576…

@inthehands

While I very much like the goal of "make the seats adjustable", I would really like to see a little more acceptance of the (neuro)diversity of teachers --- there used to be an attitude that a student should figure out how they can learn from a teacher --- now it is all on the teacher to figure out how to accommodate the student.*

Maybe there's some way to talk about meeting in the middle?

* You wouldn't believe the amount of work they are now demanding I do to accommodate hypothetical students who have never actually asked for changes. I'm getting very close to saying "F*** it. I have other, more important things to do." I do like teaching. I enjoy it. A lot of students love my class. Many have said that it was their favorite class they took in college. But teaching is supposed to be one small part of my job (if at all). The extra work being demanded is interfering with the rest of the important things that I do. At some point, these burdens are going to preclude me being willing to do the work.


“Make the seats adjustable” is a thought I bring to teaching, for example: Does the context I’m creating for learning accommodate people with all different kinds of minds? What variations am I not accommodating? Can I make some things more individually adjustable to better embrace those variations? Can multiple instructors / learning environments / schools offer the flexibility that I can’t offer myself?

Total adjustability is impossible; infinite flexibility is impossible. But as an ongoing effort, as a •direction•, this work is both feasible and useful.

9/


Aaron mastodon (AP)

@adredish

Accommodation should always be a two-way street. A dialog, not a declaration. The abilities and resources of *both* parties have to be taken into account.

I saw this firsthand when an artist friend of mine didn't provide alt text. Someone chewed her out for it, and then she didn't feel comfortable posting her art anymore. What the other person failed to account for was that the artist herself is *also* disabled, and struggles to find the words to describe images. The end solution that made her feel comfortable posting online again was when people made it clear to her that it was okay to post and then ask for help with the alt text.

Whether someone is officially classified as disabled or not, there are always things they can't do. The whole point in accommodation is to treat *all* people as having intrinsic value, and to make room for each other as best we can.

@inthehands

even if you expand “normal” out to within 1σ of average less than 1 in 2000 people would fit 20 independent dimensions!
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@standev
And when “normal” occurs only 1 in 2000 times…aren’t they the weirdos at that point? 🤣🤣
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Aaron mastodon (AP)

@minmi

"It's weird to be normal," will now be one of the things I say to people who expect normalcy. lol

@standev @inthehands

I wonder what this means for something like neurology, where we don't even know how many dimensions there are, or if that number is even fixed and not its own dimension!!!

@alter_kaker
Yeah, just vast terra icognita; most of our understanding of the mind is still “here be dragons.”

The things is, my “average is highly unlikely to exist” argument doesn’t depend on knowing any of that. If we assume the space of possibly variations is highly multidimensional, then it’s basically QED without any further knowledge needed!

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Aaron mastodon (AP)

I kept thinking of hypervectors as I read all this. The way cosine similarity drops off exponentially faster with increasing dimensionality.

@alter_kaker

Well, but we typically talk about human things being typical more with standard deviations than with exact numbers anyway. If "neurotypical" is anything in the first standard deviation, you're WAY more likely to get multiple dimensions in the same target. Given a normal distribution, about 2/3 of the population will be "typical" on any given trait.
@michaelc OK, if one sigma is “typical” (probably too broad to actually accommodate people well, but let’s roll with it) and we still assume a measly 20 dimensions of brain variation, then we’re up to a whopping 0.03% of the population being “neurotypical” — an extraordinarily rare condition, even under a ridiculously broad definition.
1

I've heard it phrased as "everyone has some neurodivergent traits, but not everyone is Autistic/ADHD/AuDHD".

When someone says "everyone is a little bit autistic", wherever they are coming from, it comes off as minimizing, dismissive, invalidating, or all three.

@cratermoon yeah this one gets my hackles up immediately. Might as well say you don’t see race.
Aaron mastodon (AP)

@lkanies @cratermoon

I don't think that's what Paul was saying, though. We have identified these categories because those of us who fall in them (like me) often struggle more than others to conform to societal expectations. But that doesn't mean that anybody is "normal". You can say nobody is normal, or nobody is typical, without denying that outliers exist and face greater challenges in society.

