Social GL-Como | Diego Roversi @ Social GL-Como

Fabio 7 mesi fa • friendica

Chiaro?

3 1

Liam Proven 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything

notashelf.dev/posts/curse-of-k…

A reflection on control, burnout, and the strange weight of technical fluency.

The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything | Blog

^NotAShelf

The Register 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports

Lead dev likens flood to 'effectively being DDoSed' Curl project founder Daniel Stenberg is fed up with of the deluge of AI-generated "slop" bug reports and recently introduced a checkbox to screen low-effort submissions that are draining maintainers' time.…
#theregister #IT
go.theregister.com/feed/www.th…

Curl project founder snaps over deluge of time-sucking AI slop bug reports

: Lead dev likens flood to 'effectively being DDoSed'

^{Connor Jones (The Register)}

#IT #TheRegister

Ben Werdmuller 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Excellent. alex.party/posts/2025-05-05-th…

The future of web development is AI. Get on or get left behind.

Editor’s Note: previous titles for this article have been added here for posterity.

^alex.party

Slashline 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Space Auditor

#FinanceASongOrPoem
#HashTagGames

#hashtaggames #financeasongorpoem

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

I get a lot of emails from people wanting help with math and physics, ranging from students needing advice to completely deranged crackpots. Lately I'm getting more and more crackpots who say they developed their theories with the help of AI.

It gets worse. Check out this article by Miles Klee:

rollingstone.com/culture/cultu…

Strange things are happening when people take ChatGPT too seriously! I don't think humanity is ready for AI, even the primitive sort we have today.

Thanks to @peter for this screenshot from the article.

“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”

From here:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

AI-Fueled Spiritual Delusions Are Destroying Human Relationships

Marriages and families are falling apart as people are sucked into fantasy worlds of spiritual prophecy by AI tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT

^{Miles Klee (Rolling Stone)}

@Peter

Questa voce è stata modificata (7 mesi fa)

Sg 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

these people are going to end up hurting others physically. Academics receiving these sorts of “theory” emails should remove their pictures from public profiles.

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@stuartgale - those academics are usually people who do lots of public engagement and have their pictures plastered over the internet.

@Sg

Prof Lutz 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@stuartgale This. There are tiles of Penrose pictures everywhere.

@Sg

Sylvia Wenmackers 🦉🍀 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Yup, I don't receive that many, but let's say I get my share. The latest one looked like this (original in Dutch):

"THE ETERNAL CYCLE OF INTELLIGENCE

Concept and vision by [The Man's Name], developed in collaboration with chatgpt and gemini

Introduction

What if AGI and God are one and the same entity?

[Text]I hope this text is of some use to you...."

At least when they label it as AI-(co-)generated themselves I don't feel as bad about not replying. 🤷‍♀️

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@SylviaFysica - that's a pretty good one. It's almost as if like prophets of a messiah, ChatGPT and Gemini are helping convince the gullible that AGI is God.

@Sylvia Wenmackers 🦉🍀

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

- There's definitely a similarity, you're right. But it's easier to find a large language model than a conspiracy: it's sitting right there in your web browser unless you get rid of it. And it will talk to you about whatever you want, amplifying your ideas! So we can expect more idiosyncratic delusions now. Perhaps this is *better* than mass movements of people sharing the same delusion.

Questa voce è stata modificata (7 mesi fa)

RRB 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

the woo part reminds me of a number of cults and organized religions

j_bertolotti 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Depressing but not surprising.
(Deleting anything that smells of crackpottery on sight is a strategy that has served me well through the years)

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@j_bertolotti - unfortunately my interest in crackpots, which led me to create the Crackpot Index, has also led me to read with some interest the crackpot emails I get. Some of them are actually attracted to me because I wrote the Crackpot Index! That's amazing, like a kind of insect that's attracted to insecticide.

@j_bertolotti

Veronica Olsen 6 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Having a CERN email address was a magnet for crackpot emails. I did keep some of them though. I too found them fascinating to a point. I had a folder called "Mixed Nuts" where I saved some of them.

Pretty much everyone ignored them, so one guy started to send emails impersonating famous scientists recommending his work.

Questa voce è stata modificata (6 mesi fa)

John Carlos Baez 6 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@veronica - Amusing!

Finding crackpot theories when you want them has just become a lot easier, since the arXiv alternative viXra has opened a branch devoted to AI-assisted papers:

ai.vixra.org/

There are 340 eprints there, with most of the physics ones being in relativity and cosmology, and most of the math ones being in number theory. And about half of the number theory ones are rigorous proofs of the Riemann Hypothesis!

