Watch out for those FLUFF cameras!
@catsalad CTZ :D
Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
@Floppy I wish I could downvote this, but the frequency in which this has been happening lately is very sad. I mourn being able to (naively) believe that tech was more altruistic than this 😢
Even worse somehow is the hill that people are willing to die on. Sure, it's painful to our pride to admit mistakes, but are we all so bad at learning how to empathize and improve 😭
Andreas Wagner
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Modern Dependency Problems (with apologies and thanks to XKCD)
Probably needs more arrows, tbh
What next?
Lake Superior to be renamed Lake Tremendous.
Lake Erie to be renamed Lake Creepy Orange Sex Pest President. https://mastodon.social/@GrumpusNation/117169655274939155
@urlyman Who had ‘hydronym’ as their word of the week?
hypebot
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Hoff die Fände Fochenende!
Andreas Wagner
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Ich habe mir gestern zwölf (!) Stunden lang den Innenausschuss von Thüringen angehört. Dort sprachen Expert*innen über das geplante Polizeigesetz. Die Aktivist von @ThuerPAG_stoppen waren auch vor Ort. Die spannendsten Statements habe ich für euch extrahiert. https://netzpolitik.org/2026/polizeigesetz-thueringen-haben-haben-haben-und-dann-schauen-was-passiert/
If you trust your data to a company like Microsoft, you are gambling with your future, as a slew of nonprofits discovered to their horror.
https://slate.com/technology/2026/08/microsoft-software-nonprofit-data-delete.html
@dangillmor shit, thank you!!!
Alberto Cottica
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The statement of the Collettivo Autistici / Inventati:
»Today we were made aware that the US Government has targeted a small, volunteer-run, technology collective from Italy with disproportionate sanctions as anyone can read in the Treasury Department Statement, the State Department Statement and the related Executive Order.
We deny all allegations included in the statements, while we strongly affirm our dedication to providing a platform of tools for digital self-defense, addressing the need of free communication for activists and other individuals, groups and associations.
We will not back down, we will keep doing what we have been doing all these years and we will do whatever is in our possibility to counter the false allegations made by a politically desperate administration with the sole intention of swaying people and media attention away from their own violence and warmongering.
Antifascism and anticapitalism are not terrorism. Protesting is not terrorism. And everyone has the right to speak out and to struggle for humanity.
Collettivo Autistici / Inventati — “Socializzare saperi senza fondare poteri”
Stay human«
Coping with targeted harassment of the #US government will require lots of energy and creativity. If you want to support them, consider a donation:
Passive voice stopped being recommended for academic writing in the 1980s (sorry, couldn’t resist it!). Modern academic style is active.
But this doesn’t help readability because the filter is ‘does this sound impressive to reviewers’. I’ve had to fight for a paper more than once in a PC meeting because it was too obvious and incremental. Why was it obvious? Because the authors explained the problem so clearly that the solution fell out naturally. But you can’t come up with that clear framing of the problem until you’ve found the solution.
One of my favourite papers is like this: it starts describing a simple spinlock and then frames the problem as ‘how do we build a spinlock that minimises cache coherency traffic?’. It then shows a bunch of designs that address a limitation. The first time I read the paper, I came up with each of their solutions before I read it because they framed the problem so clearly that it was the obvious solution. Then they refined the problem based on limitations of the approach and did it again. Before reading it, I hadn’t considered any except the first approach.
@david_chisnall @dlakelan @jonny I've found this effect in writing formal specifications as well. After sanding them back a bit it feels easy for others to say "that design is obvious"
I love this, so I
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ASN: AS3737
Location: Hawley, US
Added: 2026-08-27T13:13
Andreas Wagner
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Hi everyone, glad to be here! I‘m Merle, currently working on my BA thesis analysing migration discourses in the US and Germany in 2015 and 2025. Looking forward to connecting with other humanities folks 😊
While much work in so-called 'prompt engineering' obsesses over the perfect prompt (Andreessen's monster prompt comes to mind), we find that real-life prompting practices are sequentially organized, feature repurposed patterns of human interaction, and result in users adjusting expectations & aims
2 media files
@dingemansemark "...adjusting aims in line with the affordances of technology" sounds like it could be a problematic pattern in some sense. Not totally unexpected, though, tbh.
Luke Drury
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Pascal
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This post received a lot of comments and reactions, which is great!
It also proved that my little Raspberry Pi Zero W, powered by NetBSD, could handle the load.
Now - to help me test how much load it can tolerate - please boost and react to this post! 🚀
Ridicule is much more effective than criticism, violence is much more effective than ridicule.
There are tons of dead "Carty, violence is ineffective" folks, no one cares what they think.
I'm not advocating violence though, because for sure we do not yet know what we are doing.
hypebot
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Please support the people of Creetown and Carsluith in Dumfries and Galloway to oppose the impending industrial woodland proposal around Barholm. This land was quietly purchased by a London and EU based venture capitalist investment business.
https://c.org/B2j9BTnWY4
Here is another one of the wonderful people and organizations we have on Feedle, who also happens to be active on Mastodon: @Mojeek
Make sure to check them out and say hi from us! 👋
An idiot grovels before a reptile 😸
@Persona Oh my gosh, I had a heart attack just watching this
Similarly, AI is an opportunistic infection. It turbocharges deepfakes, industrialized scams, again attacking disproportionately vulnerable people. But we believe those scams because the institutions that are supposed to stand guard to the the truth are badly broken: "From tobacco safety to food safety to the climate emergency, it's obvious that the system of expert agencies that we rely on was terminally compromised by corporate power and regulatory capture".
2/n
(Maybe) two conclusions follow from this line of reasoning.
* Statistical: might "excess fraud" be used to estimate the impact of #AI on disinformation?
* Policy: it seems that we have no choice but to build a better world. Single-point measures are unlikely to be effective. When institutions are trustable and scammers and liars are marginalized, the attack surface of fraudsters shrinks dramatically.
For me, as usual "a better world" means "a radically rewired economy".
3/end