@inthehands

Families with 2.6 children knew instinctively that statistical averages are constructs that do not affect lived experience.
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One slightly more blunt stat I tend to mention is that the average person has about one testicle. Which is more about bimodal distributions than your point about high dimensionality. But it still tends to rattle the cage whenever I hear people trying to optimize for the "average case" without much introspection about it.
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@wrosecrans
Due to the existence of pregnant people, the average human body has more than one skeleton inside it.
1

beautifully communicated and thought out

'average isn't real'

this is in so ways why we as a species are 'failing'. we have built a society on an average (determined by the most privileged among us).

racial average. gendered average. abled average. prosperity average. medical average.

none of this averaging works because on an individual basis it is never accurate. we are all a bunch of overlapping blobs and spending all of this time trying to precicely categorize each and every one of us into specific boxes is both a gigantic waste of time and an oppressive tool that guarantees our needs won't be met.

this is of course extremely relevant in the conversation (and widespread adoption by those in power) around AI, as one big gigantic averaging tool.

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@coppercrush

Yes. And note the “average” here isn’t always even truly the midpoint of the population, but rather the locus of power: much of society is built around men, for example, when being male is not even typical.

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joomy mastodon (AP)

the UNIX v4 tape reminded me of this story by Ali Akurgal about Turkish bureaucracy:

Do you know what the unit of software is? A meter! Do you know why? In 1992, we did our first software export at Netaş. We wrote the software, pressed a button, and via the satellite dish on the roof, at the incredible speed of 128 kb/s, we sent it to England. We sent the invoice by postal mail. $2M arrived at the bank. 3-4 months passed, and tax inspectors came. They said, “You sent an invoice for $2M?” “Yes,” we said. “This money has been paid?” they asked. “Yes,” we said. “But there is no goods export; this is fictitious export,” they said! So we took the tax inspectors to R&D and sat them in front of a computer. “Would you press this ‘Enter’ key?” we asked. One of them pressed it, then asked, “What happened?” “You just made a $300k export, and we’ll send its invoice too, and that will be paid as well,” we said. The man felt terrible because he had become an accomplice! Then we explained how software is written, what a satellite connection is, and how much this is worth. They said, “We understand, but there has to be a physical goods export; that’s what the regulations require.” So we said: “Let’s record this software onto tape (there were no CDs back then—nor cassettes; we used ½-inch tapes) and send that.” Happy to have found a solution, they said, “Okay, record it and send it.” The software filled two reels, which were handed to a customs broker, who took them to customs and started the export procedure. The customs officer processed things and at one point asked, “Where are the trucks?” The broker said, “There are no trucks—this is all there is,” and pointed to the tape reels on the desk. The customs officer said, “These two envelopes can’t be worth $2M; I can’t process this.” We went to court, an expert committee examined whether the two reels were worth $2M. Fortunately, they ruled that they were, and we were saved from the charge of fictitious export. The same broker took the same two reels to the same customs officer, with the court ruling, and restarted the procedure. However, during the process, the unit price, quantity, and total price of the exported goods had to be entered—as per the regulations. To avoid dragging things out further, they looked at the envelope, saw that it contained tape, estimated how many meters of tape there are on one reel, and concluded that we had exported 1k to 2k meters of software. So the unit of software became the meter.
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I once read a story about the people writing the software for the NASA Apollo missions. There was a functionary in charge of weight accounting, who came to them and asked how much the software would weigh.

They told him it weighted nothing, but the functionary had heard *that* one before and insisted—everything had to be accounted down to the last ounce. He demanded to see it.

They showed him a stack of punched cards, and he was triumphant. “You see,” he said smugly, “it doesn't weigh only ‘nothing’!”

“No, you misunderstand,” they replied. “The cards aren't going on the spacecraft. Only the holes.”

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hackaday mastodon (AP)

Bare Metal STM32: Increasing the System Clock and Running Dhrystone

hackaday.com/2025/12/18/bare-m…

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Programmare FPGA sotto linux.

Se a qualcuno può interessare, al seguente link un presentazione su come programmare una FPGA sotto linux, con tanto di introduzione su come funzionano.
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Mx. Eddie R mastodon (AP)

George Clooney is an actor.

