Hobbyists and pirate broadcasters can now do the funniest things. @arstechnica@mastodon.social
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skry
@skry@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Tech (ux, infosec, facepalms), ethics, science, US politics, climate action, public health, social justice, human rights. Visuals on art, crafts, weird stuff, living things, archaeology, landscapes. Beauty and curiosities.
Left Coast, US
Following behind you adding ALT text so I can boost your images.
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Joined April 26, 2022
Profile photo:
Poppy anemone flower
Header photo:
Turkeytail shelf fungus on a log
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she / her
“Take a moment to think before you dive in. That’s the best advice for #Google Photos users, as the company confirms its latest update can scan all your photos to “use actual images of you and your loved ones” in AI image generation. That means Gemini seeing who you know and what you do. You likely have tens or hundreds of thousands of photos. They’re all exposed if you update.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2026/04/20/google-starts-scanning-all-your-photos-as-new-update-goes-live/ #photography #privacy
Boosted by @octothorpe@mastodon.online
Hootsuite in #Vancouver #Canada licking the fascist boot. #Surveillance #ux #uspol
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-hootsuite-canada-vancouver-ice-social-media-contract/
"One e-mail sent internally by a Hootsuite sales employee in September, 2025, described the project with ICE as a “Trojan Horse Deal” that could turn into a seven-figure contract. The author mentioned travelling to Washington with “Irina” – Hootsuite’s chief executive officer is Irina Novoselsky – to “brief ICE on how Hootsuite and Talkwalker can support their mission.” (1/2)
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@baillehache_pascal Looks like wild ginger to me. If so you can smell in order to tell after it has more leaves.
It does look like the Julia set, but I didn’t realize that until you mentioned it.
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@deFractal
Zero Privacy is the ultimate in Permanent Pornography User Tracking (tm). To protect children, every person in America will soon have all their online activities tracked from cradle to grave in case they do or say anything prohibited.
Palantir loves this plan and so will you.
Ask Congress to start tracking you today.
@pluralistic @privacyint @eff
“White Supremacist dating platform hacked and deleted - live on stage Chaos Communication Congress” (Reddit)
https://www.reddit.com/r/chaoticgood/comments/1pzu0ei/white_supremacist_dating_platform_hacked_and/
Data analysis https://okstupid.lol/
Full talk (download for English)
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-the-heartbreak-machine-nazis-in-the-echo-chamber
“Requiring every citizen to provide a passport or birth certificate in person to register or update their voter information would impact all of us, but would especially impact working-class Americans, older voters, women who’ve changed their last name, and those who’ve lost essential documents due to natural disasters.”
// And they are pushing this in the short time between now and November. So also get your docs in order if you can. @indivisibleteam@mastodon.social
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@jasmine@chaosfem.tw I think @Tael@mastodon.social must have been responding to @Navi@mastodon.social.
Thanks for spreading this so people can make informed buying decisions.
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@fembot @evacide What’s worse is that if you don’t have a mental model of how a system works in your own context you miss attack surfaces and data exhaust that might matter a lot.
Example: Strava exposing top secret military locations, raising threats for thousands of people who don’t use the app.
Or people paying with Venmo but not imagining that transactions are public by default.
Or not realizing that bluetooth beacons and invisible pixels report your route offline and on, now for sale.
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@evacide I keep showing people the terrible 2023 @mozilla results for #mentalHealth apps and their horrible privacy problems. https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/mental-health-apps/
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@dymaxion As a person in the market for such devices, I'm very excited you're doing this. Please holler whenever you want some usability feedback or testers.
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@dragonfrog@mastodon.sdf.org @sarahtaber@mastodon.online My sourdough supplier meets us in the park on Fridays and we drive by and shove cash into her hands.
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@taylorbrooks@mstdn.ca @Pinchy63@ottawa.place @elbowspeak@mastodon.social @sarahtaber@mastodon.online San Francisco has (had) cannabis smoking lounges with mood lighting and munchies, beanbags etc. Also hookah outdoor cafes on the West Coast and cigar bars in the South. It seems that if the purpose of your establishment is smoking, that’s okay in some places.
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@mgiraldo @mralancooper Weird. It didn’t link for me in OP and I am also in that domain. That’s good.
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@fembot It’s complicated.
We need the user illusion because the complexity and plumbing needs to be paved over for ease of adoption and use.
Even though dipswitches begrudgingly gave way to software, the field attracts maker geeks who revel in finding out exactly how shit works. That’s how they got their skills, and that’s who they naturally imagine is their user in the absence of data to the contrary.
And thus began the battle of qualitative vs quantitative data and the collision of Agile.
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@mralancooper It’s usually invisible in posts because of html, but names and web addresses must be fully qualified on Mastodon in order to form links reliably even though your editor shows you it is linked. I added @ mastodon . social to the end of the name @mgiraldo for ex.
IIRC, the folks on your own server might not require that, so that’s a namespace misdelivery hazard potentially.
https: // required and invisible in posts, is hard to discover, so everyone must RTFM or get help, lol.
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@fembot @evacide It’s a technical term when in a technical context, but it’s also a handy metaphor.
What most folks do is probably closer to risk assessment and threat weighting, but there’s a lot of ‘if A then B’ planning for existential things like where to live, what to eat, whom to date, which job to take, what to insure against, etc.
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@toxi Thank you for your work.
The exploitation of FOSS and the lack of giving back has been appalling.
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@androcat@toot.cat Maybe you can find it at archive.today.
