@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 3d ago

do you ever have conversations with your plushies?

under 25: yes

0.0% (0)

under 25: no

4.3% (1)

25+: yes

52.2% (12)

25+: no

43.5% (10)

23 votes Poll closed

View on social.treehouse.systems

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 4d ago

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

anyway. because of this, we have an authenticity gap in social media. when i grew up on the 'net, we were fucking around in IRC. people on windows were using apps like trillian to talk to each other. people made customized websites & profiles that reflected their own aesthetic. now, everything is homogenized. when you compare to something like myspace, for example, we've lost so much potential for expression. in a way, one of the reasons i became very interested in pleroma, to the point of contributing heavily to it, was because pleroma brought back the notion of a customizable profile page. so i want to build something that allows people to express themselves, through customizing every facet of the application. that's the goal, anyway.

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 4d ago

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

importantly: social media is *broken*, and that brokenness has deeply harmed humanity. we have been conditioned to view every single issue as transactional & tribal: you're with us, or you're against us. reality, of course, does not actually work this way. there are many examples in the current cultural zeitgeist where we can see the effects of this conditioning first-hand. this is because social media rewards content that can produce tight feedback loops: the ding of every interaction gives a dopamine hit. that's fine if those interactions are actually meaningfully constructive, but usually they aren't. this leads to a cycle of antisocial behavior designed to drive more interactions.

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 4d ago

anyway, there is a vision to #thicket, which is to create a more human-centric version of social media what do i mean by human-centric? well, you can probably ascertain that by what i've written over the years, but it basically comes down to building systems that are friendly and forgiving to humans systems that lift humans up & amplify them when they make cool shit systems that don't throw humans under the bus in moments of panic systems that are honest and transparent to humans about what is and is not possible and what that means in basic and direct unambiguous language

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 4d ago

web design is not my passion (this bullshit is basically 100% auto-generated by phoenix)

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 5d ago

I used to be skeptical about harmful starlink was to our night sky, but after spending this summer camping, I have to say that @sundogplanets@mastodon.social has a point. when you do dispersed camping in the middle of nowhere, you can see starlink satellites all over the place moving around with the naked eye. it is actually kind of distressing. I don't know what to do about it.

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 5d ago

Boosted by

DanSup is @ FediCon @dansup@mastodon.social

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

when I criticize fedi projects it isn't to dunk on them, but out of a genuine desire to see them be successful

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 5d ago

Boosted by

DanSup is @ FediCon @dansup@mastodon.social

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

and aside from the unencrypted DM misfeature, loops looks neat

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 5d ago

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

to be clear, this is definitely not a call to rescind the DM feature, or to harass/cancel/whatever @dansup@mastodon.social about this decision. he was likely approaching this from a user empowerment perspective, in which case DMs are an obvious feature to pursue, encrypted or otherwise rather I am saying that we need to move as quickly as possible to deprecate unencrypted DMs across the entirety of fedi.

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 5d ago

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

this isn't a theoretical btw. DMs in loops should not be a thing if they are unencrypted, here is an example showing why:

consider a female creator who talks about women's rights and women's health. I am told that many such creators exist on tiktok, for example.
an American DMs that creator asking for abortion advice.
that creator responds, providing advice on how to get and use misoprostol.
irregardless of whether the American gets misoprostol and takes it, she has a miscarriage. her phone is taken, imaged and analyzed.
the FBI discovers that she followed said creator and subpoenas the loops instance and/or uses legal pressure such as MLATs to force the hosting provider into providing a disk image of the loops instance server.
the FBI discovers the DM.
the American woman is tried and convicted based solely on the DM.

and this isn't a wild hypothetical. this shit happens all the time!

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 5d ago

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

fwiw MLS on activitypub is great. i'm 110% here for it. the SWICG is doing good work that is absolutely meaningful. basically my point is that unencrypted messaging should not be exposed to end users without them having to opt in and acknowledge the risks.

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 5d ago

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

I think as technologists we have an obligation to consider the harms and potential harms of the features we build. it would be better for new social apps to put unencrypted DMs behind a feature flag for testing the DM user experience instead of exposing users to the risk of unencrypted DMs, especially in today's geopolitical environment

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 5d ago

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

guys, I've been warning about this for the past decade. many parts of the world have slipped into authoritarianism, and the CIA gladly admits they kill based on metadata -- not even messages. what are we even doing?

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 5d ago

Boosted by

DanSup is @ FediCon @dansup@mastodon.social

social apps quit adding unencrypted DMs challenge 2026, difficulty still impossible

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 5d ago

ok maybe @benpate@mastodon.social can be the fediverse devrel specialist instead

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 6d ago

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

i do not even know what is going on, but i've heard the phrase 'subduction zone' twice

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 6d ago

Boosted by

DanSup is @ FediCon @dansup@mastodon.social

now somebody is advocating for cascadian independence at #fedicon

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · 6d ago

Boosted by

DanSup is @ FediCon @dansup@mastodon.social

meanwhile at #fedicon a person is being interviewed about their blåhaj

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 06, 2026

wile e. coyote injured himself through no fault of the ACME corporation but rather through misuse of ACME products. in this thread I will...

