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@dyckron@cosocial.ca
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keithzg
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca
pleroma
2.6.3
My first home on the Fediverse was @keithzg@mastodon.club, and I'm the admin here on fediverse.keithzg.ca originally out of necessity and now just out of cozy laziness.
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Replying to
@kopper@not-brain.d.on-t.work
@kopper@not-brain.d.on-t.work "The year is 2037. Java dominates web and app programming."
Replying to
@mcc@mastodon.social
@mcc@mastodon.social I firmly believe that app developers should not have the right to theme their apps and that this needs to be wholly the domain of the user's personally-controlled desktop (or mobile equivalent) settings.
https://poweroutage.atco.com/map is *wild* right now, like if I'm reading this right most of the literal area of #Alberta is without power?
Replying to
@denzilferreira@techhub.social
@denzilferreira@techhub.social Yeah the irony of using a Google phone and being locked out of a lot of apps these days because now my phone is untrusted *because I've updated it to keep up with security updates* is very rich.
And any regulators sleeping on the incredible lock-in that results from this are basically just allowing oligopolies to solidify.
Replying to
@misty@digipres.club
@misty@digipres.club I mean people saying "obviously America wouldn't make decisions against its clear economic interests and ties with the global economy" are not serious students of history or prognosticators of the future, that it has been orthodox to believe in Rational Stable USA certainly doesn't mean the "cranks" are wrong!
Replying to
@bridget@beige.party
@bridget@beige.party Prompting LLMs is being a scab and crossing humanity's picket line
Replying to
@ifixcoinops@retro.social
@ifixcoinops@retro.social Your anger is righteous, but I do think a lot just comes down much more to "because capitalism". Megacorporations steering things for their own ends has made for infertile ground for better tools, for more accessible digital worlds. The geeks certainly haven't done as much as they could have to help others, but building user-friendly tools and platforms and standards is frustrating and even doomed in a world whose metasystems actively work against those, block them, hide them from view, make it seem like the only options are technofeudalism or technoabstinance . . .
And one result of all this is it's easier to make a website simply than it ever has been, but harder to get there. Like, one *can* just make a webpage using literally whatever text editor one is most familiar with, and I don't just mean text editor in a computer nerd vernacular, I especially mean Document Editors, be it Word or LibreOffice or Google Docs, stuff people use every day and yeah it'll save to HTML in a form that is horrifying to look at under the hood but it'll work! We have, looking at it from a slant, exactly the tooling you say we've failed to make, easy for everyone even if messy as hell.
But the problem is that there's an enormous gulf between Having A Web Page and Putting It On The Web.
Nearly everyone these days has some tool they're reasonably comfortable with that, though they likely don't even realize it, could let them create a webpage. And in a functioning civilization, everyone would have an easily accessible space to put those messy, self-created pages. But people don't see that they have those tools because the territory between them and having something On The Web is a confusing chaos of gatekeepers and middlemen.
To try and pull out of a Lapsed-Trotskyist tailspin and finish my annoyingly long reply with optimism and concrete advice: those of us with the combination of drive and opportunity to be able to navigate those layers of bullshit can serve as guides and greatly help others! I've shown people tools they've found to be great reliefs from the corporate shit they thought were their only options; I've explained in sane terms the arcana; I've quickly set things up for people so that they don't have to deal with the acidic atmospheres and trap-filled labyrinths. It's hard to solve systemic problems flowing from economic structures without reworking the foundations, but we *can* each (that is, those of us in a cohort of people of a sort to even know about something called The Fediverse) fairly easily carve out better parallel worlds for at least a few others as well.
And hey, maybe from example, maybe from the release of pressure these saner and more humane practices of digital publishing and communication create merely by existing in a world of friction and profit-driven scams and pennypinching . . . perhaps transformation will snowball! Revolutions, literal or more figurative, do tend to happen when the tension ratchets up between what is seen to be possible and the misery of What Instead Is.
Replying to
@saltywizard@beige.party
@saltywizard@beige.party Last time I saw this go around I was on my phone, and tickled by it giving away surprisingly less than I actually assumed. This time I'm on my desktop, and there's at least one bit it gets amusingly wrong.
Replying to
@Rhodium103@mastodon.social
@Rhodium103@mastodon.social @davidgerard@circumstances.run But you don't understand, the year is 2026 and nobody has yet invented change management of text documents!
Really at all levels it's more than any coordinated group of humans could possibly accomplish without rolling a LOT of dice and being absolved of all liability, it's crazy to claim otherwise just because "people have been doing this fine for decades" and "this mostly shows other pathological problems with contemporary academia suffering from defunding and publish-or-perish grossly distorting the entire practice"
Replying to
@Chigaze@cosocial.ca
@Chigaze@cosocial.ca @mWare@ottawa.place I can say I would write "eachother" in most but not quite all circumstances, and actually "each other" looks weirder in print to me? I didn't realize this wasn't common, though I have looked askance at spellchecks underlining "eachother" I never gave it much more thought until now.
