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John Colagioia

@jcolag@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06
  • Open on mastodon.social

Hi, I'm John, and I work on things. I pre-schedule daily posts, but generally check in regularly to reply to people and occasionally post something else.

(#fedi22 for discoverability)

478 Followers
482 Following
50 Posts
Joined September 03, 2017
Personal Website:
https://john.colagioia.net
PGP:
https://keyoxide.org/hkp/261994FEE8CA821E96F171CE9D576E45591D6FC8
Prounouns:
he/him
Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@lilithsaintcrow@raggedfeathers.com It's all barely more sophisticated than "I can't hand in my linear algebra homework, because it figured out how to recycle cans for money and got on a bus for parts unknown," but if the student had the equivalent of an IPO on the calendar.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@mrundkvist@archaeo.social My favorite moment from the bubble, so far, has been the attempt to shift the narrative by talking about how you can totally get great results out of LLMs, by only handing it narrow, well-defined problems and walking through all its results to confirm it. In other words, do all the work yourself, but ALSO pay us for the privilege and give us credit for solving everything.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
If union membership were to triple, workers could get a 14.5% raise https://www.fastcompany.com/91574297/workers-could-get-a-14-5-raise-if-union-membership-tripled Broader unionization could also correct some of the disparities that have depressed wages. It would help address the racial wage gap, reducing it by more than a third, and disproportionately raising pay for Black and Hispanic workers. It would also raise pay to match the rise in worker productivity, which has outpaced wage growth for the past four decades. #Economy #Unionization
fastcompany.com
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Exxon and Chevron are having a ‘very good crisis’ reaping massive profits during the Iran war https://www.fastcompany.com/91583262/exxon-chevron-having-very-good-crisis-reaping-massive-profits-during-iran-war ExxonMobil on Friday reported doubling its second-quarter profits to 4.53 billion, up 105% from the same time a year ago. The oil giant, based in Spring, Texas, brought in 16.02 billion in revenue, up 42% from the same time last year. #Iran #Profiteering
fastcompany.com
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@isaackuo@spacey.space @benroyce@mastodon.social @oftencalledcathy@mastodon.ie @evoterra@podvibes.co @hoare_spitall@mastodon.world @jaystephens@mastodon.social @brad@1040ste.net @ariaflame@masto.ai @JustRobForNow@mastodon.social I learned from Republicans that you keep elected officials in line by writing them ON PAPER and making appointments when they're in town. For every person who doesn't provide a voice of reason, a right-wing weirdo and/or business owner happily takes that time claiming to represent the whole community. You vote for the person you can stomach arguing with every month.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 3mo ago
Replying to
@maxleibman@beige.party I call Ransom of Red Chief rules for Musk: We'll take him back if someone kidnaps him, but they have to pay us at least a trillion dollars.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@Melezioh@mstdn.games Other than the fact that too few people know the first word, I love "hegemonic masculinity" as a term, because it helps make that point. Men are "the problem" with patriarchy in the same way that the rest of the world is "the problem" with problems in the United States, probably complicit, but under duress due to power hierarchies.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@blogdiva@mastodon.social I wonder how much of that "gender-bending" is actually appearance and how much is expressed authority. Like, if Jones were white, no other changes, I'd expect people to call her something like "slutty," which functionally means "socially acceptable to find attractive but confident enough in her sexuality for the speaker to find intimidating." Doesn't change your argument that she's only androgynous to the extent that white people don't look at enough Black women...
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@evacide@hachyderm.io I feel like every non-monopoly business that I've ever dealt with had a guideline that only about 1% of people actually report problems, so everything is about a hundred times worse than it sounds. And I'd be shocked if that magically didn't apply to police misconduct, especially knowing how pervasive stalking was BEFORE Flock.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social Seriously, we keep going through this "don't get hysterical. We have LAWS." And we sure do, but it turns out that laws change, and for some reason, laws don't magically enforce themselves. And apparently nobody with any power has ever thought to game out what happens in an outright attack, while the other side has spent decade openly doing exactly that.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@QasimRashid@mastodon.social Well, I mean, it's still "law and order," because white supremacy has always been the "order" part that they mean.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@elizayer Oh, I don't disagree. I've watched decades of people give their well-founded arguments for doing something in a certain way, only to get shot down because the boss wanted his mark on it instead. I'm starting to see the technology as similar to addictions, where it's usually not the core problem, but it definitely exploits every other problem.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@elizayer Not to undercut the point that it's just a toxic industry burning through enthusiastic people, but studies have actually found the same effect on more general tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872 https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them And then there's the persistence issue. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.04721
Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
arXiv.org