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 05, 2026

RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117045200596075081 maybe CXMT will save us

Quoting

Kevin Beaumont @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social

All memory on track to be manufactured in 2027 by Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron is now sold out, with no additional supply planned. https://www.digitimes.com.tw/tech/dt/n/shwnws.asp?CnlID=1&id=0000763847_DVY7YHX65GMLYZ6UQEEMP

Open quoted post

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 04, 2026

Replying to @dansup@mastodon.social

@dansup@mastodon.social safe travels

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 04, 2026

Replying to @shituationist@kolektiva.social

@shituationist@kolektiva.social lots of people have asked me if I think LLMs will result in any of the promises the LLM companies have made, all the way up to and including self-modifying models (superintelligence), and I keep saying "no" and these people who ask me this, who are typically pretty smart people, but none of them have any actual expertise in ML other than memeing around with ollama or vLLM or maybe tensorflow/transformers for a sophisticated experimenter, so they choose the side of confirmation bias and tell me I'm definitely wrong on this 🙃 if you look closely, you'll notice that OpenAI is already hitting scalability problems keeping ChatGPT up and running, and we know they are having scaling problems because of how the outages are shaped: they come as micro-outages, where inference requests will sporadically fail for short periods of time. this type of availability problem is basically almost always caused by lack of horizontal scaling. and that's because they simply don't have the inference capacity. they buy all the GPUs, all the RAM, its still not enough. and the bill is coming due at the end of this quarter for OpenAI, though apparently nvidia have proposed refinancing the debt, so who knows?

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

in my opinion as someone who has exhaustively researched ML and has owned production ML workloads at adtech-scale in the past, i think a large part of the problem is that LLMs have enabled people to sound confident while not knowing a fucking thing about what they are talking about. "look ma, i'm an AI engineer now" energy

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

my interests are, at this point, essentially harm reduction:

debunking bullshit when i see it (such as yegge's post today)
pushing for more ethical research approaches (we do not need to build giant unscalable monoliths)
pushing for more clear definitions so that people are equipped with a sufficient understanding of what is actually going on for real

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

incidentally: i don't have respect for either side

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

one side, carrying economy-breaking capital pressure, spreads misinformation about the capabilities of their silly LLMs (which are silly) other side, out of rightful and just anger of the capital side, spreads misinformation based on strawman arguments that have nothing to do with what is being discussed

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

the problem with discussing the actual state of machine learning is that you get people who just show up in your mentions wanting to debate some strawman that you never discussed in the first place it is exhausting

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

Replying to @atax1a@infosec.exchange

@atax1a@infosec.exchange @jsbarretto@social.coop @davidgerard@circumstances.run idk, having seen quite a few people go down this path now, i think it's the tight iteration loop leading to frequent dopamine hits that cooks their brain ultimately

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

there is, incidentally, no actual evidence to support anything steve yegge is saying here: https://yegge.ai/essays/model-welfare/

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

was so hyped, in the words of jensen huang, "we're gonna be rich!" unfortunately, there is no market for DDR2, so we in fact, will not be getting rich

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

i stumbled on 256GB of RAM, but then it was DDR2 :(

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

Replying to @JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange

@JessTheUnstill@infosec.exchange @rl_dane@polymaths.social @whitequark@social.treehouse.systems innovation!

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

Replying to @rl_dane@polymaths.social

@rl_dane@polymaths.social @whitequark@social.treehouse.systems sounds unfortunate for those who have a TV in the botnet

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

Replying to @whitequark@social.treehouse.systems

@whitequark@social.treehouse.systems the only thing that is going to work is IP banning the scrapers anyway

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

Replying to @kulupuSoweli@transfem.social

@kulupuSoweli@transfem.social there are a few, however, several of them are actually zoo instances :(

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

what the fuck, mastodon supports profile pic alt text now?

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 03, 2026

feelin' too corporate, time to shift gears

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 01, 2026

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

grok is a supercharged neuron, or perhaps those are ganglia openai and anthropic are different representations of neural network graphs

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 01, 2026

if you were wondering: the reason the AI company logos all look the same is because they're intended to be an artistic representation of either a neuron or a neural network

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 01, 2026

Replying to @dansup@mastodon.social

@dansup@mastodon.social also i usually write my slides like the night before, i pretty much just YOLO all of my talks

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 01, 2026

Replying to @dansup@mastodon.social

@dansup@mastodon.social that's my point, i don't think fedi nodes should be so large that you need to start thinking seriously about reliability engineering

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 01, 2026

Boosted by

Daniel Supernault @dansup@mastodon.social

personally, i think fediverse should grow organically, rather than be promoted or 'product managed' i like having a space where i do not have to think about whether or not some dude in a bank is reading my posts

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 01, 2026

Replying to @dansup@mastodon.social

@dansup@mastodon.social i get anxious because we have "institutional investors" now, and they tune in sometimes, so it's like a different vibe

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 01, 2026

Replying to @dansup@mastodon.social

@dansup@mastodon.social i mean i still do twitch streams sometimes, but like, i get anxious anymore because now i'm an executive instead of a feral researcher

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 01, 2026

Replying to @dansup@mastodon.social

@dansup@mastodon.social i mean, idk about california sober, does that include shrooms?

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 01, 2026

Replying to @dansup@mastodon.social

@dansup@mastodon.social i don't drink anymore

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Aug 01, 2026

ah, it is the weekend when i wonder if @dansup@mastodon.social is stoned or not

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 31, 2026

Replying to @davidgerard@circumstances.run

@davidgerard@circumstances.run this is why i went to dell.com, bought a server, and colocated it. my hosting needs are now set in stone at $90/mo for the foreseeable future.

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 30, 2026

Replying to @ariadne@social.treehouse.systems

normally, when your HOA president has a stroke, he is replaced with a new HOA president but apparently not this HOA

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

@ariadne@social.treehouse.systems · Jul 30, 2026

i hate my HOA with a passion

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Ariadne, bunyote friend

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do you ever have conversations with your plushies?

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