(I'm one of those folks that has autocorrect firmly off on any touchscreen devices and cannot use swipe keyboards, and it's dozens of little things like this that have had me in that small but obstinate camp for years.)
Replying to
@AmeliasBrain@mstdn.ca
@AmeliasBrain@mstdn.ca I wouldn't be surprised! I couldn't tell where the actual fire had been though, so dunno. Doesn't look like it's gone up on the City's fire response open data yet.
Some sort of fire along 109th street just north of #Parkallen here in #YEG, saw some firetrucks and then checking my PM2.5 and 10 readings there was a huge spike just a few minutes ago, and I can smell smoke.
Replying to
@Chigaze@cosocial.ca
@Chigaze@cosocial.ca @MetalheadDana@metalhead.club It's time we start our own libraries, I guess!
Actually I already have, and so far I've even managed to keep the catalogue public despite the scourge of LLM scrapers out there these days, so if anyone in #YEG wants to borrow books from me or the cohort of friends of mine who've created "branches" in it, lemme know :)
(That also goes for anyone who wants to make a branch of their own! I can set one up for ya on my server, or help anyone else through the sometimes smooth and sometimes confounding process of setting up such a server themselves.)
https://lib.keithzg.ca/
Obviously, this sort of effort is no replacement for proper public services. But, as important as it is to fight against the twin conservative fists of defunding and ideological control over public institutions, it's pretty disheartening and doomed a lot of the times (like here, where the UCP will, yeah, inevitably just ram it through), and building our own public infrastructure and services sans government involvement both seems prudent and offers ways to feel less powerless, I reckon.
Replying to
@robpike@hachyderm.io
@robpike@hachyderm.io It's far from the only problem with capitalism, but certainly one of 'em is that any longterm for-profit endeavour will, at some point or another, self-cannibalize for some wishful thinking of short-term profits.
But I'm personally heartened by how the actual people involved skew far *more* against the malpractice the industry has abruptly standardized on. The big corps have *always* had fundamental pathologies stemming from the nature of such organizations in our socio-economic system, and that becoming painfully clear for more people may have positive affects that reverberate for a long time, even as the costs of the LLM mania inevitably do too.
Replying to
@smitten_@key.portend.place
@smitten_@key.portend.place @croissant@zeroes.ca What people don't understand about public health policy is, the most important thing is you have to believe really hard that no drastic interventions or systemic changes are necessary, this is priority and step number 1
Replying to
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca
@dangoodin@infosec.exchange The nuances of https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-vulnerability/ will be interesting to you too, of *that* opinion I feel confident! ;)
Replying to
@dangoodin@infosec.exchange
@dangoodin@infosec.exchange For one, my point was that the Curl folks comparatively do seem to have open and unbiased minds, frankly much less biased than mine, so as someone who's curious about the realities but exhausted by Silicon Valley hype it's their project, or someone/thing akin, that I'm waiting on.
I certainly wasn't saying "and so instead listen to MY analysis!". I am in many ways the entire security department of the software company I work for, so I'm not fully just some random dork on the internet, but that certainly doesn't give me insight into the sorts of realities a major world-facing project like Firefox or Curl deals with and the insights that provides.
For two, there's famously such a thing as having such an open mind that your brain falls out. And I think it would be hard to claim Mozilla's leadership hasn't been fumbling their brains quite a lot in recent years, particularly when it comes to tech that for-profit American companies are hyping.
Replying to
@dangoodin@infosec.exchange
@dangoodin@infosec.exchange Mozilla as an org though has some top-down interests in hyping LLMs, so it's a somewhat skewed thing to begin with. Personally I'd be much more interested in going into such details with an open mind if, say, they finally gave access to the curl folks (who were theoretically accepted into the early access program for this "dangerous model" and then . . . haven't been given that access yet still).
Replying to
@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club
@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club Confirmed :)
Replying to
@isaackuo@spacey.space
@isaackuo @MichaelTBacon @MartinEscardo As corporate tech enshittifies, I hope the smallscale hacker tech that is increasingly and delightfully able to take its functional place really embraces bringing back physical buttons and knobs, and I have some genuine optimism it will.
Replying to
@ned@beige.party
@ned @LaNaehForaday My experience with the Edmonton Police is definitely that female cops love saying victims must have brought it on themselved, but yeah that does seem better than the cop joining in on the harassment and assaults so certainly a lesser evil.
Replying to
@ajft@aus.social
@ajft@aus.social Blocking the bike lane *and* the sidewalk, that's quite the asshole accomplishment by that driver
Replying to
@ifixcoinops@retro.social
@ifixcoinops Canada, the most American place in the world other than the USA, decided some years ago to get rid of pennies and we . . . did. They're gone! I've got a jar somewhere in my basement for nostalgia and history and I haven't seen one in the wild in at least a decade, other than when I visit south of the border where they just start chucking them at you if it so much as looks like you might be thinking of buying something.
