the solarpunks are wrong, and you have to delude yourself pretty thoroughly to believe it's possible to have advanced manufacturing of semiconductors like microcontrollers for farming bots and batteries and, yes, solar panels, in a world where the evil polluting factories and mines that make those things are defunct and covered in vines, and in fact I'm pretty sure the whole aesthetic sprang from "i want evil pollution to end but i don't want to give up any of my modern technological conveniences" and then working backwards into a world where that's true, hand-waving all the details of where the technology comes from. but eh, let em have their fun. they're mostly young and they deserve to have a little hope that the future after capitalism burns itself out won't be natural disasters and 50C summers competing for who can kill the most people until there are none left

What would happen to your timeline if mastodon.social went away?

(Reposting my tool that helps you figure this out.)

mastodon.social is the biggest server on the #fediverse , with over 21% of accounts, and an even higher percentage of #Mastodon accounts.

But what does that mean to you, personally? Let's say it went away tomorrow - (assuming you aren't on it yourself), how much of your timeline would vanish?

In my case, it turns out - not a lot, actually! The biggest sources of posts that I see are (1) a very small instance that doesn't even federate with much of the Fediverse, but many of my friends are there, (2) my own instance, (3) a large tech-focused instance that is still much smaller than mastodon.social. The big guy is only 5% of the post I've seen recently.

But this might be different for you!

Find out for yourself at https://moderation-explorer.online/ . Use 'advanced mode' to see this analysis, since you need to log into see your actual feed.

You might even decide to try moving to an instance that you're more connected to?

(It's explained more on the site, but all the work happens in your browser, I don't see your identity, auth tokens, posts that get loaded, none of it.)

People's houses are getting eminent domained to build beefier power lines. Tell me again how the power use from AI isn't that big of an issue.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgia-power-ai-data-centers-eminent-domain/

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@josephcox/116994609630364826

Do not donate a penny to Wikimedia until the union is recognized

[Edit to add: If you are pausing donations, as I am, one thing you can do is email them at donate@wikimedia.org to let them know why.]

[Edit 2: here is what the union is asking for instead of pausing donations https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Workers_United#Solidarity . That said financial support is how I support Wikipedia, so I'm still going the financial route for putting pressure on the organization.]

I did it again, completely accidentally, and I didn't get to write down the vote totals first! Here's my best approximation from what I remember:

54 votes
51% Reply in your native language
10% Machine translate from your native language to the language of the post
20% Don't respond at all
8% Other

Whoops, editing the post cleared the poll! Before I cleared it, there were:

5 votes for "Reply in your native language"
3 votes for "Machine translate from your native language to the language of the post"
1 vote for "Not respond at all"
1 vote for "Other (please specify)"

I believe it is the first option, because machine translation is famously inaccurate. If the original poster speaks your language, they will understand you better than if you had translated it. If they do not speak your language, they have access to the same online translation tools you do, and they can translate it themselves.

I have just met a French speaker who is adamant that this belief is ethnocentric, which prompted the poll.

I would love to hear other people's thoughts on this, especially since the results are so close.

#OpinionPoll (please boost for visibility)

You find a post on the Fediverse that is not in a language you speak. You use machine translation to read it in your native language and find you would like to reply.

Should you:

#poll

RE: https://discuss.systems/@dan/116949237218117423

remember that narrow window of time between the end of the crypto crash and the start of the ai boom when it was possible to buy a computer

Even if #vibecoding can democratize programming, I don't believe it should.

I do not believe someone should be allowed to make software unless they have learned to program.

Novice programmers have enough of a god complex as it is. Learning how things actually work under the hood, how they can go wrong, and how much work goes into making that not happen has the tendency to take a plucky young idiot down a few pegs.

(I say "tendency" because plenty of tech bros slip through the cracks -- although most of them don't actually know how to program.)

Giving a young programmer an #LLM who constantly tells them how smart they are and lets them tell it what they want, then does all the work for them, is a recipe for making them build things they have no business building, which is how you end up with a social media site with literally no database authentication and lets anyone make posts as anyone else going live to the entire fucking internet

One thing I keep coming back to when comparing #ActivityPub and AT Protocol: ActivityPub is basically a convention on top of the #web stuff we already have. An actor is a JSON-LD document you GET. An inbox is an endpoint you POST to. If you already run a website, you can bolt this on without changing the site's basic shape. Ghost didn't set out to join the #fediverse, and then years later it could, just by adding an endpoint.

