RE: https://merveilles.town/@prahou/117511205187027547

Omg this whole thread is gold. Where is this town called Merveilles, whence heroes hail?

People who understand #mastodon / #fediverse better than me:

Occasionally in my feed on masto, I see posts from from actors/accounts I do not follow, that are not tagged with any hashtags I follow (the example has no hashtags), were not boosted by anyone I follow, and are not homed to the same mastodon server as my account.

Case in point, the attached. To be clear, this is in no way a comment regarding the content of that post; I present it only as an example of a Mastodon behavior that indicates my mental model of how this works is somehow incomplete or broken.

When this happens, it _feels_ like the source has managed to exploit some edge case in Mastodon’s use of ActivityPub, or my client’s support for the Mastodon API, of which I’m unaware, which gives me a perhaps unduly squikky feeling.

Any ideas? I just want to understand.

#askfedi #askfediverse

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/117470017311879943

Friends, if you’re in a position to give this electoral cycle, but have been discouraged by the lack of guidance on how to make the most out of your contributions, this is for you.

As @glyph describes in the thread, this the result of a detailed, grassroots, passion-project analysis of the electoral map looking for districts with great candidates, winnable numbers, and a high likelihood that getting out the vote for one candidate will have the same effect on candidates for other, overlapping districts. There’s a Doublemint jingle in there somewhere, but I’ll spare you that part.

Anyway, this important. I’ll admit that before I got involved, I hadn’t fully understood the details—I just knew that smart people with good judgment were passionate about it, and that was good enough. Having helped in a few small ways, I see just how critical this kind of grassroots strategic cooperation and investment in democracy is. This is exactly how we should be directing our contributions.

If you can spare anything at all, and want to know that your contributions are being allocated in the most effective possible way, please take a look.

#elections @democratsabroad #midterms

RE: https://mastodon.social/@kottke/117451928571598524

Does *not* disappoint.

“In summary, it’s no longer just a Nazi bar. In fact, if you had a drink there a year ago and were put off by the crowd and decor, let me assure you: the Hitler posters have come down. Riefenstahl Movie Night is now just a campy sing-along—much more enjoyable, much less preachy. And it’s clear that they’ve learned from their mistakes; even Goebbels himself has learned to trust the retention numbers and suppress the urge to greet everyone at the door, and spends far less time with the mic. We are all, after all, capable of growth.

Contrast that to the shitty dive bar down the street. The bartenders are grumpy! They don’t like the Nazi bar, probably because little by little their customers are being won over… they’re just not where the action is. Some of the characters there are just _out of their mind_, and I’m not even going to acknowledge the folks who aren’t crazy and pissed, it’s that bad.

I think it’s safe to say that the Nazi _ownership_ have learned their lesson: there are _plenty_ of folks out there, ranging from the Nazi-curious-but-afraid-of-peer-pressure, to the folks that are _just exhausted by the lingering reaction of the lulus and negative-Nancys to the withering clusterfuck that, yes, can be attributed to the Nazi ownership of the Nazi bar, and who are just looking for a welcome, no-politics, angst-free environment where they can let down their hair, grab a cold beer, and smile. They were just turned off by the wallpaper before; it’s amazing what a year and a glow-up can do.

Yes, the time and money you spend there benefit the Nazis. But the Nazis have come a long way, and the new look may surprise you.”

#daringfireball

https://daringfireball.net/2026/10/x_once_again_marks_the_spot

Occasionally, a glimmer of good news, however small.

#stargate

https://gizmodo.com/amazons-stargate-series-is-back-in-development-this-time-with-wandavision-creator-2000824399

The second anniversary of this post is coming up, and surprise surprise these little "end of life" laptops are continuing to run well with #linux and do what we need them to, which includes spending less on tech so we can buy more actual books for the school library. #schooltech #endof10 #edtech #foss #reading #kidlit

RE: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/117360673402922204

And…

> Thinking for yourself is beautiful. Walking around and observing is way more instructive than jumping from a fast train to another fast train without even thinking about what you’re doing. Independence and freedom start in the mind. You have to tend to your mind. You have to nourish it. Tech toys in most cases do the opposite. They make you passive, acquiescent, controllable. This is what the rich elites want. Don’t become an accessory to your own ruin. Train your brain, not your LLM.

