@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 1d ago

Hologram's Solstice (2018) is just what my ADHD brain needs today to remain calm... Melodic, rhythmic & aural evolving complexity of the finest synthetic vintage... (Headphones recommended) https://runningbackrecords.bandcamp.com/track/solstice #Music4Coding #Hologram #Synth #NoBeats

Running Back

Solstice, by Hologram

from the album Solstice

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 1w ago

Replying to

Glacier Gate (2024) (Ever shapeshifting, ever collapsing, ever shrinking... 😢) #SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #Alps #Glacier #Autumn

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 1mo ago

Great article about the loss of diversity induced by recommender systems (including LLMs): Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same "A world that keeps removing the unlikely also removes the things that could have become the next likely. Ecologists have known this for a long time already and even priced it: they call it the insurance value of biodiversity, the standing reserve of rare species that cost energy and contribute nothing, until the climate shifts and one of them turns out to be what survives. A monoculture is efficient right up until the weather changes." https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/temperature-zero-for-culture-why Related: In my 2013 EYEO talk I used the Tower Of Babel as metaphor to talk about polyglot, diverse culture as key long-term survival strength (not punishment!) and to address the growing lack of diversity and rise of monocultures in creative coding fields, back then largely caused by centralization effects of popular frameworks (e.g. Processing, OpenFrameworks) and their social attractor effects restricting the practice and surrounding educational efforts to mostly a single family of (C-based) programming languages whilst completely disregarding other approaches, techniques and influences. My main argument was (and still is) that diversity of languages and programming approaches (functional, imperative, object-oriented, logic, declarative...) is an important factor for long-term cultural survival and robustness, something I've also been warning about being increasingly under threat by LLM-based coding. The latter is accelerating the monopolization of existing tools/frameworks, due to their over-representation in training sets and therefore offering more "stable", usable LLM solutions, leading to diversity collapse and making it increasingly hard for new contenders to establish themselves. Also wrote more about that previously... #Average #Diversity #Robustness #Survival #Culture #ProgLang #LLM

laurenleek.substack.com

Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same

What 640 London shopping streets, 4,000 Billboard hits, a million films and synthetic AI personas tell us about why everything is flattening into sameness and how to regulate the algorithms behind it.

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 2mo ago

A Conjuring Of Clouds Yesterday's evening walk... It's been a great week for cloud spotting, but with dozens of storm cells & hail moving through the area all week... (Also thinking about the connotation to wildfires raging in Canada... 😢) #MonochromeMonday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #Photography #BlackAndWhite #CloudAppreciation

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Boosted by @Michigander@toad.social

Replying to

...and because sometimes a video is worth a 1000 images, here's a short clip from the earlier mountain pass nearby, giving more of an impression of the mood of this place! #FootpathFriday #NaturePhotography #BloomScrolling #Alps #Mountains #Video

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 2mo ago

RE: https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@HennaVirkkunen/117008348161347403 Not just the plan itself for Europe to "become an AI continent" (🤮), but also the entire cliché phrasing of this announcement couldn't be more tone-deaf even if they wanted to... #AI #EU

Quoting

Henna Virkkunen

@HennaVirkkunen@ec.social-network.europa.eu

The AI Gigafactories call is now open. Today, we launched a call for tenders to establish up to 7 AI Gigafactories across Europe, boosting Europe’s computing capacity and unlocking more than €30 billion in investment. I am pleased to see Member States, industry, and the Commission coming together to build these facilities, which are key to strengthening our technological sovereignty. This is a milestone for Europe in becoming an AI Continent. https://link.europa.eu/qGDhv3

Open quoted post

ec.social-network.europa.eu

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 3mo ago

Summer solstice 2026, last night, ten minutes past sunset... on our way back from the very end of the valley. #MountainMonday #LandscapePhotography #Video #Alps #Mountains #Lake #SummerSolstice

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Alpstein

(To me, one of the most stunning and interesting mountain ranges, the tectonic folds here having created the most incredible forms, formations and stunning valleys in between...)

