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mastodon 4.7.3Certified genius adjacent. My intelligence is like a unicorn, nobody has seen it and it's probably mythical.
>follow for my takes on tech, life, flower pics and occasional projects I make for the open web.
adopt from a rescue if you can.
humanity comes first.
enshittification of technology is real.
support foss applications.
be kind, it takes nothing.
avatar: diana penty
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Joined April 30, 2025
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Every time one of these people open their mouths, I swear to God, it's a confession of how deep they are. Was human race not functioning before 2023?
#noai #enshittification
Replying to
If you're tired of endlessly scrolling to find opportunities, you can use https://fedi.thatshubham.com I set it up for free to consolidate most Fediverse hiring posts. it updates every 24 hours. Feel free to use it if it helps your search!
Boosted by @jwz@mastodon.social
Given how casual these AI agents are with deleting production databases, y'all should be campaigning to put them in charge of student loans.
Do you see the problem with AI and how it massively enables bullies and perverts?
This is what a recent IPF World Junior medalist from India posted on her instagram.
Replying to
@Remittancegirl@mstdn.social in my language, there's an idiom that goes "kuye ka mendhak" aka "frog in a well". Basically, a frog who dwells inside an old well can seldom imagine the world outside of it. It bewilders them.
Your government is testing what you'll tolerate and a lot of us are tolerating way way WAY too much.
Google is not a serious company. How does your email's web client fire up 604 requests for showing me my emails?
#web #google #gmail #enshittification #privacy #programming
"Death will come one day, in the middle of unfinished plans, and the world will continue without me."
Hot take, perhaps.
What doesn't sit right with me is perhaps the idea that trading the majority of your waking hours for money is the natural order of things, when it is really just one economic arrangement among many that got locked in and dressed up as inevitability.
Most people spend their healthiest decades doing work they would not choose, to buy back small slices of the freedom they gave away, and we call this being responsible. Layered on top of it are supporting scams that keep the machine running.
Manufactured needs sold as happiness, debt marketed as opportunity, brands worn as a status symbol, and the quiet belief that your productivity is your worth. None of these are laws of nature. They are agreements we renew every day mostly because everyone else seems to be renewing them too, and questioning them feels riskier than complying. The genius of the whole setup is that it convinced billions of people that the cage was the sky.
It's rather simple, I hear an AI voiceover on a video, I reflexively skip. I read an obvious AI written/proofread sentence, I close the article tab. It does not matter how interesting the premise was. Protect your sanity as much as you can.
We spend a lot of time in our tech bubbles debating the latest silicon and sub-millisecond latencies. That makes it easy to forget the grim reality of the digital divide.
The milkman who has delivered to my family since I was a kid mentioned his daughter is in 10th grade. She has been trying to do her online coaching on a failing, stuttering budget phone from a decade ago. The friction of just trying to learn is massive because the modern web has largely abandoned low-end hardware.
I picked up a Moto G06 Power for her and gave it to him this morning. It was a sharp reminder and a reality check.
Just think about it for a second - for millions of kids, a basic, reliable smartphone isn't a luxury or a doom-scrolling device. It is the literal gateway to social mobility and education. When we ship bloated, complex architectures, we think its just adding a 100ms delay to flagship hardware that barely notices it. What we should also be wondering if that's unknowingly locking out the student trying to study on a $100 phone.
Accessibility also means building for the hardware people actually have.
You can offset carbon on a spreadsheet. Yet you can't offset thermodynamics in the real world.
Big tech is bragging about "water-efficient" AI data centers while intentionally omitting the power plant. Read this article.
In the US, generating the electricity to run these clusters uses roughly 12x more water than the data centers use on-site.
Buying "water credits" in Michigan does not change the physical reality that you are boiling off the local municipal water supply in a desert area to dissipate the thermal load of an LLM.
Kinda sus to call it an engineering breakthrough. Looks like thermodynamic gerrymandering to me.
