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• Post #4468859

  RE: https://social.vmbrasseur.com/@vmbrasseur/117062115632453344 “A lot of days we are using more wind,” Whitesides said. “There are no fuel costs there; it’s essentially free.” This is what makes wind and solar so nice as power generation systems. It’s almost a one-and-done thing, unlike fossil fuel generation where you pay a massive amount to build a plant that… does nothing until you pay (continually) someone else for the inputs.

• Post #4468858

  More people should take courses in 18th century French history. https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:r75unbj372lvbim6syioaueo/post/3mslohzup5224

• Post #4364192

  Seeing another round of “it turns out that WFH has serious downsides because employees get all their social interaction at work and are getting unhealthy without that” and my first thought is “maybe we should fix that but where people are forced to rely on their jobs for social interaction” rather than “let’s go back to the office”

• Post #4260180

  Neat the MFA is running a French film festival. (Pinging @tankgrrl@hachyderm.io in case they didn’t know) https://www.mfa.org/programs/series/the-boston-french-film-festival #Boston

• Post #4169592

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@houstonpublicmedia/116998685471778121 Frankly at this point grid operators should guarantee residential rates and supply, and have large inbound customers bid for the remainder, along with them being the first cut when the grid is stressed. Want to open a datacenter? You’re first for the chop when the water or power supply is low, and you absorb the extra costs. If you don’t want this, then pony up the extra capacity as part of your hookup, and if you can’t then su...

• Post #4145758

  RE: https://fosstodon.org/@AkaSci/116993671723883053 Given how capital intensive satellite internet is, especially since the satellites have a very short and hard-imposed lifetime, how small the addressable market is, and how much competition for ISP services there is, I honestly don’t see how having multiple satellite internet companies is viable.

• Post #3914222

  Nothing quite like spending time trying to configure the WiFi gateway on some consumer hardware to make you seriously consider getting a good masonry bit for the drill and just running cat6 cabling instead.

• Post #3901349

  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@corq/116938767979195456 Well, this explains the “we just updated your Wordpress install!” email I got from my hosting provider. I really, really would love to get rid of goddamn Wordpress and use something a bit less… full-featured.

• Post #3871019

  Oh, huh, Taco Bell gave a huge number of people the enthusiastic shits. Now there’s one of the least surprising thing ever, though in fairness I think they don’t usually do it with parasites.

• Post #3498304

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@brettcannon/116837182802106809 A reminder of why you should never put your "smart" TV on the internet. And also this should just be illegal. Put some sensible regulations in place as to what apps are allowed to do.

• Post #3495384

  Oh, look, datacenters driving up the cost of power. This is one of those cases where I'd say the school district(s) and municipal governments should install some mass solar. Schools tend to have huge parking lots you can put solar shade over, and buildings with lots of flat space on their roofs, plus an in with the planning people. Bonus is you get incremental benefits -- you don't have to wait for everything to be installed and can turn things on as they go in. https://www.404media.co...

• Post #2498604

  I'm actually kinda impressed at how all the computer-y AI boosters are completely missing how switching over to sparkling autocomplete will basically kill programming language research and development dead. Sparkling autocomplete can only produce variants of things in its trained matrix that pretty much by definition guarantees it can't make any use of new things. Like, say, developments in programming languages and their environments.

• Post #2303109

  This whole bullshit with Chrome snagging another 4G of disk space for local model weights reminds me that developers should always be outfitted with the second shittiest machines still under support, and the proper response to whines of "my machine is slow!" is "write better goddamn code."

• Post #2297795

  The more of this I see the more I wonder about the long term effects of COVID, tbh. https://mastodon.social/@prietschka/116513063765127751

• Post #2122017

  Yow. Hantavirus has an up to 8 *week* incubation period. That's wild. Also the fact that there's potentially some human to human transmission here is kinda terrifying. (I wonder how long before all the world except the US has a viable hantavirus vaccine available?) This was a fairly small cruise ship, thankfully, but still. Ocean cruises. Not even once. https://www.science.org/content/article/cruise-ship-s-hantavirus-outbreak-puts-researchers-uncharted-territory

• Post #2076698

  Oooh, it's 5/4. Dave Brubeck day! Have a link to possibly the best version of Take Five that we have a surviving recording of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tT9Eh8wNMkw

• Post #1745293

  Neat pointer to a thing from @tchambers@indieweb.social and I look forward to the outcome. Also, if you're a person in Big Tech (or even Medium Tech) and think "this is neat, I kinda wish someone was doing that for this other thing I like"... that means you! Yes, you, the person who doesn't have the time but absolutely has the cash. Sponsor a grant for someone to do the work. You can afford it. It's probably even tax-deductible and employer-matchable. https://indieweb.soc...