#MountainMonday #LandscapePhotography #Photography #BlackAndWhite #NoirCountry #Alps #Mountains

mastodon.thi.ng

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 2mo ago

Reminder: Just as with Age ID and Chat Control legislation justifications, the AI build out, the price gauging of memory, storage (and CPU/GPU/SOCs too), the emerging hardware leasing & subscription models — all this is not just driven by generative AI in the form of chatbots, media generators, automation, job replacements, FOMO stories and other "obvious" reasons repeated ad infinitum by CEOs and in the media... The only way these industry shifts and largest tech investments ever done make any sense (even in the face of the projected severe negative financial returns) is to consider them part of a larger, class-political project of comprehensively centralizing, monitoring/surveilling, renting out, drip-feeding and otherwise controlling future compute resources and access to them. This includes not only pure computation resources, but equally all communication, data & media produced, processed, stored or consumed via these infrastructures. Personal computing is being pushed out and with it privacy and autonomy over your own compute & media resources are going too... Governments which have been vapidly talking for decades about "Digitization" (and utterly failing) are jumping on rolling out low quality, "good enough" AI services mostly aimed at the working class, allowing govts to maintain existing austerity programs, whilst claiming to be innovative, cutting costs (by pumping billions into overpriced consultancy contracts) and reducing "red tape" (i.e. mostly regulation which was actually beneficial or protecting the population & environment). The return on these investments is not financial, but mostly political! As an aside: I see the biggest threads to the fediverse, as self-owned, self-hosted & self-moderated communication space, are not AI bots, nazis or bigtech-owned platforms, but price explosions of the required (and mostly rented) compute infrastructure. In the near future, these ongoing price increases will force more communities to look for alternatives, which will slowly erode this space[1]... Solidarity and crowdfunding are some ways to combat that, but I fear they will only go that far (i.e. not far enough)... So even when the current AI bubble bursts, this built-up centralized digital architecture will be a key pillar for any authoritarian government (the general trajectory every country is seemingly on, at current...), run in collaboration with oligarch operators whose purposes are served even more so by said infrastructure. At the very least these data centers will be used for vastly increased state surveillance (machine learning hardware/software is uniquely suited for these use cases), at worst to disenfranchise, prosecute & deny entire demographics... I'd very much like to stand corrected with this, but there are a no publicly available hints to suggest anything drastically different to happen, not with the current breed of politicians and money in play... At least in the EU, all the talk about Digital Sovereignty already has made it clear that it's mostly about building parallel infrastructure to US big tech, but with the exact same anti-democratic bias, justifications, funding structures and neglect of any climate/social considerations. 30 billion Euro investments to create "AI giga factories" and an "AI continent"[2]. Data centers operated by goody, goody European billionaires rather than evil US based ones... How novel and how sovereign! [1] Related to that I also see the resource-hungry and extremely chatty nature of the ActivityPub protocol and Mastodon itself as primary implementation as large weak points... In order for the fediverse to survive for longer (for the above stated reasons), I think some drastic reconsiderations of existing design decisions are required to achieve a much lower computational footprint & running costs (e.g. storage requirements, consolidation of messages, reducing traffic & worker effort, esp. important for larger accounts or communities etc.) [2] https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117010071572799616 #AI #Politics #PersonalComputing #DigitalSovereignty #LongRead

mastodon.thi.ng

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 2mo ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@concretedog/116976794778175500 How TF is it even possible for this new version of "The Stack" (aka 53 TB of stolen/scraped GitHub repos) to contain private repos? Nothing new at all, but it truly is an industry run by psychopaths & sociopaths, devoid of any ethics or respect of other people, and aided by clueless technophobic media companies regurgitating those companies' twisted PR sagas...

Quoting

concretedog

@concretedog@mastodon.social

This is nuts. #huggingface have just scraped the entirety of #github. https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceCode/in-the-stack

Open quoted post

mastodon.social

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 2mo ago

Replying to

Invisible Chasm Ⅱ (2026) #TextureTuesday #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Abstract #Mountains #InvisibleChasm

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

"Learning from mistakes" as individuals is hard if those lessons are not (or can not be) percolated up or are even rejected by larger groups or society in general, if the behaviors one might consider a mistake on a personal/ethical level are actually rewarded and encouraged (or imposed) by those larger social structures.

