mastodon 4.5.18Geek for all seasons, especially #SCA, #LARP, #scifi, #boardgames, #comics.
Avid programmer, focused on #FP #Scala, especially #Typelevel
he/him
“Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines”: https://www.frogandtoad.ai
tl;dr — this is a cute, quick little children’s story that also serves as a pretty accurate summary of the HuggingFace Incident.
Well worth bookmarking for anybody who is trying to figure out what the hubbub was all about.
The #enshittification of #Google continues apace.
I’m going to be staying at a hotel soon. I want to put that in my Saved list in Google Maps. Nice and straightforward you’d think, right?
No — when I put the address into Google Maps on my laptop, it shows me *all the hotels in that area*. (Of which there are many, because it’s in the middle of a city.)
Worse, while the desired place is top of the list, it is in no way clearly highlighted on the map, so it’s impossible to find in that sea of hotels.
Worse yet, from that search pane, I can’t find any way to *save the address*. Instead, Google is so busy trying to sell me ways to make a reservation (which I already have), it’s managed to misplace the “save” button.
I finally gave up and did it from my phone (the app still works properly). But in Google’s desperation to Sell Sell Sell, they’re losing sight of why I ever bothered to use them in the first place…
RE: @homegrown@social.growyourown.services
Seriously, folks — it’s way past time for the #SCA to get the hell off #Facebook, but this looks to be the nail in the coffin…
For the #comics fans: I just got introduced to the Sweet Shop app, a new platform for digital comics that seems to get the details right, including:
* Bootstrapped instead of VC-funded (so much less prone to #enshittification)
* Leans towards DRM-free when they can (although they allow creators to ask for DRM)
* Provides PDF downloads
* Already has a considerable stock of good comics
More immediately, for the next week or so, Iron Circus Comics ( @IronSpike@mastodon.social ), one of the best queer-friendly indy publishers around, has a deep sale on a good chunk of their back stock — a buck a volume for a bunch of great stuff: https://sweetshop.app/publishers/iron-circus-comics
So I’ve just bought the ~half of their comics I didn’t already own, and wholeheartedly recommend checking it out: it’s a fabulous deal on a lot of fine comics.
And more generally, check out Sweet Shop (and yay for alternatives to the Amazon empire): https://sweetshop.app/
Epic and delightful game of 20 Questions that I just learned about for the first time: https://www.tumblr.com/thestoryofaslut/829053719115071488?source=share
(Vague content warning as kink-related, but the post itself is entirely SFW.)
Ah, neat -- #YourLocalEpidemiologist's NY branch is now formally expanding to the whole northeast: https://yourlocalepidemiologistny.substack.com/
For anyone who doesn’t know it, YLE has been a sensible, calm source for public-health information since the beginning of the pandemic. It’s pretty much my go-to for coverage that is well-informed and neither panicky nor denialist.
Speaking of prescient, @harris@social.coop
just pointed me to this excellent article: https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260
This posits the notion of the "moral crumple zone": using humans to take the blame when a complex system like #AI does something wrong. The "prescient" is because it dates back to 2019, early in the AI age.
The problem is that we're trying to find humans to take the blame for collective failures.
We define companies as "legal persons" financially; I think we need to get much more serious about doing that for civil and criminal penalties.
IMO the fault should heavily lie with *owners* (including the stock market) pressuring companies to be careless in the name of speed. If we want to fix that, we need laws to *routinely and quickly* assign fines of millions-to-billions of dollars for every single infraction -- enough to hurt.
Don't search for a human to blame -- look to fix the problem. I think that can only be done if the financial risk is greater than the profit.
Really excellent take on the bloody “Lesbian Bar Mask Mandate” story that’s taken over the internet the past few days: https://awardsforgoodboys.substack.com/p/lesbian-bar-mask-mandates
This one’s hard to summarize into a tl;dr — the article’s a little long, but worth reading for a bit of properly nuanced perspective.
It echoes nicely with my own feelings about the whole thing, which is that I have a good deal of empathy with all of the people who are actually *involved* in that situation (on both sides of the debate).
But some of them lost perspective (in somewhat stereotypical ways, unfortunately) and it *completely* went off the rails when it went viral and became “news” (in the sense of “News-Shaped Entertainment Content” that really is no business of the wider world).
Anyway — read the article. It takes this specific incident as an opportunity to remind us of some wider and more important lessons.
Oh, this looks neat: https://structural.chat
This is the latest product from the #Unison team (who I knew from the #Scala world back before they founded Unison).
Haven't read my way through the papers yet, but the (very reasonable-sounding) theory seems to be that #LLMs are actually a pretty lousy way to build chatbots -- they're achingly slow, non-deterministic, and dangerous from a security POV.
They've instead come up with a technology that provides a similar look-and-feel, but is lightning-fast and deterministic, so it works Just Plain Better.
Very cool, and very much a product for our times. I look forward to digging into how it works...
