khm (@khm@hj.9fs.net)

https://archive.org/details/plan9designintro

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Aaron Bieber » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@pixx @khm ope, seems my server didn't load all the replies :D

Penny boosted

R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🌐 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

"Traditionally, Operating Systems courses used UNIX to do this. However, today there is no such thing as UNIX. Linux is a huge system, full of inconsistencies, with programs that do multiple tasks and do not perform them well. Linux manual pages just cannot be read."

Dang, Ballesteros comes out swinging!

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kabel42 » 🌐 2026-04-19 / 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

@rl_dane thats why there is linux for using and minix for teching /hj

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R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🌐 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

@kabel42

I've never tried minix. Is it fun to use/well thought-out?

OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Plan9 seem to be the go-to for folks who want an OS that makes sense and has a sense of elegance.

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kabel42 » 🌐 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

@rl_dane from what i've heard it's exclusively for teaching and you really want bsd or plan9 if you want both but i haven't tried

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mirabilos » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@kabel42 @rl_dane Minix 3 is… well, it can be used for real.

At some point, they threw away the Minix userland and imported NetBSD’s. The system is now less buggy but also less consistent. This is an actual problem for the mksh port to Minix, which now has to distinguish between Minix-vmd, Minix3 and “Ninix3” (my name for the versions of Minix3 with partial NetBSD userland) as distinct OSes. Doesn’t help that they didn’t even bump the minor version for that…

Yes, you want BSD if you want something real.

Plan 9… if you want to play around with three-button mouse chords, and read “Mein Kampf”, which 9front ships, I suppose.

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R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@mirabilos @kabel42

...and read “Mein Kampf”, which 9front ships, I suppose.

🫣

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kabel42 » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@rl_dane @mirabilos wat?

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mirabilos » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@kabel42 @rl_dane the currently predominant Plan 9 distribution, the one everyone recommends, infamously ships (shipped?) a copy of "Mein Kampf" on the ISO.

Make of that what you want.

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R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🔓 2026-04-20 / 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@mirabilos @kabel42

I have a hard time believing @pixx would be involved with the OS if that were still the case.

Hopefully, whoever did that has had a vigorous adjustment with a sufficiently sturdy [LART].

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@rl_dane @mirabilos @kabel42

Shipped, past tense.

The tl;dr is that a high schooler edge lord put it in there as a joke a long time ago. We recently rewrote the entire history of the repo to erase that commit and a few other problematic ones from the same time period. Nobody involved with 9front has _ever_ endorsed it or agreed with it.

There was also a picture of the rails towards Auschwitz at one point because someone googled "Ruby on Rails" and it was the first picture result and they thought it was hilarious.

Humor in arguably-bad taste --- though I'll note that, growing up as a Jew in a Jewish school, we made _much_ worse jokes about the holocaust all the time.

it's just "a lot of teenage boys make bad jokes, and probably shouldn't be given unrestricted commit access unless you're clear that the jokes should not be commited."

...

2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

the joke, specifically, was that the US Constitution was already in /lib/ and so it should have other root documents of fascist empire-building as well.

remnants of a brief golden era when nazis were widely regarded as losers with whom one would not want to be compared. now that they're popular politicians in many western countries, the jokes stopped being funny and started being depressing.

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

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mirabilos » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@khm @pixx @rl_dane @kabel42

the US Constitution was already in /lib/

huh? why?

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

no idea, it came that way from Bell Labs

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

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mirabilos » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@khm @pixx @rl_dane @kabel42 ah. Could be changed, too, of course.

R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@khm @pixx @mirabilos @kabel42

Yeah, this is something that younger folks and/or folks not from the U.S. wouldn't necessarily pick up on.

Nazis were the butt of jokes for most of my life. Nothing more. Same for any kind of neo-nazis and KKK. They would organize at times, maybe march at times, and be laughed at and go home feeling stupid.

That changed in the last ten years, and it's not a laughing matter anymore.

R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@pixx @mirabilos @kabel42

I appreciate the fact that the 9front page has a pretty strongly anti-fash sentiment now.

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mirabilos » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@rl_dane @pixx @kabel42 it looks not only very overdone but also in weird juxtaposition to e.g. the propaganda/ page’s images and… whoever designed that werc logo?! oh nevermind, the suckless people, who have been accused (by poettering tho…) of alt-right-ism as well…

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

IMO it _is_ overdone, but that's what happens when people keep calling you nazis for years.

Personally I'm very much of the "eh, fuck em" camp; if someone wants to make associations about people they don't know and can't take a joke, I don't really care to be around them anyways and have no need to change their mind

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mirabilos » 🔓 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@pixx @rl_dane @kabel42 hmmh.

But you have to admit that the history, the association with Suckless, Poettering’s stories thereof, the “of course it’s only an electric sign and a stroke to make it look like a W”, the propaganda images (most of which have been there for a very long time as well), etc. don’t paint a nice overall image.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

I can rebut each individual point, but at the end of the day: no, I don't really care to engage in arguments about optics and vibes.

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mirabilos » 🔓 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@pixx @rl_dane @kabel42 fair

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

What it boils down to is this:

Yes, it looks bad, sure. And? What's your actual argument?Because IME optics arguments always start and end with just optics.

"Hey! That looks bad!"

"Yeah, but it's not."

"But it LOOKS bad!"

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mirabilos » 🔓 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@pixx @rl_dane @kabel42 from an outsider PoV, people have no way of knowing whether it only looks bad.

But I’ll be quiet now.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

The problem with optics arguments, though, is that they're literally impossible to win.

We removed the worst offenders from the repo, and scrubbed it from the history. People who care about optics over facts will claim it was done to hide evidence or some shit like that.

Nobody who's complaining about it is ever going to be satisfied, literally by anything, so why even bother trying to appease people who don't actually care about the project and just want to get off on being right?

2 ★ 0 ↺

ori » 🔓 2026-04-20 / 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

It hasn't been there since 2011. I believe it was there for only a few days before people noticed and reverted the commit by the edgy highschooler. If you'd looked for it a week earlier or later, you would not have stumbled across it. And that's not the only change in the last decade and a half.

AodeRelay boosted

Devine Lu Linvega » 🌐 2026-04-20 / 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

We've had this long furling tape from Japan for the longest time, for years!! thinking it was in inches. Causing us lots of mistakes and fuck ups, the whole time we thought it was our own miscalculations, that we must have messed up in converting it to metric or something.

1) The unit on the tape is in tenth of a foot.
2) That's almost exactly 3cm, BUT NOT QUITE.
3) The ruler says FEET, but then breaks it down in 3cm segments each divided in tenth of a tenth of foot.

WHAT THE FUCK RULER

Alt...

In comparison with an actual inch.

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Older...

rostiger [he/him | they/them] » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@neauoire One ruler to mess with them all.

AodeRelay boosted

Andy Alderwick [he / him / Dr] » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@neauoire Perfectly cromulent semi-SI units. Decifeet, centifeet, kilofeet

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Devine Lu Linvega » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@alderwick here I was hating on the fact that the word "hexadecimal" mixes up latin and greek roots.

40 ★ 9 ↺

DHeadshot's Alt boosted

ori » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

Those are metric inches. Obviously.

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cerement [he/him or your choice of neutral] » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@ori @neauoire

100 mm = 1 M (module)
1 metric inch = 25 mm = 0.25 M
1 metric foot = 300 mm = 3 M

used in building one of the BBC studios and in Soviet copies of US electronics

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0 ★ 0 ↺

cgnarne » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] is that real? oh my god it is! Incredibly cursed!

Third spruce tree on the left » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@ori @neauoire

If you start talking in deca-feet and milli-inches Ima bout to get angry and start throwing things.

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AodeRelay boosted

Brad Macpherson » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@tezoatlipoca @ori @neauoire deci-feet, surely?

Or decimal inches?

I'll get my coat. I'm very sorry to have troubled you on this fine evening.

nick [He/Him] » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@tezoatlipoca @ori @neauoire milli-inches is already a thing, called a "thou" and used in engineering and machining.

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nick [He/Him] » 🌐 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@tezoatlipoca @ori @neauoire 1/1000th of an inch is also sometimes called a "mil" which is a smidge confusing if you're used to a "millimeter" being called a "mil".
1/10000th of an inch is sometimes called a "tenth".
Also there's an angular unit called a "milliradian" which is 1/1000th of a radian and is also called a "mil".

1 ★ 0 ↺

ori » 🌐 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

Ah, yeah, 'thou', which is short for 'thou lilly-livered excuse for a unit of measurement'.

UserName Aged Badly » 🌐 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@tezoatlipoca @ori @neauoire
Gah, it's obvious you're looking for the term millimiles

Enys (Yao) » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@neauoire shaku-sun-bu approximator based on international feet, I guess? unless zhat's slightly off and actually 0.9942x ze measurement on your tri-blade ruler, which'd mean it's literally just shaku-sun-bu

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Devine Lu Linvega » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@yaodema it's a german triblade, so I think that's probably actual feet. If not, our measurements have been fucked on meta levels.

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Enys (Yao) » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@neauoire oh I mean your tri-blade being *actual feet* and zhis weird ruler being off by a tiny amount you can't see wizhout calipers, here. shaku are defined as 30.3cm to a foot's 30.48, after all

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Devine Lu Linvega » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@yaodema I'm just here questioning everything now, I don't have enough rulers on the boat to be doubly sure of anything.

AodeRelay boosted

Chloe :> [she/they] » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@neauoire i got more cursed units where that came from

Alt...

A ruler saying "light picoseconds"

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Devine Lu Linvega » 🔓 2026-04-20 / 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@angelwood "It takes roughly 100 picoseconds for light to travel one-tenth of a foot."

Devine Lu Linvega » 🔓 2026-04-20 / 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

We kindda wanna pass it on, but we'll have to put a label on it something, like: CURSED UNITS, experimental uses only.

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gregori » 🔓 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@neauoire Pass it on?! Absolutely diabolical.

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Devine Lu Linvega » 🔓 2026-04-21 / 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@Gregori literally me when I put it on the Free Stuff shelf at the marina.

cc @rek

Alt...

the button from Drag Me To Hell

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R E K » 🔓 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@neauoire @Gregori Lamia surveyor's tape

Jacob ¶. Ford » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@neauoire .beat distance unit?

Blake Coverett » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@neauoire Apparently it is not a rare thing in oilfield work? I recently watched this https://youtu.be/sdWEGzWFcCc?t=276 which has lots of other fascinating horrible units, but that's the bit that talks about "decimal feet".

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Devine Lu Linvega » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@blakecoverett holy crap, you can't return to working in the normal world after that

13 ★ 4 ↺

Orca 🌻 | 🎀 | 🪁 | 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ boosted

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

it's not just in oilfields. surveyors use decimal feet (and decimal "US survey feet" which are different) and that's almost certainly a surveyor's tape.

decimal feet used to be somewhat common in all kinds of engineering, but it seems to have stuck around longest in civil engineering.

@khm @blakecoverett @neauoire

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Blake Coverett » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@khm @neauoire Fascinating. Thank you. That does track. I was vaguely aware of the "US survey feet" thing and clearly have a new Wikipedia rabbit hole to explore now.

clew » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

I find decimal feet easy to work with — squaring up a plot using Pythagoras’ theorem, etc —

BUT

the only un-cursed way to make those tapes is to print a decimal point before *every* tenth of a foot.

1 .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 .6 .7 .8 .9 2

So when you read it off or copy it down, you naturally include the “point 3”, etc.

occult » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@khm @blakecoverett @neauoire yeah I was about to say it's a decimal feet tape measure for like, surveying purposes.

That's pretty hilarious though.

U47 » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@neauoire isn’t that just a standard drafting scale, at 1:10000 feet? We used the metric ones in school, but they were standard scales.

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Devine Lu Linvega » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@u47 the triblade? yeah that's my everyday ruler.

Coles Street Pothole » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@neauoire
So, wait—when it hits 10, does it go back to 0 and count up in tenths of a foot until it gets to 2 feet? As in there are no 11 and 12 marked on there?

Wow, just found one that does both:

Alt...

A tape measure that has inches marked out, but also "decimal feet"; that is, tenths of a foot, marked as .1, .2, .3, etc.

David Bender » 🌐 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@neauoire
In forestry management we use imperial tape measures divided into 10 instead of 12. Specifically when measuring the diameter of a tree trunk. It means the result is a straight decimal, ie. 3.4' or 3.9' instead of 3'-4 4/5" or 3'-10 13/16".

I mean, yeah, metric would be easier all around, but at least this method does make tabulating and synthesising results in spreadsheets easier for Americans when it's in tenths of a foot vs twelfths.

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David Bender » 🌐 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@neauoire
And you should see the back side of that same measuring tape - it measures "inches", but each "inch" is in actually 3.14159 (pi π) inches long, so that you don't have to do math in the field to convert circumference to diameter!

Super handy for those who know. Flabbergasting to those who don't.

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Devine Lu Linvega » 🌐 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@Bender that

is actually mind blowing. Thank you for that fact!

Jon in Albany » 🌐 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@neauoire It's engineering units. I have an old folding rule, inches on one side and tenths on the other. It can be confusing. Anyhow, if you were working off plans with measurements in tenths, it is easier to use this kind of tape than converting numbers on site.

bstow » 🌐 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@neauoire Yellow is inches, white is tenths.

brendan (ジャンク品) boosted

Lucie / minute [they/sie] » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

testing/validating the final mounting design of the MNT Reform Next trackpad with a 3d-printed slice of the case, and the production glass overlay. works very well. please excuse the mess

Alt...

back/inner side of case slice with trackpad and button board mounted. the cable on the right can be made a lot shorter now

Alt...

top side with buttons

Alt...

greta testing the pad by drawing a dog of some sort

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Lucie / minute [they/sie] » 🌐 2026-04-20 / 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

the trackpad sensor PCB was originally designed by @timonsku , i just gave it one more pass for the mechanical fit and production components.

shtrophic » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@mntmn so I can use the Reform Next for drawing dogs. Nice

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

tina.svg is fast becoming an industry standard fyi

James Potato Finger » 🌐 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

One thing that has irritated me with GhostBSD is installing packages. I have now, on more than one occasion run:

pkg install package

Only to be told that no package exists, but it is supposed to. Then it turns out that, for some reason that escapes me, it turns out you install the package via:

pkg install category/package

For instance:

pkg install genisoimage

Will not install genisoimage. Package is not found. Instead it is:

pkg install sysutils/genisoimage

Which makes it very frustrating to search for and find software at times. I am currently at a loss as where I can install wodim from. I can search up the man page on the freebsd website, but the package escapes me.

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Csepp 🌢 [it/they/he, same one you'd use for animals] » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

@jameschip Wow, that's a weird design. If the name uniquely identifies the package, that should be enough.

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-20
@[email protected]

it's a holdover from the ports sytem, where stuff is categorized in directories under the ports tree. it mostly prevents every single port being in one directory. in this case, wodim is provided by sysutils/cdrkit, which I had to find by grepping the ghostbst-ports repository for bin/wodim

https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mjmztqnuwc2g

0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

hot take: cammy doesn't deserve to be in these movies because she wasn't in street fighter ii

AodeRelay boosted

mcc [she/her] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Bluesky is down today. "Hah", I think, "since I use a self-hosted PDS for posting and Blacksky for viewing posts, I can go on using the service just fine".

Blacksky can't show me my own posts. I can make them and they show up on my PDS, but my profile shows none more recent than last night.

I wonder if Blacksky is coincidentally having server problems, or if Blacksky has a still-undisclosed dependency on Bluesky services. (It *does* have disclosed use of Bluesky moderation; maybe that's it.)

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AodeRelay boosted

mcc [she/her] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

There's a bit in Terry Jones' "Starship Titanic" where an alien gets caught in a traffic jam on Earth, and explodes "your transportation system is so poorly designed! when more people use it, it goes *slower*! you should design it so it goes *faster*— to accommodate the extra load!".

It's funny because the former seems like the obvious, natural way transportation works, and the latter seems to require magic alien future technology.

