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• Post #4372846

  The standard should be: “you racially abuse or otherwise discriminate against a health care worker? One chance to apologise and then you are gone. You really don’t want to be treated by an immigrant? Well, off you fuck then. Someone else moves up the queue in your place. You prefer racism to getting support, diagnosis and treatment? Well, enjoy whatever disease you might have. We are prioritising the physical and mental safety of staff over your bigotry.” https://news.sky.com/story/nhs-staff-ex...

• Post #4360110

  In a few years time, we'll have a massive cybersecurity crisis that breaks important civilian infrastructure—emergency services, payment networks, food logistics etc. Politicians will trot out "it's so complicated!" excuses. Hucksters will say AI caused it/could have solved it etc. Meanwhile, people who recreationally run *BSD on their toaster will point to the NVD giving up on CVE enrichment and everyone that knows how computers work being made redundant. And nobody will lis...

• Post #4350879

  I need to reformat the indentation and spacing of an XML file. 1. `xmllint --format my_file.xml` 2. Pay lots of money to upload it to a third party service which may or may not reliably do it, and hope they don't use the contents of the file in a way you don't like. I'm apparently the strange one because I think (1) is a good solution.

• Post #4350337

  It'd be really good if non-technical journalists could cover technology with the base assumption that when someone says something will be here "in two years", that's another way of saying "obviously nobody has any goddamn clue but I need to convince the investors".

• Post #4303211

  I'd strongly recommend against doing this, for so many reasons. For one, if getting a tattoo guarantees you a job interview, congrats, that's a practice that puts members of religious groups that forbid tattoos (mostly Jews but also some Muslims and Christian sects) at a disadvantage in the hiring process. And "we did it for viral clout and lulz" is unlikely to be "a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim" under s19 of the Equality Act 2010. https://www....

• Post #4035867

  People who are unhappy with Codeberg’s decision should set up a Forgejo instance with the opposite policy. Slopheap? Vibehub? IgnoreAllPreviousCommits? I mean, if you don’t like Wikipedia you can get Grokipedia to give you Mecha-Hitler’s take instead.

• Post #3994439

  “Calling THIS a flop would be an INSULT to flops. We've found a disaster, an apocalypse, a catastrophe, an outrage, a career-buster, a guaranteed-to-close-before-it-opens beauty! Read it and weep; it's practically a love letter to Nazi Germany!” (@mozilla@mastodon.social’s social media team channelling Mel Brooks)

• Post #3956611

  OpenAI in 2015: "our aim is to build value for everyone rather than shareholders. Researchers will be strongly encouraged to publish their work, whether as papers, blog posts, or code, and our patents (if any) will be shared with the world." OpenAI in 2026: Moonshot giving Kimi K3 away for free as an open weight model is "full AI communism" and the idea of AI being a "public good" is "dystopian".

• Post #3936970

  Apparently, AI-enabled software development involves... waiting for a guy called Tibo to tweet that you can write software again. Letting one or two venture-backed and unprofitable companies (led by the sort of people who tell themselves sci-fi ghost stories around a fire and then fail to realise they are fiction) be a chokepoint over the world's entire software development processes seems... somewhat ill-advised. https://codex-resets.com/

• Post #3922443

  In an attempt to try and translate lawyerese into nerdish, I wrote up OpenAI's trade mark failure before the CJEU. Mostly because I'm seeing lots of nerds who can't read or understand the decision. https://tommorris.org/posts/2026/european-court-lawsplains-trade-marks-to-sam-altman/

• Post #3886372

  Every big infosec incident increases the chance a U.S. General who started out piloting Apache helicopters in Desert Storm has to sit through this briefing: "Sir, we do not think it was the Russians or the Chinese or the North Koreans. In fact, the vulnerability first came to light through a post on Mastodon from an account called 'Autism4Guillotines'. Our contacts in Berlin say the person behind this account DJs fortnightly at a goth/industrial night at a bar in Friedrichshain.&qu...

• Post #3842202

  Just to give an idea how LLM nonsense is affecting #Wikipedia, perhaps a quarter of threads on ANI, the Administrators' Noticeboard for Incidents, involve LLM use—either crap articles generated by LLMs, or people using LLMs to write extremely wordy, unhelpful replies to concerns about their behaviour. That's a huge externality right there - whatever uses AI tech has, it has enabled a DDoS attack on the hardworking volunteers trying to maintain the commons-based project the damn LLMs tra...

