Oh I know what I need to download to my phone next! Some freaking Otep. I need to rest my ears a little after the Poppy marathon, but yeah.

This brings me back to my original point that end-user programmability is not a true form of malleability, but a kludge indicating the program’s features were not well chosen. Applications should not resemble avocado slicers, but flexible, foundational tools, open-ended enough to support a variety of uses. These applications should support simple forms of automation, such as macros, so users can tailor them to perform the task at hand, with no programming required.

(cont'd) 🧵 (10/?)

#Malleablecomputing

If you think about it, the whole "white van with Free Candy on it" stranger danger archetype is a near exact modern day retelling of Hänsel und Gretel.

Predatory senior citizen lures kids into their curiously decorated dwelling with the promise of free sweets and an intent to perform an unspeakable act.

And both tropes are not grounded in reality and were really invented to spread distrust of people outside the traditional patriarchal home, and both misuse child abuse as metaphorical imagery to advocate for the isolation of children and the reinforcement of conservative home values.

At least Hänsel und Gretel get to enact revenge on the witch. The white van lore does not go that deep.

An important action alert on KOSA and the SCREEN Act ... Together, these bills would  make age verification a requirement for every fedi instance in the US, and allow the Trump administration to censor abortion, sex ed, and LGBTQIA2S+ resources off the net as "harmful to minors".

The vote is tomorrow morning (10:00 a.m. Eastern time in the US, that's 7:00 a.m. for those of us on the left coast) so take action today!

Alt text: Senate Commerce Committee is taking up KOSA + SCREEN Act this Wednesday.  TAKE ACTION 248-331-8665

https://mastodon.fightforthefuture.org/@fight/117038320728176776

The "Game industry hardship fund" bundle for devs which lost their job has raised over $130K.

Runs for 9 more days.

https://itch.io/b/3802/game-industry-hardship-fund

RE: https://mastodon.social/@transactualuk/117042053143753443

This is a REALLY valuable guide, and shows how the new Code of Practice – awful, exclusionary, transphobic and segregationist in tone and ambition though it is – is no reason for outright panic. It has created an awful, confusing mess – but that cuts both ways. Segregation can still (often) be challenged.

The Onion has an AI policy. It is refreshingly clear

https://theonion.com/about-us/

@kepeken the numbers here are astronomical - 69 billion tokens in a month, or, for a rough average, 50-60 billion words worth of text on the fable tokenizer. there are 5.2 billion words on english wikipedia, or, it's about 92,000 copies of War and Peace back to back.

Nobody publishes numbers on this, but like, back of the envelope, think about the energy cost alone:
Fable is something like a 2-5 trillion parameter model, google estimated their ~200B model at ~0.24Wh/prompt last year. that's probably low, since it was a google-authored study, but we'll go with it. So assume linear energy scaling per parameter (i would bet it's actually supralinear), that's ~15x the size, or 3.6Wh/prompt.

google didn't say what the median token count in a "prompt" was, but wild guess, say the median prompt + response that google would be measuring is something like 3 paragraphs, or 300 tokens. Then you have 3.6/300=0.012Wh/token.

So then the astronomical numbers part: 0.012Wh/token * 69 billion tokens = 828 million Wh, or 828 thousand kWh. The average electricity price in the US in 2025 was $0.136 per kWh.

So, that means, back of the envelope, estimating conservatively, the energy should be in the ballpark of 828k * $0.136 or $112,000, or like 1.3x the API cost. We would have had to be off by a factor of 1.3 to break even on the energy costs alone - note that the google estimates were just of inference not including training. Models could have gotten way more efficient, but a number of the guessed parameters could have gone the other way too: energy more expensive, fable is larger than 2T, energy scales supralinearly, eg. And the conventional wisdom is that inference is orders of magnitude cheaper than training, so we need to be way better than breaking even on inference to make up for all the capex spend.

So it might seem like $80k for a months worth of tokens suggests that the API prices are inflated, but a) this person is generating an absolutely preposterous quantity of text, and b) the thing that is being done is so much more inefficient than you can possibly imagine, it's like trying to think about how much bigger the sun is than your car.

editing: swapped 69->96 billion tokens initially, it's 69 billion.

…The dev expectation that a phone is less than X years old actively feeds the incentive for a phone to *be less than X years old*.

Which feeds more non-metabolisable e-waste, and accelerates the fracturing of ‘critical’ metals supply chains.

This is just a small part of how very far we are from paths towards a less toxic future

Can I offer you some Actual Good News about the environment?

https://www.corkbeo.ie/incoming/joy-irish-bird-feared-gone-34401701

#IE #Ireland #Cork #Mastodaoine

RE: https://gruene.social/@jon/117042263073728235

Jon is completely correct about the complexity of running a Scotland to Europe night train. None of the problems are technical. They are *all* political. Every single one can be solved through political will and throwing money at it.

Which is why it won't happen.

But. There is this: this service is a necessity in a sustainable future.

Pubic Service Announcement

The Vagina Museum is trans inclusive. Always has been, always will be.

Today the new EHRC Code of Practice comes into effect. Let us be clear, the guidance changes nothing about how we operate. The Vagina Museum is free and open to all and we have one accessible bathroom, part of the Tower Hamlets Community Toilet Scheme, that anyone can use.

The Museum is free and open to all, five days a week at 275 - 276 Poster Street, Bethnal Green.

https://www.vaginamuseum.co.uk/

So, a weirdo religious scam guy came to my attention. One with a special !true! translation of the Bible to sell you and a really slick, polished website.

Now, you'd think – you'd think! – that in this day and age, the industrious religion scammer would simply AI-generate some nice photos of converts to fluff up the site. The marks can't tell the difference anyway.

However, unfortunately, I am 100% certain that the photos are real photos of real converts who've already given him money.

Because one of them is my weird religious uncle.

I don't understand the people who told me I would get more conservative with age. The more powerful I become, the more angry I get at the people who abuse their power and the more aware I become of the ways in which systemic oppression functions.

20-year old me totally believed that tech was a meritocracy where people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and that the 30-something guys I dated were attracted to me because I was so mature.

> Another member, Astro, continued with the band until November 2013, when he departed to team up with Campbell and Virtue to form their own band, called "UB40 featuring Ali Campbell".

What an excellent troll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UB40

@johnzajac @andrewt @ErikJonker @olivia AI advocacy is of the same form as creationism advocacy, tobacco advocacy, anti-climate-change advocacy and tobacco advocacy

"While the Rust project is a collection of technical artifacts, it is also a community of people who work together to build, maintain, and extend those artifacts. When we talk about "contributing to the Rust project", we partly mean work on those artifacts, but we also mean joining that community and collaborating with the people already there."

So much this but for every project.

#Meme #Humour

#WritersCoffeeClub 5 Aug
Share a small selection of something you wrote recently that you're [satisfied with]

From my current WIP. (Text in alt.) 30 years condensed into 158 words!