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• Post #3784778

  What's everyone like for a #GameDad handheld? Anbernic is sorta looking like the most popular choice.

• Post #1896525

  "Scientists say older animals often play several critical roles in how populations function, broadly falling into three categories: ecological knowledge, reproduction, and immunity. They carry knowledge that guides survival, play outsized roles in producing the next generation, and possess stronger defenses against disease built up over time. Together, these qualities can make the difference between populations that endure and those that slowly fall apart." https://e360.yale.ed...

• Post #1602049

  Corporate social media sold us the premise that a network only has value if it functions as a "global public square" — that any network not engaged in the process of drawing in everyone is therefore a failure. But the value I find in the fediverse derives not from its universality, but rather from the particularity of what takes place here. I don't want to keep people out, but I don't feel any urgency about growing any bigger than is required to sustain what we&...

• Post #1474468

  This is such a fantastic resource: https://anatomyof.ai

• Post #1379251

  If you can make operating systems so that they handle age verification for every app and website they encounter, then you can make operating systems that decline AI integration for every app and website they encounter, and I'd much rather have the latter than the former.

• Post #1214215

  What exactly does everyone mean when they say Bluesky is down? Presumably it's not the PDS since it seems to be affecting other PDS too. Is it the appview? (In which case, other appviews, like Whitewind, should still be working.) Is it the relay? (Which would stop just about everything.) Do outages like this take out the other *sky networks as well?

• Post #1159539

  Yes, "agentic" is supposed to make you think of the program as something with agency, which it does not have. Okay, good, we've all caught onto that. But "agentic" is also supposed to make you think of something discrete, a separate entity summoned just for you, your own little worker imp, when it resolutely is not. It's a way of obscuring the enormous, undifferentiated mass of data center cloud that handles most LLM operations.

• Post #1156285

  "Most of your screen time isn't leisure. It isn't addiction. It isn't even a choice. It's maintenance." https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing

• Post #1017393

  Don't tell people to leave Mastodon. Mastodon is just server software. It's not your community. Don't tell people to leave the fediverse. The fediverse is just the aggregate of federated services. It is also not your community. The closest thing you have to a community here is your home instance. Moderate and gatekeep that however you see fit, up to and including whose messages you want to allow via federation, but don't forget that other communities are not you...

• Post #999124

  Kinda feels like we ought to have much better software to show for 3.5 years of 10x software development.

• Post #958391

  Part of where today's main character post went wrong is that there was a trend a few years back in which tech bros tried to pass "viewpoint diversity" off as a DEI issue so that they could justify bringing more conservative/libertarian voices to the table, and while that's not where he was going with that post, that's the frequency it vibrated.

• Post #892232

  Sorta disappointing how often the narrative arc of rock biopics ends up being, "I wanted to be a rock star, so I started acting like one until it made me rich."

• Post #889684

  I have very little patience for most "poetic" novels.

• Post #884652

  A previous job involved a lot of lawn and garden research, so if you have a lawn and want to be more environmentally friendly this season: 1. Raise the carriage of your lawnmower. Like: All the way. Most people cut their grass much too short. Taller grass provides better coverage and can reduce the need for watering by shading the soil and slowing evaporation. 2. What's the most eco-friendly lawn mower? One of these bad boys: https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/lawn-garden/g40061434/...

• Post #852966

  The popular understanding of enshittification gets things precisely backwards. It's not that digital platform startups set out to make valuable services for consumers, but end up making changes that tilt the balance toward exploitation. Rather, exploitation was the destination from the very start, and user satisfaction was a means of scaling up the pool of exploitable users. Enshittification is planned, not inevitable.

• Post #826428

  AI is not how you take back the open web. AI is how you lock yourself into a subscription for operating on an "open" web.

• Post #770466

  Seems like the worst possible time to spend $1 billion in taxpayer money to prevent Americans from benefitting from wind energy, but okay. https://stateline.org/2026/03/24/trump-administration-will-pay-1b-to-block-2-offshore-wind-farms/ #politics #USPol #energy

• Post #770465

  (Previously: https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/116247481804614003 ) I'm not sure what to make of the accounts of Abram's wandering. Seems like there's a tangle of traditions being shoehorned in here. For example: Famine drives Abram and co. down to Egypt, where he has Sarai pretend to be his sister. Pharoah takes her as a wife, paying dowry(?) to Abram, until God plagues him, at which point, he catches on, castigates Abram, then expels them from Egypt. I get the sense th...

• Post #770464

  You can get a rough sense of how much generative video was costing OpenAI by the fact that they were willing to turn down a $1 billion dollar investment from Disney rather than keep running Sora: https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/openai-shutting-down-sora-video-disney-1236698277/

• Post #770463

  @seldo@alpaca.gold @janl You would really do well to be more sensitive to the fact that a great many people on the fediverse want as little to do with commercial AI as possible. At the very least, you should provide an easier, across-the-board opt-out. But really, the fediverse norm is to make services like this opt-in only. Devs who don't provide for consent tend to face a pretty harsh backlash.

• Post #770462

  Don't use services that feed your fediverse follows to commercial AI platforms unless they're built for consent. For example, the only way to opt out of Zeitgeist is to block anyone who uses it: https://alpaca.gold/@seldo/116229243453108157 and there's no clear indicator to show who is using it. That's not consent.

• Post #746619

  You can reduce the amount of data you're sending out by turning off search engine suggestions in your browser smart bar. Then set the smart bar to draw suggestions from your bookmarks instead, and bookmark just about any site you think you might revisit one day. I've found that to be a nice little quality of (digital) life fix.

• Post #706539

  Using Substack for comms? Building LLM mod tools? Vibecoding their platform? Alright, you know what. I'm changing my position on New_Public to ESE (extreme side eye).

• Post #706538

  picking up from this thread: https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/116234786341436033 We're getting into some serious begats now. One of the underlying premises of the genealogy Genesis traces from Noah is that the various nations of the region all derive their name from some initial founder. So Noah's descendants include a Canaan, an Egypt, a Cush — all of which would have been recognizable to Israelites as place-names. Eponymous founders are a pretty common tropes in proto-histori...

• Post #706537

  IDK, I like low-poly graphics, so if it means game companies start shipping more low-poly games on the assumption that the hardware will upscale the graphics for them, maybe DLSS5 isn't such a bad thing after all.

• Post #706536

  Something in my brain refuses to not say "Euclid" any time it sees the name ELUCID.

• Post #706535

  Strong contender for best ProPublica headline of all time: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-cybersecurity-government

• Post #706534

  Apart from the fact that it won't actually address fraud, Trump's self-serving SAVE America Act would add tens of millions in costs for state elections officials without providing any funding to cover those costs. https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/elections-officials-decry-costs-heaped-states-save-america-voting-bill #politics #legislation #USPol #elections

• Post #706533

  An industry-wide coding strike where programmers check out of their Big Tech jobs for a week to work of FOSS projects instead, to A/B test whether companies relying on agentic AI can really produce software of the same calibre.

• Post #706532

  I'm not convinced the point is even to get rid of programmers, so much as it is to make them dependent on a resource that only their employers can afford to provide, so that management has a dial to turn whenever the workforce grows too demanding. Maybe AI's not a replacement worker. Maybe it's a company town.