• Post #3841868

  A few months ago, the Metropolitan Police Federation objected to the use of Palantir's AI-based surveillance tech to monitor officers to prevent corruption/misbehaviour (after Sarah Everard, can't imagine why...), on the basis that police officers deserve some privacy (and Article 8 rights) while off-duty. They're remarkably silent on whether ordinary innocent-until-proven-guilty Londoners deserve similar privacy protections against live facial recognition cameras. https://metfed.o...

• Post #3783221

  Retroactive law change is a very liberal and normal thing we shouldn’t worry about if it is aimed at stopping a bad guy. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8m9615dqlo

• Post #3735316

  I do not want to watch a podcast. I never want to watch a podcast. Please stop.

• Post #3636687

  Agentic AI has "guardrails" (e.g. you have to explicitly say "don't delete all the files on my computer" if you don't want it to delete all your files). One of these guardrails is asking users to confirm whether to do things. Claude Code apparently has now decided that if you take over sixty seconds to answer a question, it'll just go ahead. Turns out guardrails get in the way of consuming tokens, and you must consume tokens in order...

• Post #3636686

  While other people I know have really embraced Jujutsu, for me I've got enough of Git burned into my brain as to change the cost-benefit analysis of learning JJ. But LightJJ is a really superb UI (similar to the macOS GitUp UI), and makes the benefits JJ brings over Git clear, e.g. visually moving (and splitting/rebasing) changes between parents is quite intuitive. https://github.com/chronologos/lightjj

• Post #3636685

  Oh no, someone might post “homosexual pornography” on the fediverse. And someone who definitely isn’t homophobic will cry about it.

• Post #3636684

  It’d be fascinating to imagine a liberal commentariat that was as forgiving to a 19-year-old student activist being cringe at a Free Palestine rally as they are to Peter Thiel or Steve Bannon. The latter invite you to hang out though.

• Post #3636683

  Fair play to Pizza Express for doing a more diligent inquiry into Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein than many other organisations and institutions. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1my27lyjx9o

• Post #3636682

  According to BBC News, 80% of culture news is Taylor Swift.

• Post #3636681

  If UK politics doesn’t work out, Farage has shown the kind of skills necessary to run FIFA.

• Post #3636680

  Based on every conversation I’ve had with academics about what teaching is currently like for them, I feel I should add “(no AI used)” after each entry in the education section of my CV.

• Post #3626978

  The aristocrat/convicted criminal who has been funding Farage apparently calls him "daddy". This is how gender studies MA dissertation topics are born.

• Post #3561234

  Just been reading about the enormous amounts of money schools are spending buying lockable pouches for mobile phones. Maybe, at some point, the opportunity cost of these lockable phone pouches could be weighed up against hiring classroom assistants, or providing more breakfast clubs or sending volunteers into deprived schools to go and read to kids and talk to them about their lives and careers. But here we are in Ban-It Britain, a little island of the pettiest authoritarians.

• Post #3536184

  It’s pretty close to journalistic malpractice to do a piece on “how AI (whatever that means) is affecting {some profession, e.g teaching}” and not talk to the people who work in that field. Literally saw a piece broadcast a few weeks ago and they talk to someone at Google about AI in Google Classroom but don’t talk to any actual teachers. The people doing the job know their own reality in a way even the most honest tech folk never will, and the corporate sales droids are not honest tech folk.

• Post #3487955

  Just as Windows being turned to shit is doing wonders for Linux adoption, GitHub’s product direction is really making Forgejo look so much better by comparison.

• Post #3487260

  I love how instead of using a search engine to find an incorrect StackOverflow answer, or an outdated blog post, I can now ask an LLM which will also give me the wrong answer. This is definitely worth $200 a month.

• Post #3427358

  If paying does not give you ownership, piracy isn't theft. https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/legal/psvideocontent/

• Post #2445139

  Every so often, someone writes an essay about how AI is inherently fascist and the standard reaction is "sure, interesting, but perhaps a little much". Meanwhile corporations are now using algorithms to mask the accents of ESL speakers at call centres because god forbid someone hear an accent that's different from their own. https://mobilesyrup.com/2026/05/06/telus-digital-using-ai-to-mask-accents-of-offshore-workers/