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AodeRelay boosted

mcc [she/her] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

P2P is a world where naturally the more people use it, the faster and more resilient the network becomes. Load gets distributed. Working nodes talk to each other and ignore nonworking nodes. That's how the primitive, BitTorrent era systems worked.

Bluesky somehow applied superfancy alien future technology to invent P2P traffic jams. When one node goes down, the others go down because they depended on it. Because it's a mesh of interoperating microservices by different providers, not federation.

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Cassandrich boosted

mcc [she/her] » 🌐 2026-04-16 / 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

This appears to be the explanation:

In Bluesky, the PDS talks to the relay talks to the appview goes to the client. Blacksky set up all four last year. But they only deployed their PDS and client, at first. They used Bluesky's relay and appview. This wasn't clearly disclosed. Then there was a censorship scare, and they switched to their own appview. But apparently they're still using Bluesky's relay. This wasn't clearly disclosed. Now relay death kills Blacksky.

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Cassandrich boosted

mcc [she/her] » 🌐 2026-04-16 / 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Now, interestingly, this means that Blacksky users can continue talking to Blacksky users. I can read Rudy's posts on Blacksky. Because that bypasses the relay. But¹ to read my *own* posts, *on a self-hosted PDS*, Bluesky is apparently required, because Blacksky relies on Bluesky's "relay" to scrape my PDS before it gets added to the Blacksky appview database.

¹ (if I'm interpreting Rudy's posts correctly, hardly a guarantee)

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Cassandrich boosted

mcc [she/her] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

And it's extremely relatable why Rudy took this shortcut of "build out our own stuff, but rely on Bluesky's components until we're forced to drop it": *Because standing up your own Bluesky stack is nightmarish!* It is a borderline miracle that a team his size made this work at all; I'm not sure a third team could replicate to the extent Blacksky has (and even on non-outage days, there are still large technical problems with Blacksky which cannot conveniently be fit in this thread).

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mcc [she/her] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Because this is the other "we used future alien technology to make it worse" thing about Bluesky.

In the "natural", Hobbesian form of P2P, the more nodes you add the less work per node you need to do, because of work sharing.

But Bluesky's "federation" is like blockchain. When you create a second "instance", that instance must duplicate *literally all the work* of the first instance. It must scrape all the posts itself. It must archive all the posts itself. It must CSAM-scan the posts itself.

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AodeRelay boosted

mcc [she/her] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

This is why I believe Bluesky was never meant to be federated. To create a Bluesky "instance", like Blacksky is heroically attempting, you have to perfectly duplicate every server Bluesky runs. But Bluesky is a business operating at a loss by burning unlimited-for-now VC cash. That has always implied only a business with unlimited VC cash can create an instance. Blacksky is succeeding. Except on days where they aren't.

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Ку 🇧🇬🇪🇺 » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@[email protected] they're allowed to succeed so they can be paraded around thet "see, it's all super distributed and decentralized".

The moment VCs realize they need RoI a bunch of " improvements" likely mostly "for security", probably " for safety", definitely "for the children" will add to the already insane architectural costs, a bunch of operafional burden that makes it impposible for other "instances" to exist.

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3 ★ 1 ↺

BohwaZ boosted

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

that's the Signal playbook. "sure we can federate, but we won't, for reasons"

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-18
@[email protected]

Oh, what we have lost :(

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-18
@[email protected]

the best rail trail in the state of Washington was converted from a rail that was originally electric. 645 miles of 3kV DC power. :(

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

@khm Big fan of trails, big enemy of rail trails

I don't think there's any situation in which it makes sense to me

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

I mean, if the alternative is a disused railroad track forever, then what's the plan

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

@khm Get it used

0 ★ 0 ↺

@qrstuv.bsky.social » 🔓 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

I don't know what you think has been lost. Service between Kenosha and Milwaukee? Who cares. I don't know of any difference between them, nor does anyone else. Service to South Bend? Nobody wants that. Nobody from Illinois wants to go to Indiana, and Illinois can't afford to take in millions of dirty destitute refugees from Indiana. Build a wall, imo.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

...I don't know what you think has been gained by being like this :)

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1 ★ 0 ↺

@qrstuv.bsky.social » 🔓 2026-04-19
@[email protected]

And you can actually still get to South Bend if you're mentally ill and want to. I assumed that The South Shore Line was out of business because nobody wants to go to Indiana, but they're apparently still around. You can still today travel by rail to everywhere that was served by the railways in your drawing. You just have to take a long detour and transfer between Amtrak and Metra if you want to get to Kenosha from Milwaukee.

zuggamasta » 🌐 2026-04-17 / 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

Wait it’s an actual clock!?! I knew my friends had good taste but his caught me of guard!

Alt...

Cat clock

...

sirjofri » 🔓 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@zuggamasta
Yeah, and we have it in #plan9

Alt...

sped-up catclock from plan 9

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Esi » 🔓 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@sirjofri @zuggamasta I am born and raised in Iceland and I just thought this was a weird plan9 thing but not an actual clock. Today I learned...

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sirjofri » 🔓 2026-04-18
@[email protected]

@esi
We had that in our community a few times that this clock is pretty well known in the US. I was just sure that someone built a clock like that at some point, because why not, and I read in some history paper that the program was inspired by one that the devs found somewhere. I've personally never seen one myself in action (Germany).
@zuggamasta

...

1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-18
@[email protected]

I've had one on the wall for years! They still make em https://californiaclock.com/

https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2781&cclcl=en_US

...

sirjofri » 🔓 2026-04-18
@[email protected]

@khm
Finally, a website that looks very modern and works without javascript! Even with solid animations! Truly a nice experience.
@esi @zuggamasta

3 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-18
@[email protected]

"love is the most powerful force there is"
-- people who have never operated a Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-18
@[email protected]

@khm Ahhhh, but without love, how do you know where to aim the mk 19 automatic grenade launcher? :3

3 ★ 1 ↺

irrational method boosted

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

cheaper than the imported stuff

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cathos [she/they] » 🔓 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@khm love the house brand peanut butter. https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387&cclcl=en_US

...

2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

people say $1200 is too much for peanut butter, but they never mention you're getting three jars for that price

cathos [she/they] » 🔓 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@khm also human serum: https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=909c&cclcl=en_US

...

1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

fine substitute if homemade isn't available

R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🔓 2026-04-17 / 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@cathos @khm

Price: $1,246.00

wat

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cathos [she/they] » 🔓 2026-04-18
@[email protected]

@rl_dane @khm it's reference grade! With relevant test parameters provided!

khm boosted

irrational method [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-17 / 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

People love the quote "there are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things"...

However, I am certain that those problems originated outside of computer science, we just expected computers to solve them.

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Kilroy_Was_Here » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@IrrationalMethod

Naming things can be a significant challenge. Linnaeus is still famous for, essentially, naming things.

I didn't know what cache invalidation is, did a search. Seems to me it's basically throwing out old data. I think everybody with a filing cabinet has debated on when to throw something out of it. And librarians have to think about this when weeding.

Turns out that really fast adding and subtracting machines aren't suited to solving all problems. Who could have guessed!?!

9 ★ 1 ↺

R.L. Dane 🍵 boosted

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-17 / 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

LLMposting [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

developing a theory about why all the vibecoding afficianados keep saying shit like "model [whatever] isn't as good, model [older thing] used to be better"

pretty sure they're just getting worse at programming because they keep outsourcing their own problem-solving efforts, so it's tougher for them to seive the slot machine output to get working code

so it doesn't matter which model, or what service, or whatever: it's always going to "work" "worse" than it did when it got you addicted

...

cancel » 🔓 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

LLMposting [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@khm it's because they are filling their project with shitty LLM generated code, and the coordinate space where newly added code (of any kind) doesn't fuck something up gets smaller and smaller.

AodeRelay boosted

Tim Chase » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

LLMposting [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@khm @rl_dane

"Older models had a warmer tone and a softer clipping for a more authentic sound" 😆

#OhWaitThoseAreTubeAmps

...

R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

LLMposting [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@gumnos @khm

😄

Have you seen the solid state tube amps? Crazy stuff. One of the earlier C64 remake motherboards used them for that super-crisp SID sound 😂

khm boosted

mta [he] » 🌐 2026-04-16 / 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

i wrote an internet standard https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-meow-mrrp-00.html (it's published on ietf.org so you know it's real and official and endorsed by the ietf)

LÆMEUR » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

It is just wild to me that anyone pays attention to Curtis Yarvin as an "intellectual". They guy is constantly making the same idiotic appeal to history that feudalism, being more abundant in the historical record, is our "natural state" and therefore preferable to democracy.

No, dude.

The majority of human existence has been tribal, with life expectancy below age fifty, crazy high child mortality rates, no written language, scarcity of food and resources... *that* is our "natural state"...

...

LÆMEUR » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

And he peddles this idea that monarchies are more "effective" -- that they *get things done*. Okay, so... let's go back and look at Europe 1200 years ago. There's a different king every 200 miles in northern Europe. How many of those dozens of "great men" are getting things done and improving the lives of their people? Charlemagne, a "great man" unified a big chunk of the continent by force... then died, left a power vacuum, and it all fell apart. And that's ...natural? Good?

1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

dipshits with these opinions wear eyeglasses 100% of the time and I think that's hilarious

I mean, so do I, but it's not contrary to my fundamental worldview

AodeRelay boosted

Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Saw mention of *banning* LLMs again, and YES! So much YES!

How do you do this? Well, it came up before with cryptocurrency mining/PoW...

The libertarian bros insist it's not possible do ban these things without infringing on some "liberty to compute". They hated when I detailed a way to do it last time, so I'm going to try to recall it here... 😈

🧵 1/N

...

Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Both of these things, LLMs and cryptocurrency, have one thing in common, and that's how you effectively ban (or tax out of existence) them:

Utterly MASSIVE energy usage, many orders of magnitude higher than any reasonable personal use.

2/N

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

So what do you do? You tax energy consumption with a progressive tax, starting 1-2 orders of magnitude above the maximum amount for any reasonable personal use, with the tax rate rapidly ramping up into the thousands of percent.

This is for draw from the grid, which has to be tied to a personal use allowance to be exempted from tax collected with service billing.

3/N

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16 / 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Of course the abusers out to burn the planet will then just want to use their own fossil-fuel-fired or nuclear plants, or maybe even renewables. The scale of these makes them easy to track and tax just the same. Even if you're "producing" it, you still pay the same astronomical tax.

4/N

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Then, you carve out discount/exemption lists for known pro-social industrial uses of large amounts of power. Compute does not go here unless it's things like medical research.

5/N

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

In general, businesses with physical offices would probably need some allowance of some % of a personal allowance per employee, for operating the space. Tying the allowance to employee count would also have the bonus of being a huge counter-incentive to layoffs.

6/N

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viq [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Unintended consequence? [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@dalias though that may also be a counter-incentive to allowing work from home.

viq [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Poking holes to see how it holds up [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@dalias two things that come to mind that use large amounts of power which this could affect:
- water + renewable electricity -> hydrogen
- switching metallurgy to electric arc instead of fossils for heating, this will use *ridiculous* amounts of electricity, but is probably something we want to shift towards.

Do those count as pro-social? Or how do you see treating cases like this?

...

Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@viq Metallurgy and other real infrastructure manufacturing industries probably count as pro-social. But I wasn't suggesting to incentivize keeping them on fossil fuels. Same rate would apply to energy usage in the form of fossil fuels. 😈

AodeRelay boosted

Andrew Zonenberg » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@dalias given the prevalence of cloud/outsourced compute, how would you implement this? Would AWS have to collect signed certifications from every customer as to whether any given instance was an exempted purpose or not? Or tax them at the full rate regardless, making the entire cloud business model non viable and forcing a transition back to on premises hosting (which I'd prefer but it's a somewhat orthogonal issue)

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@azonenberg Thanks for asking! This was part of my thread on the concept last time (I think it was back on ) and it's important. For oursourced compute, you'd have it charged against your personal tax-exempt allowance in order not to pay a huge premium on it.

This would also get rid of dirt cheap anonymous outsourced compute, which is probably a mix of good and bad. But even with the tax (on energy part of hosting only), VPS for small websites etc would still be cheap. Just massive compute wouldn't.

AodeRelay boosted

Andrew Zonenberg » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@dalias i guess more generally would the tax be on AWS or the customer?

Like if your tax rate depends on usage and you have 100 customers pulling 10 kW each to make the numbers round, do you tax at the 10 kW or 1 MW rate if they're independent users under one roof?

Does it change if the customers own the hardware and are just paying for rack space in a colo, or if they're renting a third party server?

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@azonenberg Formally AWS would be paying the tax on their usage, but would be able to reduce it by documenting that it was outsourced compute for their customers.

So they'd either need to raise prices massively for everyone and run themselves out of business, or integrate with a system for charging the energy usage against customers' allowances.

0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

I don't think you need a tax for this. Electric rates can just differ based on utilization. Where I live, nonresidential rates are different based on anticipated monthly maximum demand. Currently anything over 5MW is $0.0459/kWh , anything 50kW to 5MW is $0.0464/kWh, and anything under 50kW is $0.0724/kWh. Seems to me we just bump the greater-than-5MW price to, say, $0.1/kWh, and problem solves itself.

Changing the rates is a hell of a lot easier than passing a tax, especially in states like mine where such taxes have to be validated by referendum.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@khm Functionally a government-mandated "different rate" is pretty close to "tax". Would you propose letting the utility just keep the extra? Just double would be nowhere near enough to kill off AI, PoW, and whatever they come up with next. It should rise quickly to at least 10x, maybe more. And I really don't think utility providers should be keeping that when someone is willing to pay it, rather than putting it to good public use.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@khm But the proposal as I've stated it isn't a viable short-term legislative agenda. It's a revolutionary solarpunk way to approach energy usage on a finite planet where a small number of awful people want to use it for very harmful things.

1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

My local utility is municipally-owned, which probably isn't as common as it ought to be.

David Monniaux » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@dalias Serious question: more energy for a developer with a $200 subscription to Claude than for somebody commuting 40 km by car every day, for instance?

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@MonniauxD We're not talking about the user. We're talking about Anthropic's training and operations.

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David Monniaux » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@dalias Ah sorry you said "personal use", so I was wondering about the energy cost "per seat".

...

Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/116415981906427926

@MonniauxD Businesses would have the same limit as a person, or less, except as described in posts 5-6. It's just that "a couple of orders of magnitude beyond reasonable personal usage" is a good place to set the threshold.

Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]
In general, businesses with physical offices would probably need some allowance of some % of a personal allowance per employee, for operating the space. Tying the allowance to employee count would also have the bonus of being a huge counter-incentive to layoffs.
6/N

AodeRelay boosted

Demi Marie Obenour [She/her] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@dalias The main problem with both of these is that companies would move abroad.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@alwayscurious On some level, yes, fixing things requires global cooperation. But you can ban companies that are evading taxes by "moving" abroad from doing business in your jurisdiction without evidence that they paid an equivalent tax in their own jurisdiction. There's room for lots of creativity here if there's will to rein in corporations run amok.

AodeRelay boosted

Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-16 / 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Name a better combination than tmux and vim.

Go on, I'll wait.

(No, emacs does not count)

...

Older...

AodeRelay boosted

Tall Simon » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Since the days of twm I'll admit that I've struggled with (and largely given up on) getting a consistent, hot-key friendly way of navigating the layers of interaction. I've never been able to give up on my "card file"/"messy desk" approach to windows (I never minimize, keeping at least a corner visible to remind my brain they are there).

My aversion to tmux (well, TBH, screen, mostly) tended to be due to hot-keys getting trapped by something in the WM->Window->Tab->Sub-Win/tmux->Editor/whatever chain before getting to the Editor, and that trap annoying me. It was an extra layer in an already complicated interaction.

We never really got a rule, or a keyboard with Meta-type keys, explicitly for actions at (using KDE's Plasma model) Activity -> Virtual Desk -> Desktop -> Window -> Window Tab -> Application levels. Alt does tend to address the first couple of levels, Ctrl the last couple, but it's never consistent. 🤔

Not sure I want 5 levels of Meta key, either...

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Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@TallSimon

I agree that a consistent approach to terminals, shell, editing and multiplexing would be great. The joys of a system designed in the stone age of computers...