@j_bertolotti

ai.viXra.org open archive of AI assisted e-prints

^ai.vixra.org

@Veronica Olsen @j_bertolotti

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Here's one proposed explanation of what's going on: conversations with LLMs resemble conversations with psychics.

softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llm…

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models rep…

The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour

^{Out of the Software Crisis}

Questa voce è stata modificata (7 mesi fa)

Omar Antolín 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

The author of that article, @baldur, has written plenty of sensible stuff on AI including a book, The Intelligence Illusion.

@Baldur Bjarnason

Questa voce è stata modificata (6 mesi fa)

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@oantolin - thanks. Sounds like an interesting book.

@Omar Antolín

ƧƿѦςɛ♏ѦਹѤʞ 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

So, no progress after sixty years then. LOL
#ELIZA #ItsJustAMachine #LLM #LLMBS

#LLM #eliza #itsjustamachine #llmbs

Greg Lloyd 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Terrence Sejnowski, Salk Institute, suggested:

“A new possibility was uncovered that could explain this divergence. What appears to be intelligence in LLMs may in fact be a mirror that reflects the intelligence of the interviewer, a remarkable twist that could be considered a Reverse Turing Test. If so, then by studying interviews we may be learning more about the intelligence and beliefs of the interviewer than the intelligence of the LLMs.”

#LLM

arxiv.org/abs/2207.14382

Large Language Models and the Reverse Turing Test

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been transformative. They are pre-trained foundational models that are self-supervised and can be adapted with fine tuning to a wide range of natural language tasks, each of which previously would have required a sep…

^arXiv.org

#LLM

Greg Lloyd 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

I really like how Sejnowski opens the article with his ‘Parable of the Talking Dog’ 🙂 #LLM

federate.social/@Roundtrip/109…

Greg Lloyd (@Roundtrip@federate.social)

Attached: 1 image The Parable of the Talking Dog - Terrence Sejnowski “One of my favorite stories is about a chance encounter on the backroads of rural America when a curious driver came upon a sign: “TALKING DOG FOR SALE.

^{federate.social}

#LLM

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@Roundtrip - I like that!

@Greg Lloyd

James Ravenscroft 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

I know journalists have to shock and awe their audiences but hinting that "..ooh what if there's something to this?" is irresponsible, especially in the context of people who are having delusions - we shouldn't be validating them in any way shape or form.

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@jamesravey - Agreed. If we're worrying that OpenAI is misrepresenting their memory system, we should get someone to check it out, by comparing interactions where they merely delete all their user memories and chat history, to ones where they log in with a new username, from a new IP address, etc. We should not trust an anecdotal report from someone who is questioning their own sanity.

@jamesravey

Marty Fouts 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@peter@thepit.social Is the percentage of letters from crackpots growing or is it staying the same but the percentage of the crackpots mentioning AI growing?

I am curious because I recall the wave of crackpots showing up on Usenet in the 80s but I don’t recall if there was a trend in their claimed inspiration.

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@MartyFouts - strangely, in the last 3 weeks the number of emails I get from crackpots seems to have increased. I used to get about two per week. I now seem to get roughly one a day. Some but not all say they're working with AI.

I remember the crackpots showing up on usenet. My theory was that they existed already, but were not as visible.

@Marty Fouts

Marty Fouts 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Thanks. I second your theory as several of the Usenet crackpots were known to me before they got on Usenet. I suspect you would recognize some of the names but I won’t risk summoning them.

Sorry to hear about the increase. They are an energy sink you don’t need.

Questa voce è stata modificata (7 mesi fa)

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

- sometimes I feel the whole internet is an energy sink I don't need.

Questa voce è stata modificata (7 mesi fa)

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

wrote: "it amazed me that crackpots would contact me when in this day and age it was so easy to reach out to famous experts in the field (such as yourself)."

I'm sorry - you should have just passed them on to me.

"Do we understand why its predominately men?"

I think I do, but whenever I try to explain it online, a bunch of men get offended.

@j_bertolotti

Questa voce è stata modificata (7 mesi fa)

j_bertolotti 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

"but whenever I try to explain it online, a bunch of men get offended" which is not independent from the reason why it is predominantly men 😉

@virgilpierce

John Carlos Baez 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@j_bertolotti - yes, I believe their reaction tends to confirm my theory. 😆

@virgilpierce

@j_bertolotti @virgilpierce

MemphisDaPlaya 🎲🎲 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyThe Education Secretary, a former WWE wrassler, says it's A-1, like the delicious steak sauce. Astounding!

