Life is Tetris @tetrislife@qoto.org

Pretty much any time you see an "Open" (blank) "Alliance/Coalition", it's actually just Google doing Google things. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/google-accused-of-shadow-campaigns-redirecting-antitrust-scrutiny-to-microsoft/

The "Open Handset Alliance" was Google's way of preventing anyone from forking their supposedly open source software, lol.

“OpenAI’s stated corporate mission remains “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

Lol

by age 30 you should have:

- acid reflux
- a friend you only call by their last name for reasons no one can articulate
- a fingernail that grows a bit strange due to The Injury
- 12 boxes of unsorted miscellaneous junk at your mom's house that you refuse to take or throw away

tfw you notice you've started the first half of a sentence with words starting with the same letter and you spend the next half an hour trying to finish the sentence without breaking the pattern

If "research" is "come up with endless variations on a theme, all different" then I sure can do research

@aral he's a nationalist, not a fascist. You must not now what fascism is and use it as "bad guy" but when you call people fascist who are obviously not, you just come across as ignorant.

https://factorcode.org/ is really sweet

the whole listener / inspector is reminiscent of smalltalk

👏

AI is "inevitable" like "racial hierarchies and inequalities are natural and inevitable"

https://www.wired.com/story/google-microsoft-perplexity-scientific-racism-search-results-ai/

Except racial hierarchies and inequalities are neither natural nor inevitable. They are lies spewed by white supremacists, with no base in science or fact.

AI is not inevitable. AI is happening because too many of us are cowardly, lazy and greedy.

Doug McIlroy — Unix pipes, diff, spellchecking, macro pioneer whose work fed into Hart's impementation of Lisp macros, &c, &c — on driving to MIT from NJ to hear McCarthy give a talk on Lisp in 1959.

@breadandcircuses @gerrymcgovern Sometimes it feels like nature "is working on it" by setting our species into overdrive suicide mode.
There is just no other, reasonable explanation why globally everybody is going crazy, politically.

“The importance of Indigenous Peoples in the protection of the Amazon is not reflected in the design of international climate policy. Given their historical and ongoing struggles against extraction, guidance from Indigenous Peoples must be central to any climate justice approach.”

https://news.mongabay.com/2024/10/study-redd-doesnt-work-without-indigenous-peoples-but-fails-to-engage-them/

The Global North is implementing a silent policy of extermination of Indigenous people and biodiversity in its pursuit of precious metals, in its righteous cause for the Green Transition.

@joe Those who would give up expressive liberty, to purchase a little type safety, deserve neither expressions nor types.

TIL you can link directly to text content in a web page without using an ID attribute

#WebDevelopment

https://alfy.blog/2024/10/19/linking-directly-to-web-page-content.html

One thing I hear every now and then is that people on fedi (and elsewhere, I guess) would like to be in control of the algorithm. Thinking about this some more, I think I'd like to see a number of things: A way to include somebody else's algorithm; a way to adapt it interactively (more or less from this person, more or less from this hashtag, more or less from this phrase); a way to display these rules as text and a way to edit these rules as text.
The first time I saw something like this was article scoring in Gnus, a news reader inside Emacs.
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Scoring.html
It also featured adaptive scoring (based on your behaviour, configurable, of course) and score decays (the algorithm slowly reverts to the default).
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Adaptive-Scoring.html
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/Score-Decays.html

I think a set of rules in plain English would be easier for people than the special expressions with all the parenthesis that some people like so much. I'm thinking of how Microsoft Outlook E-Mail rules are written and shown. That's pretty cool.

In a way I'd love to see similar implementations for fedi, news, feeds, and so on. But I suspect that an external scoring implementation would simply lead to nobody using it. Too complicated.

I'm old enough to remember the outrage and hand-wringing from western politicians and media when the Taliban destroyed ancient cultural and religious sites in Afghanistan.

Now? You could hear a pin drop.
https://www.newarab.com/news/israel-dynamites-historic-lebanese-village-mhaibib-rubble

I tried to type a post about a mistake I made in a program, and my phone changed to "in a problem".

And yeah, I get it. Many programs would be better referred to as problems

@_elena @mcc @mhoye This chimes with my anecdotal experience of seeing some former Twitter mutuals turn up on Mastodon. They receive multiple Welcome! greetings and the usual simple tips about following liberally, following hashtags etc. Then they follow nobody; complain it's 'too quiet' here; sometimes moan out loud that 'you can't build an audience in here'; and leave. It's as if they wandered into a café where people are mingling and chatting, but they mistake it for a stage with an audience.