So many people have tried so hard for so long to share their knowledge and tools, trying to teach & inspire others, to build communities to help make the world at least a tiny better, enabling people to do more with their tech than just consuming or being "entertained". People have been sacrificing years and hard-earned savings to keep the work/projects/momentum going... only to have these efforts being outright stolen & upended now, declared meaningless, and at the same time being called to our faces "entitled", "self-important", "gate keeping" for attempting to retain some form of humanity in these projects (all phrases taken from an email received on weekend about my anti-LLM stance for my own 200+ projects — always so amazing for motivation! 😭)

Has this all been meaningless? The same entities who've been benefiting the most from 20-30 years of this culture of openness, are now regularly talking about it as weakness, "supply chain risk" and "threat vector"... People who've never ever run a project themselves are just as happy to chip in with this narrative.

Sure enough, mistakes were made, many of them (a small selection):

A large mistake was to systematically devalue our own labor, to believe a participatory, postspectacular[1] society would be possible, that more people/orgs would not just consume, but actively participate, reciprocate, feed back, wanting to learn/build together, to create & co-own their tools of production and seeing the true value of that. Of course, not everyone is able to divert time & energy, but many more people/orgs/unis/govts would and should have been! Support for these projects can take so many different forms! Instead it's always been left to so few people to do it all... and then punish them (in many direct/indirect forms) for trying (or not being perfect)!

A mistake was not to set strict boundaries early on what these shared assets/knowledge could be used for and by whom. We allowed large corporations (and countless smaller bad players[2]) to harvest the fruits of our labor as free, high-quality raw material, them never contributing anything back. We didn't organize to demand more rights, have proper legal frameworks or even interest from larger society to help creating or enforcing terms & constraints. For years, we were labeled naive altruists and were stuck with the issues of existing FLOSS licenses which were written by people who (mostly) explicitly rejected any ethical/moral constraints of use and instead sold this lack as "freedom to use for any purpose", a core pillar of these licenses.

A mistake was to believe a culture of resource-poor decentralized entities could meaningfully influence or even outcompete the centralized infinitely funded structures whose ONLY interest is in exploitation, sustaining/cementing/expanding their own imposed hierarchy and grasp of power/control at all costs.

These mistakes (and many more) are all fractal in nature, from the individual, projects, to governments and entire cultures... If you personally or organizationally have benefited from open source culture, but never once acted on any of the above, you're simply part of the problem and the mistakes made!

It's time to learn from them, together, and before it's too late (if it isn't already)...

If you want to keep on benefiting from open source culture (not the corporate or agent-regurgitated neo-interpretation), get active, show some support to the projects and esp. people involved, in whatever form or gesture you can!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

[2] Over the past 25+ years, I know of at least that many businesses & people who built their entire early careers on my open source work, without ever contributing, donating or acknowledging...

#OpenSource #Culture

en.wikipedia.org

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 2mo ago

Trametes gibbosa (2026) (English: Lumpy bracket, German: Buckel-Tramete) #FungiFriday #NaturePhotography #Fungi #Mushrooms

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Postglacial Abstract (2026)

(Forgot to add, find/notice the lone hiker in one of the snow fields, for scale...)

#TextureTuesday #LandscapePhotography #Photography #Texture #Abstract #Art

mastodon.thi.ng

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

The Mountains Flowed Before Him (2026)

(Given a large enough time scale, these mountains would be almost like waves...)

#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #BlackAndWhite #NoirCountry #Alps #Mountains #Hiking

mastodon.thi.ng

Mastodon Glitch Edition

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 3mo ago

Glaciers in the Alps are melting at an alarming rate. The brief video shows what we witnessed two days ago at the end of our work trip in Tyrol and what the locals confirmed to us as extreme levels (not that it wasn't obvious)... It shows different tributaries and stages of outflow of remaining glaciers of the Weißkamm and Kreuzkamm feeding into the Rofental, a small side valley of the Ötztal. Two kilometers downstream is the confluence with a similarly intense drainage from the neighboring valley (Niedertal with glaciers of the Similaun group) Swiss glaciers are not much different: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/27/snow-and-ice-on-swiss-glaciers-melting-at-alarming-rate-amid-heatwave-expert-says "The snow and ice accumulated last winter by Switzerland’s glaciers is expected to have all melted away by Monday, marking the alarming second-earliest arrival on record of the tipping point known as glacier loss day. All further melting between now and October will see the size of glaciers in the Swiss Alps shrink." #Glacier #GlacierLossDay #HeatDome #ClimateChange #Alps #Video