I don’t know why it’s not paywalled for me today. It seems to be about not updating Google Photos.
Here’s a Gizmodo article. https://gizmodo.com/google-makes-image-generation-a-little-creepier-with-personal-intelligence-2000747437
Maybe if you search for “Google Photos” AI you could turn up a lot of material about this story.
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@BentiGorlich@wehavecookies.social @bruces@mastodon.social ALT:
Paul Graham @/paulg@twitter.com
I used to think woke mobs would be the death of Twitter. Then it seemed like right-wing goons would be. But cheery, vapid Al-generated replies seem more dangerous than either of them.
@/jason@twitter.com
That's a great observation! It's actually quite a fascinating point when you think about it-the idea that "niceness" can feel more alienating than a heated argument.
••• (1/2)
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How about we build a plan and punch up that tweet into a full essay? We could dive into the "Uncanny Valley" of toxic positivity and explore why a bland, algorithmic
Would you like me to start by outlining some key arguments for the essay, or should we focus on finding a few more examples of "dangerous" Al cheer to include? (2/2)
@mralancooper Allegedly DOW wanted to (did?) shoot lasers at “Mexican drones” and FAA couldn’t get answers, so they shut it down without notifying the mayor or the gov or the other feds. Not sure why the 10 days at first, but now it’s back open and everyone is pointing fingers at each other.
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@mralancooper@hachyderm.io @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng For the website and app work I did, as a practical matter, three was the maximum for one study. I haven’t been in a situation where teams had more than three competing ideas that anyone was passionate enough about to think through to prototype, even in paper.
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@mralancooper@hachyderm.io @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng Design Thinking: The method that contributed to Ford touchscreens that were so difficult and dangerous to use that people returned their entire cars over it.
Boosted by @octothorpe@mastodon.online
“In the last month ICE has bought warehouses in:
- Hagerstown, MD: $102 million
- Surprise, AZ: $70 million
- Hamburg, PA: $87 million
- Tremont, PA: $120 million
- San Antonio, TX: $82 million
- El Paso, TX: $123 million
- Social Circle, GA: price unknown This is unprecedented.”
https://bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3meh26dlgms2a
// https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:tfi2ptjvgjf5xvkbykujtyz7 tracks these concentration camps.
#Maryland Washington County Commission votes tomorrow https://projectsaltbox.substack.com/p/washington-county-commissioners-to #uspol https://mastodon.social/@indivisibleteam/116042496057260606
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@bit101@mstdn.social Having been a usability pro for most of my life, I can agree with @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng’s points easily, but I need to say “It depends” on Don’t Make Me Think, a book I have read. I share the title discomfort, but the thrust is that we need parts of interaction to be muscle memory so we can use cognitive processing for important things. Don’t exhaust people by moving buttons on every screen, etc. It’s about consistency w/expectations (largely a pipe dream, but still a useful concept)& learnability.
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@bit101@mstdn.social @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng This idea is the opposite of game design, and there’s the point of friction. Technophiles like different things than regular people do. Most people hate figuring out a new app, because that’s not the activity they are interested in. They just want to buy groceries or register for class.
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What Sam Altman Doesn't Want You To Know
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@lethe@digitalcourage.social @paulisci@mstdn.ca …while researching early infowar, when everyone with a networked device was able to talk to each other (which alongside traditional birth control caused population decline).
2026’s “netizens” debated whether “agentic AI” would ever become trustable.
In 2126, we can now look back with regret on all the hopeful dreams of the Mad Generation—who fell in love with unregulated chatbots trained on stolen, illegal, and unvetted wild corpora—and lost their minds while the world burned.
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@trevdev @Gina @JakeKb Signal group calls can be started by sharing a link with up to 75 people. https://signal.org/blog/call-links/
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@bruces We’ll look back at this and marvel that the main effect besides burning greater-fool investor cash was bankrolling Anduril, our new drone overlords.
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@pikesley@mastodon.me.uk Some people have a rich inner life, while others take the money and never look back at their own terrible ethics and consequential failures. They just seethe and cope and implode. Sad.
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@otfrom@functional.cafe @pikesley@mastodon.me.uk Machines, it’s all about talking to the machines and making bigger machines. History and literature are for people who can’t code.
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@js@ap.nil.im @blogdiva@mastodon.social You mean chip wafers I guess.
I hope that this market opportunity causes Apple to make more fabs.
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@vashbear@hachyderm.io @mralancooper@hachyderm.io Official Trump posts: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/
Boosted by @octothorpe@mastodon.online
• ICE killed a US citizen in 2025: #RubenRayMartinez, a Trump and police supporter in #Texas.
• The officer claimed a knee injury from allegedly Martinez’s vehicle (a common ruse by border patrol in their extrajudicial killings, according to the Minnesota Renee Good murder investigations).
• The TX grand jury failed to indict.
• The passenger and witness died in a car crash Saturday, but he had sworn in an affidavit that no one had been hit by Martinez.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/02/25/texas-ice-shooting-death-grand-jury-no-bill/
Brown Texans🤔
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@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng @mralancooper@hachyderm.io As a usability pro, the only good answer to the conundrum above is “we can test that”. We would prototype the best ideas and test them, then cherry pick the parts that worked, make a new prototype and test that. Everyone sees what works and how task failure happens.
@bruces That illustration style is right up there with 1990s email clip art on my cringe meter.
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@ngons I have never seen one with wrinkly skin or with sunspot camouflage. Ours hide in wet leaves. Lovely.
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