This is a great read, from @morrick.

https://morrick.me/archives/10424

RE: https://masto.hackers.town/@Wrewdison/117333132091183192

Holy crap. I’ve wanted something exactly like this forever.

Posted a thing, tooting it to pin it.

I've rewritten this twenty times. It is impossible to keep it short. It's impossible, for me, to unscramble the technical, social, and moral aspects, because they cannot be separated, and anything I write that doesn't touch on all of them diminishes the omissions.

"My Work, My Values, and AI"

https://crystaldrift.net/blog/ai-values-and-work/

Done with all that.

2/ In my childhood environment, these were synonyms. Or, “nice” was always used, and given as the definition for “kind,” whether by teachers or by family. It took me decades to really unlearn that.

1/ If there were a single bit of advice I could give my 12-year-old self, it would be to know and understand and meditate upon the difference between “nice” and “kind”.

One of my highest cheer-to-effort ratios has been obtained by including fingers of random plans on @benbrown 's happynetbox.com in my shell startup.

Go on, live a little. You know you want to.

#happynetbox

Question for the #homelab nerds out there.

I have a running family of projects (well more like a breakfast club of misfits) that I've been deploying to my "lab" (by which I mean, currently, a mediocre #raspberrypi), currently stitched together with docker-compose.

An important underlying theme to this effort, and a reason why I'm sticking with the pi, is a focus upon resource-constrained, high-efficiency, self-contained, open-source computing. Kinda the opposite of the vibe of the times, I know, but I think it's important.

I suspect I'm far from alone in this, and I'm curious: what are other folks working on projects like this use for observability? So far, I'm cobbling my own together with shell scripts and instrumentation in the code (using #tokio tracing if it matters).

I don't really want to go down the "standard" bobsled run that ends with an army of proxmox vms and various free-tier accounts on cloud-based services... again, resource-constrained and self-contained. It feels like we used to have tools like this, when every server was a pet; surely those haven't gone away?

Search results, unfortunately, are twenty pages of "The N best homelab observability stacks in 2026! (Number N-M will suprise you)" AI-generated marketing blogslop, all of which I've sampled launch an aforementioned sled.

So, asking here. Tips solicited. Retoots welcome.

#askfedi

Focus on the work.

#writing #blog

https://crystaldrift.net/blog/focus-on-the-work/

What I imagine when people say they're #writing with #ai.

https://youtu.be/8t8c4x8S0NA?t=25

OMG you guys.

Oink Oink.

#ai #aisecurity #aislop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhi6JU5pOJk

Hey nerds, I'm working on a super secret important project that only I probably care about, but one important aspect involves book search (as in searching for books)... specifically, providing links to searches by isbn and by title.

I would like the links to take users to search results at decent organizations—truly nonprofit .org sites, whatever. Or, in other words, I wish to not just direct users to Amazon.

One obvious candidate is Bookshop.org, but I see a relatively low hit rate for more obscure titles. Worldcat.org seems to do a good job. I now that Goodreads is popular, seems to have a decent hit rate, and I intend to offer it as an _option_, but I don't know that I want to make that the default. I definitely want to stay away from the search majors, or any destination which would de-facto compromise users' privacy if I send them there.

Thanks!

#askfedi #books #BookshopOrg

It occurs to me that with all of the posturing regarding age verification "to protect children from…", there's an actually extremely vulnerable group, especially in the sycophantic LLM era, that few discuss: elders.

My grandmother, over a period of months, went from one of the brightest people I knew to someone who had a hard time distinguishing dreams from reality and fell victim to obvious scams, and she was an outlier of longevity among her peers. Part of that was luck, and part of that was the fact that she kept her brain active.

I haven't heard _anyone_ musing about the risks here. I can speculate how my nan would have fared had LLMs been available while she was alive, but this seems to be something that (more) serious (than me) people would be curious about.

Anyone?