Let's just say tmux+vim is the least bad solution for me right now.

Michaël Parienti » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

mosh + tmux + vim (emacs for me, but you get the idea)

...

Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@mparienti

Mosh is definitely good. I have never found a use case for it, though, but that's just me.

2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-16 / 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

tmux and nvi2

(also "tmux and ed" of course)

NetBSD Foundation 🚩 » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@ParadeGrotesque tmux and /usr/bin/vi

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Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@netbsd

So nvi right? 🤓

ed(1) conference [it/they] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@netbsd @ParadeGrotesque

tmux and /bin/ed

...

Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-16 / 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@ed1conf @netbsd

Coming from you, that was to be expected... 😂

...

Michael W Lucas » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

You expected correctness from @ed1conf ? Wise of you, because "tmux and ed" is correct.

AodeRelay boosted

vins » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@[email protected] ttys and ed?

...

Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@vins

Are you @ed1conf astroturfing account? 😂

...

ed(1) conference [it/they] » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@ParadeGrotesque @vins

I suppose if I were playing more old-school, I would have recommended traditional job-control (jobs, fg, bg, ^Z) and /bin/ed

Evan J Rowley » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

GNU screen and GNU sed with the -i option.

...

Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@ejrowley

Old school, but I like it.

it's case! » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@ParadeGrotesque the wat you immediately disqualify emacs makes me feel that you know it'd easily best any other multiplexing system

...

Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-16 / 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@acdw

Emacs is a fine operating system, it's a shame it does not have a good editor.

Like vim.

(I know, it's a classic, but, let's face it, you asked for it) 😂

(Also: found the emacs user!) 😅

9 ★ 2 ↺

𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇨🇦) boosted

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-02
@[email protected]

important announcement [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

congratulations to me

Alt...

certificated not techbro

...

𝓼𝓮𝓻𝓪𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓱【ツ】☮(📍🇨🇦) » 🔓 2026-04-14
@[email protected]

important announcement [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

https://amiatechbro.com

seems i cant share a link to the results page, so i here are the results.

Alt...

am i a tech bro results page 1/2

Alt...

am i a tech bro results page 2/2

the vessel of morganna [they/them] » 🔓 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

important announcement [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@khm I ended up scoring 11% - one answer considered "tech bro". "tech can lead to disruption of existing jobs" which I find unfortunately true; in my opinion there can be cases where the loss of jobs in lieu of automation is a better outcome for the world as a whole, e.g. machine manufacturing of medical supplies vs potential risk of mistakes, contamination, etc from human hand manufacturing. I don't agree with disruption of employment in all cases though

...

1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

important announcement [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

one of the things I both like and don't like about this test is the specificity of the statements. compare what you said

"tech can lead to disruption of existing jobs" which is a sentence I'm comfortable agreeing with unreservedly

vs the phrasing on the test

"If my product eliminates existing jobs, that's an inevitable price of progress." a sentence that raises alarms in my head: are we sure your product is progress? is your product inevitable? etc etc

so imo there's a big margin of error depending on how suspicious you are of a given claim.

Velocipedestrienne 🇿🇦 » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

165 clicktivist comments against data centers on <checks notes> Facebook which totally doesn't use data centers nope. #NIMBY

...

2 ★ 2 ↺

MrMagne boosted

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

RIP rsyslog

https://docs.rsyslog.com/doc/about/ai_first.html

...

Older...

Torbjörn Norinder » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@khm can’t believe this is not parody

...

Adam [He/Him] » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@tnorinder it's such beautifully-crafted April 1st material.
@khm

∴ esoterik ∴ [he/him/etc] » 🔓 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@khm ...wow

Adam [He/Him] » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@khm "Users want focused answers fast. AI helps surface concise, context-relevant guidance instead of long pages to sift through."

no, we want the right fucking answers. this is not a difficult concept to understand. I want reliable, correct information for documentation. Yes, a quick start and tutorial section is nice but if nobody's contributed them then fine, give me long pages to sift through. If the software is complex this is necessary. I don't want random shit every time I press the button. I don't want lies.

The Orange Theme [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@khm Calling it a responsible AI-first approach is like calling my father's parenting style a responsible beer-first approach.

mirabilos » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@khm old news though, he’s been using it for years, at least the version in trixie is already tainted and ought to be moved to non-free

🗳 ✓

roger w. capisce boosted

96 Greers » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

How weird is it that Judy Greer has never been on Bob's Burgers?

not that weird:	5
a little weird:	10
pretty weird:	8
extremely weird:	12

Closed

3 ★ 4 ↺

Anthk boosted

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

holy shit hahahahah

https://ir.allbirds.com/news-releases/news-release-details/allbirds-inc-executes-50m-convertible-financing-facility

The shoe company pivoting to AI cloud infrastructure

the shoe company

pivoting to

cloud ai infrastructure

...

Chloe G artist [She/her] » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@khm from insoles to assholes in a single leap. Impressive.

dch » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@khm @danyork makes total sense they’re just boot strapping

AodeRelay boosted

European Commission » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

It is for parents to raise their children. Not platforms.

The European Age Verification App is ready.

It will allow users to prove their age when accessing online platforms. Just like shops ask for proof of age for people buying alcoholic beverages.

And it ticks all the boxes:
✅ Highest privacy standards in the world
✅ Works on any device
✅ Easy to use
✅ Fully open source

More info: https://link.europa.eu/HmnrJc

...

Older...

Csepp 🌢 [it/they/he, same one you'd use for animals] » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@EUCommission Does it tick the "does not require a TPM" box?

...

12 ★ 3 ↺

Eggs now in different baskets. boosted

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

You can immediately tell someone is full of shit when "works on any device" shows up

...

Haelwenn /элвэн/ » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@khm @csepp @EUCommission Also I love how they're saying it's open-source, yet it doesn't seems to be distributed yet so it's also just politician-promises.

...

lori » 🌐 2026-04-21
@[email protected]

@lanodan @khm @EUCommission @csepp I smell some openwashing.

Csepp 🌢 boosted

w [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

I'm looking forward to trying this on my Nintendo DS web browser

@khm @csepp @EUCommission

...

Eggs now in different baskets. » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@w @khm @csepp @EUCommission Imagine taking an internet enabled fridge shopping with you to verify your age.

It would be a lot easier when shopping on the internet as you could sit in the kitchen next to your fridge.

Adam » 🌐 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

Some other tell tale signs that someone is full of shit is when they say things like "it is for parents to raise their children which is why they need to use a government app to use the internet" and "our I.D. and biometrics collection app has the highest privacy standards in the world"

@lanodan

thedæmon (Clay Ayers) [he / him] » 🌐 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

This is awful. Thanks for sharing.

7 ★ 0 ↺

cgnarne » 🔓 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@[email protected]

As a european citizen, can we please not do this? How about regulating social media companies?

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Diogo Constantino » 🔓 2026-04-16
@[email protected]

@cgnarne they are already regulated (EPrivacy, Internet Society Services Directive, GPDPR, DMA, DSA, AI Act)... What's missing is way faster, more transparent action by the regulators, including the EU Commission.

The legislation that exists is nor perfect, and might need some improvements, but the Commission is actually proposing making it mostly worse, not better.

@EUCommission

Cassandrich boosted

Nicole Parsons » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@EUCommission

Age verification is a truly terrible idea.

It doesn't protect children.

It shields American tech companies from lawsuits when they are negligent in their duty to public safety.

These are laws that will enrich Meta and Google.

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TC Won't Give In To Lies » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@Npars01 @EUCommission

I've gotta disagree

Sure, age verification can be implemented terribly. It can empower fascist techbros.

But as a concept, it is a critical part of public safety when done right.

Think of IRL, where thousands of foods, medicines, products and services have 3 layers of regulation - some things are banned, some are age gated and some are allowed but regulated.

We need to accept that reality and find a way to safely implement in the online world.

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AodeRelay boosted

Nicole Parsons » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@TCatInReality @EUCommission

Fair points.

The problem is that Meta, Google, Oracle, Amazon, and Palantir are squabbling to privatize age verification in American hands.

Does anyone trust these Trump donors with confidential information?

As the fiasco with Musk's DOGE proved, these folks don't adopt even rudimentary precautions to prevent data theft.

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/23/nx-s1-5684185/doge-data-social-security-privacy

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/5821106-social-security-data-theft/

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/privacy-under-siege-doges-one-big-beautiful-database/

The state surveillance platform these dopes want is international.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17 / 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@Npars01 @TCatInReality @EUCommission Privatization makes it *even worse* (fascist US corporations getting access to lucrative data including data on children, whom they will use it to harm!), but it's fundamentally bad regardless of whether it's a private party or government doing the" verification".

It is particularly an assault on queer and non-neurotypical children who likely do not have community or acceptance locally in-person and who are stripped or any hope of having community or acceptance when you age-gate the spaces on the internet where they can find it.

Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission There is fundamentally no way to implement it not-badly. "Age verification" inherently entails identity verification. The claims that it doesn't are a lie. And it also inherently involves infringement of children's rights to knowledge, community, and participation in society.

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Plan-A » 🌐 2026-04-17 / 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

It's not a lie their goal is not to protect children!
Participation in society by being a herd? where is my freedom and human rights to retain my privacy?? What are you meaning exactly?

Location: 0.0.0.0

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@zer0unplanned I'm confused what you're responding to, but maybe I worded by post poorly.

The lie I'm talking about is their claim that they can do "age verification" without "identity verification".

Any form of "age verification" inherently eliminates anonymity.

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Plan-A » 🌐 2026-04-17 / 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@dalias I mis understood on my part as well... I'm sorry.

Location: 0.0.0.0

Taran Rampersad » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@dalias @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission Good arguments for and against...

And...

Since there are privacy concerns either way...

This is only a debate because there is a fight to a right to have access to extractive online platforms...

Why use them at all? 🙃

There was life and messy childhood long before the techbros.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@knowprose @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission No, there are not "good arguments for". The argument for is that they want to let the abusive tech bros keep operating harmful platforms and wash their hands of liability for harm to children.

But that's bullshit to begin with, because the vast majority of the harm to children that comes from these platforms doesn't even depend on children using them! It comes from their parents or their parents' generation using them.

Denying them vaccines, robbing them of a livable world because they've been brainwashed into right wing cults, etc.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17 / 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@knowprose @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission This is not "a fight to a right to have access to extractive online platforms". Nobody wants that.

It's a fight for any access at all, to any sort of community. These laws are pushed by the extractive platforms. They're not going to be like "oh, ok, you kids can just go to Mastodon". That would destroy their grip on the market extending into the next generations.

Instead they're like "Join Facebook Kids, certified safe with age verification where you can't meet scary strangers who might tell you it's ok to be queer. Oh, Mastodon has those, so it's illegal now unless it submits to our age verification mandates."

Taran Rampersad » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@dalias @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission

I am in agreement about the proxy harm.

Yet my point remains. Everyone seems to assume the platforms must be used.

If people don't use the platforms, this becomes a non-issue.

Consent begins with the decision to use the platform... or not.

If anything, raising the bar for people to make that choice is good.

https://knowprose.com/2026/03/the-puddle-we-keep-choosing/

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@knowprose @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission Any argument that starts with "if everyone would just..." is a non-starter. The only way you can get everyone not to use the abusive extractive platforms is to ban them.

And they are not going to stop trying to take away children's rights to community and acceptance and knowledge even if you do try to do that.

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Taran Rampersad » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@dalias @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission 1/ effectively, that is what the law is doing if you really care about privacy.

I cannot find it in myself to argue that children should harm themselves in any way.

And for or against age verification seems the wrong thing to be arguing because of that.

We have enough societal problems with adults using the platform, don't we?

Attempting to raise the stakes for self-interest is the only thing a government can appear to do.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@knowprose @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission For fucks sake do you not care? This law will kill queer kids. This law will condemn NNT kids to be treated like there's something wrong with them and they have no hope of having meaningful social relationships. This law will make our community here an illegal resistance.

And here you are being like "I don't care I don't think you should fight it because Facebook is bad."

It's Facebook who wants this law.

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Taran Rampersad » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@dalias @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission the point is that I do care.

I care enough to suggest that no one should be using the platforms.

And i am doing it on... Mastodon.

Caring is not my issue. I've written a lot about centralized social media.

I care enough to say that this becomes a moot point if people stop acting like the platforms involved need to be defended when they are harmful in and of themselves.

Consent begins with use.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@knowprose @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission If you care that no one uses their platforms you would not arguing that we should allow extreme harm to people we care about to give them a get-out-of-jail-free card.

The reason Facebook wants this law is so they can keep doing the harms they're doing with impunity by disclaiming liability for the harms to children.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@knowprose @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission Fighting "age verification" laws is the *opposite* of defending these platforms. It's holding them accountable.

Taran Rampersad » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@dalias @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission 2/ all this time, energy, outrage and passion could be doing something else if people looked to their own self-interest.

There are so many reasons not to use the platforms in the first place. At the base of it, extraction.

Meanwhile, in the US, FISA just got extended for 10 days. The Trump administration wants 18 months.

And because of where the companies are, it impacts all those online platforms.

I don't agree with age verification because of

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Taran Rampersad » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@dalias @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission 3/ the privacy issues, and I don't agree with using those platforms for privacy issues and the attention, intention and influence economies that extract (privacy).

So... why not just not worry about age verification if you ain't gonna use it, and explain the privacy issues to the kids?

They're smarter than most adults about this stuff.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@knowprose @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission Not going to use what? The internet? 🤦 🤡

"Why don't you worry about this other thing instead?" is always an invalid argument. We can work on both. We can let the people who deeply care about and understand particular issues put that care and understanding to use.

A better question is this: Why do you think spending your time arguing on the internet to disempower people fighting back is appropriate?

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@knowprose @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission Shutting up and letting the people who do care do their job is free, you know?

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Taran Rampersad » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@dalias @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission

It's hard to have a conversation with someone who has suggested I don't care, is ignoring the greater harms I am pointing to, and ruining my first cup of coffee. 🙃

As such, I am removing my own consent to attempting conversation.

Be well.

Taran Rampersad » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@dalias @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission

I said I am done.

Consent begins with deciding what you choose to engage with, including online platforms.

Let me be done.
Please.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-17
@[email protected]

@knowprose @TCatInReality @Npars01 @EUCommission You're the one who chose to use my activist reply into the EU Commission thread as an invitation to inject your anti-children's-rights propaganda up in my @'s.

I didn't even realize you were following me and that's how you got into the conversation, but now my consent for you to do that is revoked. You're blocked.

in reply to »

kabel42 » 🌐 2026-04-14
@[email protected]

@OpenComputeDesign I think i just found the video for you :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1si1y5lvkk

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

@khm Is this you? 🤔

@kabel42 @OpenComputeDesign

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

are you accusing me of youtubing

@khm @kabel42 @OpenComputeDesign

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

nah, only of correct opinions

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

how dare you

@khm @kabel42 @OpenComputeDesign

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-15
@[email protected]

Well, I've got this keyboard, some fingers with which to press the keys, and a generally positive opinion of you with which to annoy you

in reply to »

Pikario [he/him] » 🌐 2026-02-22
@[email protected]

@memoriesin8bit I didn't know 🤣
But after a laugh I think a distro should not change your default DE, it's a bad behaviour

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8Bit | | 🍶🦊 » 🌐 2026-02-22
@[email protected]

@pikario The way I understand is that often it's through people installing ProtonVPN tray icon which is only needed for Gnome and has all of it as a dependency. This then also installs GDM which boots to Gnome by default.
What I don't understand, yet is how just installing a Display/Login Manager automatically activates it. Say I installed it, I would need to disable SDDM and enable GDM. But I suppose some more beginner friendly distros do this automatically by now?

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Reinout van Schouwen » 🔓 2026-02-22
@[email protected]

@memoriesin8bit
This sounds like something that could have happened twenty years ago. But now? This behavior is anything but beginner friendly.
(Saying this as a GNOME enthousiast since v1.2 or thereabout)
@pikario

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8Bit | | 🍶🦊 » 🔓 2026-02-22
@[email protected]

@reinouts @pikario Agreed. Installing a whole desktop cause you accidentally install a package made for that desktop - okay fine. The rest is not okay. As I said before, I don't even know how that works. Maybe Mint automatically activates services you just installed to make it easier for newcomers? I dunno.