theguardian.com

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@ErikJonker@mastodon.social For me to answer that better, you'd first have to share your own definition of AI and its purported use cases in this context... Why are we dependent on AI to begin with? I'd like the EU and member states to invest in actually helpful technology infrastructure, in a way which doesn't actively harm the population or the environment, which doesn't require this insanity of resources and conflicting supply chain dependencies, which doesn't accelerate the emergence of an authoritarian surveillance state... Also, can you not see the mental gymnastics and compartmentalizing needed to justify a 30 billion investment in the #1 accelerator for getting rid of net-zero policies whilst the continent is burning? For real sovereignty and the upholding of democratic ideals in mind (not just for rhetoric purposes), we need investment in technology and services which are designed with said ideals. We need technology for humans, which increases and ensures transparency, literacy, healthcare, which improves inclusion, accessibility and which actually meaningfully reduces bureaucracy for the wider populace (vs. reducing regulations for capital only). Instead of the EU/states outsourcing increasingly crippling bureaucratic burdens onto citizens and/or SMEs (PPWR just one recent bad example), we need investment into technology and means of their production, ownership and their maintenance which ensures independence via open source solutions which are not just replicating the very same anti-democratic use cases, structures/patterns of their bigtech commercial counterparts. Above all, we need politicians who want to see this type of tech in the world and who're actually still believing in any of these ideals and don't succumb to persistent lobbying efforts aiming to degrade or dilute them... It's entirely irrelevant, if AI plays a part in this all. Technology always has been a tool, a means to an end, not the other way around (as it increasingly seems to be the case)... Investors and politicians are behaving as if AI is the holy grail, but they never clearly communicate to which end...

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Schlangenhaus (16th century, Werdenberg, St. Gallen)

#FensterFreitag #History #Switzerland

mastodon.thi.ng

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Boosted by @mattsheffield@mastodon.social

Replying to

@gusseting@mastodon.social @JulianOliver@mastodon.social @mattsheffield@mastodon.social @crowgirl@hachyderm.io Btw. The inventor of RSS 2.0 has been entering similar Dawkinsian terrain: https://social.vivaldi.net/@ianbetteridge/116522439483754901 FWIW Instead of being ND or not, I think the propensity to see and believe LLMs to be "active minds" or "new forms of consciousness" runs along different axes, including that we're evolutionary geared towards a tendency to see minds everywhere (being more cautious, even with a lot of false positives, meant better survival chances, but for LLMs it feels the inverse is just as important 🤷‍♂️). Then, there are also these factors: LLMs are (still?) complete black-box functions (even if introspectable by experts, they're not fully understood, and for normal users probably the closest to "magic" post-modernism ever got to)The mistake of considering language as direct proxy for minds, amplified by the turn-based interaction/conversational pattern imposed by LLM UIs (starting with ELIZA). Growing context windows and larger potential/scale of variability of answers have amplified that effect even further (and therefore also lowered the threshold of believability for some susceptible people).A ton of anthropomorphic design choices (dark patterns?) at different layers, e.g. default use of first person voice & conversational/empathetic tone, system prompts to nudge the model output to sound more human & sycophantic... These all are intentional decisions by the model providers! Also important: Most users NEVER encounter the models during training and generally have no clue (or even interest!) about the incredible amount of human effort required to filter, curate, transform, massage & fine-tune inputs, training data and outputs to reduce the amount of public failure modes. I've been working with generative art/design processes for ~30 years and know from own experience that the human input/effort (but also our intent) and curation of these systems is the most valuable aspect of this way of working... Even deeply appreciating the sometimes truly "magic" moments of serendipity in the generated outputs, has never made me doubt even once my own agency involved in the process, or to start assigning these systems a form of consciousness, neural networks and genetic programming included... Lastly, I think Dawkins is a special case, exactly because for decades he's been extremely vocal about the delusion of religion and religious tendencies of people, only to succumb to the lure of LLMs himself... There's a bittersweet irony alone in that!

social.vivaldi.net

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

RE: @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

Reposting for #FootpathFriday. Not because there actually is a path, but because I just love how that single hiker is creating their own path in this surrounding vast (and otherwise completely abstract) landscape...

mastodon.thi.ng

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 4mo ago

Simulated opinion polls to drive public policy — what could possibly go wrong!