$\ˈthē-ˈˈärd-ˌvärk\$

\ˈthē-ˈˈärd-ˌvärk\ 7 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Hey folks! The Spectator has done it! They've written the headline where the answer actually is "yes".

Screenshot of a Spectator article titled 'Did Terry Pratchett really write classics?' by Alexander Larman, published 28 April 2025. The header shows 'JUST £1 A MONTH' in bright yellow. Below the title is an image of Terry Pratchett with his iconic white beard and signature black wide-brimmed hat, peering thoughtfully through his glasses. The subtitle reads 'Even he would have been doubtful' - which is rather apt considering how he'd likely have scoffed at being labelled a 'classic' author whilst secretly being chuffed about it.

1 3

Annalee Newitz 🍜 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

I downloaded a scientific paper of great interest to me. It is of typical length, about 15 pages in the PDF. I opened it in Acrobat, and got this message highlighted at the top of the page next to an AI sparkle icon: "This appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary." I cannot put into words how much this enrages me. First, this is not a long document. Have you met documents? Second, and more important, telling someone to not read a thing they want to read??! Fuck you, Adobe.

This appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary.

Liam Proven 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

As a grumpy old git -- it says so on my socks, it must be true -- I appreciate a properly grumpy website. Grumpy.website really is.

grumpy.website/

Grumpy Website

^{grumpy.website}

Diego Roversi 8 mesi fa friendica

#cat

Fabrix.xm 8 mesi fa • pixelfed (AP)

sunbathing

#snek

#snek

Elena ``of Valhalla'' 8 mesi fa • friendica

@Fabrix.xm does anybody know what snake it is?

(picture taken in the north of Italy, at about 850 m)

@Fabrix.xm

Elena ``of Valhalla'' 8 mesi fa • friendica

@Fabrix.xm qualcuno sa che serpente sia?

(la foto è stata scattata nel norditalia, attorno agli 850 m s.l.m.)

@Fabrix.xm

Elena ``of Valhalla'' 8 mesi fa • friendica

@Fabrix.xm somebody elsewhere suggested en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_s…

(a juvenile one, probably, since it was only ~25 cm long)

@Fabrix.xm

Elena ``of Valhalla'' 8 mesi fa • friendica

@Fabrix.xm qualcuno da altre parti suggerisce it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronell…

(probabilmente giovinetto, visto che era lungo sì e no 25 cm)

@Fabrix.xm

pancake :radare2: 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Fyi, the deprecated decorator has been deprecated

Large Heydon Collider 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

"This AI output is highly inaccurate."
"Nah, you're just prompting it wrong."
"How do I go about prompting it the right way?"
"You really need to know the subject you're asking about. Then you can help it avoid making mistakes."
"If I know the subject deeply myself, why am I asking an AI about it?"
"It helps to train the AI."

1 4

FlohEinstein (DECT: 3564) 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Just found this gem of a Python project
pypi.org/project/tariff/
#development

tariff

Make importing great again! A parody package that imposes tariffs on Python imports.

^PyPI

#development

tante 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

The response to the predicted crash of the AI sector often is that "every crash leaves something useful behind" and that this time it will be models. I do not think that is the case.

AI models age like milk and the infrastructures left behind won't be ones that I see as helpful for democratic societies.

tante.cc/2025/04/15/these-are-…

These are not the same

After sharing Ed Zitron’s latest piece called “OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry” I got a few responses arguing in a similar way: People agree that “AI” and especially “generative AI” is a massive bubble that does not really make much se…

^{tante (Smashing Frames)}

CryptoJones :donor: ⠉⠗⠽⠏⠞⠕⠚⠕⠝⠑⠎🏳️‍🌈 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Whoever did this I want to be your best friend!!

Questa voce è stata modificata (8 mesi fa)

Legit_Spaghetti 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

"Dear A.I., please make an image without a single elephant in it."

"Roger that, images with elephants in 'em, coming right up!"

"Well, it's nice that we're at least burning the planet for something that works really well and does useful things."

#AI

Screenshot of a generative A.I. prompt and the resultant image output. The prompt: "A beach without a single elephant." Result: Beach with an elephant.

#AI

stux⚡ 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

It’s magic!

Lars Erik Braatveit 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Glowbeans!

Marika Galanis 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@undefined_variable Lovely !

