Harvard is now selling a 700 USD course taught by LLMs trained on their facultiy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/business/dealbook/harvard-ai-faculty.html

(I don't know what's worse: Harvard's open disdain for education and standards or the suckers who pay 700 bucks for it.)

Sono ancora fresche le immagini dei migranti arrivati a nuoto a Ceuta. Molti non ce l’hanno fatta, subito dimenticati. Dalla rubrica di Donatella Di Pietrantonio.

Silenzio d’accusa

Beyond kneejerk revulsion, LLM companies’ rampage through old book collections has much broader implications for the health of our society’s collective memory. http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2026/08/ai-destroys-transgenerational-memory-by.html

Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links

TIL archive.today was involved in a hack.

(Skipping to the details: Malicious code in Archive.today's CAPTCHA page was used to direct a distributed denial of service attack against a critic's blog after the site's maintainer demanded the removal of a post discussing the founder's identity and Russian ties.)

What would I do if I didn't have to sit from 9-5 in my home office?

Sustainable, solar-powered neighborhood-level data centers built on trash compute (or other commodity hardware).

Local backups, photo hosting, shared DVD + Blu-ray libraries, excess power generation, neighborhood calendars of events + signup not hosted by Eventbrite, forums, encrypted chat. The possibilities are endless, and I would love to do this and help wrest control of our communities from the billionaires

#Solarpunk #TrashCompute #Dreams

Intent to ship: JPEG XL! This will be on-by-default in Firefox 157, which should become the main release version at the end of September.

This includes key JPEG XL features like progressive rendering.

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/3YMV4MS34KA

@stroz why? Why aren't we all doing that?

(do I ask while at my 9-6 home office)

Just a reminder - boost everything you love, it helps people find cool stuff on Mastodon.

@mike it raining though

So much “advice” I’ve received over the years, from teachers, colleagues, employers, family, has functionally boiled down to some variant of these:

“Just be less autistic.”

“Just be less ADHD.”

“Just be more well-adapted to the society you were born into.”

“Just care more about things you don’t care about, and less about the things you do.”

“Just do the things you find hard, that I don’t. It’s easy!”

#ActuallyAutistic #ADHD

@Xavier I just saw this, so forgive the lateness of commenting on a four day old post.
* "As a moderator, I can't nuke racism."
- Sure you can. You have a rule saying "be nice" and racism's not nice. _Racists_ aren't nice (no matter how polite they express themselves).
Anytime you see someone being racist: nuke 'em. As with sexists, fascists and so on.
It's within your mandate as a moderator, and I'd even say it's your duty -- you can't have a healthy community if you allow bad actors to fester.

No, thanks! I am happy with tried and tested Debian or Arch Linux. Lmao. Yes, this is my honest opnion as someone using Linux since 1994 when most of these new age people were not even born or were still on Windows or Apple ecosystems.

@ozeng Of course, if you want to use BOTH the GPIO solution AND UVLO setting via resistors, it's even trickier…

@tinker Sending hugs, cousin. It is all so overwhelming, and that's before we open our eyes. You are a wonderful human, I am glad you are you, I just wish life and shit were kinder to you.

Social media doesn't have to be bad. It can be beautiful.

But in our digital world, we've learnt a lot about behaviour online. What had once seemed simple, putting people in a digital town square, we now realise is not. People act differently online.

Now, as we build alternatives that take us back to the root benefits of social media - connection and learning - it's our chance to build in a way that reflects human behaviour online.

So, let's grow something to be proud of.

#SocialWeb #Proud

AliExpress Silent WebAudio Fingerprinting Uses Bluetooth Hardware

AliExpress uses hidden WebAudio graphs to fingerprint devices, which blocks Bluetooth multipoint headphones from switching audio sources. The tracking relies on obfuscated scripts that maintain an active audio pipeline even when muted.

**If you shop on AliExpress and your Bluetooth headphones stop switching between devices, this is caused by hidden tracking scripts on the site, not broken hardware. Install uBlock Origin and add filter rules to block `collina.js` and `fireyejs.js` on aliexpress.com, then close all open AliExpress tabs and reload the site for the fix to take effect.**
#cybersecurity #infosec #knowledge #awareness
https://beyondmachines.net/event_details/aliexpress-silent-webaudio-fingerprinting-uses-bluetooth-hardware-9-o-c-m-i/gD2P6Ple2L

Now, as we build alternatives that take us back to the root benefits of social media - connection and learning - it's our chance to build in a way that reflects human behaviour online.

So, let's grow something to be proud of.

Social media doesn't have to be bad. It can be beautiful.

But in our digital world, we've learnt a lot about behaviour online. What had once seemed simple, putting people in a digital town square, we now realise is not. People act differently online.

A very good explainer of how the AT protocol stuff actually works.

https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/