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24😷-185 » 🔓 2026-02-22
@[email protected]

@memoriesin8bit @reinouts @pikario

It's often due to user error. They follow this link: https://protonvpn.com/support/official-linux-vpn-mint then click on the other link https://protonvpn.com/support/official-ubuntu-vpn-setup/ and unfortunately skip this part before clicking:

“However, if installing the GUI app, please skip the Linux system tray icon (optional) step, as the gnome-shell-extension-appindicator package will install the entire GNOME desktop environment as a dependency.”

Poorly worded instructions? Maybe

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Cassandrich » 🔓 2026-04-14
@[email protected]

@240185 @memoriesin8bit @reinouts @pikario There are two problems here:

One is the utterly bogus dependency. At most these packages should pull in a few GNOME libs, not any applications much less GDM.

The other is that the distro is using "user installed this package" as proxy for "user wants to change their system settings to run it as their login manager".

🤡 🚗 at so many levels.

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4 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-14
@[email protected]

this is the oldest debian/ubuntu vs fedora/redhat fight there is. in debian installing a service activates that service during installation. "the user installed it, so they must want it running" logic happening. in fedora, installing a service doesn't do that. "if the user wants it running, they can start it" logic happening.

the disagreement will continue until the end of time

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

Your review of ULTRAKILL received an award! https://steamcommunity.com/userreviews/viewreview/222280875

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cancel » 🌐 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

@khm try devil daggers and hyperdemon if you haven't yet (in that order)

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-11 / 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

I have now watched their trailers and I have no idea what the fuck is happening in either one of them

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cancel » 🌐 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

@khm you have to work up to hyperdemon via devil daggers

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-14
@[email protected]

I got these games

they seem to be a stream of sounds and lights

far as I can tell this is FPS bullet hell and I am not the person who is going to play this

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cancel » 🌐 2026-04-14
@[email protected]

@khm haha sorry. the main technique is to play to avoid it getting out of hand. I suggested it after quake because the enemy interactions are similar where each one has a specific call/response strategy to kill it

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-14
@[email protected]

happy to support the devs! no regrets, just ... not meant for me I guess

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cancel » 🌐 2026-04-14
@[email protected]

@khm have you tried Quake Brutalist Jam III?

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-14
@[email protected]

not yet!

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cancel » 🌐 2026-04-14 / 2026-04-14
@[email protected]

@khm it's really fuckin good as long as you don't desire strings of levels with cross-level coherency (since they're all made in parallel by different authors)

2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-13 / 2026-04-13
@[email protected]

wordpress users continue to get what's coming to them, part 4,285

4 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-13
@[email protected]

lesson learned: just block people who are emotionally invested in corporations. they're beyond rational thought

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pmjv s klapkami na očích » 🌐 2026-04-13
@[email protected]

it was an educational thread!

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-13
@[email protected]

it is not lost on me that I was being lectured about the viability of Sailfish as a phone OS by someone posting from an iPhone

R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🌐 2026-04-13
@[email protected]

https://www.404media.co/hacker-compromises-a16z-backed-phone-farm-tries-to-post-memes-calling-a16z-the-antichrist/

Ugh, I felt that toot in my soul.

If some people could live as well as they can lick boots. 🤦‍♂️

AodeRelay boosted

404 Media » 🌐 2026-04-13
@[email protected]

Doublespeed uses a phone farm to flood social media with AI-generated influencers. A hacker managed to get into a backend system of the company.

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⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ » 🌐 2026-04-13
@[email protected]

@404mediaco am I meant to know what a16z means?

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-13
@[email protected]

Yes.

#Jolla #SailfishOS #DigitalSovereignty #PrivacyFirst #CommunityPowered #European

AodeRelay boosted

jolla » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

Yesterday we told you about Jolla appearing on Viiden Jälkeen by Finnish national TV channel MTV. Today they published the full story! 🎉

MTV wrote about digital sovereignty and whether a Finnish mobile operating system could be the European alternative (article in Finnish 🇫🇮). There are only four mobile operating systems in the world: two American, one Chinese — and Sailfish OS. The only truly European one.

Read the full piece here:
https://www.mtvuutiset.fi/artikkeli/suomalaiskannykasta-turvallinen-vaihtoehto-jattifirmoista-irti-haluaville-entisten-nokia-insinoorien-jolla-tekee-paluuta/9321652

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Iron Bug » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@jolla the only thing that is private and safe is free software, the matter is not companies registered here or there. until the code is open and free for distribution and modification - it is not safe and reliable.

4 ★ 1 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

"four mobile operating systems in the world" not counting UBPorts, PostmarketOS, Mobian, Maemo Leste, and of course KaiOS, which has shipped more units than Sailfish despite the latter's five-year head start

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Hummel » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@khm @jolla
1. KaiOS is made for Feature Phones. Jolla is focused in Smartphones.
2. KaiOS is almost dead

The Linux alternatives you mentioned are nothing you could as daily driver.

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-09 / 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

1. KaiOS is not noticeably less 'smart' than Jolla. They've chosen to aim downmarket, but that is not a technical limitation.
2. Sailfish is also 'almost dead.' Jolla isn't even a company any more, just a brand name rescued from the flames of Rostelecom investment. It's a series of Kickstarter projects with mixed results.

Having used Sailfish and also literally all of the alternatives I mentioned, several of them (particularly UBPorts and PostmarketOS) are at least as good as Sailfish. An ancient Oneplus 6 running Phosh on PostmarketOS is a better successor to the Nokia N9 than anything Jollyboys has in the hopper.

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Hummel » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@khm @jolla
KaiOS runs on outdated software and almost every remaining useful app is a web app. There are barely any new phones.

"Jolla is almost dead" 10k+ pre-orders for the most recent phone after the C2 . And if "Kickstarter with mixed results" kills Jolla's credibility, what does that say about PostmarketOS, which has no company, no employees, no hardware program and no revenue?

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-10 / 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

Still not sure how "barely any new phones" differentiates Sailfish and KaiOS.

10k pre-orders is meaningless noise in the mobile market. It's a rounding error.

Having no company, no employees, no hardware program, and no revenue is a hell of a lot better than having a company, employees, hardware program, and revenue, and no resulting advantage, and a previous failed company.

I would love to live in a world where Sailfish is a major player. They have demonstrated for over a decade that they cannot achieve that goal.

Csepp 🌢 [it/they/he, same one you'd use for animals] » 🌐 2026-04-13 / 2026-04-13
@[email protected]

@Hummel @khm @jolla postmarketOS has a pretty stable OpenCollective AFAIK. They post regularly about how they use the money. My favorite example of it being put to good use is their hardware CI rig.

Antti » 🌐 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@khm @jolla In the news it was put that "four COMMERCIAL mobile operating systems in the world". And to be fair I think that is true. OS needs to be commercial if it wants to become option for wide masses and not only for niche very tech oriented people, IMO.

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3 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

good catch! wonder why they left that out of their post. I agree that adjective is necessary for their claim to be accurate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zfTxd7gZzo

w [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-13
@[email protected]

I think there may be an issue with this SD card

Alt...

a windows explorer properties window describing a directory named "MTP! `" The file was allegedly created Monday, December 31, 1979 at 11:00:00 PM

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2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-13
@[email protected]

looks like a perfectly normal 75MB sd card from the Carter administration era

AodeRelay boosted

vga256 » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

does anyone else remember 1970s Federal hot coffee and/or hot chocolate vending machines in north america?

for some reason these were ubiquitous at airports and bus stations for decades here, and then quietly disappeared

i cannot explain why, but i so badly miss hitting a button and watching that paper cup drop, and then fill with boiling hot water and substandard hot chocolate 😋

#canada

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Older...

Scott Small 🇨🇦 [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

@vga256 I remember one of these at my local swimming pool back in the early 90’s. I don't think I ever saw anyone use it... there was a cafeteria on the upper floor where you could get a real hot chocolate instead of the junk that the vending machine would serve you 🤣

That being said, as a kid, there was a certain air of intrigue about the cup dropping and the machine filling it with the correct amount of liquid. I liked the sound it made!

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fergycool » 🔓 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

@smallsco @vga256 Very common also in public swimming pools in the UK at that time. Generally next to a vending machine that served a few chocolate snacks such as chocolate covered raisins. Even now when I think of poor quality scalding hot drinking chocolate and chocolate raisins I also smell “chlorinated water”!

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Scott Small 🇨🇦 [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

@fergycool @vga256 I distinctly remember a row of five vending machines across from the pool's reception desk. In addition to the coffee/hot chocolate vending machine there were a couple Coke machines for soft drinks (one in the 70's wood grain style with horizontal buttons, one “modern" early-80's with the giant Coke button), and a couple generic chips-n-chocolates machines.

I think they all survived until toonies came out in ’96, which they weren't able to accept.

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fergycool » 🔓 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

@smallsco @vga256 Coke vending machines were a bit rare in eighties UK. You'd get Kia Ora and Ribena but not much else! But always chocolate covered raisins!

0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

Vending menace. We meet again

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEBmh_zE9Yo

4 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

there is a person whose rss reader is pulling a feed from my site every fifteen minutes

I wonder what they're afraid of missing

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GuilOooo » 🔓 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

@khm
That might be me!
I run sfeed_update in a cron job on my laptop. At the time I set this up my laptop was up often, but only for short amounts of time (like 60 minutes) each time. So I went overkill with my cronjob frequencies to ensure I had one update per boot. I told myself there was no chance to hammer even a tiny server with 4 requests/hour. In retrospect it was not necessary, but I never changed it.

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

yeah four requests an hour is not a problem, I only even noticed because the pattern was somewhat regular, but you didn't answer the question

what are you afraid of missing

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GuilOooo » 🔓 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

@khm
Anything at all!
What if a gem pops in an inactive feed and you're not paying attention? What if you find out only 29 minutes later!? Imagine the consequences!

Seriously though, I keep the feeds of the sites I like a lot in my reader, even after they've become inactive. It's a bit like I pick up an object as a souvenir on every trip I make, and keep all that in a drawer in my home.

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

makes sense. sucks when you're like "oh I can go to this site and look at this" and then it's just fucken gone

🗳

Rep. Eric Gallager (no "h"!) » 🌐 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

#MastodonPoll: Which of the following regulations regarding leaf blowers would you support? Choose as many as you like.
1. Decibel limits
2. Fuel efficiency standards (the relevant metric for cars is miles per gallon, so the corresponding one here would be what, leaves blown per gallon?)
3. Fuel type restrictions (i.e. ban gas-powered ones completely)
4. Full ban, both gas-powered ones and electric

Decibel limits:	6
Fuel efficiency standards:	6
Fuel type restrictions:	7
Full ban:	3

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@egallager I voted for 1-3, but I think 2 is a no-op unless 3 can't be done. There's no point in trying to regulate "efficiency" for electric ones except possibly driving up cost and making people throw away and replace perfectly good equipment. I only see it as a stealth way to ban gas-powered ones if option 3 isn't politically viable as stated.

pixx » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@egallager
If you'd asked me a year agp I'd have agreed with 2 and maybe even 3, but...

I live in a semirural area (in a town, surrounded by rural). I use an electric lawn mower for instance.

The industry for electric power tools is broken. Every manufacturer uses their own battery, most of which are $20 BOM and hundreds of dollars to buy, and which use proprietary chargers.

I use an electric lawn mower anyways. If and when it breaks, or the battery dies, it fucks me over really badly.

Meanwhile, it can only _barely_ handle the _small_ area I've got. I know people nearby who, with a gas leaf blower, need _two full tanks_ to clear their space.

To me, this rules out a ban on gas tools. The electric ones can work of you're, like me, insistent on using them, but they are in many ways inferior, not because electric is worse, but because their manufacturers are hostile.

Moreover, making small gas engines super efficient is _hard_. Not impossible, but hard. And expensive. There's limits to what's doable.

So I'd be in favor of a moderate requirement, to start: look at current high efficiency models and use that to raise the minimum slowly.

Tbqh, i think regulation of the electric manufacturers is more important. If we want widespread adoption of electric tools over gas, which i think is desirable, they need to stop getting away with acting like they own the tool *i* bought just because it has a battery instead of a fuel

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@egallager
To emphasize: MAMY electric tool makers don't even make serious money on the tools. They just make the battery systems so locked down that you literally cannot do any repairs without going to an authorized dealer.

If a gas tool breaks, anyone competent can fix it. This isn't true with electric, by design. Third party batteries are impossible, by design. Repairs are impossible, by design.

Shoutout to walmart, actually, for somehow being the only manufacturer I've seen (under their "hyper tough" brand) for which i could make a custom battery. The *only one*. Of dozens.

Replacement instead of repair also has high emissions. It's bad enough that imo the negative effects are largely worse than low efficiency gas tools.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@egallager

On a personal note, as someone who got electric tools and only recently began to understand why people hate them, i think it's very important that anyone who wants to get rid of the gas ones (a position i held a year ago) understand why people still use them. It's not stupidity, it's not apathy, in many cases it's not lack of care for the environment, i know some hippies around here who use em to maintain a privately-owned open-to-the-public trail and forest area.

But also: rural is not suburbs.

I'd probably be on board with tightened requirements for within city bounds, just not a State-wide restriction?

Large areas in rural neighborhoods absolutely need gas still, the highest capacity electrics can maaaaaybe do it but they're way overpriced and the gas ends up far far cheaper even after a decade of operation and even with the lower efficiency

Basically: it's a complicated topic with a lot of nuance and i think any simple rule will probably have unwanted negative consequences, including some that cancel out the intended wins

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@egallager
Oh, and one last point (if i haven't annoyed you into ignoring me yet): emissions requirements are probably more important than fuel efficiency requirements in the suburbs.

Someone burning half as much fuel and spitting out double the emissions at their neighbor is not a good thing

But, also, emissions and fuel efficiency requirements tend to force engines to get bigger and heavier which, for something that is handheld or worn on the body is not ideal

Which is why i find it easy to agree with "ban the unreasonably awful" (if two models of equivalent weight exist and one is twice as bad as the other...) and harder to say "mandate an even stricter minimum" (because that likely renders designs that people currently depend on impossible with a good replacement)

So much of the problem comes back to the electric tool industry being scammy as shit :/

Rep. Eric Gallager (no "h"!) » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@pixx there is actually no need to blow leaves; raking is also an option, as is just letting the leaves sit

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@egallager
...that's true. I was thinking of gas vs electric in general, not just for leaf blowers.

Fair point, i change my answer largely :)

that said, afaik the electric leaf blowers have the same problem as the other electric tools soooo I'd prefer to add right to repair laws there first and _then_ I'd probably be in support of an outright ban on gas leaf blowers _at least inside of cities_

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Rep. Eric Gallager (no "h"!) » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@pixx yeah I agree that we should implement right to repair laws

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@egallager

One thing that I'm curious about though, is... if the electric manufacturers make their money on batteries largely, and pricing is already bad compared to gas, what happens when they're not allowed to gouge people on batteries anymore?

Tbh i think, more specifically than right to repair, we just need to make it illegal to implement a mechanism that prevents someone else from manufacturing parts

I don't want access to the protocop that they're using to cryptographically verify batteries, i want it to be a capital offense for them to have such a protocol to begin with

2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

nine times out of ten gas leaf blowers already violate city noise ordinances and it's just a matter of convincing anyone to enforce it

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Rep. Eric Gallager (no "h"!) » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@khm @pixx yeah, the decibel limit one can be interpreted as meaning lowering it where it already exists, establishing a statewide one, increasing funding for enforcement, or anything else along those lines

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@egallager

I don't think funding is the problem.

A few months ago, a cop showed up on my door step. Told me the neighbor thought I'd knocked her cans over. The cop was very apologetic and understanding, i told her I'd seen a raccoon in my backyard an hour before, and she seemed embarassed to be there tbqh.

If i complained that my neighbors had a leaf blower that was too loud, the result would be similar. Nobody's going to charge someone over that. It's just not going to happen.

