mastodon 4.7.2Internet introvert
It's not what I write on my profile, but what I toot that defines me
It's just occurred to me how strange it is, that when someone follows you and you get a notification, the *one* other piece of information included is how many followers they have.
That's interesting, I suppose, but why not include how old their account is, or how many people they're following? Are they new? Are they following *me*, or do they follow everyone?
Even the account summary popup only contains the follower count datum
Can we not escape the pull of the popularity contest?
@JdeBP@mastodon.scot @cstross@wandering.shop @GetCarter@mastodonapp.uk
As she ignores the excesses of her husband’s second term – the name-calling, the immigration raids, the stifling of decent, I’m [...]
Slightly amusing Freudian slip there - along with the dissent, he definitely does stifle the decent, also!
If you do not like the “Projects” folder, simply delete it! The xdg-user-dirs utility will not try to create it again
Oh, that's (relatively) nice. Is that a change in behaviour for xdg-user-dirs dirs generally, or is it just for "Projects", or am I misremembering that those directories get re-created on deletion?
Checks must be conducted entirely client-side, on the user’s device. […] And the code that underpins the system must be open-source, allowing the public to be certain that these expectations are being met.
So, the checks must be on the client, with open source code that the user can inspect… and modify… on their client?
I thoroughly approve (also related, right2repair) - I'm just not convinced you'll be able to sneak it past even the most techno-ignorant of legislators!
@sil @mnot Wait, half a gig? I thought Debian had packages for those, and they weren't anywhere near that big, were they?
tippy tappy
https://tracker.debian.org/news/1412242/accepted-doc-rfc-20230121-1-source-all-into-unstable/
461535648 doc-rfc_20230121.orig.tar.gz
461MB zipped. Huh. I guess my memory is a bit off then.
Wait, what about historically?
tippy tappy
https://tracker.debian.org/news/457888/installed-doc-rfc-20010331-1-all-source/
44166426 doc optional doc-rfc_20010331.orig.tar.gz
44MB. That's a bit more sensible. Quite an increase over the last... 25 years? Oh, OK. Yeah, that's a long time.
If OpenSSL loses its remaining core developers, if libcurl loses Stenberg, if the Samba committer base ages out without succession, the organisations depending on those components lose a supplier. There is no patch for “the project no longer exists.”
Um, yeah there is. An org can maintain its own fork if needs be.
I wonder what the contingency plan is instead, if Microsoft or Oracle goes out of business 20 years into a 30-year OT product lifespan?
The report identifies the UK as a “new autocratiser”, driven by “a substantial decline” in freedom of expression[…]. “In the UK, it began [with] the Elections Act 2022 […]” Lindberg says. “The Policing Act 2022 decreased civil rights and free speech. The Online Safety Act 2023 was used to penalise online speech […]. The Higher Education […] Act 2023 increased demands [to] police free speech. What’s worrying is that once the democratic backsliding begins, it’s often hard to stop.”
@raganwald@social.bau-ha.us I was with the article right up until
Juniors in 2026 aren't going to spend their days writing CRUD endpoints. But they can review AI-generated output, learning to spot the subtle wrongness that only develops through exposure.
Will they though? I thought there was plenty of evidence out there that humans evaluating machine output that's kind of ok much of the time tend to get pretty blind to even the blatant mistakes when they pop up.
[Moreno-Gama] referred to himself as “butlerian jihadist” on Instagram (a reference to a war against machines in Frank Herbert’s Dune universe).
That seems weirdly incomplete. The Butlerian Jihad was very specifically a war against thinking machines.
On jobs, 73 percent of [AI] experts were positive about the long-term effect
But what do AI experts mean when they say they're positive about AI's long-term effect on jobs? What counts as a positive outcome in their worldview?
@jwz@mastodon.social Your take on Nick Cage reminds me of one of my favourite paragraphs by Roger Ebert, reviewing Drive Angry (2011):
Of course it stars Nicolas Cage. [...] Cage is a good actor in good movies, and an almost indispensable actor in bad ones. He can go over the top so effortlessly he rests up and makes lemonade for everybody.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/drive-angry-3d-2011
If Noir is a snooze, maybe he's starting to slow down?
Definitely going to keep an eye out for Vampires of the Velvet Lounge though!