Replying to
@cstross@wandering.shop
@cstross@wandering.shop Next step: the failsons of Bond villains? The inbred aristocracy of Bond villains?
Replying to
@davidgerard@circumstances.run
@davidgerard@circumstances.run @androcat@toot.cat A demoralized and diminished workforce after all the layoffs probably isn't going to get them there...
Replying to
@glyph@mastodon.social
@glyph You've nailed it, when LLMs thrive and achieve is where we've malformed things to be entirely wrong for humans to interface with.
I remember in ~2009 I wrote an entire GUI application for my phone, on my phone, for querying and displaying local transit information, in about 30 lines of Python code . . . and a lot of that was comments or spacing out things for aesthetics, even! Compare that to modern phone app development, where there's hardly a single file of the sprawling boilerplate a Hello World would need that's that short.
It's not that the tech has become meaningfully more complex and thus this additional stuff is necessary, it's that the sprawling organizations like Google and Apple and Facebook had so much staff to throw at stuff that the inefficiencies and inhumanities grew and grew, things that any platform made by humans with other humans in mind would have standardized and provided became wheels each user was expected to reinvent (yes, it has to conform to exacting specifications; no, we will not stop changing them or failing to fully helpfully document them, and no, we will not provide anything entirely working out-of-the-box).
At one point I didn't even necessarily need a development environment for my phone, and at the time I imagined us humans would reduce and simplify and nurture even more. In a foolish lack of cynicism, I didn't internalize how corporations, as inhuman and consciousness-lacking machines, would pull mainstream software development in the exact opposite direction.
These days I cannot even get a working development environment running for my main phone, they're so complex and sprawling soas to guarantee something goes horribly wrong. (Like, Android Studio crashes on startup! On a fresh install with a blank user!) These are tools and development methodologies made by and for giant corporations, and they are as lumbering and inefficient and death-spiralling as their motherships.
And we can do better! We've done so before, and us humans have the undeniable potential to know more than we did then, to learn from past triumphs and mistakes in complex, higher-order abstractly considered ways that machines—be they corporations or the LLMs they've birthed—simply cannot. And where they excel, where they surpass or even come anywhere close to meeting human efforts, we'll know we need to either change or abandon that territory for others.
Replying to
@megmac@social.treehouse.systems
@megmac @ned Yeah, alas. And that Ford is outright mentioning *specific* FOIA requests that led to them changing it shows where these ostensible laws have largely always lain, they exist only really on paper and vanish even there when push comes to shove.
Years ago my dad ended up having public materials that *became illegal to have*, because he had been studying gas wells in the lens of risk management and the then-Klein government had noticed some small amount of media coverage starting to happen and inverted things, public disclosures flipping into forbidden knowledge with the stroke of a legislative pen.
Replying to
@megmac@social.treehouse.systems
Replying to
@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club
@algernon Appreciated, and boy howdy do I know that spoonless feeling
Replying to
@keithzg@fediverse.keithzg.ca
@algernon The outright pageload failures look to have been Very User Error on my part, but I can further report for example x-request-id: NLCTLT-0WB7P2fWsXx1bH from my trying to load https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/documentation/3/reverse-proxies/ with Falkon here still on Kubuntu 24.04 (and thus Falkon 24.01.75 using QtWebEngine 5.15.16, which is admittedly all pretty outdated in our fast-paced world).
Replying to
@algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.club
@algernon At present for my own personal purposes I haven't yet set up iocaine, despite getting somewhat exasperated with outages caused by LLM scraping, due to
I'm kinda lacklustre with proxy config stuff and there's no guide you have up for Apache2 (I'm sure I could muddle through some setup eventually though if I put actual effort into it)Though it's better about this not happening than Anubis, I still seem to get my main current browser of choice (Falkon) caught by Iocaine, enough so that in fact currently I cannot read the documentation as pages like just https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/documentation/ sit loading forever even when I begrudgingly switch back to Chrome (so I assume either I've now been blocked, or your server has been hammered coincidentally). From https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/tales/surviving-the-crawlers/#three-ifs-in-a-trenchcoat I got for example x-request-id: 0ia4BzigBrtETmjH0S2nd so, as per the text there at the bottom after the AI-aimed gobbleygook, I am telling you ;)
Replying to
@davidgerard@circumstances.run
@davidgerard @mgorny I keep teetering on the edge of setting up iocaine for my own code/issues/etc self-hosting using Phorge, which keeps getting hammered into OOM-death by LLM scrapers, and I really *should*, but it just feels so darned depressing
Replying to
@blogdiva@mastodon.social
@blogdiva Recurring dream of America's ethnonationalists, eh? They see races as real and immutable, and so dream of shipping everyone out into countries to hold them—Israel's support from such folks these days recalls the dream of many racists who for one reason or another didn't want to continue slavery but instead "solve racial tensions" by sending all black people "back" to a new country in Africa…
Replying to
@dyckron@cosocial.ca
@dyckron@cosocial.ca Parties against proportional representation have opted out of being proportionally represented! Sorry not sorry, Tories.