In the name of saving costs and producing more polls (i.e. the double benefit of increased efficiency AND productivity), statistical truth (traditional polls) is being replaced with its derivative, producing statistical insights via a second layer of statistics and agents simulating known, pretrained demographic behaviors & preferences, instead of interviewing actual people. Yay!

It seems they're blindly following Wheeler’s Law, i.e. "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection" and ignoring the corollary: "...except for the problem of too many layers of indirection."

Queue future presidential approval ratings based on a simulated population of agents... Too dystopian?!

@pathunstrom@ngmx.com

#LLM #AI #Gallup #Statistics #Poll

ngmx.com

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 2mo ago

Question for other EU-based online shop owners: How are you going to deal with the upcoming EU PPWR packaging legislation changes[1] and specifically requiring a third party legal person/entity in every single EU member state you want to ship to after August 12, potentially having to contract & pay another EU-wide one-stop service or up to 26 middlemen just so are allowed to ship all EU countries? What happened to the idea of a single market? Some of the "cheaper" offers I found provide conformity declaration and authorized representatives for 1000 Euro per year, yet another cost-of-doing-business fee for ever increasing bureaucracy demands... The law has no exceptions/provisions for small indy shops/providers... Any links/insights/tips you can share? [1] https://www.verpackungsregister.org/en/knowledge-bases/authorising-a-representative #FediAsk #PPRW #EU #Packaging #Legislation #OnlineShop

verpackungsregister.org

Authorising a representative

Discover how international companies without a branch in Germany have to appoint an authorised representative.

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 4mo ago

RE: @NoveltyBot@mastodon.social

Just maybe there have always been some issues with the unquestioning adoption of the latest breakthroughs/technologies... No risk, no gain, so they say...

mastodon.social

A Most Amusing Bot: "New Asbestos Cigar Pipe only 10¢ from Charles S. …" - Mastodon

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

How is it possible in 2026 for Canon to not provide (anywhere) an ICC profile for their scanners?! The colors are completely off and everything has a purple tint... 😩 Does anyone know where to find ICC profiles for the Canon LIDE series (400)? Otherwise I will have to purchase an IT8.7 calibration target and crack out the LittleCMS tooling to create my own ICC profile. Great customer service! #Canon #Scanner #ICC #ColorCorrection #AskFedi

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@ErikJonker@mastodon.social Also see this longer post from just earlier: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117014222535129596

mastodon.thi.ng

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@smilingdemon@mastodon.art @nclslbrn@mstdn.io @alesroubicek@indieweb.social @made@mastodon.gamedev.place Thank you very much, all! 🙏 This weekend was a dream come true, and a much needed recharge! Onwards!

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 2mo ago

TIL that I've actually created a few "high impact" packages on NPM (with 1+ million downloads per week)... Just got this email from them (see screenshot) If each one of these would just pay me $0.001, I could actually comfortably dedicate myself full time to these projects (which has been my long, long dream job). But the system and social contract around open source is completely broken and so I've to balance my time and try to sustain myself and my family via other ways for periods of time... and because of that I'm losing existing sponsors, a great vicious circle... If you want to support my work and 26+ year track record of building, sharing, teaching and maintaining hundreds of open source libraries for a huge variety of use cases (another downfall, since most other projects are much more narrow in scope), please reach out and/or visit: https://codeberg.org/thi.ng/umbrella/ (monorepo of 200+ current main projects) https://thi.ng/ (aging website, but more overview & timeline visualizations) How to financially support my work: https://codeberg.org/thi.ng/umbrella/src/branch/develop/CONTRIBUTING.md#donations Sponsoring/donations can be done via: Liberapay, Stripe, GitHub Sponsors or Patreon Thank you for your consideration (and support for those!!!) ❤️🙏 #OpenSource #Fundraising #Donations #TypeScript #JavaScript #NPM

codeberg.org

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 4mo ago

RE: @lugidani@swiss.social

The Swiss are still doing better in that respect than many other developed countries, incl. Germany yesterday:

https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/newsroom/country-overshoot-days/