Put him in the role of a surgeon in front of a camera, and he will do and say things the average non-surgeon viewer will agree are surgeonish. After an hour of that, we are, as average non-surgeon viewers, satisfied and entertained.

Put him in an operating theatre, and the patient will fucking die because he's not a surgeon and knows nothing about really doing surgery.

This is a post about LLMs.

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llms know, as it turns out, a whole hell of a lot more about cancer and reading mammograms than radiologists
anubis2814 friendica (via ActivityPub)
@gary @Mx. Eddie R True they are way better at certain things. The problem is when they get shoved into everything like a panacea for everything

Liam Proven mastodon (AP)

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple

hey.paris/posts/appleid/

«I effectively have over $30,000 worth of previously-active “bricked" hardware. My iPhone, iPad, Watch, & Macs cannot sync, update, or function properly.»

— Paris Buttfield-Addison

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That's the level of harm that would at least have me threaten a civil case.

I also wonder if, within the domain of the GDPR, at least access to the data could be compelled. Maybe Australia has a similar law?

Leeloo mastodon (AP)

At least they have a possible explanation.

I only ever used my Apple ID for downloading free stuff from the Mac App Store and to add music to my iTunes wish list. I have no clue why it got disabled.


Ada Palmer mastodon (AP)
Want to read some intense, ideas-packed #hopepunk sci-fi with complex world building and a hopeful future? It's not too late to get the "Too Like the Lightning" e-book on sale for $2.99 today, on sale on ALL e-book platforms (Kobo, Nook, Kindle) including ebookdaily.com/ #booksky
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Dubious Blur mastodon (AP)
sympathies! I bought it anyway. I’m being told to stop reading so many depressing books and this seems perfect. :)
Ada Palmer mastodon (AP)
@dubiousblur Hopepunk is a great contrast with the usual dystopian gloom. It’s part of what makes the genre so exciting to write!

Liam Proven mastodon (AP)

RT @moultano on Bluesky:

Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists. You’re telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth, made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?

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phaedr0s mastodon (AP)

I just found a page on from what I can tell is an actual food cooking site that is an entry on Yocto recipes. Because the tool Yocto used to create Linux distros calls their directions to install certain software "recipes".

Does this site scrape other sites and copy anything about "recipes"? Did someone that does Linux development post this to the site? This is just funny.

eathealthy365.com/the-ultimate…

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phaedr0s mastodon (AP)

@mwl man, respect to food bloggers. I would at first want to make fun of them, but they out there putting work into their own site, not on a social media platform, but their own blog at their own domain.

So I might scoff at their recipe blog "Carrot and the Crisp" or something with curated pics of all the ingredients in their own bowls, but I'm still making their roasted cauliflower recipe.

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Food bloggers understand platform, branding, and owning your intellectual property.

That's why they write long posts. The recipe itself is not copyrightable, but commentary around it is. It lets them track scrapers.


jolla mastodon (AP)

Batch #1 is officially sold out! 🎉

Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered and helped bring the new Jolla Phone one step closer to reality.
Because of the incredible demand, Batch #2 is now open.

⚓ Batch #1 — Sold out (499 € final price)
⚓ Batch #2 — Now available (549 € final price)
⚓ Limited run of 2000 units
⚓ 99 € refundable down payment

Be part of the next wave shaping the independent European Linux phone.

Pre-order Batch #2jolla.com/phone

#JollaPhone #SailfishOS #DIT #LinuxMobile #DeGoogle #european #DigitalSovereignty

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Pavel Machek akkoma (AP)
Jolla is not what most people would call #LinuxMobile. Important parts are non-free. Their licensing also prevents "doing it together". You wound not call #Android Linux Mobile, would you? There are other projects trying to do the right thing, such as wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Dev… .
Daniel Wood mastodon (AP)
@pavel while I have backed the jolla phone and I hope it is a huge success, I would love to see a vendor supported device that runs mainline Linux as a usable device. Every option is compromised with poor hardware, no vendor support or libhybris based. I am genuinely hoping that this changes soon.

I Went All-In on AI. The MIT Study Is Right.

Just want to clarify, this is not my Substack, I'm just sharing this because I found it insightful.