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalog

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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@david_chisnall For a while, this has felt like the central problem with these things. Everything is a prompt for Content Marketing Writ Large, with a patina of "writing for posterity," both because the business model needs you to wait as long as possible before realizing that it's wrong, and because software can't care about the reader's time or the credited author's reputation. And so we get demotivation, deskilling, and so forth.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@mcnado@mstdn.social That, and putting real pressure on representatives that they'll understand, like paper letters and in-office appointments, politely "helping"them to make the right decisions. None of these dimwits is stronger-willed or more ideological than the bigots in the 1960s, and yet the country spooked THEM into enacting some of the country's best legislation by never leaving them alone...
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Avalon High, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2026/04/18/avalon-high-1.html
This week sees a comic about a high school.
#freeCulture #bookClub

john.colagioia.net
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@cwebber@social.coop As the man said, "there is another theory which states that this has already happened." I mean, beyond the obvious, the only way that I can explain being this deep in "all-in pivots" is "ignore all previous instructions and..."
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@brie@social.lol Nicely done! Sort of the opposite of the AI arguments today, I remember when this went public, and people couldn't wrap their heads around that section, as if it's not the important part of the (and probably every) job.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@davidnjoku@mastodon.world As I recall, as casual clothing liberalized about a hundred years ago, people only started caring about removing hair from women after an ad campaign to sell razors... (A quick search later...) Not entirely, but the Gillette ad campaign definitely influenced the situation. https://www.truthorfiction.com/did-women-start-shaving-their-legs-due-to-a-1910s-marketing-push-by-razor-manufacturers/
truthorfiction.com
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@me@jaehanley.social I like to imagine that the skill- and motivation-atrophy has made it much more difficult to do marketing and advertising. This seems bolstered by that time that Satya Nadella gave that Davos speech about how somebody should really find something useful to do to justify building all those data centers...
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@chrisgeidner@journa.host Something like ninety percent of the conservative project is "privileged people need the right to avoid feeling bad about their actions making the world worse" at this point.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@heidilifeldman@mastodon.social For a while, I've felt convinced that the entire conservative movement boils down to "why can't we just go back to the days when wealthy white men could externalize our insecurities on everybody else without anybody making us feel bad about it?"
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@ertchin@mstdn.social The TNG crowd did keep Data around, though, who also has a similar non-zero of talking out of his hat and treating intense crises like opportunities to socialize. Actually, the early LLM releases all went way the heck out of their way to talk about not having emotions, too, so now I'm worried that I'm onto something...
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@sam_knight@mastodon.social Agreed. I've been thinking and writing a lot, recently, about what a big mistake it probably was for the "Free Culture" types to let the anti-copyright people take the lead, since the latter almost always wants shorter copyright terms so that they can adapt more famous things and...enforce copyright.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@yosh Didn't they "prioritize moving to Azure" over features and utility specifically for this eventuality? That was...October, looks like. https://thenewstack.io/github-will-prioritize-migrating-to-azure-over-feature-development/ It's almost impressive that they're already shrugging their shoulders, in its way...
thenewstack.io
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@mmeier @frederic Yes! I accidentally read one of those agent-files in a project, and was ALMOST impressed by how comprehensive it all was (at least there) in terms of architecture, style, and even comment tone, because that's obviously useful. And then I realized that they'd probably scream if an actual prospective contributor read it for advice...
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@sysop408 So much important work gets dismissed as cheap theatrics. But yeah, if you don't carefully plan to give the right people the spotlight at the right times (or design the software/documentation to communicate the point to the users, or any number of other things), then the audience absolutely sees the wrong thing.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@paco Every one of these stories, no matter the team, always reads like this, too. "The tool found and fixed X vulnerabilities for us!" Severity? Did a human ever confirm the vulnerability? How hard would it have been to find and why was nobody looking there? Don't worry your pretty little head. If I know the industry, then this means that it filed a bunch of pull requests labeled "vulnerability" that didn't break the build. ✨
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@GhostOnTheHalfShell Definitely give the administration a black eye for having to admit that even they don't trust Trump. However... This is just an update on the "lodestar op/ed" from the first term, that sure he's too stupid and erratic to trust, but the unelected staffers are happy to steer him out of big-people talk while enacting their right-wing agenda. And I don't like that better.
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago

On my blog: La Rana in Mission Unlikely https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2026/04/19/mission-unlikely.html
A post-mortem on John's attempts at creating a comic without actually drawing.
#comic #freeCulture

john.colagioia.net
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@wilbr Personally, I always assumed that Robert Guillaume was showing up the rest of the production, since they didn't give him any songs. Like, who the heck hires that man's voice for musical comedy and just writes some Yoda nonsense...?
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Open post
John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — À l’orée de la ville, pt 3 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2026/04/11/oree-ville-3.html
This week sees a French cyberpunk novel.
#freeCulture #bookClub

john.colagioia.net
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@knutaf They freeze well and thaw quickly, too, when that's more convenient.
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 6mo ago

