Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

Last night @pfrazee.com joined @bcantrill, me, and the Oxide Friends to talk about the inner workings of @bsky.app and the AT Protocol. From Scuttlebutt to Firehose and the ill-fated Scenes, lots of inside baseball!

https://youtu.be/5axpWF48bwQ

- I've always had this bent, but committing much more strongly to a curiosity about "states" over "traits." How do we reason in a state of fear? State of ambiguity? State of uncertainty? Ideas about how we coordinate differently, and what becomes foregrounded

- I've come back to enjoying a lot more bio-focused work this year, probably because of doing Change, Technically ! So much scicomm is needed here to help folks understand the new sciences of these types of measures

And that's it! After 37 installments I think I covered pretty much all the bigger things in the NEWS file with a story.

Of course, there's a lot more in this release. For the full list, consult our NEWS file:

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/70bae7648f2c18010187c9cf20093155eaa26029/NEWS

Stay tuned so that you won't miss out on the #systemd258 series when the time comes for the next release!

New for Android: Chat folders to organize your conversations into customizable folders.

See unread messages, filter 1-on-1 and group chats, and keep work chats separate to clock what's happening after you clock out.

Settings > Chats or long-press any chat

Thinking every other human, besides you and a small group of your friends, are evil idiots who are just acting out conspiracy theories is, I am really sorry to say, conspiracy theorizing

Choose any three.

Wrote up some notes on Microsoft's new Phi-4 LLM. They trained it on a LOT of synthetic data, and the details of how and why they did that are really interesting.
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/15/phi-4-technical-report/

On GAIA-X, through a Swiss lens. With some quotes by me. https://dnip.ch/2024/12/16/gaia-x-letzte-chance-fuer-europas-digitale-souveraenitaet-und-wie-die-schweiz-profitieren-koennte-teil-1/

Let's look at the delta between my definition of decentralization and the one chosen by Bryan:
- The discussion of power dynamics, and diffusion thereof, is removed
- The "phrase complete" reliance is introduced, so incomplete reliance is now ok
- And not only that, now it's "not always required!"

Does anyone in Berlin need a washing machine?

It's a Siemens E 14-4M, and it's free if you can move it (4th floor, no elevator).

It needs to be gone by tomorrow afternoon

Read your bike history. Bikes have been a radical technology everywhere they exist. From a materialist perspective, you dont just invent the most energy efficient means of conveyance by an order of magnitude and have it not be revolutionary. You dont invent a technology that dramatically reshapes people's relationship with space and have that not be revolutionary.

Ebikes are an evolutionary step in that history. To be able to gain access to the City with a stolen BMX bike and the cost of a single Uber ride in parts is revolutionary. To not need government identification and an elaborate system of regulation to interact with space is, for now, revolutionary. To be able to avoid automated plate readers and move freely in a surveillance state is not a luxury, it is necessary.

I’m staying on Mastodon because the operating model is immune to hostile billionaire takeover 🏴‍☠️

Here lies tpolecat, slain by his printer card. There seems to be a subtle but serious problem with the card I designed because I took it out and my disk failures went away, then put it back and my disk failed almost immediately. Seriously no idea how this could be possible but I'm bummed about it and also lost a couple days of work. 10/31

I need to contact Ezra Klein. I wouldn't ask in public like this unless it was really, really important. Can anyone connect me? My email address is on my blog. Thank you!

On Monday, @bcantrill and I were joined by @postwait, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and @sogrady to talk about tech conferences. Unsurprisingly, a lot has changed in the decades since we met these folks at conferences! What's worth the trip in 2025? https://youtu.be/YBId0FLKxCo

In our study for instance we found that by troubling the definition of "adoption" we learned a lot: people can feel that their TEAM uses AI but they don't, and people can also be covertly using AI without their team knowing, btw there are already interesting gender diffs here, and people can be using AI but not trusting its output vs using AI and trusting it deeply; all of this is to say when you do designed social science you get to think about how to construct the measure & we really need that