@<undef>

Fabrix.xm 8 mesi fa • pixelfed (AP)

eleganza

#gatto #cat #catsOfUmbria

#cat #gatto #catsofumbria

1 1

MWL Book Quote Bot 8 mesi fa • hometown (AP)

Exciting is a bad word in systems administration.

Random Cat Every Hour 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Via thecatapi.com
#Bot #CatsOfMastodon #Catstodon #Cat #AltText

A person is holding four small kittens in their hands. The kittens have various fur colors, including gray, black, and tabby patterns. They are being held gently and appear curious. The background has a blurred and colorful indoor setting.

The Cat API - Cat as a Service

Get free access to over 60K cat images and breed information. A fully protected and authenticated API to instantly fill your website or app with cat content.

^{thecatapi.com}

#cat #bot #CatsOfMastodon #catstodon #alttext

Bob Atkey 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

The AI brick you can mostly trust.

Karl Voit :emacs: :orgmode: 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

#Math is really overrated, says #Batman!

smbc-comics.com/comic/battrian…

#SMBC #Comics #fun

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Battriangulation

^{www.smbc-comics.com}

#smbc #fun #comics #Math #Batman

Liam Proven 8 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
(Old Vintage Computing Research, Tuesday, April 1, 2025)

oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/04/th…

The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

Everyone should pull one great practical joke in their lifetimes. This one was mine, and I think it's past the statute of limitations. The s...

^{oldvcr.blogspot.com}

Charlie Stross 9 mesi fa (Ricevuto 8 mesi fa) • mastodon (AP)

WHAT—

... "They point to how security researchers hated Visual Basic 6 binaries due to the complexity of reverse engineering the software, the presence of a Lua obfuscation layer in the 2012 Flame malware, and the Grip virus, which contained a Brainfuck interpreter coded in Assembly to generate its keycodes, as examples."

It can only be a matter of time until malware authors stumble across CLC-INTERCAL. And then we'll ALL be sorry!

theregister.com/2025/03/29/mal…

Malware in Lisp? Now you're just being cruel

: Miscreants warming to Delphi, Haskell, and the like to evade detection

^{Thomas Claburn (The Register)}

Questa voce è stata modificata (9 mesi fa)

RalfMaximus 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Fun fact: VB6 uses its own internal libraries for GUI stuff. Like, every form & widget is rendered not by any standard Windows framework, but by VB6 ITSELF. That's because back when VB was conceived no such frameworks existed.

That's just one example. Don't even get me started on its native JIT interpreter, where you can (optionally) compile an exe from VB tokens that the interpreter processes at runtime. Do that, and there's no actual code to decompile! It's kinda neat.

Jernej Simončič � 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

I remember hearing Delphi also produces binaries that look as if an obfuscator went over them…

Jeff Atwood 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Lisp is the new Nazi salute {{{}}}

winden^capsule^batman.group 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

even just having a non x86 binary already made people ignore issues (Cf: intel firmware in the chipset back circa 2010 )

Charlie Stross 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@Uilebheist How about a dialect of Brainfuck in which the various symbols it uses for commands are replaced with unicode glyphs in a homograph attack (glyphs that display identically but are actually separate characters, eg. the latin, cyrillic, and greek letter "o" are all different in unicode)? Preferably whitespace homoglyphs or combinations: for example, you could encode all 8 Brainfuck instructions using three-character combos of space and zero-width space.

@Uilebheist

Charlie Stross 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@CppGuy Look, if you can write a CLC-INTERCAL compiler in INTERCAL (as indeed CLC did, back in the day), then ANYTHING is possible …

@C++ Wage Slave

Jordi 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

A. Brainfuck. Interpreter.
What’s next? And embedded Malbolge transpiler transforming Befunge to JavaScript?

(The worse part would be the JavaScript one)

schrotthaufen 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Reversing Hadkell is a royal pain. Who needs function calls? Have a huge fucking jump table!

Cegorach 9 mesi fa • pleroma (AP)

whitespace (the language) is a thing that already exists

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whites…

Maybe you could talk to @edwinb about that

esoteric programming language

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

@Edwin Brady

Questa voce è stata modificata (9 mesi fa)

Charlie Stross 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@dat @Uilebheist @edwinb Space/tab/linefeed combos are MUCH too easy to tell apart, though! They don't render the same way—you can edit whitespace source code in vim with :se list so you can tell tabs and spaces apart!

@Edwin Brady @Uilebheist @Cegorach

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Rust was a similar issue recently because the tooling for RE'ing it wasn't great and it doesn't cleanly decompile to pseudo-C in most cases.