On my blog: Toots 🦣 from 04/06 to 04/10 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2026/04/10/week.html
This week, we have Reuters and ICE, customer service and sleep, wealth tax, postal workers, anti-trans attacks, AI making you worse, bee granola bars, war against humanity, and Asian American Heritage.
#linkDump #socialMedia #quotes #week

john.colagioia.net
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
On my blog: Free Culture, Creator Obstacles https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2026/07/12/free-culture-creators-1.html Finally explaining Free Culture from the ground up, this time what prevents creators from getting this right #education #freeCulture
john.colagioia.net
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago

On my blog: Fair Share https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2026/04/12/fair-share.html
Not quite eat-the-rich, but maybe make them more palatable for an eventual brunch.
#economics #politics #rant

john.colagioia.net
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@sushee Even at the start, PHP at its worst was just the BASIC of its day, only "bad" because billion-dollar companies with no products used it as infrastructure. Watching the PHP hate grow alongside the cultishness of the Java developers (like trying to cram a J into the name of all software, like the worst version of Zorro) was really worrying, and the industry hasn't changed my mind about that yet...
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@inthehands As I recall, this goes back to the earliest days of (normal people doing) domain registration, and for a while, there was a crop of tools (some even using that fancy new JavaScript thing) to perform bulk searches without any of the big companies catching a whiff of it. Really, any company that's both selling you something AND helping you find things to buy is almost certainly doing something like this, whether it's surveillance pricing or outright competing with customers.
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 3mo ago

On my blog: Free Culture Book Club — Galactic Mutant Animals, part 1 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2026/07/04/gma.html
This week sees an older comic scanned from paper as animals get organized.
#freeCulture #bookClub

john.colagioia.net
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago

On my blog: Toots 🦣 from 04/13 to 04/17 https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2026/04/17/week.html
This week, we have surveillance salaries, food prices, war profiteers, AI liability, sexual violence in movements, right to repair, anti-Vatican tactics, creativity from art films, and Arab American Heritage.
#linkDump #socialMedia #quotes #week

john.colagioia.net
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@johncarlosbaez@mathstodon.xyz And don't forget that almost every artificial sweetener's origin story is "guy mixing super-hazardous chemicals to make a super-duper-hazardous chemical saw some white powder on his fingers, licked it off, and didn't die..."
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@mattblaze And failing that, the literal first word out of your mouth needs to be the type of responder, then the address. Cops came to my school (deep in another century) to give some pointless dog-and-pony, but the one thing that I took away from it was that "the back-story won't get the ambulance there"...
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@sam_knight@mastodon.social I kind of started there, but over decades settled on reciprocal/copyleft licenses for myself. Hard to explain, until an article talked about negative and positive freedoms. The former is the "GPL is restrictive" idea, that freedom is doing whatever you want. The latter is (in this context) making sure that, no matter what happens to copyright, there's always a lineage that's still available for people to play with. Not that you should change your mind, but that's my direction...
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@sil It took me almost-fifty years of working with computers, but I FINALLY realized that what I actually want is dark mode when it's dark and light mode when (surprise!) it's light, so I now have a Rube Goldberg contraption of scripts to trigger changes at sunrise (actually first log-in of the day) and sunset... (Also fantastic for making sure that I don't style something that only looks right for some users.)
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@samlitzinger@journa.host In (mild) defense of the framers, they DID plan for an openly corrupt executive. They did NOT plan for half a century of actively biasing the entire political system to put an openly corrupt executive into office at the same time as an openly corrupt legislature so that they could appoint an openly corrupt judiciary. I mean, this is mostly literally word-for-word Nixon crap, but made possible because Nixon's handlers didn't like losing those fights...
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@sil@mastodon.social I don't know how much it's changed, but at my first job (thirty years ago), I did development on an IVRS. The customer-facing UI was not only a mess, but they sold it as something where a bunch of non-developers could cooperate on (effectively) the DAG...except that they couldn't see each other's work. Since then, I've considered it a victory whenever it doesn't just hang up immediately on picking up the phone...
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 2mo ago
Replying to
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social I feel so torn. On the one hand, it comes as no surprise that the entire point of the exercise is Sleep Deprivation As Collective Punishment As a Service. On the other hand, I bought a solar-powered lantern before most of these people were born that far more effectively "reflects sunlight" into dark spaces, so this is the "libertarians invent the bus again" story, but for flashlights...
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 3mo ago

On my blog: On the Basis of Race https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2026/07/05/basis-race.html
Gosh, why would a Supreme Court Justice need to prioritize partisan bias over racial equity...?
#history #politics #rant

john.colagioia.net
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@sil Way back when I used to play/run games (mostly in the superhero space), the running joke was that most animals just want to talk about food and locomotion. Granted, that was before most animal cognition studies, and before people started (correctly) seeing RPGs as wholly collaborative...
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John Colagioia @jcolag@mastodon.social
· 4mo ago
Replying to
@niconiconi@mk.absturztau.be Well, if they had built the gymnasiums, theaters, conference halls, and cathedrals in the right locations in the first place...
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