The author describes himself as a "fractional CTO"(no clue what that means, don't ask me) and advisor. His clients asked him how they could leverage AI. He decided to experience it for himself. From the author(emphasis mine):

I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.

I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.

Now when clients ask me about AI adoption, I can tell them exactly what 100% looks like: it looks like failure. Not immediate failure—that’s the trap. Initial metrics look great. You ship faster. You feel productive. Then three months later, you realize nobody actually understands what you’ve built.

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What's interesting is what he found out. From the article:

I forced myself to use Claude Code exclusively to build a product. Three months. Not a single line of code written by me. I wanted to experience what my clients were considering—100% AI adoption. I needed to know firsthand why that 95% failure rate exists.

I got the product launched. It worked. I was proud of what I’d created. Then came the moment that validated every concern in that MIT study: I needed to make a small change and realized I wasn’t confident I could do it. My own product, built under my direction, and I’d lost confidence in my ability to modify it.

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matz gotosocial (AP)
Va bene, ritorno con La Voce a Pezzi per dicembre.
Vediamo un poco.
Sicuramente Instagram si scorda che gli scucia soldi.
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Tim Bray mastodon (AP)

RE: cosocial.ca/@timbray/115639842…

OMG it turns out this is due to the Mac APFS filesystem’s default case-mapping behavior, so things like SSH and LS work (bleccch).

(h/t @stoey.bsky.social over on bsky)

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rob pike mastodon (AP)
Thanks for the shortcut, mein Herr.


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Jaime Robertson mastodon (AP)

Nice that they were given something to snack on. Better than some airlines.

I assume that’s what the branches on the sides were for.

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And I thought seeing a stuffed peacock in an open-topped trailer was weird...

Kevin Beaumont mastodon (AP)
Stealing this phrase - “AI is a Dunning-Kruger accelerator”
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Liam Proven mastodon (AP)

A headless mystery

Archaeologists find evidence that a wave of mass brutality accompanied the collapse of the first pan-European culture

science.org/content/article/he…

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Liam Proven mastodon (AP)
@kaasbaas More like the Sea Peoples, but quite a bit earlier...?
Liam Proven mastodon (AP)

@kaasbaas BTW if the "Sea Peoples" thing is not widely known...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peop…

Mysterious people in ships who decimated multiple civilisations in the late Bronze Age.


SwiftOnSecurity mastodon (AP)

You meet the users where they are.

You have literally no idea how much this paid off. The number of infected media players people downloaded in the age before Windows Media Player had more than three codecs is unimaginable

Who knows if I saved the entire firm doing this

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Catherine Schmidt mastodon (AP)

#Humor #Satire #Thanksgiving #Turkeys #Bribes #trump #alt

Borowitz Report 11/11/25 SATIRE
TRUMP REFUSES TO PARDON TURKEY AFTER IT FAILS TO BRIBE HIM (SATIRE)

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Enrico Zini mastodon (AP)

opl.it/evento/24-11-2025-CHI-T…

CHI TI HA DETTO CHE ERA AMORE? Sguardi, parole e responsabilità di fronte alla violenza di genere e al femminicidio

Evento accessibile da remoto, organizzato dall'Ordine degli Psicologi della Lombardia

#psicologia #violenzadigenere

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Thom, not a YouTuber mastodon (AP)

Look, we can all complain about religion all we want, but the Protestant Church in the Netherlands in the city of Kampen who have been holding an uninterrupted mass for over a year to protect a family of two parents and five kids (21, 15, 11, and 4) from deportation are fucking heroes. This family has been in The Netherlands for 12 years, so these kids know nothing of the place they came from (hell, two of them were born here and have never seen their parents' home country), and deporting them would be insanely cruel.

Why the long mass, though? Well, according to Dutch law, law enforcement is not allowed to enter a church (or other house of worship) as long as a mass/service/etc. is underway. As such, members of this church take turns holding mass, and 2000 of them have been keeping this up for over a year. The family has its own little area in the church, but they can't leave the building. The kids are taught by local teachers inside the church, and the 21-year old does odd jobs in the building. So yeah, they've been inside for over a year.

Turns out this "church asylum" thing has actually been attempted over 50 times since 1978, and it's been successful at times.