#infrastructure #greenwashing #technology #genai #noai #climatechange #datacenters #sysadmin
A warm reminder that the most successful days in infosec and systems engineering are the ones where absolutely nothing happens.
It is hard to overestimate the tedious yet important tasks these folks do. Things like configuring strict CSPs, managing access states, updating systems, keeping proper backups, keeping an eye on network traces or patching vulnerabilities before breakfast rarely get a parade. If you're one of the folks keeping the infrastructure boring and stable today: thank you. Your well-calibrated paranoia is the foundation the rest of us build on.
#infosec #sysadmin #cybersecurity
Good morning and wish you a great day. Here is a cute hibiscus flower from my garden.
Quote of the day, "Look at your wardrobe, your routines, your meals, your room and ask yourself if they reflect the person you want to be. If not, start editing."
#goodmorning #quotes #flowers #photography #bloomscrolling #garden #nature
Just remember, if someone is making $90K a month trading stocks/being a highly sought after software engineer/training high end athletes for sports/[fill-in-the-blanks], they wouldn’t need to sell you a course.
Replying to
@TheNovemberMan@bookstodon.com If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.
I want someone smart to compare characteristics traits of a typical cult and this psychosis 😭
The death of the password is not very far in the future, if our overlords are to be believed.
Google is pitching this new "selfie video" recovery as a lifeline for when you lose your phone. I get the appeal, losing your primary gmail account is akin to a digital eviction for millions.
But think about the architecture we are accepting here. You are anchoring your entire digital life to a biometric that you publicly leave on every Zoom call and Instagram story you ever posted.
How long until an attacker realizes it's infinitely easier to synthesize a video of your face than it is to guess a 16-character password?
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-security/selfie-video-sign-in/
Good morning everyone!
Enjoy the latest pictures from our mango tree. Growing really fast now.
The branches have brought these wonderful fruits right on the balcony! ✨😊
Replying to
@bimmer "if you don't build a house like this, you're missing out. This is the only future, get in or get left behind"
Holy smokes some people can see the future. I visited my cousin brother today, he likes to game a lot. Turn out last year he somehow anticipated all this memory shortage phenomenon and upgraded to a disc edition of Sony PS5 with an 8TB SSD from Western Digital.
Surely that disc is alone worth double now right?
If the AI companies raise their prices 100x tomorrow, or shut down. Will you still be able to do your job?
#noai #capitalism #design #softwareengineering #askfedi #slop #programming #writing
Why don't airports have movie theaters?
If my layover is four hours, let me watch a movie instead of wandering around the terminal. I would happily pay for that.
realistically, how much would I have to drink for a mosquito to instantly die from alcohol poisoning when it bites me?
Work and life has drained my battery lately, I'm sorry for not being active here as much as I would like to. Hope everyone reading this has a great week ahead ✨💜
One of the most dangerous myth in tech right now is that complexity equals sophistication.
I spent the past few days auditing frontend architectures for various enterprise clients. You wouldn't believe the sheer amount of technical debt hiding behind "modern" heavily funded SaaS stacks. Teams of 50 engineers burning hundreds of thousands to manage state updates that a simple HTML form and edge-caching could handle instantly.
The market is quietly punishing financial engineering and rewarding actual operators.
I hope the future doesn't belong to the loudest hustler. It ought to be the quiet operator who builds boring, hyper-fast, privacy-first systems that just work who comes out at the top.
Does anyone here feel the industry shifting back toward fundamentals, or are we still trapped in the hype cycle?
#softwarearchitecture #enshittification #programming #technology
Replying to
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange Exactly! Earlier this year I had made a tool to compare AI spending with similarr projects too!
https://tulana.thatshubham.com/
A sharp bit of speculative fiction: the year is 2063 and you were never interesting. The algorithm always knew.
