Sven Slootweg (soft-deprecated) @joepie91@pixie.town

In time of climate change, skyrocketing wealth inequality, pandemic, and global strife, it's good that the New York Times decided to focus today on what really matters…

*checks notes*

…unabashedly laundering the reputation of a convicted fraudster whose wide-scale "medical startup" con (enabled in no small part by puff pieces in NYT in the first place) destroyed a lot of trust in medical progress, Elizabeth Holmes.

*sigh* 🙄

Unrelated: I wonder why people mistrust the #media. It's a mystery!

please boost for visibility <3
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hey fedi! i just broke my own single-user instance and had to reinstall. i've lost a good number of my followers and mutuals.

if we used to be mutuals, or if you just think i'm kinda entertaining, please be so kind as to follow me! i have bad takes on politics, privacy and technology, my mum says i'm pretty cool, and i bake a good banana bread.

kids these days will never get to experience the expectant excitement of this screen ever in their life. not the tense sound as it reads your disk or the clicky sounds of your harddrive as the game is installed, or the celebratory drive opening as you finish... soulless downloads is all we have left. pour one out for....

Saw a cool light pattern under a bridge on my morning walk

“ What I hear in that is, “Those aren’t existential to me. I have millions of dollars, I am invested in many, many AI startups, and none of this affects my existence. But what could affect my existence is if a sci-fi fantasy came to life and AI were actually super intelligent, and suddenly men like me would not be the most powerful entities in the world, and that would affect my business.”

Great interview with @Mer__edith by @wilf
https://www.fastcompany.com/90892235/researcher-meredith-whittaker-says-ais-biggest-risk-isnt-consciousness-its-the-corporations-that-control-them

no no, let's hear out the royalist on this excellent idea

#Mastodon monoculture problem
https://rys.io/en/168.html

> Mastodon-the-software is used by far by the most people on fedi. The biggest instance, mastodon.social, is home to over 200.000 active accounts as of this writing. This is roughly 1/10th of the whole #Fediverse, on a single instance.

> Worse, Mastodon-the-software is often identified as the whole social network, obscuring the fact that Fediverse is a much broader system comprised of a much more diverse software.

🧵/1

How many of those who want to create “AGI benefiting ALL of humanity” & concerned about
“existential risks” were at #ICLR2023 in Kigali? We know they show up to any of the conference rotations when they’re in their usual places with visas barring most ppl in the world. But I am blabbering on about the global apartheid system of visas that restricts the movement of non white people. Genius minds like Hinton & others can’t be bothered with such minuscule issues: they’re thinking about HUMANITY!

You mean to say the fediverse isn't moderated by people in sweatshops in countries with names I can't pronounce????

can anyone give me a bootrom dump for Amlogic S905D3/S905D3G? i'm interested in how the "password" in fuses works, nobody's really mentioned much about it (other than "this is how the bootrom bug was mitigated")

nobody's mentioned anything on how it was set in the google chromecast update (just TRNG output or something else); whether the check can potentially be bypassed via glitching; etc

@aurynn @mike I think these problems with defederation and misbehaving admins would be much less severe if there weren't large instances that have users who don't even know who their mods/admins are. The "99% of users on that.domain are totally innocent" objection to defederation wouldn't apply if the instance were small enough for nearly everyone to have had some direct interaction with their admin at some point. There'd both be fewer innocent people to affect, and they'd be more likely to have actually noticed the behavior themselves and had a chance to make a choice in how to deal with it.