I almost bought a house in Kampen a few years before meeting my now-wife and moving to Sweden. Had that not happened, and I managed to buy a house in Kampen, I would've joined this church in a heartbeat to help out.

nos.nl/artikel/2591258-kerkdie…

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Stefan Bohacek mastodon (AP)

EDIT: The Malwarebytes article has been updated:

"After taking a closer look at Google’s documentation and reviewing other reporting, that doesn’t appear to be the case."

This confusion could've been easily avoided if Google was more clear in how they communicate with their users.

ORIGINAL:

PSA to anyone who uses Gmail!

"Reportedly, Google has recently started automatically opting users in to allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models. This means your emails could be analyzed to improve Google’s AI assistants, like Smart Compose or AI-generated replies. Unless you decide to take action."

malwarebytes.com/blog/news/202…

#gmail #AI

#AI #GMail
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Annika Backstrom mastodon (AP)
Ask not for whom the cloud flares: it flares for thee.
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Ben! (Boo!) mastodon (AP)

Automatically blocking any account that uses Harry Potter to farm engagement. It is time to move past Harry Potter as a society, we do not need to keep maintaining JK Rowling's cashflow or propping a series that actually is not very well written and chock full of offensive racial stereotypes and literary cliches.

#bookstodon #movies #books #films

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Jon Gilbert mastodon (AP)
I kinda need an escape crocodile shirt now
Oblomov mastodon (AP)
best survivorship bias comic ever.

scott⚡️mccloud ActivityPub

A rare interview with the creators of the always-funny, always-brilliant, and *usually*-sexy—or occasionally anti-sexy—OGLAF! Cooper has kept a low profile over the years, but is legitimately one of the very best artists in comics today. Read OGLAF if you're old enough to drive!

Talking Oglaf with Trudy Coope...

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Cactuar Joe mastodon (AP)

Folks it is now about one hour until #MONSTERDON the weekly monster movie watch party! If you want to filter out the hashtag, now'd be a good time to do that.

If you'd like to join in, this week's movie is VAMPIRE ON BIKINI BEACH (1988), which I can only assume is a documentary about vampire bats in California.

No? Huh.

Anyway it's free with ads on Tubi over here: tubitv.com/movies/712244/vampi…

Or you can download from Archive.org over here: archive.org/details/vampires-o…

Just hit play at the top of the hour and toot along! See you there ^^

#Cinema #Movies #Cinemastodon #Horror #Scifi #Vampire #Bikinis

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Cactuar Joe mastodon (AP)
I get the strong impression that Vampire on Bikini Beach would have done *severe* psychological damage to me if it had actually been comprehensible at all. #Monsterdon
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Cactuar Joe mastodon (AP)
Like, that movie bounced off. No contact at all.
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jonny (good kind) mastodon (AP)
@TodePond what have you done
github.com/TodePond/GulfOfMexi…
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Charlie Stross mastodon (AP)

Absolutely ghastly—I approve!

(Only one quibble: array base being fixed to -1 is *boring*. Why not steal the discontinued Perl idiom of the array base being a special variable $[ which you can assign to, so you can start enumerating your arrays from -1, 0, 1, or pi? Much more powerful and general! Also, can we have rich markup syntax is comments, please? Markdown is ubiquitous so how about using nroff with the -ms macro package by default?)

Stewart Russell mastodon (AP)

@cstross delightful!

The 'const 5 = 4' is very like early FORTRAN where you could redefine numeric constants. The official line was "don't do that", but nothing stopped the determined programmer.

MikeStok mastodon (AP)

@cstross what’s wrong with PostScript for documentation. Let’s hear it for stack based executable documentation!

What could go wrong?

Charlie Stross mastodon (AP)
@MikeStok The document format isn't complete until it can boot Linux to a command line environment: github.com/ading2210/linuxpdf

RetroStrange TV owncast (AP)

RetroStrange TV is now streaming!

24/7 science fiction and horror all October long

#streaming #retro #movies #scifi #horror #tv #vintage #publicdomain #adfree

live.retrostrange.com

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ArneBab mastodon (AP)

If someone comes into a dev mailing list and says "my AI told me … I don’t understand it, but you sure do" that means that many people will either ignore it completely or read a wall-of-text that isn’t known to actually be useful.

