Tinkerer. Reverse reverse centaur. Fix your hearts or die.
"Scientists say older animals often play several critical roles in how populations function, broadly falling into three categories: ecological knowledge, reproduction, and immunity. They carry knowledge that guides survival, play outsized roles in producing the next generation, and possess stronger defenses against disease built up over time. Together, these qualities can make the difference between populations that endure and those that slowly fall apart." https://e360.yale.edu/features/longevity-conservation
#ecology #wildlife #conservation
You can reduce the amount of data you're sending out by turning off search engine suggestions in your browser smart bar.
Then set the smart bar to draw suggestions from your bookmarks instead, and bookmark just about any site you think you might revisit one day. I've found that to be a nice little quality of (digital) life fix.
I'm not convinced the point is even to get rid of programmers, so much as it is to make them dependent on a resource that only their employers can afford to provide, so that management has a dial to turn whenever the workforce grows too demanding.
Maybe AI's not a replacement worker. Maybe it's a company town.
Don't tell people to leave Mastodon. Mastodon is just server software. It's not your community.
Don't tell people to leave the fediverse. The fediverse is just the aggregate of federated services. It is also not your community.
The closest thing you have to a community here is your home instance. Moderate and gatekeep that however you see fit, up to and including whose messages you want to allow via federation, but don't forget that other communities are not yours to control.
Kinda feels like we ought to have much better software to show for 3.5 years of 10x software development.
You can get a rough sense of how much generative video was costing OpenAI by the fact that they were willing to turn down a $1 billion dollar investment from Disney rather than keep running Sora: https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/openai-shutting-down-sora-video-disney-1236698277/
"Most of your screen time isn't leisure. It isn't addiction. It isn't even a choice. It's maintenance." https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing
@seldo@alpaca.gold @janl@narrativ.es You would really do well to be more sensitive to the fact that a great many people on the fediverse want as little to do with commercial AI as possible. At the very least, you should provide an easier, across-the-board opt-out. But really, the fediverse norm is to make services like this opt-in only. Devs who don't provide for consent tend to face a pretty harsh backlash.
The popular understanding of enshittification gets things precisely backwards. It's not that digital platform startups set out to make valuable services for consumers, but end up making changes that tilt the balance toward exploitation. Rather, exploitation was the destination from the very start, and user satisfaction was a means of scaling up the pool of exploitable users. Enshittification is planned, not inevitable.
If you can make operating systems so that they handle age verification for every app and website they encounter, then you can make operating systems that decline AI integration for every app and website they encounter, and I'd much rather have the latter than the former.
An industry-wide coding strike where programmers check out of their Big Tech jobs for a week to work of FOSS projects instead, to A/B test whether companies relying on agentic AI can really produce software of the same calibre.
Don't use services that feed your fediverse follows to commercial AI platforms unless they're built for consent. For example, the only way to opt out of Zeitgeist is to block anyone who uses it: @seldo@alpaca.gold and there's no clear indicator to show who is using it. That's not consent.
What exactly does everyone mean when they say Bluesky is down?
Presumably it's not the PDS since it seems to be affecting other PDS too. Is it the appview? (In which case, other appviews, like Whitewind, should still be working.) Is it the relay? (Which would stop just about everything.)
Do outages like this take out the other *sky networks as well?
Part of where today's main character post went wrong is that there was a trend a few years back in which tech bros tried to pass "viewpoint diversity" off as a DEI issue so that they could justify bringing more conservative/libertarian voices to the table, and while that's not where he was going with that post, that's the frequency it vibrated.
A previous job involved a lot of lawn and garden research, so if you have a lawn and want to be more environmentally friendly this season:
1. Raise the carriage of your lawnmower. Like: All the way. Most people cut their grass much too short. Taller grass provides better coverage and can reduce the need for watering by shading the soil and slowing evaporation.
2. What's the most eco-friendly lawn mower? One of these bad boys: https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/lawn-garden/g40061434/best-reel-mowers/
3. Bald patches? That's your yard telling you that grass doesn't belong there. Just till that plot and plant something else — preferably something that grows locally. Particularly if you're in a hot, dry region (as more and more of us will find ourselves, going forward), the practice of xeriscaping is your friend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeriscaping
4. Plant other stuff anyway. Local ecosystems thrive on plant diversity. People (especially Americans) have this warped, neo-Victorian ideal of a monoculture yard containing nothing but neatly trimmed Bermuda grass, and that's just not healthy.
Sorta disappointing how often the narrative arc of rock biopics ends up being, "I wanted to be a rock star, so I started acting like one until it made me rich."
Yes, "agentic" is supposed to make you think of the program as something with agency, which it does not have. Okay, good, we've all caught onto that.
But "agentic" is also supposed to make you think of something discrete, a separate entity summoned just for you, your own little worker imp, when it resolutely is not. It's a way of obscuring the enormous, undifferentiated mass of data center cloud that handles most LLM operations.
Seems like the worst possible time to spend $1 billion in taxpayer money to prevent Americans from benefitting from wind energy, but okay. https://stateline.org/2026/03/24/trump-administration-will-pay-1b-to-block-2-offshore-wind-farms/
#politics #USPol #energy
I have very little patience for most "poetic" novels.
(Previously: @lrhodes@merveilles.town )
I'm not sure what to make of the accounts of Abram's wandering. Seems like there's a tangle of traditions being shoehorned in here. For example: Famine drives Abram and co. down to Egypt, where he has Sarai pretend to be his sister. Pharoah takes her as a wife, paying dowry(?) to Abram, until God plagues him, at which point, he catches on, castigates Abram, then expels them from Egypt.
I get the sense that we've lost some important context for this episode.
#Bible
AI is not how you take back the open web. AI is how you lock yourself into a subscription for operating on an "open" web.