AT Protocol feels less like that to me. Running a PDS means a signed repo, a Merkle search tree, a firehose, a DID. It's not a layer you add to an existing site. It's closer to standing up another backend beside it.

I think that's why ActivityPub keeps making sense to me. You can join later. You don't have to have built the whole thing with federation in mind from day one.

#ATProto #ATProtocol #fedidev

Dragon Dads (https://dragondads.org/) is a group of dads and other caregivers who are affirming and supportive of LGTBQIA+ kids. One of their big activities is going to #pride events and giving out free dad hugs. Many of them have been doing this for 10 years or more. This was my first time.

Let me tell you, I saw, and felt, absolutely everything.

There was someone who squealed when they saw the booth and did a ten yard sprint to catch me in a flying hug. There were people who walked by several times before they timidly came up and asked for a hug.

There were people who wanted long hugs, side hugs, pats on the back, fist bumps. (We have a menu.) People who don't like hugs, but were nonetheless thrilled that we were doing it.

People told me that their dads had passed away, refused to have anything to do with them, or that they had had to cut their own dads off. One told me "I miss my dad", and when I said I was so sorry, they said "he's in Arizona".

There was an elderly person in a wheelchair who told us how their alcoholic father used to beat them, then told us all the things they had accomplished in life in spite of him, just to show him.

There were people who trembled. People who sobbed. People who melted.

A giant dude in one of those neoprene dog masks (with my permission) grabbed me in a great big hug and lifted me off the ground.

I leaned down to hug people in wheelchairs, and stretched up to hug a woman who I swear was seven feet tall.

Some people stayed to chat, or to cool off in our misting fan in the blistering heat. Others got a hug and left quickly, tears in their eyes and a "thank you" on their lips.

Absolutely everyone who wanted a hug got one.

I've signed up for more events.

#AI and more specifically #LLMs are going to produce a lot of what I like to call "grievance forks", #fork s of a software project to address one specific decision that the maintainers made that the forkers didn't like. See #Sneedacity, Xlibre, (arguably but not really) #Lix, etc. We've already started to see a few when projects "fell to the slop": #ChiPass, Vim Classic

I'm only in my early 20s, but I've been in the software game long enough to know that these forks rarely if ever go anywhere. It turns out maintaining a software project is really hard, and in a few months or years, when the fork starts to lag behind in features, bugfixes, and security fixes, and the new maintainers (of which there are far fewer and who are likely to be far less experienced) start to burn out, in the battle in users' minds between moral righteousness and personal convenience, it's only a matter of time before the latter wins.

I hate AI too. And I really, really want to believe it's not inevitable. But I don't think I can.

*finds soapbox to stand on in middle of crowded square, and despite his three-foot-two stature, manages to see above the throng*

FRIENDS! COUNTRYCREATURES! CUDDLY BEINGS OF EVERY SHAPE AND SIZE!

For years, the illustrious @Bwee has provided us with hugs, cuddles, and reminders that we are loved, day in and day out, without fear, favor, or thought of reciprocity!

*cheers from crowd*

But even the strongest of warriors, the steadiest of rocks, the cuddliest of creatures need someone to rely on when times get tough.

Lately, that voice for all that is pure in this world has been faltering. Bwee, the fluffiest of all of us, is losing their sparkle.

*gasps and horror*

Countrycreatures, I say we cannot let this state of affairs stand! I say it is high time we returned the favor!

*cheers*

Go to your homes! Use your finest-smelling bath bombs! Fluff yourselves up to maximum floof! Get those hugging arms ready and meet back here at sunset. Tonight, we throw the ULTIMATE surprise party!

back when i was first learning #nixlang everybody online told me it was basically "JSON but with functions" and now that i'm taking a programming paradigms class and we've gotten to the functional programming chapter, i gotta say, that was a really really weird way to spell "#Haskell but with about half the features missing"

i love thinking i'm stupid for not immediately understanding functional programming concepts without being told that's what i'm learning

#nix #nixos

RE: https://toast.dragon2611.net/@Dragon/116302663279903059

@fasterthanlime ruin a developer's day in 4 words

it's debuginfo. it's always fucking debuginfo

i just built the same binary twice from the same source code using the same version of rustc, once with crate2nix and once with `cargo build --release`, and the cargo one is a megabyte and a half *bigger*. wtf????

#nix #crate2nix #duckduckfedi #rust

I, a programmer, am not afraid of #vibecoding because I'm afraid a chatbot will take my job. I'm afraid of vibe coding for the same reason that a licensed electrician who moonlights as a firefighter is afraid of homeowners who do their own electrical work.