Please read your search results yourself, and if you find something useful, summarize it and only ask about the stuff that you actually need to know to move forward.

Please respect the time of people in mailing lists. Don’t drop generated walls of text.

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Liam Proven mastodon (AP)

Europe's Self Inflicted Cloud Crisis

berthub.eu/articles/posts/our-…

<- Bert Hubert nails one of the big problems in contemporary IT management

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zenkat mastodon (AP)
@anthropy @osma echoes of this mornings conversation

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do you mean cross over? Happy to support if so.
Liam Proven mastodon (AP)

@mart_brooks *Wags reproving finger*

I really wish the BSDs could resolve their differences, and more of the people focused on things like Plan 9 instead, but there's room at the table.


Italian Linux Society mastodon (AP)

🗓️ Linux Day è domani! 25 ottobre 2025 - 25° edizione in Italia 🎉

:tux: Incontra la community più vicina:
linuxday.it/2025/

@linux

Grazie a tutte le città attive! Arona, Avellino, Bari, Benevento, Bergamo, Biella, Bologna, Bolzano, Brescia, Cairate, Casarano, Casorate Sempione, Cesate, Cosenza, Crotone, Este, Fabriano (parte 1 ..)

#LinuxDay #LinuxDay2025 #SoftwareFreedomDay2025 #SoftwareLibero #Italy

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Italian Linux Society mastodon (AP)
...e grazie alle community delle città di Fermo, Ferrara, Francavilla Fontana, Genova, Imperia, Macomer, Mantova, Messina, Milano, Modena, Napoli, Palermo (x2!), Parma, Pavia, Pesaro, Poggibonsi, Pontedera, Pordenone, Prato, Rieti, Roma (x2!), Terni, Torino, Trieste, Verona e Vicenza! 🤯 🤯 🐧
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Laic Salocin mastodon (AP)

A ⁨⁨#Torino⁩⁩, farò una presentazione di ⁨⁨#LINEAGEOS⁩⁩, ⁨⁨#FDROID⁩⁩, ⁨⁨#XMPP⁩⁩ durante la ⁨⁨#LINUX⁩⁩ DAY TORINO 2025

⁨⁨Https://linuxdaytorino.org/2025/#schedule⁩⁩

Orario 14.00
Dove: arsenale della Pace, Torino

Prima di tutto, vi invito a venire e partecipare numerosi
Puoi, questa presentazione è l'occasione di offrire un'alternativa a ⁨⁨#Google⁩⁩, e aumentare la ⁨⁨#Privacy⁩⁩
Pertanto, vi invito a divulgarlo presso i vostri colleghi, amici e famiglia torinese che volete convertire a ⁨⁨#LINEAGE⁩⁩ OS, F-DROID e XMPP

La presentazione spiegherà come installare LINEAGE OS, F-DROID e XMPP.
Dei QR code gratis per ⁨⁨#MONOCLES⁩⁩ da GOOGLE PLAY saranno distribuiti.

Sperò di esser stato esaustivo e vi aspetto, voi, i vostri amici, colleghi e famiglie, sabato 25 ottobre 2025, a Torino, alle 14.00, Arsenale della Pace, per la LINUX DAY TORINO 2025, nella AULA MISC.

⁨⁨#jabber⁩⁩ ⁨⁨#dino⁩⁩ ⁨⁨#monoclesim⁩⁩ ⁨⁨#gajim⁩⁩ ⁨⁨#movim⁩⁩ ⁨⁨#siskin⁩⁩ ⁨⁨#monal⁩⁩


"The villain is a gay Muslim terrorist who looks like Prince doing a terrible Doctor Strangelove impression with a monkey scurrying around his shoulders. He's aided by an army of lesbians led by Colonel Honey Hump."

My latest newsletter is about my fav weird movies:

buttondown.com/charliejane/arc…

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myrmepropagandist mastodon (AP)

Struggling with vibe coding? You just need to get better at prompting. Here is a six video series "course" to teach you how to write the most effective AI prompts and get the most out of vibe coding!

