Notices by JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social), page 2

it is so, so trust-damaging that Signal still has this in their UI, and it will only get moreso as the crypto ecosystem sinks ever deeper into its swamp

@jrose @mcc this is great, thanks.
i always felt like the (post-prologue) first room of Symphony of the Night, where Alucard enters the castle and the entryway is still dark, and then the lights come up... i always really wanted to hear Alucard start singing an awesomely schmaltzy Andrew Lloyd Webber type broadway anthem.

Eg if you're in a social setting, at a conference, and some guy says something inappropriate to a woman in your group, you can say "that's inappropriate" or "we don't say things like that in this community". Don't make it about you, don't make it about the person targeted by the inappropriate comment, make it about the behavior. Decide now that you will do this, even if the man is powerful or well-liked, even if he's someone you respect or owe something to career-wise. I promise you can do this.

To speak within my lane: cis men, one thing we can do to help with the many missing stairs in our communities is to stand up and use the authority we're granted, by being men, to make it clear when behavior/speech we see isn't acceptable. It can be scary and uncomfortable, but usually less so for us than for those more vulnerable. And "pre visualization" works: you can make it less scary if you decide ahead of time, mentally rehearse it effectively, that you're going to do it...

genocide is the crime of crimes. it is not a political bargaining chip. if you teach yourself to compartmentalize and justify it there will be no lower limit to what you can convince yourself of.

fedi has a lot of zionists who believe it is defensible and i don't want to see or hear from them, they have abandoned their humanity and i don't care that they might have something interesting to say about tech or whatever

israeli snipers shooting children in the head is indefensible

@clarity as it turns out, "do one thing, and do it well (and screw anyone who finds it hard to use)" is very susceptible to the particular form of EEE that involves building an ease of use layer around the open thing.

The question of whether LLMs "work" (in the whitepaper sense) serves as an obfuscating abstraction over the questions of whether they are fit for a given purpose - policing, medical diagnosis, education, etc. That they frequently work for producing passable code becomes a way of insisting, by the people sitting at the top of the pyramid of labor most valued by capital, that they work just as well for the many other purposes they have been deployed, that we can clearly see they are unfit for.

standard "star trek bridge crew taking a torpedo hit, camera tilts and shakes, sparks fly from consoles, everyone is knocked off balance and one or two crew fall down" shot, but a stage hand tosses a flapping chicken into the shot just to add extra chaos

the 4 words she most wants to hear

you look at Jabba the Hutt and notice Salacious Crumb, the weird little laughing goblin-muppet sitting on his shoulder, and then you look closer and notice a tiny, even weirder guy sitting on Crumb's shoulder, and you imagine it going on like that forever with progressively tinier weirder guys

Exploring more of the Dynamicland website eg https://dynamicland.org/publications and this document is particularly full of bangers: https://dynamicland.org/2022/Radical_Decentralization.pdf
"Many modern technologies are too complex to be learned and practiced by communities, and are instead bound to industrial modes of production, creating a class divide between “developers” and “consumers”. These complex technologies will never be decentralizable, and any attempts to decentralize them will fail."

I'd like to make a static HTML page with a gallery of pixel art images that can be viewed in a javascript-powered "lightbox". Tons of existing libraries for that, but none of them seem to have a couple niche features I need: aspect correction from non-square (4:2.5) pixel source resolution, nearest-neighbor upscaling small (320x200) images to fill screen / a larger area. Am I in "code your own custom lightbox" territory here, or is there a smarter path?

@tante it's yet another case of tech insisting they be judged on their potential not on their actual accomplishments; their lack of further progress becomes the regulators' fault. very convenient device for them.
and of course the openly reactionary tech guys insist "we'd have AGI computer god by now if you just let us make 'not-woke' AI, ie letting it say all the slurs and conspiracy drivel in its training data"

FYI: computers

There's a real Rube Goldberg quality to many of the attempts to find real use cases for LLMs: take regular desktop screenshots, OCR them, "find meaningful patterns" 🤔 so the system can answer queries... the amount of compute being chucked on a fire speculatively is absurd - so much of it already rolled out to users! The carbon cost of that is immediately alarming but there's also just something repellent about it from a systems design perspective. The desperation of these companies is palpable.

Ursula K Le Guin, on tech workers:
"Real power goes to waste. Every wizard uses his art against the others, serving the men of greed. What good can any art be used that way? It's wasted. It goes wrong, or it's thrown away. Like slaves' lives. Nobody can be free alone. Not even a mage. All of them working their magic in prison cells, to gain nothing. There's no way to use power for good."
- "The Finder", from "Tales from Earthsea"

@violetmadder @mcc i think the courts as an instrument are contested ground. they *should* be able do what they were created to do, and sometimes they do, and that is often down to the specific people involved. we should not concede the courts, categorically - specific courts, though, probably, yes.

"We guarantee that [our community's] livelihoods will not be part of a corporate buyout." - from @mirlo 's kickstarter campaign, this is what we need to expect from any project that is trying to replace the old world of for-profit platforms.
At this point I don't care how virtuous or competent a project's leaders are, if its structure is such that it could all go away in an instant if some capitalist shrugs or swipes at it we can't entrust it with our future as creative people.