It's annoying that people are loud, but noise complaints result in them waiting until the cops leave, not solving it.

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Rep. Eric Gallager (no "h"!) » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@pixx @khm I guess another idea is changing the point at which the decibel limit is enforced? Like, I think the way to do a decibel limit is to make it illegal for manufacturers to sell leafblowers that exceed a certain decibel limit, rather than punishing the end-user of the leafblower, who can't necessarily control it.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@egallager

Yeah, disallow their sale within city limits or something js probably the way to go

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khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

having had some experience in these matters, this would be really hard to do. city powers are almost always granted via state law, and it gets dicey trying to build an ordinance like this. closest you might come is by putting it in the zoning code? dunno, it's tough.

and speaking as a motorcyclist, the end-user is expected to control it by considering these matters during product acquisition. I inherited a Harley, and installing more effective exhaust silencers was very much On Me.

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@qrstuv.bsky.social » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

I wouldn't mind knowing the list of dozens of manufacturers whose batteries you failed to reverse engineer.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

@qrstuv
It's not about failure to RE; the most egregious example i think is the STIHL one i have which, if it detects an attempt at charging it from a third party charger, trips the BMS as if it had an undervolt.

Remove the cells and charge them externally: BMS trips.

And if you take it to an authorized dealer and it shows signs of tampering, they're not allowed to disable the trip.

If i was made of money i could probably buy ten of them, fuck around, and figure out how to disable that check.

As is, i don't have a spare battery to play with.

...actually, the issue i had was with making a custom charger. Making a battery... hmmm 🤔

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

I might have been approaching jt from the wrong direction, I'll need to probe the tools and check if it's doing shenanigans too, thanks for poking me yk think about tbis again :)

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@qrstuv.bsky.social » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

It's a shorter list than I thought it would be.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

That's the worst one, others are very similar

I haven't bought most of them *to* RE because i knew it'd be a pita. I prefer to get ones that won't give me that trouble

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0 ★ 0 ↺

@qrstuv.bsky.social » 🔓 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

It makes me wonder if you're not completely full of shit.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

@qrstuv
Maybe!

I know some of the others are _less_ bad. Perhaps I'm overestimating their safeguards. Didn't put too much effort into it since the batteries are >$100 to replace.

It's also entirely possible that the one I've got is actually unique in how bad it is.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-11
@[email protected]

http://archive.today/2026.04.09-110333/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto-identity-adam-back.html

Honestly you're probably right that I'm totally full of shit on this one

It's been like... 16 months? Since i looked at it and i didn't look super deeply other than at the specific one i already had bought qhen i realized how fucked it was

I'm quite likely extrapolating the one data point i do have and making incorrect assertions as a result. I genuinely don't remember most of it, shouldn't have spoken so confidently on it

Consider my ego popped for today

2 ★ 0 ↺

@qrstuv.bsky.social » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

FREE GIFT ARTICLE

"The Cypherpunks interacted mostly through something called an internet mailing list. Ancestors of today’s message boards, mailing lists were large group emails in old typewriter font that subscribers received in their inbox. To communicate, respondents replied-all."

"I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. So does Bitcoin. A Bitcoin user has two keys: a public key, from which an address is derived that acts as a digital safe deposit box; and a private key, which is the secret combination used to unlock that box and spend the coins it contains. How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed."

"Other parallels between Mr. Back and Satoshi started to become apparent. For instance, Mr. Back and Satoshi shared a dislike for copyright. “Scrap patents and copyright,” Mr. Back wrote in September 1997. In keeping with this belief, Mr. Back made his Hashcash spam-throttling software open source. Satoshi did a similar thing. He released the Bitcoin software under M.I.T.’s open-source license, which allowed anyone to use, modify and distribute it without restrictions."

"Satoshi had famously used the British expletive “bloody” on Bitcointalk while complaining of how hard it was to explain his invention to a general audience. In several posts on X in October 2023, Mr. Back insisted that he had never used that term: “try google and see for yourself not a word i use.” But I found a 1998 Cypherpunks list post in which Mr. Back used “bloody” to express his growing irritation with internet banner ads: “it is getting ridiculus (sic) most of the bandwidth through my trusty 28.8k modem is bloody banners these days!” Why deny using a word he had in fact used so adamantly if he had nothing to hide?"

"Like Satoshi, Mr. Back used two spaces between sentences, an outdated practice that suggests Satoshi is older than 50. Mr. Back is 55."

John Carreyrou is an investigative reporter for The Times’s business section.

Dylan Freedman is the A.I. projects editor for The Times, investigating a range of topics. He has experience as both a reporter and a machine-learning engineer.

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3 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

I tried to read this but I withered and died during the description of mailing lists

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Haelwenn /элвэн/ » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@khm @qrstuv And of course they seem to have it confused with putting everyone in the To/Cc, aka spam.

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@qrstuv.bsky.social » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

Please stop replying all.

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2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-10
@[email protected]

https://www.404media.co/i-wish-i-didnt-care-about-marathon-player-numbers-but-i-do/

404 Media » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

Marathon is a great game for uncs. As signs of a crash change the video game industry, there might not be a lot of those left.

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Conor » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

@404mediaco Just some friendly feedback: I have no idea what "unc" means and so the article made very little sense to me.

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

the article you're talking about explicitly defines the term

seems like a 'you' problem

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Conor » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@khm @404mediaco Where?

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

In the article. The bit with the words in. The part where they wrote "As you probably know, unc, short for uncle, is a way to jokingly refer to old, potentially out of touch people." It's in the middle of the big pile of letters, which are the bits that aren't quite pictures.

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Conor » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@khm @404mediaco Thanks! That saved me a lot of reading time.

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

I can imagine no nobler goal for you

Csepp 🌢 [it/they/he, same one you'd use for animals] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

I can't believe I haven't seen #DontHugMeImScared until now. The world needs more weird art . Shoutout to #Dropout for this and also #ToonOut .

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3 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

Don't Hug Me I'm Scared and Look Around You are the only children's educational TV content I unreservedly recommend

1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

there's a video circulating, claiming to be footage of a bot farm, and it's thousands of phones in racks presumably doing Bot Shit and now I'm curious

have the bot farmers not discovered virtual machines? is it really cheaper to gather thousands of phones and build all this custom infrastructure

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∴ esoterik ∴ [he/him/etc] » 🔓 2026-04-09 / 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@khm depends on the goal but i think it's a lot easier to use real hardware / simcards / phone lines / etc. than trying to spend a ton of time figuring out how to convincingly fake whatever signals the upstream services are using to try to differentiate "real" from "fake" accounts/traffic/etc.

(maybe not cheaper but easier and more reliable)

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Csepp 🌢 [it/they/he, same one you'd use for animals] » 🔓 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@d6 @khm This is probably doubly true if the app you want to automate requires crap like Play Protect. I couldn't even get Google to verify my Waydroid instance.

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

ok but like, bot farm. presumably these are the ones shitposting on facebook and twitter and tiktok etc. are these apps protected via play protect?

the more I learn about this platform the more I'm glad I don't use it

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Csepp 🌢 [it/they/he, same one you'd use for animals] » 🔓 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@khm @d6 That I don't know, but I know banking apps tend to use Google's DRM things and that they are juicy targets.

pixx » 🔓 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@khm @csepp @d6

Even if not, most platforms try to determine bots, presumably because it's bad for retention of actual users when they keep running into bots

So if you can more convincingly fake that you're a distinct person, yeah

Plasmawiz » 🌐 2026-04-09 / 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@khm It is two factors. It is arguably cheaper to bulk-buy cheap Chinese smartphones and hook them up to a board via USB than to build more expensive rigs for virtualisation, with the added benefit that the applications running on them are on real hardware and thus can easily pass basic VM checks to pass as "real" traffic.

🌲 » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@khm Most commercial Android apps tend to object to running on anything but phone hardware with an OEM OS

3 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

part of the MacO's experience is sometimes the computer just makes a fucking noise, which years of computer use has trained me to associate with something changing, or a notification happening, or something, but there is no visible information related to the noise and no way of finding out what the fuck just happened

super inuitive, just works

Mark Dominus » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

I can't remember a better example of Poe's Law in action.

Alt...

A cartoon with two sections: 1. PROGRAMMERS THEN: Pictures of a smart-loooking, smiling programmer, labeled: “Writes code from scratch” “Debugs using only logic" “Memorizes algorithms” “Optimizes every byte” 2. PROGRAMMERS NOW: Pictures of a worried, sweating programmer, labeled: “Searches error on Google” “Copies code from Stack Overflow” “Asks Al to explain the code” “Changes one line and hopes it works”

...

🗳

Mark Dominus » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

I think the cartoon in the previous post is…

… a sincere expression of the author's views.:	24
… the author's parody of someone else's views.:	11
(Don't know.):	16

Closed

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Dan Piponi » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@mjd I think I want to say that it's straightforwardly true but why would you make a cartoon about something so ordinary?

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Mark Dominus » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@dpiponi I'm pretty sure I remember “changes one line and hopes it works” in use a bit before 2023.

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3 ★ 0 ↺

ori » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

Yeah, this is the habit junior programmers tend to fall into all the time, and the thing that I spent a lot of effort trying to break them out of. A lot of "Ok, you think this line will change things; can you explain your reasoning? What information do you need in order to know if this is the bug?"

That said, the "optimizes every byte" beside the python logo puts this deep into "unintentional joke" territory.

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

<code {

Mark Dominus » 🌐 2026-04-12 / 2026-04-12
@[email protected]

@ori @dpiponi

I have spent a lot of time trying to teach that to junior programmers also, that it very rare to find a bug by pure deduction like Sherlock Holmes, and much more common is to use systematic, scientific inquiry: develop a theory, think of a test that would falsify the theory, run the test, repeat. If you can't think of a theory, try to gather more information.

I think one reason the misapprehension is so common is that when you watch an experienced programmer at work, the steps are often going by too fast to follow, and much of the theorizing and testing is never explained, so from the outside it looks like magic.

“But they just changed one line and then it worked!” But as the old story has it, the value is $1 for changing one line, and $9,999 for knowing which line to change.

(Of course, Holmes also spent a lot of time crawling around in the mud with a magnifying glass, and cataloging cigarette ash, and such.)

AodeRelay boosted

European Commission » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

Europe, the AI Continent.

One year ago, we launched the AI Continent Action Plan. Since then, we have made huge strides:

✅ 19 AI factories are now live across EU countries.
✅ We established the AI Skills Academy to train experts.
✅ The AI Omnibus is cutting costs for business.
✅ We have earmarked €1 billion to support AI adoption in industry.

We are building a secure and innovative AI future for Europe.

Here's how 👉 https://link.europa.eu/nj3VH9

Alt...

A robotic hand and a human hand reaching towards each other, reminiscent of "The Creation of Adam." They are framed by a circle of glowing pink and blue stars. Below, white text reads "EUROPE The AI continent," with the European Commission logo in the bottom right corner.

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Older...

Csepp 🌢 [it/they/he, same one you'd use for animals] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@EUCommission gross

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8 ★ 1 ↺

Matúš Chochlík boosted

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

easily the dumbest shit I've seen the EU Commission post

https://democraticwhip.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/house-democratic-leadership-statement-on-donald-trump-s-threat-to-kill-a-whole-civilization

Tomáš » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@EUCommission why are you like this?

2 ★ 1 ↺

algernon.st boosted

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

every week there's a new post in my timeline from a new credulous git who has fallen for the latest LLM grift. seeing patterns in these posts. lately there's been a rise in "it's doing so well on this synthetic benchmark created by the vendors" but there's still a strong "it's not good at my domain but it appears to be flawless at these other domains I don't know as well" contingent this week

65dBnoise » 🌐 2026-04-08 / 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

I've heard all kinds of arguments by establishment #USDemocrats about the #US war on #Iran, how bad the strategy was, how its end-goal shifted from regime change to reopening of the Strait, the lack of an exit strategy, that it is "Trump's war", and myriad others, but what I haven't heard is the simple demand:

STOP THE WAR!

Why is that? Why is it that mainstream Democrats can only allude to but never actually utter this simple demand?

(Adam Smith = progressive Dem) ∉ establishment

#USpol

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Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

@65dBnoise

Because war is good for business.

And the kind of business that benefits from war donate money to both republicans and democrats.

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

it's also, you know, a bullshit claim

I say this with full confidence that the Democrats in congress are spineless enablers and are not doing enough to stop the idiocy coming out of the white house but like

https://x.com/SenSchumer/status/2041505371940958335

https://x.com/ChrisVanHollen/status/2041588430375669943

https://democrats-armedservices.house.gov/2026/4/natsec-dems-demand-trump-negotiate-diplomatic-end-to-his-war-of-choice-with-iran

turns out that one duckduck go search for a specific string of words does not in fact lay your finger on the pulse of American political rhetoric

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Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus?cycle=2024&ind=D

Talk is cheap.

Numbers, on the other hand...

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

oh for sure, no absolution for these fucks. but talk was the claim, and it was an easily disprovable one

65dBnoise » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

@khm
Thanks for letting me know. I'd rather have Jeffreys's and NatSec Dems' statements reach my, and I guess many other people's ears and eyes through normal news channels, than through a post calling my post bullshit.

Of course I'd also expect Democrats to do a lot more to stop a war, than just issue statements for the record. There is a reason I put "STOP THE WAR" in capitals, but that's probably too much to ask from spineless enablers.

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

normal news channels are also in it for the money, so if the message isn't outright rage bait it's got less chance of getting amplified. there's no money in common sense.

The Real Grunfink boosted

pmjv s klapkami na očích » 🌐 2026-04-08 / 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

@[email protected]

new achievements just dropped

#snac

Alt...

computerspeak enthusiast

Alt...

troublemaker

Alt...

run snac

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Older...

2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

it's me!

The Real Grunfink » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

😆

ozzi » 🔓 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@[email protected]
See, now you're getting grunfinked.
@[email protected]

ManMachine » 🌐 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

it is, in fact, that easy

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ozzi » 🔓 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@[email protected]
It's probably even easier if this isnt literally your first selfhost. (I did linger on initial setup, but migrating from nasty noisy* lenof to cute noiseless thinclient was simple)

*not fanless. it didn't use the fan much, though, no.
@[email protected]

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ozzi » 🔓 2026-04-09
@[email protected]

@[email protected]
By the way, my bio remains true. The TC is placed atop the lenof.
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

pixx boosted

jbz » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

🛸 Plan 9 is a Uniquely Complete Operating System https://posixcafe.org/blogs/2024/07/27/0/

#plan9 #osdev

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

@jbz

> In general the system becomes somewhat isolated from the general flow of software outside of it.

this should be under pros IMO :P

good article though :)

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

hey @[email protected] they're talking about you

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moody [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

@[email protected] Yeah someone posted that blog post to lobsters.

brendan (ジャンク品) [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

what a shame. looks like a perfectly serviceable demon core. abandoned. cold. lonely.

Alt...

image of a non-descript grey sphere on a sidewalk next to a parked car

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

if you're cold, they're cold. bring the demon core inside

Fellwing🇪🇺 » 🔓 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

To this day I decidedly maintain the position that monochrome icons are terrible for readability.

KDE's WiFi, audio, light level, KDE Connect, Clipboard, etc etc all look the same at a glance.

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thedæmon (Clay Ayers) [he / him] » 🔓 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

I prefer text, so much easier to recognize honestly. But also, I agree. Color is better.

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khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

I wouldn't care either way if they'd just stay in one fucking order

Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber? This post from @carnage4life has me questioning our community. The Mastodon team is finally getting some traction, the product improvements are increasing, The #UX is improving, yet people posting on multiple platforms are making comments like this. It's confusing.

I *know* people here don't want this to be a classic social media-clone but we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!

Alt...

Post from @carnage4life showing how their followers are growing on threads/Bluesky but falling on Mastodon.

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Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

As this conversation is spiraling a bit I want to make a few things clear:
1. I'd like Mastodon to be MORE inclusive and bring in more voices
2. Some people don't seem to want that
3. This is core problem to solve: How do we let more in, but not "pollute" your feed?
4. The solution is NOT "gatekeeping", revelling in the fact that AI journalists aren't welcome
5. This is the same reason we lost "Black Twitter" when it came over in 2022

Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon, any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.