• Post #1625654

  Oh, look, another expensive toy I really don't need but *absolutely* want. https://gizmodo.com/anker-uv-printer-printing-on-different-materials-comparison-2000749680?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

• Post #1476568

  At this point I’m comfortable saying any policy this administration proposes is bad and planned for bad and probably evil purposes. They may suck at it because they’re incompetent, but the reasons are still bad. https://universeodon.com/@digyoursoul/116439835076916678

• Post #1411426

  Oh, hey, maybe we found the ginormous security flaw that Mythos was warning about! https://piefed.social/c/programming/p/1990030/mcp-design-flaw-puts-200k-servers-at-risk-and-anthropic-won-t-fix-it

• Post #1411423

  Is it quantum? I feel like any kind of bitcoin AI movie should be quantum somehow, that just seems appropriate. https://flipboard.com/@kotaku/culture-ofp4l3m8z/-/a--nDxHQSJTSix2Xsu37o0aA%3Aa%3A1938881949-%2F0

• Post #1318302

  Saw a news blip that said "RFKjr is talking everything from cocaine to Froot Loops" and I misread that as *taking* and I suspect my version is also entirely accurate.

• Post #1135865

  With this whole "AI Zuck" thing, I am now left wondering whether people will consider the real or AI Zuck to be significantly more human, and also why that's the AI one.

• Post #1135863

  This is hilarious. Also fake, but let's be honest our bullshit AI "summaries" have set us up for this and frankly we deserve the ridicule for it even when it's not real. https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@rygorous/116395019715158849

• Post #1135861

  Huh, the ATProto/Bluesky folks have gone full Web3 and built payment stuff into their protocol. I'm sure this'll work out, since we all know Web3 is going great! https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:xgvzy7ni6ig6ievcbls5jaxe/post/3mjfc2sekbc2k

• Post #1135860

  Handy list of things you can do with Google. We *do* still have a lot of useful information and really powerful capabilities built into search, we're just intent on hiding them behind a layer of AI crap for stupid organizational reasons. https://cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has-a-secret-reference-desk

• Post #793920

  New Tank! performance. It's ridiculously self-indulgent and goddamn awesome. 28 years after the original series got released but Yoko Kanno and The Seatbelts absolutely still have it. https://youtu.be/d75ov4HvRrM Edit: holy shit, she’s coming to #Boston in a week! Anime Boston 2026 at Hynes on April 3rd. She’s musical GoH too. Also link to find a place to buy so you don’t have to mess with ripping from YouTube: https://linkco.re/1XRNMCYM?lang=en Buy music, support artists.

• Post #781874

  "At trial, Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testified that “harms to children, such as sexual exploitation and detriments to mental health, were inevitable on the company’s platforms due to their vast user bases,”" Umm... if the problem is your platform is too big that it has to harm people then maybe the answer is "you can't be that big" https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/03/meta-loses-trial-after-arguing-child-exploitation-was...

• Post #726419

  @soatok and you can even pronounce that “no” like “the ROI on collecting that data is negative” because it is for basically everyone. The suits often need you to speak with an accent that way so they can hear you clearly.

• Post #699431

  Oh, goddamn it I should know better than to go go look up build costs for things, because now I'm enraged about yet *another* stupid thing around AI. This time it's about how utterly horrible the misallocation of resources are for this bullshit. We've had, what, $500B in legitimately attributable capex for AI datacenters and shit. D'you know how much the LHC cost? $6.8B inflation-adjusted dollars. A solar panel factory? Maybe $500M. But no. We spent orders of ma...