Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

The AI hype train is reaching predictably ridiculous extremes in a desperate attempt to force acceptance of its “inevitable” narrative, and it’s partly because credulous journalists who should absolutely know better by now happily platform the worst of this nonsense.

https://loudpoet.com/2024/12/13/the-ai-in-publishing-hype-train-needs-to-be-derailed/

Rarely has manipulation of the public opinion by media outlets, been as obvious as with the UHC CEO assassination.

There's no end to articles decrying widespread "polarization" on the matter that simply doesn't exist, opinion pieces full of non-sequiturs and strangely aggressive pearl-clutching that is totally out of character for the outlet that publishes it, or direct copy-pastes of statements from politicians, cops and executives that are superficially laundered as 'news'.

If you've ever been in doubt about whether the media is there to inform and support the public or just to protect the established power structures, well, here's your answer.

The discover feed is a powerful default on #bluesky - but only if you are using the bsky-provided PDS. @gabboman and I compare screen captures of the new user onboarding flow on the default PDS vs. on his PDS and confirm that the discover feed is only visible by default when one makes an account on bsky's PDS. I personally can't make my default feed be anything except discover even when following is the highest priority.

This is more important than a simple default because a) it's conspicuously one of the only closed-source parts of bluesky and b) it is the most obvious revenue stream: you can't sell ads in a choose-your-own-feed system. The dissociation of behavior by PDS - aside from showing that the platform behaves differently depending on your PDS, which is interesting in itself - hints at the leverage that they have over hosted data and app experience at a very granular level.

Fedi-friends, I wanna buy a phone that runs Linux, but I don't want to deal with anything installation related, flashing microSD, flashing bios, whatever.

I would like to receive the phone with a Gnome-based shell already installed and ready. Are there ANY options on the market? If I could, I would absolutely buy a Fairphone 5 with postmarketOS today.

”Do you reckon someone has ever gone to see the band Placebo, thinking it was The Cure?”

(source: abcelya on Instagram)

Aagh 😆

#tööttiläpät

I do think that public broadcast of content makes sense to some degree, but trying to make the "global context collapse firehose" healthy doesn't feel, to me, where efforts should go.

It's fine for people to keep working on it, but I'm more interested in contextual communication, public and private

There's other details, but I wanted to say:

ZIP ON THE FLY IS BACK AT INTERNET ARCHIVE.

You can go to an item, click on a file type on the right, and you can download all the pdfs, the mp3s, or whatever else, in a zip. We missed you, little bulky! So glad you're back.

In a Wales-first (and possibly UK-first?) I've created a micro-server for Mastodon to enable local primary school children to explore social media in a safe environment. It's not connected to any other server, so only children and teachers from that school can create an account.

I'll be sharing my experiences in a blog post in due course, in case it's of interest to others. Would love to have another Welsh language primary school interested so we could have multiple schools collaborating!

“Neemt u bij het verlaten van de trein uw eigendommen mee”

This VIRM is mine I take it thanks!

i released the first version ever of my open source painting program, it's still in early stage but it has the following features:

- No AI, this is a program for real artists
- 100% native, no Web, no Qt, no GTK, no dear imgui
- Advanced Layer System
- Infinite Undo History
- GPU Accelerated Canvas View
- Brush Engine similar to popular manga software
- Bucket Fill with gap closing (proof of concept)

download: https://mrgaturus.itch.io/npainter

#gamedev #indiedev #opensource #linux #mastoart #furry #art

Look it’s /possible/ there’s some technical reason why your site launch flopped; one that could save your marketing team from the axe. What’s the URL, I’ll have a look.

An “A” record. How quaint. Where’s your quad?

No, Eye Pee Vee Four may have been good enough for Jesus but it is NOT good enough in the year of our lady twenty twenty nine. The only countries that still use vee four are Liberia, Myanmar and the United States of America. Both of them. In the entire rest of the world, including South of the Concord Wall in Greater Mexico, it’s vee six or go home.

#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #BonusEdition

Really enjoying reading this 1993 thesis about how the theories of Linnaeus, Newton and Lavoisier met with very different concepts of matter stemming from Buddhism, Confucianism and Japanese medicine, via the unlikely bridge of Dutch chemistry textbooks that entered Japan via the trading post at Deshima.

#togotsukahara #systemsthatmatter

"LLMs are helpful with boring, repetitive work"

I can't help wondering if, in the long run, the better strategy is to address the repetition?

#TechTip you can enable manual adding of search engines in #Firefox by adding this variable in about:config:

`browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh` as `true`

Then in the search settings on about:preferences#search a new "Add" button will appear

Oh btw you can actually download any file from Google Maps in full resolution (and with original file name 💀) easily

All you need to do is to click "Report a problem" in the dropdown menu next to image's author

File loaded on the page that will open is a raw uploaded JPEG with just the metadata stripped lol

#TechTip #Google #GoogleMaps