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Eugen Rochko » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@scottjenson I’m not interested in following any “AI people”. That doesn’t make it an echo chamber. We don’t need equal amounts of people who love puppies and want to kill puppies, not everything needs to be equally represented.

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Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@Gargron That is a personal choice and one which I totally respect. But I do think Mastodon should be big enough, and open enough, to allow an "AI community" to form, even thrive.

Too many people in my replies don't seem to agree with that.

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cratermoon » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @Gargron I'd have to ask, what value would an an AI Booster community bring to the FediVerse?

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trisweb [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron This is a very rich ethics question hidden in a specific example.

Would you permit or allow any community with which you disagree to participate on a platform, even if you’re not forced to participate?

A shortlist of thought experiments, to broaden the perspective, some of which are already here, some not…
- The oil & gas community
- Forestry workers (logging)
- The cryptocurrency community
- Workers at a chick rendering plant
- The finance industry
- Adult content creators
- Religious communities

Is there a litmus test for topics that you can or can’t discuss on the fediverse? Specific servers sure, but the whole fediverse?

Does that align with the values put forth by mastodon or the fediverse in general?

I don’t have the answers.

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CM Harrington » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron by definition, no. Literally anyone can spin up a server and talk about anything/try to get more folk to listen…

But other folk have to want to listen to whatever they are saying. Servers and individuals can just decide not to. No one is guaranteed an audience, just the ability to speak.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@octothorpe @trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron This. The fake question framed as if not pandering to their "AI" fawning bullshit is "not allowing them to be on fedi" is bad-faith sealioning. If they don't come here because they know folks here don't want to listen to their shit, that's not our problem.

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Phil Dennis-Jordan [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06 / 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias @octothorpe @trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron Yeah, I don't know what Fedi everyone else has been hanging out on, but there seem to be plenty of "AI" believers on here. I used to follow quite a number of them prior to their going off the LLM deep end. I have to maintain an extensive filter list to avoid having that stuff constantly surface in my feed.
This whole thing is just another variant of the tired old "free speech means you have to listen to my crap" argument.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@pmdj @octothorpe @trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron Well fedi doesn't make you hear the bad opinions of people you chose not to follow by algorithmically putting them in your feed to make you mad and drive up engagement.

So that means you don't see the AI propagandists on here except when someone you follow is debunking them.

Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@pmdj @dalias

That is the exact opposite of what I said. I'm saying the fediverse gives you the tools to follow/block/filter/ to your hearts content to create the space you want.

What is corrosive is people ACTIVELY going after people they don't agree with. Just look at the replies to my post to get small sample.

My point was, I thought, very simple, and very reasonable: we should be more welcoming of more opinions. If you don't like them, then don't follow them. That should be the fedi-way. To be clear, I'm NOT endorsing AI, it just used it as an example.

Instead I'm living the very point I was trying to make. I've been told to leave, called a racist, and had ad hominem attacks leveled at me.

Now to be fair, my original post was poorly worded. I've owned that
https://social.coop/@scottjenson/116358195717244835

Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]
OK, this is going even MORE sideways so I need to make a few things clear:
1. I took a complex point and made it poorly
2. My goal was to ask for more inclusiveness
3. I am sickened by what happend to BlackTwitter and I don't want it recur
4. But I can't speak for BlackTwitter nor should I
5. I apologize to black mastodon users for making such a poor comparison
6. I'm not endorsing "AI Slop" they were a foil to make my point
7. I'm certainly NOT trying to compare AI bros to Black twitter (but, as I said, I can see how people made that connection. I'm trying to correct that here)

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @pmdj No, we absolutely should NOT be "welcoming more opinions". "Diversity of thought" is NOT a value. Some opinions are wrong. They may have a right to exist, as long as they're not nazi opinions (those have no right to even exist), but that doesn't mean we have to welcome them. It's perfectly fine to tell people off for having bad opinions, to shun them, to let them share those bad opinions only with whoever is willing to listen to them and not in our circles.

If that causes them to leave fedi, that's not a bad thing.

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Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

So who watches the watchers?

Are you the god the decides who can stay or who should go? Who gave you that power?

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @pmdj There are no watchers. Nobody is "in charge". There is just everyone setting and enforcing their own personal boundaries.

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Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

This is the curse of the fediverse, a small cadre of usually old white guys that feel the need to "Educate" everyone around them. This is their duty, the world needs them and will eventually thank them for purifying the timeline of heretics.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @pmdj Old white guys like... checks notes... the one who's here scolding everyone that we need to be more welcoming of assholes.

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Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

I'm making a post on my timeline that you can ignore. There is a BIG difference to getting in someone's mentions and correcting them.

This is my whole point. We are each on the fediverse and we say what we want. You can like, ignore, whatever.

I'm NOT getting in anyone's mentions, I'm not scolding, I'm ASKING that we are more inclusive because it's the more humane and helpful thing to do, but hey, you can disagree, that's cool.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @pmdj You are speaking as a "Product Strategy Advisor to Mastodon Core team". You don't have to be up in someone's mentions for what you're saying to be relevant to us to speak out against. You're up in the ears of the people making decisions for the software that runs our platform.

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Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias @scottjenson @pmdj

Are you saying that asking for Mastodon to somehow be more open to new ideas and to foster a community that is more tolerant some type of evil plot?

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @pmdj It's not an "evil plot" it's just irresponsible growth hacking that capitalist social media platforms are infamous for. People with shitty opinions drive rage engagement, so encourage them to come! 🤮

As I said when I first engaged with this thead, yes "more open to new ideas" and "more tolerant" are BAD THINGS without further qualification. "Diversity of opinion" is NOT a value. It's freeze-peach bro shit.

Yes we should strive to be as inclusive as possible towards people born different from us who have not had the same experiences, privilegs, etc. as us and whose needs, concerns, ways of communicating, etc. might be very different from our own.

This does not imply we should also be inclusive towards people who want to kiss tech industy ass.

Cassandrich boosted

Fish Id Wardrobe ⁂ [He/Him (if you like)] » 🔓 2026-04-06 / 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @dalias @pmdj hard to ignore the guy who works for mastodon (?) that says that not giving equal time to folks killing puppies is a "personal choice"…

are you sure you work in PR?

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afreytes 🇵🇷 » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

... [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@dalias I thank you for this

Kwaze Kwaze » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias
He's gonna burn a hole in the projector somebody stop him!!!

Cassandrich boosted

leah & flutters & nose, oh my! [SHE/HER. [they/them in plural context only]] » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @dalias @pmdj that's the thing about power on a federated platform. nobody gave us that power. nobody can give us that power. we found it for ourselves when we realised that nobody, and no algorithm, is forcing us to listen to abhorrent opinions.

anyway, this post is a rehash of every frozen peach's shitty arguments from the year dot. honestly, they're beneath someone who's presenting themselves as an advisor to the Mastodon board. the only thing you could have done to make it more stereotypical is dip into incorrect Latin.

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Cassandrich » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@mewsleah @scottjenson @pmdj Uhg I didn't even see that he's presenting himself as a "strategic advisor". 🤮

🎉 to Gargron for rejecting that.

Myriam » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@dalias @scottjenson @pmdj
In my opinion thoughts are just thoughts, that's all.
It's better to assess them and provide/offer/think a good argument to refute the ones that are weak or wrong.

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De_Minimis » 🌐 2026-04-06 / 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @pmdj @dalias I'm with ya bro. Don't hear anyone complaining about ai application in the science fields. People are just focused on the slop side of things, not the tangible.

[edit]
Came back to posit a real world example.

Simulating ALL 100 billion stars in the Milky Way for the first time (with the help of AI?!
- Dr Becky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFpW5W06kV4

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@De_Minimis @scottjenson @pmdj I'm not going to click on the clickbait, but the claim is obviously not plausible and either she means something else and the title is just clickbait, or she's drunk the koolaid.

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De_Minimis » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias @scottjenson @pmdj She's an Astrophysicist and you're an idiot.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@De_Minimis @scottjenson @pmdj You cannot *simulate* any of that. I do not need to be an astrophysicists to know that.

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De_Minimis » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK6TXMsvgQg&list=RDMK6TXMsvgQg

jz.tusk » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @pmdj @dalias

"If you don't like them, then don't follow them. That should be the fedi-way"

I want people to build communities here. What you are proposing is what I've started calling "toxic individualism" - most Americans are taught this, and it's so pervasive that many of us don't even realize we are swimming in it.

But it prevents the many weak from coming together to protect themselves from the few powerful. I'm tired of being blandly atomized.

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Francis Cook » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@jztusk @scottjenson @pmdj @dalias hahaha. No. You want to build influence. Hard to do when the incentive to take part isn’t clicks or money or steered through an algorithm. If your idea of community is followers, that is not a community.

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Cassandrich » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dianshuo @jztusk @scottjenson @pmdj You can build influence legitimately, but that's mutual through organizing for shared interests by engaging with a community who shares them, not exploiting engagement algorithms to give your messages disproportionate weight.

Phil Dennis-Jordan [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @dalias So, the harassment via randos (or bots) in mentions/replies has been a problem for at least as long as I‘ve been on the Fedi. You absolutely need standards on how to behave, and those need to be backed by technological and social mechanisms or things devolve into a toxic mess. I think most of us are with you so far.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@pmdj @scottjenson Those problems would be largely fixed by reply controls and a working* block function, but for some reason Mastodon team can't give us those.

(*) By "working", I mean a block function that detaches all past replies by the account you're blocking from your posts, so that you're not serving as a billboard for their opinions every time someone expands your toot.

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LisPi » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias @pmdj @scottjenson > By "working", I mean a block function that detaches all past replies by the account you're blocking from your posts, so that you're not serving as a billboard for their opinions every time someone expands your toot.

Wouldn't this mostly be a UI thing?

The objects would still have the "in-reply-to" field pointing the same way.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@lispi314 @pmdj @scottjenson No, it's a matter of how your instance responds (and how other instances sync that) when queried for the thread context around one of your posts. This is not mere UI.

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LisPi » 🌐 2026-04-06 / 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias @pmdj @scottjenson I dislike the notion of mutating the objects, as followers of the one that got blocked may prefer to see the replies by one they explicitly follow (probably unlike the other party).

(This also becomes a question of who one trusts more and that's not a choice I think should be made for the users.)

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@lispi314 @pmdj @scottjenson If you have a client that's stitching them together, that's your business.

But my instance should not be using the "fetch context of this post by me" action to advertise hostile replies by someone I've explicitly blocked to others who are reading what I've written.

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Phil Dennis-Jordan [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias @lispi314 Yeah, the mutability argument is pretty weak; posts are already mutable: you can edit or entirely delete them. I don’t understand why that can’t extend to cutting off unwanted branches, or retroactively changing visibility.
If my post gets boosted too much and attracts toxic attention outside my usual community, my only options are to either bear the abuse (feebly blocking individuals) or to delete it for my followers too.
@scottjenson

Phil Dennis-Jordan [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias Yeah, see my second post, I couldn‘t quite squeeze all the context into one.
I really don‘t understand what @scottjenson is getting at, or why this sudden concern. I mean, it‘s great if they genuinely want to improve quality of discourse, but “hey, be nicer to the people shilling for the tech oligopoly that’s eating up all of the world’s energy & computer hardware, undermining labour, & stealing all the creative works in the world” hints at questionable motives.

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Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@pmdj @dalias
First, I'm using AI as an example, I'm not endorsing AI at all.
Second, and only as an example, there are open source people working on ethically trained local small language models. Again, I'm NOT endorsing them, but I can pretty confidently say that they would NOT be welcome here.

The same applies to journalism, there are VERY strong emotions here, basically telling them to fuck off (their words, not mine)

My point is that there is a pattern here: there are topics this community actively hates and "patrols" against. If that's what the community wants, cool, I'm not here to dictate anything. My point is that it might be nice to have a slightly more open way of sharing ideas: Follow, block, filter. You have the tools to make the feed you want (there are clearly more tools that would be helpful)

I'm just saying that focusing on your feed seems more healthy that attacking people whose opinions you don't like. Here, let me me give you an example of what I got 10 min ago

Alt...

Fuck off an die in a fire.

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Diogo Constantino » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson I'm with @pmdj on his point that, there's no good reason to consider that the opinion of all or even the majority of people here. The way this works, wouldn't even make that any individual is connected to every other individual, same applies to instances. This by itself would make it likely not representative, but people might even be blocking topics and words and accounts about AI and have no idea of what's happening on AI threads.

@dalias

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Diogo Constantino » 🌐 2026-04-06 / 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson we also know that nay sayers and assholes are usually more vocal than, people who like, or aren't concerned about something, and who are polite and respectful.

This doesn't mean that this noisy people aren't problematic, or act problematic about some particular topic, just that they need to be put into perspective, reported and blocked.

@pmdj @dalias

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@DiogoConstantino @scottjenson @pmdj "Polite and respectful" are not ideals to aspire to. Fuck no to tone policing. That you've lumped "naysayers" and "assholes" in the same group says a lot. In this domain and in lots of domains, the assholes are entirely the boosters, not the naysayers.

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Diogo Constantino » 🌐 2026-04-06 / 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias I strongly disagree that polite and disrespectful is not something to aspire. Being human towards others is something we should aspire. I police whatever I want to police on my feed, I recommend others to do the same.

It says exactly what I said, naysayers and assholes are always the most vocal. This is what I said, and it's precisely the full extent of what I said, anything more is not my opinion, it's not mine, and you're not entitled to say which is my opinion.

@scottjenson @pmdj

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Diogo Constantino » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias You're free to not be polite and respectful towards others, but personally I've found that being polite and respectful is better for me, and since I also can choose to behave how I want and give my opinion, that's what'll do.

@scottjenson @pmdj

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@DiogoConstantino @scottjenson @pmdj What I mean by tone policing is that often people with important critiques get dismissed for not being sufficiently subservient ("polite") towards power, when being subservient obviously would not get them what they need. And here on fedi, tone policing has been a classic vector of anti-Black racism. I would much rather hear someone speaking truth to power "impolitely" than hear someone being an apologist for power "politely".

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Diogo Constantino » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias to be polite and respectful, is not to be subservient. You can be those two things and stand your ground, be direct and say your thoughts, even veemently. We just don't need to dehumanize, to insult, dogpile, be obnoxious, or to behave even worse.

I'm not perfect, and I'm sure I did wrong to some, but I do aspire to strive for good and positive human interactions.

@scottjenson @pmdj

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@DiogoConstantino @scottjenson @pmdj The details lie in who is evaluating the distinction..

Sobri | Zoe (she/her) [she\her | they\them] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @pmdj @dalias if there was a group trying to make a model that made #alttext, I am pretty sure people would be pretty happy about it. Like alt bot. They do some cool stuff.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@cutesobri @scottjenson @pmdj There already are models that do this, and reactions are complicated. On the one hand, it may provide some accessibility where post authors refuse to. On the other hand, it's subjecting users who need ALT text to very dubious-quality, possibly wildly inaccurate description, that often miss what was important about the image even if they're not technically inaccurate. On top of that, these models often impart harmful biases from their training corpora into the descriptions, for example misgendering or misclassifying people's roles in an image based on gendered or racialized assumptions about who belongs in what roles.

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Sobri | Zoe (she/her) [she\her | they\them] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@dalias @scottjenson @pmdj I mean, that's why we need better models. I mean, they're never going perfect with the new technology. We can at least improve them by a lot and even if not, we can at least make an image format that has alt text built in.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@cutesobri @scottjenson @pmdj Those aren't really problems you can solve with "better models". Debiasing text is tractable by removing markers that could be proxies for characteristics that shouldn't be used is tractable, but for images it really isn't. And no model can gather *intent* information from the author that isn't recorded anywhere.

