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@mhoye@cosocial.ca that gives more of a FrontPage 97 feeling to me
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Gabriele Svelto
@gabrielesvelto@mas.to
mastodon 4.7.2Old school nerd
Knows things about computers that would drive you insane
Hacks on Firefox at Mozilla
3627 Followers
344 Following
50 Posts
Joined May 23, 2025
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
Happy "Oracle has lost more than 60% of its value since the peak one year ago" to all those who celebrate
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
I hate with a passion any kind of reporting that describes problems among teenagers as caused by "screen time". It depicts it as some kind of flaw among young people who deliberately spend too much time on their phones.
Call it for what it is: abusive practices by a handful of tech corporations. They profit from products deliberately designed to create addiction, and particularly so among children and teenagers.
Stop blaming victims and start blaming the perpetrators.
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
Riding bikes is - by itself - an extremely safe activity.
It's the cars that are dangerous.
Since when refusing to use a tool made you an extremist?
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
When looking for a hotel booking.com is a great resource. The correct way to use it is to look for a place you like, then find their phone number and call them directly. They will always give you a lower rate and you won't be sending money to a faceless corporation.
Boosted by @DataKnightmare@mastodon.xyz
The Ponzi schemers have asked to slow down the Ponzi scheme so that... uh, the scheme can go on a little bit longer before people figure out they've been had?
In a bit of good news Andrew Tate and his brother have been arrested. Again.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/18/us/tate-brothers-arrested-miami
A short story about data retention on modern SSDs and a word of warning about leaving them unpowered.
I recently helped a friend move his data to a new machine - and because of kerfuffle by his IT department - his new laptop arrived with a small SSD, so we had to leave some data behind until a larger one was available. I volunteered to move his Windows installation and old data on the new SSD as soon as it arrived, but life got in the way and 6 months went by before he showed up. 🧵 1/4
It has been zero days since I had to verify the output of a large language model and it was wrong.
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@nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt as someone with a long time interest in natural language processing I find this stuff an insult to decades of research. The goal was to program computers to interpret natural language and instead we've programmed them to fool people into thinking they can interpret natural language. What a shame.
I'm encountering more and more websites - mostly businesses - that block access from countries that aren't the one they're based on. This makes perfect sense given the scourge of AI crawlers. If your customers are in just one country why would you accept a massive amount of traffic from elsewhere? It also shows the increasing Balkanization of the internet, a virtual space that grows smaller and more isolated every day.
I spent some time during the past week hashing out some work with my colleagues to optimize Firefox memory consumption and its behavior in low-memory situations.
Ironically this is all work that I had already initiated years ago but couldn't finish for a number of reasons. One was that I lacked data, but we've gathered enough since then to inform our choices, so that work was not lost, it just needs to be completed.
Given the situation around memory prices I think this is a priority.
When asked about AI use in a project remember that it is absolutely valid to reply that you will use it when and if it makes sense to, and by that mean never.
RE: https://shakedown.social/@aburtch/116981916905452543
Schadenfreude like there's no tomorrow
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More in the vein of "AI is a liability not an asset": https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/a/treyalston/ghost-shell-2026-no-ai-used-director
Toma Kimura (who goes by “Mokochan”), of anime production company Science Saru, revealed at the festival that the upcoming Ghost in the Shell remake wouldn’t have any generative AI — and the crowd responded with roars of excitement.
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@jcoglan@mastodon.social this goes hand in hand with the obsession of getting better results by running these things in a loop (aka "agentic" stuff). You're exploring a statistical space through sheer brute force and randomness in the hope that you'll encounter something resembling the right answer
EA was a toxic company even before the Saudi's and the Trump's bought it off. Now it's like a sewage pit where people decided to dump radioactive waste and asbestos in.
I keep encountering the weirdest bugs on websites and in applications I've used for a long time, and every time it happens I can't help but think: is this vibe-coding?
I was not expecting the value of chipmakers to start tumbling so soon, after all those are among the very few companies that are profiting from the AI bubble. If investors feel the party is already over for them then the great AI Ponzi scheme is very close to unraveling.
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@blogdiva@mastodon.social I am no expert, just worked a couple of years in finance which gave me both a basic understanding of these numbers and a desire not to get anywhere near it again. That being said circular trading is illegal, there's no way around that... but under the current US administration no one is doing anything to prevent or punish it, and all the companies involved are based in the US.
This article¹ reminded me that the one thing we absolutely need in computing is simplicity. Cutting down on complexity, not piling it up.
BMCs are basically small Linux machines (often PowerPC-based in the past, ARM recently) that allow you to manage the server that contains them even when it's off. Crucially this is a Linux box that gets updated only when the vendor feels like updating it, which oftentimes means sometimes between too late and never.
¹ https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/thousands-of-servers-can-be-backdoored-by-exploiting-buggy-motherboard-controllers/
🧵 1/6
I've updated my tutorial on how to enable SecureBoot on Gentoo using shim & GRUB, there's a few significant changes compared to the first version I made:
- There are less manual steps as I rely more on the improvements in Gentoo's GRUB package
- There is no need to regenerate the bootloader when installing or removing kernels
- Post-install scripts are provided to automatically update both bootloaders
https://www.setphaserstostun.org/posts/secure-boot-on-gentoo-with-shim-grub/
So Nvidia bought another stake in Nebius - one of its customers. They stopped Enroning for a bit so they can WorldCom instead.
