I will say this: if someone follows you, and they immediately ask for a follow back, be suspicious. If they ask you to join a private discord or signal chat, report them. It is a scam. No matter how pretty they look and how friendly they are, they don't actually like you. They probably aren't even real. They'll probably ask for money or personal details they'll try to use to steal your identity.

I know for many of you this is obvious, but there are a lot of men my age or older who fall for this

There have been an uptick of follow requests from accounts that have very recently joined Mastodon (usually but not always the main dot social instance). They have profile images and bios but both are very generic. I'm guessing both are AI generated. There are no posts from them or if there are they are the usual "live laugh love" platitudes.

I've been declining these requests and while they seem harmless enough I thought I'd let people know about them.

@spectra I noticed that a federated live stream from spectra.video was not loading up, and upon checking the source I saw that the website is returning 502 Bad Gateway errors for all URLs.

https://spectra.video/

Based on my experience this usually means that nginx is running but the #peertube instance behind it has crashed.

Ugh my power line network adapter burnt out today. I've only been using it for 5 months, too. I'm using an older model I kept around as a spare right now, but I'm chatting with Netgear support about getting a replacement.

I certainly hope those data centers are getting phone calls from the electric company about "Energy Action Day" as often as I do*

* Haha no of course they are not.

It looks like they just released another proof-of-life photo of Mitch McConnell from the hospital.

#USPolitics

Oh yay. It's *that* time of year again. This is an indoor reading so it's likely an AQI of at least 100 outside.

Based on my limited experience with Claude Code, it's really interesting that in 12 months we've gone from "Linux is too hard for the average user" to "The user interface of the future is indistinguishable from Zork".

#AI

The second most annoying person outside of an #AI enthusiast is someone who responds to any one of a number of threads on the topic with some variation of the following:

"I've been working in the industry for 35 years and I'm so glad I retired out of it! This industry is cooked!"

Well good for you. But do keep in mind you're replying to someone who's probably 20-30 years younger than you and can't just "leave the industry" without going homeless. There are a lot of people who are stuck here.

I'm gonna subtoot here.

"I don't do websites for fun anymore because everything is dominated by web frameworks these days"

OK, listen. You can still do web pages. HTML is still here. The frameworks have not taken that away from you. It's like a musician saying "I won't perform folk music anymore because techno is too popular".

I understand you want to make choices in a chaotic world and this feels like taking control, but really you're only hamstringing yourself.

There's MrBeast scam wave hitting #Discord at the moment. A few of the servers that I'm on have been hit repeatedly.

I get that the self-hosted life is not for everyone and many streamers could not afford to move away from their current model. And that's ok.

But *man* every time the topic comes up they start complaining about how it's to hard to keep up with all the new platforms and who's buying up who, and I want to reach through the monitor and be like "You fool! That's not what this is at all! You just don't understand!!!"

But alas, they'll never really understand unless they take the leap themselves.

One of the concepts I've noticed streamers and content creators on Twitch or YouTube struggle with is that when I tell them I'm on #Peertube or #Owncast, these aren't alternative platforms. These are my own self-hosted websites that I manage and maintain myself.

These are *my* platforms. They don't "belong" to a corporate entity who manage my income streams, hosting, infrastructure, and marketing for me. I have to do all that myself.

The great thing is I see more people now than ever before.

The three biggest problems facing IT right now are:

1) AI token supply
2) AI hallucinations
3) AI financial bubble
4) Off-by-one errors

#ai #llm

People not requesting a must-have feature and then demanding to know why said feature was never added to the product is the background noise of my life. 😅

Part of my job is to occasionally remind people how the web works.

"Why can't we track page views?"

"We have a single-page app. When people load our website, we know about the first page load. Everything after that is handled by the browser, which we don't track."

"Why can't we track the browser?"

"We can, but we don't because what you're asking about is called 'analytics' and that doesn't just happen automatically. It has to be deliberately scoped and written into the project."

Our last bathroom scale was probably from the 90s and about four years ago we replaced it with a new model that can measure your weight accurately to within a tenth of a pound.

Now don't get me wrong. The scale works great. Long battery life, and it really is that accurate. But the problem with knowing your weight to that degree of precision is that you can tell if you have your car keys in your pocket. Or it's realizing how much weight you lose when you go pee (it's about a pound).

Are there any local groups here in the Twin Cities (Minnesota) on Mastodon that can help with job placement? This isn't for me personally thankfully but a friend of mine was recently laid off. I wanted to help him out here on the fedi when he gets his resume and LinkedIn profile sorted out.

#FediHire

These scams are fairly common on Facebook and some of the bigger social media networks, but are starting to pop up here in Mastodon as well. Unfortunately, I've seen some people fall for them.

So watch out. If a new follower is being more friendly than usual towards you, and asks you to talk on a private channel outside of Mastodon, please report them.

I know it sounds harsh but the risk of letting these scammers take advantage of other people is too great.

#Feditip

These accounts will often target accounts belonging to older men specifically. They have a profile picture either belonging to a younger woman or is an AI-generated picture of one. It's fairly common for these account to claim they are from Asia or Eastern Europe, or someplace foreign to the US.

They'll engage in a bit of conversation with you to gain some rapport and then they'll ask, "Do you want to continue this on my Discord/Signal?"

What usually follows are requests for money.

#Feditip