Bruce Simpson, Ph.D. » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

@dalias @octothorpe @trisweb @cratermoon @scottjenson @Gargron Never underestimate the humble sea lion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning#/media/File:Sealioning.png

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Orca 🌻 | 🎀 | 🪁 | 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ boosted

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

anyone who unironically uses the word "engagement" to describe social interactions can fuck themselves off a cliff. their priorities are sick and their motivations are deranged, and workshopping ways to attract more content farmers isn't going improve anything

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pmjv s klapkami na očích » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

😞

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

present company excluded, of course

@spiegelmama @ben @scottjenson

Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson

It's called a 'marketplace of ideas'.

Also known as: 'If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen'.

If a ton of people criticize your choices and your technical positions, maybe the problem is YOU and not the people doing the criticizing? Just a thought.

Ben Hardill » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @carnage4life Or maybe we all come here to get away from the politics and the AI BS

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Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@ben But that's the very definition of a mono-culture. A vibrant community allows all of these topics, encourages them even. Then, with filters, who you follow, hashtags, and blocking you get the feed you want.

To get the culture you want by cutting off the supply is counter productive.

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Ben Hardill » 🌐 2026-04-05 / 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@scottjenson But I get pushed US politics all day by the main stream media & I'm not even in the US & current politics (here & there) is heavily slanted towards manufactured wedge issues.

AI is a similar, for me the moral and environmental arguments against are plenty before we get into the rest, yet as I work in software it's impossible to get away from.

So I come to a place where I can choose not to engage with it, I block/mute very little, I mainly ignore it if it ends up in my feed.

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Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@ben and I want to support you, you have every right to view what you want. I'm not asking you to see anything you don't want.

I'm just saying that solving this issue by gatekeeping is a slippery slope. We need better filtering tools, not a purity test of who is allowed to post here.

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AodeRelay boosted

Ben Hardill » 🌐 2026-04-05 / 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@scottjenson I may have miss understood the initial post, I'm not suggesting the journalists shouldn't post, just that I think their engagement measurement may not be the right metric (but it is the one they are used to)

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AodeRelay boosted

spiegelmama [She] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@ben @scottjenson So, a little context from a former journalist: I asked my boss if I could start and manage a mastodon account for my publication, and she advised that we would have to conduct a study to justify the use of my time - a company asset - by measuring traffic that mastodon drove to our site. Because this is a respectful space, there was no real way to track clicks, so I couldn't justify it and I ended up deleting the account I had already started. It's often not a matter of the journalist's lack of imagination or excess of ego, but their need to meet metrics.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

If you have to use 2 units company time to evaluate whether the 1 unit of company time you're using is being well spent, there's already a problem 😂

J Miller » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@spiegelmama

Thank you for sharing your authentic experience. My snarky side says "Were they that circumspect in the early days of Twitter? I bet not."

But you point to a very valid issue for journalists that I believe also extends to nonprofits. It's not the whole answer, but we who want journalists and nonprofits may need to actively hit the like button a lot more.

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stefan (stefbun) » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@JMMaok @spiegelmama tbh it does not seem tooo hard to me to measure "engagement" atleast for the number a link is clicked (which could be used as a measure on how much "traffic" a presence on masto brings you).

You can do analytics like this in a very unintrusive way not even much needed.

A german publication and NGO that fights fake news uses a simple UTM parameter in the links they share here by attaching "utm_source=mstdn" which could give you a hint on where visitors are coming from when they click a link. Should not be to intrusive tbh. And analytics software can track this.

> by measuring traffic that mastodon drove to our site. Because this is a respectful space, there was no real way to track clicks, so I couldn't justify it

So tbh this seems more like a skill issue more than "there is no way to track this stuff". using a simple parameter is not intrusing privacy all that much tbh and may be deamed acceptable.

Obviously a discussion with the community of where the account posts if this is fine.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@stefan @spiegelmama @JMMaok

Yeah but fedi also has a disproportionate number of people who are going to use tools that remove tracking parameters from links...

Samuel boosted

Ciara » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson I'm not sure this is the best example of Mastodon gatekeeping. I suspect the person you cite (I won't tag him, to not bother him. I follow him. He doesn't follow me) has a different definition of 'engagement' than many on Mastodon. He has 19,000 followers. He follows just over 200. He never ever engages with anyone. He posts one-way toots. He never uses Alt Text. The Fediverse is a chatty place full of engagement, if you choose to take part yourself, to chat, to boost, to reply.

Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@dalias/116352044296051287

@scottjenson @carnage4life Seriously? 🤦

Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-05 / 2026-04-05
@[email protected]
@carnage4life What I'm saying is that you seem to be comparing how much people uncritically love the stuff you post.
It's weird that you see Mastodon as a "filter bubble" but don't see Bluesky as a filter bubble of fawning tech fans and mainstream politics wonks. They are not remotely representative of the general public.

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AodeRelay boosted

Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @carnage4life There's nothing keeping the Twitter journalist class off here as long as they want to come here and follow the basic rules about consent, abuse, and hate speech (something some of them seem rather poor at though, for example treating transphobic hate speech as "just asking questions").

But we sure as hell don't have to kiss AI bros' asses trying to convince them to come here. Much less nazis'.

Patrick H. Lauke » 🌐 2026-04-05 / 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @carnage4life threads and bluesky are single monolithic platforms. masto federated. so would likely depend on which masto server someone's posting on i'd guess as a starter...

also, purely anecdotally/for my own part, there's less of a culture of boosting/liking/trying to make things go viral for the algorithm. lack of apparent engagement may not signal lack of people actually reading posts/following links/etc.

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Patrick H. Lauke » 🌐 2026-04-05 / 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @carnage4life "we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!" if they're only coming to see number go up engagement metrics... they may have a hard time. maybe they should come here to, oh i don't know, spread information? have targeted discussions with specific folks (rather than hoping for drive-by engagement)?

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Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@patrick_h_lauke So is the only alternative "number go DOWN" metrics? I'm not trying to be snarky, I'm trying to find a way to have both be possible: how can we keep our soul but still have a diverse community.

My concern is that your comment uses the "we don't want a number go up mentality" argument to hide the fact that our community is a mono culture.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@scottjenson @patrick_h_lauke

The short answer seems very strongly to be "it's irrelevant because that's not what people here want"

Mastodon and fedi in general are very much countercultural. Most people who come to these platforms do so to get away from other platforms, many of which are more inclusive of mainstream voices.

So by its very nature, mastodon has a selection bias for people who do not want inclusivity.

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Shannon Prickett boosted

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

also completely overlooking the "you can use two apps" hole in the side of this logic boat

we lose nothing by crowding out the content farmers, because we can just go sign up for content-farm platforms if their bullshit is for some reason important to us. nothing is stopping anyone from using all of these platforms, except good taste

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

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Krzysztof Sakrejda » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@khm @pixx @scottjenson @patrick_h_lauke so your saying we *don't* want to be the Borg?

pmjv s klapkami na očích » 🔓 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

i have a hard time letting things go sometimes

Alt...

hot actives in your area

Daniel Brotherston » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

This take...makes no sense. "Countercultural" is almost never anti-inclusive. Counter-culture knows what it's like to be excluded.

The idea that "mainstream" voices are being "excluded" is ridiculous...mainstream voices are never excluded...it's actually a decent definition of "mainstream".

But the original thread is not better...the idea that "number go down" is not something I've seen supported (but neither have I seen it opposed) but the idea that more interaction = more diversity is just weird.

I dunno...earlier in the thread there's a suggestion "oh there's less people feeding the algorithm" and I'm not sure OP even knows how Mastodon/Fediverse works.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

> Counter-culture knows what it's like to be excluded.

Sure. It does not follow that counter-culture is not also exclusive, that makes no sense.

> The idea that "mainstream" voices are being "excluded" is ridiculous...mainstream voices are never excluded...it's actually a decent definition of "mainstream".

Yes, they're not excluded _from mainstream spaces_; people come here _to avoid those spaces_ and thus as a direct rejection of the people _who are in them_. This argument also makes no sense.

Fedi can reasonably be defined by what it is _not_. It is absolutely hostile towards corporate actors, engagement farming, and much of "normal" / "mainstream" culture.

Twitter remains a much more mainstream space; many people are here specifically to avoid it _and the people on it_. Which continues to be, well, most of them.

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Daniel Brotherston » 🔓 2026-04-06 / 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

Oh no....we're hostile to engagement farming and corporate PR departments.

No, you're right...we're inclusive of people...ONLY people.

People in "mainstream" places are not excluded here, neither are mainstream viewpoints and opinions nor mainstream ideas.

The only thing that is being excluded then is financialization and corporate capture.

I call that "inclusive".

It's the equivalent of the paradox of tolerance. Being tolerant of intolerance is intolerant. Being inclusive of grifts and PR is exclusive.

I am not here to avoid the PEOPLE on twitter...I'm here to avoid the grifts, bots, and nazis--ooh...woops, you're right...we are not inclusive of Nazi's either. I guess you have a point.... 🙄

Honestly, I find this take bizarre...this place has it's problems, but it's vastly more inclusive than Twitter or Bluesky.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

Fedi is very inclusive of traditionally excluded people, and very _unfriendly_ to normies, even if it's not actively hostile.

There's also a very, very obvious political bias, which is just as extreme (but in different directions) than mainstream platforms, and one which is not particularly welcoming of normie opinions either.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

Example: I have very strong negative opinions about AI. I also know that _almost everyone_ I've encountered IRL has at least found it _cool_. At least one friend has said they only avoid AI because they know _I_ don't like it.

Anyone talking about AI in anything resembling a positive light is probably going to have a bad time here. That's a _lot_ of normal people right now.

There's a lot of things that are normal that probably shouldn't be that people here do not like. This does not change that they are normal.

Normal people coming here and talking normally _will_ receive harassment because of it.

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Daniel Brotherston » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

I dunno...I have a nuanced and not entirely negative view of AI, and I don't have a bad time here.

Having my ideas challenged isn't "a bad time"...and if I really wanted to, I could find people who did feel differently. There's over a million people on here, not all of them feel the same way.

That said, I have never seen the harassment you speak of, and certainly I cannot imagine that someone would be harassed for "normal" actions and opinions.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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Daniel Brotherston » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

As for Fedi being unfriendly to "normies" ... I've seen conversations here explicitly discussing how to be welcoming to new people from other platforms.

But there is an inherent complexity to a distributed network that simply doesn't exist for a centralised corporatised network.

I do think that people will find a difference here between the intentionally algorithmically addictive feed from Twitter vs. the chronological feed here, just as any addictive experience is different from a neutral one.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

> how to be welcoming

Yeah there's a lot of desire and moralizing about being welcoming, until it actually happens and a lot of the people are Wrong about Some Important Thing

Patrick H. Lauke » 🌐 2026-04-05 / 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@scottjenson sounds a bit like "people don't engage with my content, so it's a monoculture"?

Alt...

meme image of jeb bush, with superimposed text "come on now... please clap"

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Patrick H. Lauke » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@scottjenson the alternative is a "number mean NOTHING" metric...

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Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@patrick_h_lauke The metrics are clear, people are leaving mastodon, our daily actives are going down. I agree that pursing follower count is not what Mastodon should be about, we likely agree on many points here. I'm just trying to say 'being more welcoming of other points of view' shouldn't be controvertial. Yet so many replies have been "we don't want them here!" which feels very head-in-the-sand to me.

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1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

no way to tell if people are leaving the fediverse or people are just switching to activitypub servers that don't track "daily actives"

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pmjv s klapkami na očích » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

man, I've been learning so many new cool words from this thread.

w [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

'being more welcoming of other points of view' means that I might listen to what you have to say. it doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to tell you your posts suck and belong somewhere else if they come down my timeline

8 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

the year is 1999. I am chastised for showing up to work in a Megadeth t-shirt. The job is manual labor at a chicken farm.

the year is 2026. I am chastised for showing up to work in an Iron Maiden t-shirt. The job is 100% remote.

Sigrid Solveig Haflínudóttir [she/they] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

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2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

wish I looked this good in a ski mask

Jason Gorman » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

Is code what we produce? Like a civil engineer produces concrete?

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clew » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

The only civil engineering class I ever took, there was a whole problem set built towards the realization that sometimes the optimal answer is to build nothing. Pour no concrete. Possibly do less of whatever.

Blew our minds!

@jasongorman

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irrational method [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-07 / 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@clew
Hey, I'm a civil engineer whose job description is managing a software development project... For software that (in part) helps other civil engineers identify ways to use existing systems better (specifically reservoirs).

I'm all for _not building_ new things!

@jasongorman

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

civil engineers take legal responsibility for the things they do

so no, in the most important possible aspect, not at all like a civil engineer produces anything

pixx » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

random UX observation: if my printer just automatically reversed the page order when printing, the resulting stack would be trivial to staple

but instead I have to manually grab every single page and swap the order. This is so dumb

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

fairly sure there's an option to do is using the windows print dialog, so the question is, can I find a good way to do it under Linux, other than using a PDF modification tool and a custom pipeline? 🤔

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2 ★ 1 ↺

Ángel boosted

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

if you're using CUPS you can use lpoptions(1) to set -o outputorder=reverse as a default

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@khm
Oooh thanks, couldn't find that :)

1 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

mac os software developers appear to be congenitally incapable of creating a program that does not have an icon in the top bar

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R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

Not sure what this refers to... Example?

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2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

Attached is a screenshot from Apple's own website. see in the upper right corner? Battery, wifi, search, settings, clock.

Every single program you install puts more shit there. the row of icons gets so long it hides behind the stupid camera notch they cut out of the display. there are programs dedicated to organizing these icons. there are programs that hide them so your screenshots don't look ugly. there are programs whose entire UI exists within its top-bar icon. it's straight up Windows 95 madness

Alt...

a screenshot of Mac OS

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R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

Huh! I remember one or two applications doing that in the Snow Leopard era, but not that many.

That's straight-up windowzish crappy UX.

Now I see why some Linux guys hate on the system tray.

To be honest, KDE Plasma is very similar, except that those are usually pretty useful, and auto-hide when they're not relevant.

There will be one or two that are persistent and pointless, though.

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2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

here's an animated gif demonstrating a commerical product someone sells

staggeringly bad

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R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

That's astounding.

What percentage of those menubar-litterers would you say are useful?

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

approximately zero. the one for the VPN is probably fine

of the ones that can't be disabled, none of them are useful. my favorite is the one that doesn't seem to do anything but pop up a menu that just has 'exit' in it. it's greyed out.

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R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

Wow. That's some serious devolution. :/

pmjv s klapkami na očích » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

lol, this is insane

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ozzi » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@[email protected]
delicious windows xp era bullshit
@[email protected] @[email protected]

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R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@ozzelot @pmjv @khm

Worse, honestly. 🤦🏻‍♂️

pmjv s klapkami na očích boosted

roger w. capisce [she/her] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@khm MacOS is for aesthetes. You wouldn't understand. The operating system is perfectly constructed.

Alt...

MacOS dialogue box: Sneaky! The Tailscale icon is hiding behind the notch. The Tailscale icon is hidden due to limited space in the menu bar. To see the Tailscale menu, please rearrange or remove some of the other icons.

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0 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

there is no Jobs but Jobs and Cook is his prophet

ozzi » 🔓 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

@[email protected]
Sneaky!

Good fuck can software limit its quirkiness
@[email protected]

thedæmon (Clay Ayers) [he / him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

Did they reinvent the system tray?

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2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

yes! complete with random colors, blinking, meaningless 'alert' badges, and no way to predict what the hell happens when you click them!

current zen meditation: the wifi thing only shows wifi. there is no visible indication of ethernet connection.

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Reid » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@khm @thedaemon

> current zen meditation: the wifi thing only shows wifi. there is no visible indication of ethernet connection.

technically they're not lying, but also even I managed the technical feat of showing both WiFi and Ethernet in the same block in Tarme, so Idk what Apple's excuse is

Shawn Webb [He/Him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

Trump sucks so much at making deals he resorted to murdering over a hundred school girls. So there's that.

Because nothing says diplomacy like good old fashioned war crimes.

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thedæmon (Clay Ayers) [he / him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

He just said he's not worried about war crimes. Who is going to prosecute him for it anyways? Fuck this guy.

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Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@thedaemon @lattera

At one point, if he is still alive, of course, he may discover a transitional US government has decided to send him to the ICC in The Hague...

