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food (vegan) 

I bought pickle-flavoured candy and, uh, it tastes like burger pickles

In older biological publications, you can find references to "Malaysia" before the country was established in 1967. This is because "Malaysia" originally was a biogeographical term to describe Borneo, Sumatra, Java and the Malay Peninsula all the way to Tennasserim.

I have found references to "West Malaysia" which actually meant Sumatra instead of the modern Peninsular Malaysia definition.

You have to be very careful when reading these older localities.

#biogeography #tootSEA

re: fedi meta, self congratulatory 

the consent piece is important obvi, we were all pretty careful about not grabbing things we shouldn't have and removing them when we should. my hope is that by treating collections as an active participant in the activitypub landscape that encourages appropriate handling by all fedi software, that we actually should have fine grained control over the implicit collections we're associated with instead of it being mostly gated by the interface.

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fedi meta, self congratulatory 

tonight was the first time i ever experienced an appreciable proportion of other people being able to see replies from people that they didn't already know on the fedi, and it was very good and shows gaps in our self-moderation tooling lmao. it's a small thing but like seeing secondary and tertiary discussions spawn off except for "small clusters of ppl who already know each other" is notably rare on the fedi, and imo i'm glad that it's happening. it feels like life.

#FetchAllReplies #InGeneralReasonableHandlingOfActivityPubCollections #WeGetToMakeUpHowTheServersBehave #BackfillingIsActuallyAReasonableThingToExpectInASocialSpaceIfDoneWithConsent

tesla, historical accident, legal stuff 

Tesla has been fined 243 million dollar for an accident that killed one and heavily injured another back in 2019. The jury decided that Tesla is partly responsible because the Autopilot system ignored a stop sign.

... that sounds like precedent. Does this mean that the longstanding legal question of "who is liable for a self-driving car accident" has finally been settled in the US...?

Account on mas.to that is less than one day old, has no followers/following, and is tagging random users? If only there was any way at all to technologically limit this

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the LLM is not a learning aid, it is an absolute barrier to learning. it is not similar in kind to copy/pasting from stackoverflow or cliffs notes. it fully supplants the entire process of learning, and the person using the LLM never improves their understanding because the LLM cognitive workflow never engages with even the shape of the problem.

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if you haven't taught someone who is helplessly addicted to LLMs, LLM brain is so much worse than you can possibly imagine. the problems i'm seeing from someone i am currently teaching are indistinguishable from illiteracy - this person literally cannot read single-line, fully descriptive error messages, and proceeds to just copy and paste whatever they say into the chatbot and copy/paste whatever it spits out, and in this problem domain the LLM is wrong nearly 100% of the time. when i ask them to stop and think about what the problem is, what steps they might need to take to diagnose and resolve it, and how does that fit in with the context of what we've been doing together for >6 months, they literally can't.

Edit: Oop this post escaped containment. I am not implying that it is impossible to learn with an LLM, so if it works for you then that is basically irrelevant to my description of this one very specific pattern of learning with which I have direct and repeated experience. This person is otherwise very smart and competent, I am describing the impact of the LLM on their mode of learning the things I am trying to teach them.

Leftist, anti-fascist activists have got to begin making more of an effort to educate themselves about the spyware capitalist tech that they insist on continuing to use. From Substack, gmail, twitter, facebook to youtube, etc. At least make the effort to use and encourage others to use the alternatives. Make an active effort to migrate away from the spyware to the free/libre alternatives that respect users, privacy and democracy. It's an UPGRADE.

#AntiFascism #Democracy #Resist #FreeSoftware

hoping i can post this full thing on mastodon... earlier today i was watching old price drop tv footage and came across this man realizing in real time that his job fucking sucks ass

Hmm I only just realized they're called toasts because they pop up. oops

Once again time to remark about how significant electronic paper (e-paper, commonly called "e-ink" after the "E Ink" company that seems to make like, all of it) as a technology has been for us. Like it completely changes our ability to read digital media in a normal way.

There's not a single other piece of technology that we can think of that's had nearly such a direct impact on our lives. Most of everything else we've used is just incremental improvements on existing tech but commercialised e-paper and e-readers came out in our lifetime and have only gotten better since.

Hackers in 2003: "Hey look, I hooked up my fridge to the internet!"

Hackers in 2025: "phew, finally got my fridge off the internet! 💪"

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