(Do you ever wonder what it would be like if there were some special language for giving commands to computers... a kind of prompting language so they would do *exactly* what you wanted? Maybe someone should invent that.)

Questa voce è stata modificata (2 mesi fa)
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Jonathan Corbet akkoma (AP)

"The manufacturer had the power to remotely disable devices and used it against me for blocking their data collection."

codetiger.github.io/blog/the-d…

...and people wonder why I resist having that kind of stuff in my home...

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Ewen Bell 📸 pleroma (AP)

Talented fellow to pull it apart and then put it back together!

That morsel of advice, to never use the same WiFi for IoT devices and your actual computers is something most people ignore. It's a major effort to setup, and the priority slides down the list unless something out of the ordinary nudges them.

Jonathan Corbet akkoma (AP)
@ewen OpenWrt makes setting up an alternative SSID trivially easy; there is really no reason *not* to do it. (And little reason not to run OpenWrt, but that's a separate story...)
Ewen Bell 📸 pleroma (AP)

No no no no no and no.

None of this is trivial to 99% of humanity. PLEEEEEEEASE see this from the perspective of regular humans!

Scott Laird mastodon (AP)

@ewen setting up an extra SSID is mostly easy for people who know what an SSID is without looking it up. Which is a fairly small slice of humanity.

But it's worse than that -- I don't think putting IoT devices on their own SSID *but the same underlying network* makes much sense. You'd probably like IoT networks to look more like guest networks, with strictly controlled access to other devices. Which needs (at a minimum) VLANs and an extra set of firewall policies, all of which depend on so many things that there's no way to produce any sort of useful cookbook for people with moderate amounts of technical skill.

And then you'll discover that there's no good way to actually configure new IoT devices without moving a phone onto the IoT network. And some features will just silently fail to work if you don't have direct IP access to the IoT device from a phone. And useful things like mDNS won't work at all unless you go to heroic lengths.

I'm perfectly capable of setting up an IoT network at home. I even have most of the config for it rolled out. But I've never moved a single device into the IoT network, because it's just going to make everything extra-painful in practice.

Ewen Bell 📸 pleroma (AP)

@laird

Exquisite description of the drama required to isolate IoT from anything important. Right down to the "Oh crap I'm six steps into configuring a device over the Thread network but I forgot to change my phone to the IoT network first. Urgh. Start over."

I have actually implemented those firewall rules to restrict what IoT devices can see. And in the back of my mind I'm thinking "What if I missed something?"

And then there's the maintenance in case something stops working.

The average person will go to Office Depot and buy a box that says "Fast Internet". Even if there was a wifi/router that would setup your separate IoT network by default and manage all those firewall rules, people would still choose a product that is cheaper or has pretty flashing LEDs.

And governments let this go on. There is zero effort from my govt to regulate for products that protect consumers. The govt has a website telling us to "be alert for scammers" and other malarkey, with absolutely tools that might actually help avoid the average person from having their digital life stolen, let alone just being spied on by corporations.

Laberpferd mastodon (AP)
@ewen @laird
I worry it will take considerably less than ten years until appliances are non longer needing your Wifi, because they will (no user intervention possible) form their own mesh network with anything else around including your neighbours and random cars that are passing by
Jonathan Corbet akkoma (AP)

@Laberpferd @ewen @laird ...or they just have their own cellular interface...

lwn.net/Articles/850218/


Liam Proven mastodon (AP)

Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than

prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

<- please can someone do an updated version, comparing Oberon to bits of Linux/BSD?

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Linux Day 2025

Anche quest'anno il GL-Como partecipa al Linux Day!

L'appuntamento annuale organizzato da ILS è nato nel 2001 per promuovere le idee del software libero e dell'open source, con un occhio di riguardo verso Linux. L'evento è costituito da una rete di eventi decentralizzati in tutta Italia organizzati autonomamente da gruppi volontari e appassionati.

In questa edizione il GL-Como si unisce a ILS Casorate Sempione, sabato 25 ottobre presso la biblioteca comunale Alda Merini .

Il programma è in via di finalizzazione, vi invitiamo a seguire il sito di ILS Casorate Sempione per aggiornamenti!

Volantino Linux Day 2025


gl-como.it/v2015/linux-day-202…

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