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2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

first the US would have to recognize the ICC

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Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

I think the US would have no problem sending Trump to The Hague if MAGA terrorists were threatening and disrupting the normal course of justice within the territories of the USA.

@thedaemon @lattera

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Shawn Webb [He/Him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

re: uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@ParadeGrotesque @khm @thedaemon I mean, we're not even prosecuting Epstein's associates--rather, we're protecting them. Shows you how messed up we are. (The "we" in this is a broad generalization of the entire country.)

2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

I, however, think they'd have no problem voting for MAGA terrorists in order to ease the threatening and disruption of the normal course of justice within the territories of the USA

@khm @ParadeGrotesque @thedaemon @lattera

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

I also think it's naive to assume that a country that knowingly voted for this guy, twice, is going to elect someone who's going to do that

Like... this _is_ democracy. A lot of people are dipshits. We live in a society run by dipshits elected by other dipshits.

Not to mention the past history of war crimes by every major power, literally no actively-major power has _ever_ been punished by other countries

The only force that has ever backed international decrees is _force_, and the ICC doesn't have that.

In practical terms, it's just a vehicle for larger countries to force smaller ones to their will. Not russia nor china nor the US will _ever_ be brought up on _anything_ there because the _only way to enforce it would be a war_.

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Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@pixx

Imagine regime change in the US and Russia.

It could be expedient for the new governments to send former heads of states to the ICC, instead of trying them at home.

Especially if parts of the judiciary are still under the control of die hard partisans of the former Presidents.

Likely? Maybe not. But we have seen stranger things.

@khm @thedaemon @lattera

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@ParadeGrotesque @khm @thedaemon @lattera

> regime change in the US and Russia

Great, and _you_ want to go to war for that?

Cuz TBH if someone else invades my home, I don't really care what my feelings on the current government are, I sure as fuck am not siding with the invaders.

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Parade du Grotesque 💀 » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@pixx

Who said anything about war?

Trump may be removed (big may be) by elections for example.

Putin could (big could) be removed by oligarchs and a combination of disgruntled intelligence services and military people.

@khm @thedaemon @lattera

pixx » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

@khm @ParadeGrotesque @thedaemon @lattera

Like, really, what gets me with this is that people keep going "but but but they broke a RULE!"

great, and? Rules aren't magic. The law isn't a real thing. It's at best an agreement enforced with violence.

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2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

uspol [SENSITIVE CONTENT]

the eternal conflict between "the will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government" and "I'm gonna tell Mom"

CC: @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

AodeRelay boosted

Passenger [He/Him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

No matter how awful a president we South Africans elect, no matter how despicable his beliefs are, he cannot nuke anyone. This is because we chose to get rid of all of our nuclear weapons in the late 1980s, inviting in foreign inspectors in 1991 to certify that we had no stockpile and no ability to create one.

South Africa is a long way from perfect but we are the only people in the world democratic enough to have rid ourselves of weapons of mass destruction, and thereby limited the powers of any future bad presidents ahead of time.

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Older...

Velocipedestrienne 🇿🇦 » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@passenger Oh yes, the moral high ground of getting rid of your nukes before turning over the keys to a Black majority democratic government. I remember it well.

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Passenger [He/Him] » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@HayiWena

Far be it from me to speak well of F W De Klerk in the 1980s, he did a lot of shady stuff in the attempt to prop up the dying Apartheid system, but I think this is one thing that had good effects.

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Velocipedestrienne 🇿🇦 » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@passenger Yes, just not done out of noble intentions.

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Passenger [He/Him] » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@HayiWena

Oh, absolutely. Even his surrender that ended Apartheid was done in such a way as to preserve economic power and land ownership in White hands.

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Velocipedestrienne 🇿🇦 » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@passenger I don't know that "enjoyed" is the right word, but I appreciated Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh's book on the privatization of apartheid. https://sizwempofuwalsh.com/product/thenewapartheid

flere-imsaho 🇺🇦 [he/him, on/jego] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@HayiWena you may want to look up the name renfrew christie before you start pontificating too much, thanks.

@passenger

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Velocipedestrienne 🇿🇦 » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@mawhrin @passenger Oh you read that article when he passed away last year, cool, good for you. My dad did work at Koeberg once, but please lecture me some more.

AodeRelay boosted

David Penfold » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@passenger I think Ukraine may also have done this.

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6 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

Yep. via the Trilateral Statement in 1994 Ukraine surrendered its weapons for decommissioning and signed the nuclear nonproliferation treaties in return for assurances that Russia would not militarily or economically attack Ukraine. So that went well.

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@khm @davep Ah, but they did so under coercion, whereas OP said

> democratic enough to have rid ourselves of weapons of mass destruction

> democratic enough

I'm curious what OP thinks about a circumstance where a nation votes, in a direct referendum, to build more nukes? 😂

"Democratic" and "did awful things" often go hand in hand lol

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2 ★ 0 ↺

khm [he/him] » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

As has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, there wasn't direct coercion involved, but the circumstances surrounding South Africa's denuclearization require an extremely friendly interpretation to interpret as well-motivated. The Angolan war abruptly ending, Botha getting chased out of office, de Klerk scrambling to rescue what influence he could, the unbanning of the ANC, Mandela's freedom, and denuclearization all happened in the space of like a year. Shit was happening and the Apartheid fucks could see they were running out of road.

So, given the timing, did they decommission because they thought it was the right thing to do, or to keep the bomb out of the hands of the people they'd been oppressing for generations?

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@khm @davep

Gee, I wonder. Musta been because it was the right thing to do, because clearly it was the _democratic thing to do_. Yknow, to keep it out of the hands of democracy. For the sake of democracy.

Passenger [He/Him] » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@khm @pixx @davep

The answer you get within South Africa, at least, is that we initially built the nukes to blackmail the Americans into continuing to support Apartheid; and when the Americans finally got fucking sick of us and didn't want to put up with our shit any more, we had to get rid of them.

Which is fair, you know. I am also sick of pro-Apartheid South Africans' shit.

I have read that the Russians think that Soviet pressure also had something to do with it, and they might be right. I have also read that the French think they have something to do with it and the Israelis think they had nothing to do with it. I do not know what the American story is.

Passenger [He/Him] » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@pixx @khm @davep

Since you asked:

To me, as to many people, democracy is about more than just electoralism.

South Africa in 1988 was not democratic, for all that we had elections. Not only could Black, Coloured and Asian South Africans not vote, but the people who lived in the neighbouring states which we dominated could not vote. We had a small White population exercising hegemony at bayonet-point over a much larger population, both within and without the country, and the nukes were built in preparation for the day that those bayonets were insufficient. The ritual of elections doesn't change that this is fundamentally antidemocratic.

Removing our nuclear blackmail ability - for all that it was done by an extremely shady leader under extremely shady circumstances - meant that we no longer had the ability to terrorise people into obeying us. We had to build a consensus, both within the country and the world at large. That is an inherently democratic step.

Several years later, we also had elections with a wider franchise, but by then the nukes were gone. Disarmament was the last act of the fascist Apartheid regime.

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

today is April 7th, 2026, a pivotal date in the history of the greatest work of web-native literature

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

your blog does not need a CDN

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Pavel Janíček » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

@khm But millions of people read it!!!

pmjv s klapkami na očích » 🌐 2026-04-08
@[email protected]

your blog does not need an anime girl web ai firewall utility

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

the only view consistently expressed in this thread is that Scott Jenson believes he is incapable of being wrong, and everyone else is bad for taking his words at face value instead of telepathically divining "what he meant"

I hope "addressing this internally" means "canceling this idiot's contract"

https://hachyderm.io/@haubles/116364023562775369

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R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

RE: https://social.coop/@scottjenson/116352522288234148

The dude's credits in UX/UI design history are legit, but he seems to have spent too much time in FAANG culture. :'(

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

if I worked on Symbian, Android, or Chrome UX there's no way in a thousand years I'd ever admit that in public

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@khm @rl_dane

If I was running a software-adjacent company and found out an employee had contributed to the "UX" of Chrome or Android I'd have them fired on the spot 😂

Either a) you were not actually contributing or b) you were part of the problem or c) you're not going to tell me when there's problems as long as you're getting paid

there is no circumstance where you are a good employee lol

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R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🔓 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@pixx @khm

I was thinking more of System 7, but ok, snarky bois. XD

Ozzelot boosted

hannah aubry » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

The views reflected by Scott in this thread do not reflect the opinions of the Mastodon core team or organisation. We're addressing this internally. I'm sorry everyone

Scott Jenson » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]
Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber? This post from @carnage4life has me questioning our community. The Mastodon team is finally getting some traction, the product improvements are increasing, The #UX is improving, yet people posting on multiple platforms are making comments like this. It's confusing.
I *know* people here don't want this to be a classic social media-clone but we'd *like* journalists to be here right? They aren't coming with examples like this!
Alt...
Post from @carnage4life showing how their followers are growing on threads/Bluesky but falling on Mastodon.

🗳 ✓

Cassandrich boosted

May Likes Toronto [Any Pronouns] » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

Working software developers of the Fedi, what's your relationship with AI coding (like Claude Code)?

#poll #askFedi #software

Don't like it. I don't use it for work.:	459
Don't like it. I have to use it for work.:	107
It's complicated. I don't use it for work.:	46
It's complicated. I have to use it for work.:	92
It's complicated. I happily use it for work.:	65
I like it. I don't use it for work.:	9
I like it. I have to use it for work.:	3
I like it. I happily use it for work.:	57
Other, comment below.:	22

Closed

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🗳

May Likes Toronto [Any Pronouns] » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

Not a developer. Want to follow this poll. and see when it's over.

Poll!:	25
poll.:	8

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May Likes Toronto [Any Pronouns] » 🌐 2026-04-05 / 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

I wonder what the distribution will look like if we get to 100-200+ votes.

My hypothesis is that the more casual Fedi users are more likely to use AI coding in some way.

Update:
- Started at 28% some sort of AI Coding use at ~60 votes.
- 36% at 336 votes.

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The Lack Thereof » 🌐 2026-04-05
@[email protected]

@mayintoronto I'm just absolutely astounded that there's this many professional coders who *aren't* required to use it in some form for work yet.

The enterprise-grade/enterprise-cost tools are far better than the basic stuff.

We have a monthly per-dev credit budget so literally on a prompt by prompt basis I have to decide which model to send it to, based on what I'm doing and how much budget I have left.

Claude Opus 4 is definitely the best. If I get all the context loaded right and give an essay-length prompt full of requirements, it will usually get something I can send out for code review with little corrections. It is also the most expensive by far.

Claude Sonnet and Claude Haiku are not worth using.

GPT-5 Codex High is next best and gets you 90% of what Claude does but at 1/3 the cost. I usually reach for it as my primary model.

GPT-5 Codex Medium is half the cost of High and I use it for simpler tasks or fixing up other models minor mistakes.

The whole gemini family is infuriating. It often does the right thing on the first prompt but when it gets things wrong it does it in the most infuriating, non-obvious way and once you see it, it absolutely refuses to take correction.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@lackthereof @mayintoronto A lot of actual programming takes place at real serious businesses actually making products and getting stuff done, the complete opposite of VC clownery flirting with investors or web monkey shops selling shovels to those types.

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May Likes Toronto [Any Pronouns] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias @lackthereof A lot of serious businesses are adopting it too across the size spectrum. As silly as the Claude Code source looks, there are some super legit use cases in even legacy enterprise type software. (Especially while the prices are hyper deflated to get people hooked on it.)

Is it still legit when they have to charge profitable prices? Probably not.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06 / 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@mayintoronto @lackthereof I'm highly skeptical of the claim that there are "legit use cases".

If you're talking about using the models to find patterns correlated with bugs/vulns, that indeed is a good use for statistical models, but having a chatbot interface that gives randomly perturbed answers, rather than a deterministic grep-for-bugs using the statistical model, is just gratuitous badness aimed at exploiting cognitive weaknesses in the user to sell your product, not making best use of the tech.

If you're talking about anything generative, even boilerplate, I don't buy that it's legit. Even in boilerplate, you have to *check* that the slop it vomited is actually correct. You could write scripts to do that, but you could just as easily write the scripts to generate the boilerplate, and have it be deterministic and reproducible and non-planet-burning.

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May Likes Toronto [Any Pronouns] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias @lackthereof No, it's doing a rough pass scanning legacy code answering questions about the 300 custom packages that you've inherited and no one left has the institutional knowledge to know how they're all connected.

Doesn't need to be perfect. There are so many cases where you don't necessarily need the right answer, but it gets you on the right path to having the answers to build the right things.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@mayintoronto @lackthereof Ah, so you're thinking about it from a standpoint of "summarization", but where you're not trusting the summary but using it as a basis to start trying to understand something that's otherwise overwhelming to look at?

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May Likes Toronto [Any Pronouns] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias @lackthereof Yeah, among other things. Fully aware that it's one hell of a slippery slope.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@mayintoronto @lackthereof Yes, it very much is. The summaries you'll be reading are of the form of the cognitohazard.

For things like this I *really* wish there were a mode on these things to *not* have them pretend to be human, but to output very mechanical looking documents to remind the reader that they are not conversing with a thinking being.

The Lack Thereof » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@dalias @mayintoronto

My workplace is an old stodgy multinational megacorp. My team produces rack-scale infrastructure appliances. The file I was working on on Friday had a git history dating to 2004 (partially imported from CVS).

We're not making app-of-the-week stuff, we're definitely not chasing VC funding. But management seems absolutely terrified that if we don't adopt LLM driven development practices, like, yesterday, we're going to be left in the dust by all our competitors who have.

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Cassandrich boosted

Third spruce tree on the left » 🌐 2026-04-06 / 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@lackthereof @dalias @mayintoronto

I would argue that if you started in 2004 or before and you're still around and you make IT infrastructure related devices... you're doing something right and you should probably just keep doing what you're doing.

The fact that this is lost on techbro VPs and CEOs is a mystery to me.

Haha no mystery, they're frequently quite stupid.

Like your sales Dept. should run campaigns like "STILL FUCKING WORKS PROPERLY." or "100% Enshittification Free"

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@tezoatlipoca @lackthereof @mayintoronto Yeah. The only thing this business would get out of adopting "LLM driven development practices" is a drastic reduction in quality/reliability, increase in stupid bugs.

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The Lack Thereof » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@dalias @tezoatlipoca @mayintoronto

From VP on down, upper management is thoroughly convinced this strategy is going to result in new product features being delivered in half the time.

I can tell lower management is not fully sold. They talk the company line in public and then in private tell us they want us to make holding the line on quality our focus.

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@lackthereof @tezoatlipoca @mayintoronto So dysfunctional. 🤦

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Cassandrich » 🌐 2026-04-07
@[email protected]

@lackthereof @tezoatlipoca @mayintoronto This whole scam really is destroying well-run businesses and turning employees who should be working together to get things done into adversaries who have to play shadowy games to avoid sabotage from above.

CyberFrog » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

Post quantum cryptography is no longer an optional feature, or something nice to have, it's now a baseline requirement to call your system secure in any capacity tbh

https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

nothing wrong with stronger crypto, but none of these breathless hype machines have shit to show for evidence

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CyberFrog » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@[email protected] the results regarding increased computation capacity and calculations with reduced error rates are still relevant to security systems that likely need to survive 20+ years into the future though, and ignoring them until they're actually extremely close to breaking the crypto we use is also a bad idea

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

Like I said, nothing wrong with stronger crypto, but not even on a 20-year time scale is there the slightest danger of the quantum grifters producing a single useable attack. I'm sure they're having fun with their conlang, but not only do they not have a computer than can run any of this shit, they don't even have a working plan to get there. It's a non-issue.

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khm [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

person said "that's a losing battle" as a justification for not fighting it

maybe they're trying to appear pragmatic

but all I take from it is they don't care as much about right and wrong as they do about winning

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khm boosted

brendan (ジャンク品) [he/him] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@khm you lose 100% of the battles you don't fight

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pixx » 🔓 2026-04-06
@[email protected]

@bnys @khm

And, relatedly, you fight 100% of the battles you don't lose!

R.L. Dane 🍵 [he/him/my good fellow] » 🌐 2026-04-06
@[email protected]