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climate change, ableism, covid, negative
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
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@tante@tldr.nettime.org this is important for another reason: AI shops want you to label what you did with their bots so they can filter it out of their training set. If you're forced to hide your machine-generated contributions then they're more likely to end up in the training sets and poison the future generations of the models with their own outputs.
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@ishambard@cupoftea.social @vitex@f.cz I made the same mistake, thought this was about Prometheus where every single "scientist" was dumb af. Unsurprisingly I did not waste my time watching Covenant and it seems I made the right call.
Spending my evening patching GRUB because why not?
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
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@mhoye@cosocial.ca there's also the fact that outside of the tech bubble this whole thing is as relevant as a sloppy fart. The vast majority of humans don't have jobs that involve pushing buttons, and the only way this technology affects them is through inflation and enshittification of the bits of technology they use for communication or entertainment.
Lebanese shia families that fled the combat are turned away by other religious groups for fear of attracting attacks from the Israeli Defense Forces on their settlements and districts.
This plays into the hands of Hezbollah which needs to refill its ranks and stoke sectarian unrest in Lebanon and yes, it's absolutely by design. It's not like the Israeli leadership didn't know this would happen.
https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-update-special-report-july-22-2026/
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@jcoglan@mastodon.social I think part of the reason is that injecting randomness into each step is crucial to the way they are marketed and to many of their use-cases. Without it you'd get predictable outputs which would destroy the illusion of a "natural" conversation with the user.
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@jaredwhite@indieweb.social one interesting wrinkle in this is that using LLMs without disclosing their use is poison for the training sets. Model collapse is directly caused by feeding model outputs into the training set, which is why the AI companies are now hell bent on having your work labelled as co-authored by a bot. It's crucial for them to be able to filter out those materials from their training set.
In other words people using LLMs without disclosing their use are actively contributing to the downfall of the AI industry.
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The combinatorial explosion is *huge* but manageable because there are rules for those forms. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to remember them. So that's the typical thing where you cannot simply list all possible forms, you need your spell-checker to be aware of the context and the rules... and if it is, it's not even that complex. A kid can remember those rules so why a computer can't?
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And in this case it's a computer backed by billions of dollars in revenues and tens of thousands of employees. You'd think they'd have enough resources to get that right 17 years after the launch of this operating system, don't they?
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To explain why that is know this: the different tenses and moods generate *dozens* of forms for each regular verb. And additionally the language has the ability to stick the object, the subject or both to the verb. For example "give that to me" can be written as a single word (dammelo). And that's before getting into irregular verbs.
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Watch out, these are the most brilliant minds of our generation we're talking about:
According to the suit, Tan began emailing himself information about Apple's suppliers before leaving his position at the company and moving on to OpenAI.
It is not reassuring to convince people that AI is going to make the world better while playing a song about the end of the world, and yet, this contradictory musical choice seems to have sailed right past everyone at Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg. [...] Then again, tech leaders are not known for their literary analysis skills.
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@hyc@mastodon.social @netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org m68k CPUs have long being discontinued but you can still buy legacy ColdFire ones (though no new ones have been made in 10+ years). Most of the m68k action now is softcores on FPGAs.
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@dev@discuss.systems how are we supposed to make satire going on? These people are walking, talking, billion-dollar-holding jokes.
Goodbye Lara is absolutely gorgeous. Apparently part of the OP was hand-drawn on cels. Seeing cel animation be done again fills my heart with joy.
Source: https://xcancel.com/Goodbye_Lara/status/2076337829341471157
OP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOfC_4qCa9c
#GoodbyeLara #さよならララ #anime
Reading about a storage array used by a Kickstart project I'm following where they lost 3 drives in the span of a few seconds in an 8 drive RAID6 array. They are now waiting for a data recovery company to hopefully restore and clone the contents of one of the drives to rebuild the array. I don't know how this kind of failure is possible but it's a good reminder to make backups even when your data is in what is supposed to be a very reliable storage element.
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@simonzerafa@infosec.exchange definitely. On my current machines I've got two different instances of Firefox open, each of which with several tabs, plus Thunderbird, a couple of terminals, Geany and a couple more utilities. That's a lot more than a regular users and I'm only using ~8.1 GiB worth of physical memory (again, with a 1080P display, a 4K one will increase memory consumption quite a bit).
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@simonzerafa@infosec.exchange that and many people are buying second-hand boxes, many of which come with only 8 GiB of memory. That's an amount that should be totally acceptable for a regular users with a 1080P screen, the fact that even 16 GiB is now considered a "small amount" is bonkers.
They broke pointers and wallpapers. POINTERS AND WALLPAPERS. Something that has been working since the early '90s. How tf do you break pointers and wallpapers? This is a disgrace. Microsoft is a joke.
https://www.techpowerup.com/352123/microsoft-confirms-windows-11s-kb5120998-update-is-breaking-mouse-cursors
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@wyatt@soc.megatokyo.moe @netbsd@mastodon.sdf.org @hyc@mastodon.social maybe they've got a nice stockpile? MC68SEC000xxxx chips can still be found but not in huge numbers (IIRC you can still order 100s of them, but not from Freescale)
Replying to on infosec.exchange
@simonzerafa@infosec.exchange for proteins I tend to switch to fresh cheeses, fish and legumes