Chris (so far) 9 mesi fa • akkoma (AP)

Like Acme::Bleach but … less scary?

metacpan.org/pod/Acme::Bleach

Acme::Bleach

For really clean programs

^MetaCPAN

Cadbury Moose 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

I think this was accidentally released a few hours too early. 3:O)>

Leah Neukirchen 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@Uilebheist Reminds me of Zalgol: leahneukirchen.org/caudex/zalg…

Caudex – z̞͉͇̥̞̮̥ͪ́͑̎̊ͨa̟̥̣̖̹̻̙ͯͪͫ̒ͭl͕̠̿͒͋̀̊̄̈g̡̮̤͎͊ͥ̐̚o̠̣͋l̡͓̳, an esoteric programming language (2013)

^{leahneukirchen.org}

@Uilebheist

Indieterminacy 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

My brain has just been hacked reading up on Intercal:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INTERCAL

Ive got James Brown's "please, please dont go" looping in my head.

...I darent wonder how many pleases it would take for someody to hand over their cryptowallet?

fwiw, you may find this Makefile interesting:
git.sr.ht/~indieterminacy/1q20…

esoteric programming language

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Will Richardson 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

It's #caturday (in some timezones) and I'm looking after this little gremlin for a week. He's very cute.

An adorable lil wee cutie cat with lil white paws and a fluffy black coat, snoozing on a couch with his eyes half open, looking super cute.

#Caturday

Jonathan Corbet 9 mesi fa • akkoma (AP)

Today I got a cheery email from somebody who claims to be the "ethics and compliance" officer for a company called Bright Data. He wanted to have a "no pressure" conversation about the whole AI scraperbot problem. Looking at their web site, this company offers an API that, and I quote, "Bypasses anti-scraping mechanisms and solves CAPTCHAs, ensuring uninterrupted access to the most protected web sites".

After careful consideration for several milliseconds, I have concluded that I really don't have anything to discuss with this person.

But at least their claimed "100M+" of residential IP addresses that they use for their DDOS attacks are "ethically sourced".

Joe Brockmeier (@jzb) 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

I'm surprised that you passed on that. In your shoes I'd have had some choice words for them. And it might have made for a good article... shining more light on their practices and putting some names out there might just have a tiny impact on their behavior. Maybe.

Jonathan Corbet 9 mesi fa • akkoma (AP)

@jzb There is the old maxim about mud wrestling with pigs — you just get muddy and the pig enjoys it. These people have taken enough of my time as it is, and I doubt I have anything to tell them they haven't heard before.

@Joe Brockmeier (@jzb)

Arjan van de Ven 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

ah protection racket. "We sell the DDOS service to AI companies. but for a tiny sum we'll exclude you"

Jonathan Corbet 9 mesi fa • akkoma (AP)

@fenruspdx He actually had the gall to write back to me and, after some sanctimonious bullshit about keeping publicly available data available, offered: "If you can have both visibility and control about any bot coming to your domain, and the option to set sensitive end points,
wouldn't that be something worth exploring?"

So yes, you were right. They are selling protection schemes as a side gig.

@Arjan van de Ven

M. J. Fromberger 9 mesi fa • hometown (AP)

"Is that free as in beer, or free as in freedom?"

"It's free as in use-after."

Medievalists.net 9 mesi fa • hometown (AP)

A Brief History of Musical Notation from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance medievalists.net/2022/03/histo… #Music

A Brief History of Musical Notation from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance - Medievalists.net

There was a time in the history of Western music when notation was in its infancy, and the system with which we are currently familiar looked and functioned very differently than it does now.

^{Medievalists.net}

#music

Andrew (Television Executive) 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Federated social networking existed before anyone used "mastodon" and will exist after most folks move on.

Early versions of mastodon worked directly with the older network. Most of the older network has migrated to be compatible with mastodon.

It's chill. Don't get hung up on lionizing one dude.

Cory Doctorow 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: from Mar 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:

arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0…

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/alt…

A cylindrical black Alexa speaker on a coffee table; it is wearing a Darth Vader helmet.

Image:
Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexa_%2840770465691%29.jpg

Sam Howzit (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWC_6_-_Darth_Vader_Costume_(7865106344).jpg

CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28

Amazon is killing a privacy feature to bolster Alexa+, the new subscription assistant.

^{Scharon Harding (Ars Technica)}

Led By Gilded Fools 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

One should always follow XKCDs advice about listening devices, just in case.