#Climate #Degrowth #OvershootDay

swiss.social

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bit101 Hah, only trying! I'm not rich, but these moments/memories/experiences (even if fleeting) mean the world to me and I'm super lucky to have such places in around an hour's driving distance (some even less)... 🥹

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@ewen@social.ewenbell.com Don't be! :) This would make a lovely book as well, (maybe in collaboration with the Bhutan tourism board 🤷‍♂️)...

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@ewen@social.ewenbell.com This is simply wonderful (and your pictures & documentation too)! 🤩 (Btw. I expected a classic 8-page zine, and was (positvely) shocked by the 100 page PDF...)

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@plexus@toot.cat Tech debt works very well for startups/businesses with an explicit intent to sell/exit in the near/medium future, because then it's exactly the same as how banks are selling debt and turning it into a SEP (a "Someone Else's Problem")... I also met contractors who're completely transparent about their main selling point being to never miss a deadline at any cost, and refuse taking on any maintenance contract (incl. for their own work). The code produced was as R-rated as you can guess, but they kept their promise and producing tech debt is/was essentially their business model! Maybe players like that are required in an economy so that various other places specializing in consulting & maintenance can actually can survive... 🙃

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Boosted by @mattsheffield@mastodon.social

Replying to

@JulianOliver@mastodon.social This related article by @mattsheffield@mastodon.social is very good too: https://flux.community/matthew-sheffield/2026/05/richard-dawkins-and-the-claude-delusion/ "Dawkins extending more humanity to a language model than he does toward Muslims or trans people is hardly a surprise based on his personal and political views. But even if he had not moved rightward in his senesence, when you consider Dawkins’s scientific views about what minds are and how they function, seeing him flirting with a chatbot is completely expected."

Flux

Richard Dawkins and the Claude Delusion - Flux

Senescence makes people believe silly things; so does bad science

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@hikingdude@mastodon.social Dank Dir, Franz! :)

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@gilraen79@mastodon.social Thank you & yes, couldn't have asked for more! The company, location and weather was just perfect! :)

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Barbramon1 Yeah, I too would have loved to stay longer... 😍 The place is mentioned at the beginning of the thread :) https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/116459235300247906 Well, this pass itself is called Gehrenjoch. Another view of it is here (the pass is the grassy part in the bottom right corner): https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/115201297729038155

mastodon.thi.ng

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Michigander Me too. I will try to do a long recording up there this summer. That day I couldn't because a thunderstorm was slowly brewing and I didn't want to be there for it in terrain like that...

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@pyrenaicus Let's do it! It's best if the image has a decent contrast already (and 16 bit TIFF if possible)...

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@pyrenaicus I think quite a few your pictures would be very suitable for this kind of process and the mood it creates/adds! If you trust me, send me one of your images and I will mail you a print back...

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@pyrenaicus Thank you, Pau! Means a lot! 🙏

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@NM8A Ps. Also just posted this a couple of days ago: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/116448212984553368

mastodon.thi.ng

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@netpraxis 🤩 (It looks better IRL! I really need to invest into a scanner rather than just taking these phone images...)

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@nclslbrn@mstdn.io Certainly an undeniable level of Rorschach or more general apophenia going on here :) In these hundreds of variations created so far I've been seeing a lot of alien creatures, ultrasound embryos, tardigrades, explosions, metamorphic rocks etc.

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@alexskunz@mas.to Very nice! Looks like everything covered in rime... Also just came across this cool variation earlier today: https://mystical.garden/@janamarie/116527887020070338

mystical.garden

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Silvia Thanks! :)

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Karsten Schmidt @toxi@mastodon.thi.ng

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@leah Thank you! :)

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