This is a fine example of *my* concerns about the dangers of #AI: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/09/report-us-almost-boarded-chinese-ship-over-hallucinated-ai-arms-report/
Many people freak out about "the bots are going to take over the world!" I'm dubious -- that's panicking about a scenario that doesn't have a clear road to get there.
This, on the other hand -- AI accidentally sparking a war that could potentially go nuclear -- has been the more-valid worry for literally 40 years, and the #DoD seems to be speeding straight towards it.
(Can you say #TormentNexus, boys and girls?)
I've been saying over and over this year that somebody needs to remake the movie WarGames. (Details at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames if you haven't seen it.) It's dated in many ways, but the high concept was prescient, and we're living in it now...
Potentially of interest to the #SCA crowd and anybody else who does research online: #Kagi recently published a useful page of Tips about how to more effectively leverage it for academic research -- https://blog.kagi.com/tips/academia
I'm always a Kagi enthusiast; this pulls together several of the reasons why, with a particular focus on one fairly hardcore use case.
Another day, another @pluralistic@mamot.fr #book, this time pulling together ideas from his various trenchant essays on the subject of #AI: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai
I suspect I'll disagree with some of the nuances (he's strongly opinionated, and I don't always agree with every detail), but he has a lot of good perspective and clue -- it should be fascinating and useful.
And as usual, he's one of the few authors who is not just vocally anti-DRM but puts his money where his mouth is: since Amazon insists on DRM he won't work with them, and instead focuses on independent Kickstarters and the always-wonderful Libro.fm platform.
Looks to be a good read and timely food for thought -- check it out!
The occasional reminder that even #Massachusetts isn't immune to Dangerous Political Stupidity: https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2026-04-09-massachusetts-house-advances-unconstitutional-social-media-ban-bill-that-will-harm-lgbtq-youth-and-human-rights/
tl;dr -- the #MA House passed a bill that is *wildly* invasive of #online #privacy, in the name of "think of the children!" pearl-clutching. It's likely to do far more harm than good, probably especially to the most vulnerable.
If you live in MA, please look up your State Senator and ask them to block this idiocy: https://malegislature.gov/Search/FindMyLegislator
Short but brutal article, expounding on the principle of "#billionaires aren't like us": https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/05/billionaire-consequence-free-reality/686588/
The pull quote that really slammed into me:
> When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist.
Today in "Don't let the #fascism pass by silently": if you're a US citizen, I strongly encourage you to comment on this ghastly FCC proposal: https://glaad.org/fcc
tl;dr -- the FCC wants to slap warning labels on content with "#transgender and #gender non-binary programming". Basically equating peoples' identities with things like gun violence.
The regime is gonna regime, but we shouldn't allow them to pretend that the people agree with them -- please comment!
In case it wasn't clear enough that the current #SupremeCourt is largely controlled by the #racists: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/04/29/us/supreme-court-voting-rights?unlocked_article_code=1.elA.jHfn.mQGLwsAyu-6C&smid=nytcore-android-share
Today in Ridiculous Potables, the Malortini: @jducoeur@querki.net
Only recommended for those who actually like Malort (which essentially substitutes for vermouth in this semi-dry martini variant), but it's not half bad.
Okay, credit where credit is due: #Kickstarter took the note from unhappy members and creators, and have rolled back their recent rules change: https://updates.kickstarter.com/an-apology-rethinking-our-mature-content-guidelines/
Another Pandora's Box well and truly smashed to splinters in this story from @404mediaco@mastodon.social: https://www.404media.co/hello-boss-inside-the-chinese-realtime-deepfake-software-powering-scams-around-the-world/
tl;dr -- high-quality real-time #DeepFakes now not only exist, there is at least one criminal organization selling the technology. It's not cheap, but not super-expensive either.
The implication is that social engineering attacks are about to become considerably more effective. Be on the lookout if you get an unexpected video call asking you to do something hinky: even if it is clearly coming from someone you trust, there's a non-zero chance that it could be a deepfake.
(For the moment, this is probably mainly a concern in the corporate and government spheres, but anybody wealthy should be careful about spear-phishing attacks with this.)
For a long time, I’ve been applauding _The Boys_, the raucous and gory but brilliant political satire that involves a deeply psychotic superhero committing, essentially, a Christo-fascist coup of the US.
One of the most marvelous things about it was how blatantly clear the parallels to the #Trump regime were. (For about a year there I was *sure* he would find some pretext to shut the show down before its finale.) So much of what it portrayed closely mocked the current right wing.
So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the real world is now aping the last season of the show, with blatantly personal ads being run by the government for the dictator: https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/09/problem-with-trumps-taxpayer-funded-ads/688817/?gift=E_ZnjFDVDXw07BX6pvgvVMlFmaLaMUd8vXcmGIxlZys&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
That didn’t prove persuasive for Homelander — hope it doesn’t do any better for Mr. Orange...
*snrk* — quote: “... what might be called #Trump’s iron-clad Law of Military Achievement: The number of times the president claims victory is inversely proportional to the actual extent of American military success”