Replying to
@icing@chaos.social
@icing@chaos.social There's some real upsides to this push, for example my "migrate my personal and professional server usage from Ubuntu to Debian" process has gained a sense of urgency ;)
Replying to
@swetland@chaos.social
@swetland @jacqueline Yeah, as mainstream devices get more locked-down and disposable by the year it's a huge relief and source of optimism for the future that open hardware designs are also becoming dramatically more real and capable; blossoming with DIY-fed gusto and variety even as corporate commercial offerings lose any remaining heterogeneity or flexibility
Replying to
@ajroach42@retro.social
@ajroach42 It's wild that in the year 2026 anyone still thinks "oh won't somebody please think of the children!!!!1" isn't painfully transparent as a ploy, but I guess it does still work in mainstream discourse and lawmaking justifications so they don't realize that anyone who's paid attention to policy discourse and changes at any point over the past half-century sees right through it?
Replying to
@UrbanEdm@yeg.bike
@UrbanEdm@yeg.bike "write to the Premier, call government ministers and UCP MLAs, and tell them to stop cheating"
Wow Nenshi's NDP is just chock full of practical ideas of how to fight back against the UCP abuses and solidifications of power 😑
Replying to
@ajroach42@retro.social
@ajroach42 @riley The PineTab and PinePhone were also just a notch or three too bad of hardware to really deliver, unfortunately. I never found the PinePhone or PineTab usable, but have since bought used phones and tablets that are well-supported by postmarketOS and it has been a *dramatically* better experience than even that exact same distro on Pine64 hardware. Felt beyond that they were underpowered (though they were that too), it's some levels of just inconsistent and troubled.
Conversely though, the PineTime is surprisingly nice, I would have expected it to be far more doomed since the OS had to be developed somewhat from scratch by folks, but especially for how cheap it was I really have no complaints; reliable, battery life of approximately a week or so. I've gone back to using a Pebble lately as it's gotten sunnier and thus having an always-on transflective monochrome LCD beats it, but that's also hardware that cost multiple times the price of the PineTime.
Replying to
@zzt@mas.to
@zzt @davidgerard
snap list | awk '!/^Name|^core/ {print $1}' | xargs -n 1 sudo snap remove
Replying to
@blogdiva@mastodon.social
Replying to
@mhoye@cosocial.ca
@mhoye That many teachers somehow not only accept but wholeheartedly embrace LLMs is constantly infuriating to every teacher I know personally.
Replying to
@lerxst@az.social
@lerxst @sarajw @mhoye "We need more than that" okay, open a ticket in our bugtracker with a detailed description condensing what you would have rambled around during the meeting!
I say this but from a point of privilege on the other side of the extreme: my office doesn't use Slack *and* hasn't had a software development meeting in over 5 years now, and frankly that is probably too *few* meetings, but from what I hear from folks at more normal software dev workplaces I'll take this extreme over the somehow normal other extreme of, like, multiple meetings a *day* somehow.
Replying to
@cr00ky@mastodon.social
@cr00ky If they pull this off I might just buy my first ever inkjet printer
Replying to
@mahadevank@mastodon.social
@mahadevank @mcc Windows was born into a world that already had inodes, but it's damned if any of its filesystems will ever support such Unixian devilry
Replying to
@jacqueline@chaos.social
@jacqueline I would gladly pay $1000 for a phone with an OLED screen, a good camera, some degree of open firmware, a headphone jack, and >128GB of storage. Unfortunately nobody appears to be willing to take my money!
In practice lately I seem to buy phones about once every 6 months, but always something used and under (often well under) $250 and usually with some harebrained scheme about what OS I might put on it that's less awful. Sometimes that succeeds enough that I transfer over to using it. Currently on a OnePlus N20 that I haven't wiped the stock and put LineageOS on it mostly because Signal is annoying about switching to anything not currently running; it cost me $180 IIRC (Canadian dollars). The camera is terrible.
Replying to
@pojntfx@mastodon.social
@pojntfx Even just having put LineageOS on my old but still functioning fine Pixel (4aXL) made not only Google Wallet refuse to let me use my TD credit card for tap-to-pay, but it also silently disabled RCS! Actually getting security updates is Bad, because the most important thing is that the software be corporate-published, nothing else matters.
Carney may regret the visa-free Chinese travel deal, since it could give us Canadians experience with a technologically-functional society . . .