If you've got someone in your circle or family who is really addicted to social media, send them this article.
https://open.substack.com/pub/lizleatrice/p/the-year-is-2063-and-you-were-never
#socialmedia #mentalhealth #enshittification
Amy Adams in the Office 😍
This would be such a bad time to be in college. Imagine you worked hard for weeks and submitted a stellar essay only to be flagged by some third grade "AI-detector" and got an F and called to the deans office for an academic misconduct hearing I would go into depression
Replying to
@tj Yes please! Scrollbars are not meant for design, they should be strictly the browser's chrome. Between this and scroll-jacking, I don't get these trends.
A classic case of "compliance =/= usability"
Technically, this 10.25 contrast ratio sails past WCAG AAA. But to the human eye, it remains a bit of a chore to read.
Well to me, at least. Standard WCAG 2.x math evaluates relative luminance of flat colors as kind of a proxy for legibility. It doesn't account for spatial frequency, i.e. the actual stroke width of the font. At 13/14px, a monospaced font like JetBrains Mono has very thin strokes, meaning we might require much higher perceptual contrast than a thicker sans-serif to read it comfortably. Not to forget there's a background image to the page which further obscures the text by overpowering it further down.
Recently read about the WCAG 3 APCA (advanced perceptual contrast algorithm) and it's very interesting. It factors in font size, weight considers the context in which colors are used to determine their readability.
How are you handling the compliance versus reality gap in your dark mode designs lately?
RE: https://mastodon.world/@davidho/116979258505111309
Reality trumps Art, yet again. We are doomed 😭
Quoting
It’s hard to tell art from reality these days.
The first photo is an artwork titled Atomic Picnic (2007) by the Mexican-American artist and photographer Daniela Edburg.
The second was taken by photojournalist Maximilien Lamy for AFP / Getty Images showing beachgoers on Moutchic beach at Lake Lacanau in Gironde, France in summer 2026.
How do you stop a player who has already conquered everything? You can't. Lionel Messi is operating in a headspace with zero pressure, and nothing left to prove.
That makes him an absolute menace to every opposition ⚽🐐
Absolutely blessed to be born at a time to witness prime Lionel Messi. Just the goat. Let's go! Well deserved win by Argentina.
I can't decide if creatine (I take creapure) is placebo or not.
Who's gonna tell the geniuses at Google that suggesting Shorts on Youtube TV breaks every conceivable convention and common-sense metric?
Why would you assume I want to watch a short on my TV?
Had to bite the bullet with a higher tier of Google One plan. Because life's been very hectic lately, and I couldn't find time to offload backup or set up separate plans for everyone at home😐
Not the ideal solution and I plan to come back to this later this year.
Almost made my mind to order a decked out framework laptop for my mom.
Went to their website but they don't even ship to India?!
Oh well. Dell's got some good options now that I looked further. Will continue to research into Lenovo, HP, Asus and Acer as well.
Kill me 🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵
Replying to
Now that I finally do have a Windows 11 system, I am experiencing first hand quirks that were alien to me before.
One complaint, why is the right-click context menu dual design-language with important legacy options requiring another click? Who approves this?
On the good side, Windows 11 isn't any slower than 10? The UI is actually faster to respond to clicks, the animations feel quick, the settings app is a massive improvement, although control panel hasn't been ported in its entirety. Some options are still difficult to find.
The explorer has tabs which I have always wanted in Windows. Most drivers work out of the box, the updates are faster to install and easy to defer. Crap like one drive and teams are click uninstall too.
Just my preliminary thoughts.
I'm write about my experience in detail after I get my personal affairs in order this week.
Replying to
@david@fouroclockfarms.club there are *some* tech companies that kinda mandated using AI assisted workflows. However the token cost has hopefully put a stop to that stupid trend recently.
Watching this video makes me feel really sad for teachers and professors who just want to teach 😔
#noai #academia #technology #books
Replying to
@dckim interesting point and yes, I agree. Call an API for this, load fonts from that, load images from another part may be an easy way to build something, its definitely not an efficient way for the end result.