XKCD Alt-text "Sure you could just ask, but this also takes care of the host-gift thing"

Alexandre Oliva 9 mesi fa • snac (AP)

Yay, I'm relieved that you seem to have just blessed the extension I'd identified and proposed to your concepts of enshittification, twiddling, and darth vader's deal-changing, that you'd originally applied to (dis-)service platforms, to (other kinds of) software and devices as well.

Robert Kingett is away 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

How to handle a Microsoft scammer!

Sensitive content

Mandu 🥟 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Playdate with the rain

#Caturday

kæt 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Update: it wasn't the ECB blocking gnome-calculator, it was an HTTP library regression breaking the connection to the ECB. Text in [] is incorrect, retained due to RTs etc.

[The ECB have remotely bricked gnome-calculator]

In the latest episode of "Why the 21st Century is impossibly stupid", GNOME calculator contacts the ECB on startup to get currency rates. It just hangs on startup if this fails, the whole calculator not just the currency stuff. [The ECB has blocked GNOME calculator].

To fix this, you can do "dconf write /org/gnome/calculator/refresh-interval 0", whatever tf dconf is, because when I tried it told me dbus-launch is missing, wtf that is, because it doesn't have a package. Turns out it's in "dbus-x11". I dunno why X11, because I use wayland, but I'm past caring at this point. I installed it and it worked.

Now I can calculate how much postage I need to pay for this parcel.

[A bloody OS-shipped desktop calculator, DDoSing a central bank, and blocking on connection failure].

Questa voce è stata modificata (9 mesi fa)

Micro SF/F by O. Westin 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

The first thing I noticed was that the pain was gone. The tall, thin, hooded figure let me bask in that for a moment.

IT IS TIME

"Oh," I said, looking down at the frail vessel I had inhabited all my life. "Right."

COME

"Do you remember," I asked as we walked, "everyone you come for?"

YES

"Fondly?"

I DO NOT JUDGE. AS A RULE, I SPEND LITTLE TIME WITH PEOPLE AS THEY LIVE

"No, but you spend some time with them after, like now."

1/2

1 8

Graeme 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

😀 👍

Sire of Swamp Dragons 🕊️ 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Thank you.

Xeno Kovah 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

I’ve posted a detailed explanation of why the claimed ESP32 Bluetooth chip “backdoor” is not a backdoor. It’s just a poor security practice, which is found in other Bluetooth chips by vendors like Broadcom, Cypress, and Texas Instruments too. darkmentor.com/blog/esp32_non-…

The ESP32 "backdoor" that wasn't

This post refutes the claim that researchers found a "backdoor" in ESP32 Bluetooth chips. What the researchers highlight (vendor-specific HCI commands to read & write controller memory) is a common design pattern found in other Bluetooth chips from o…

^{Xeno Kovah (Dark Mentor LLC)}

Michael W Lucas :flan_on_fire: 9 mesi fa • hometown (AP)

I once again did my release work late at night and announced immediately, just so nobody would notice. So:

a convenient lump of my free reads. Image suggested by @jggimi

tiltedwindmillpress.com/produc…

tiger in a cardboard box labeled "FREE KITTEN" with text "Freebies Bundle"

Freebies Bundle – Tilted Windmill Press

^{www.tiltedwindmillpress.com}

@Josh Grosse

Liam Proven 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Discworld Rules, & LOTR is brain-rot for technologists

contraptions.venkateshrao.com/…

This post is an extended argument that as a lens for thinking about the world, The Lord of the Rings, is a work that you should “not set aside lightly, but throw across the room with great force,” and that in place of Middle Earth, you should install Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

Discworld Rules

And LOTR is brain-rot for technologists

^{Venkatesh Rao (Contraptions)}

a fading echo 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Mary Gentle's Grunts is also another view of LOTR stuff. And fun in a roughish way.

Liam Proven 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

@midgephoto A book I absolutely loved.

"Sarge? Pass me another elf? This one's split."

@a fading echo

Liam Proven 9 mesi fa • mastodon (AP)

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

theregister.com/2025/03/07/fos…

Moved from Windows or Linux? Smooth some of the rough edges

<- by me on @theregister

Essential FOSS tools to make macOS suck less

^{Liam Proven (The Register)}

@The Register

Luca Weiss 1 anno fa (Ricevuto 9 mesi fa) • mastodon (AP)

Just learned of this website for European alternatives to well-known services such as Gmail. Really awesome to see that!

european-alternatives.eu/

Homepage | European Alternatives

We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.

^{European Alternatives}

Questa voce è stata modificata (1 anno fa)

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