friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Katy's been down a YouTube rabbit hole on $medical_condition lately. Today we watched a yoga video that purported to relieve one of the symptoms. Cool cool, yoga can have benefits. Let's give it a go. Some of the instructions in this video were oddly specific but whatever, that's fine. Then we read the comments and my cult alarm started blaring.

This was a video with millions of views and an untold number of comments. Some of them were downright scary in their praise for this guy* and there wasn't a single remotely negative comment to be found.

Not one. I looked.

Someone is really dedicated to sliencing dissent on this video, and I can't imagine that being anything shy of a full-time job. That is probably one of the most massive red flags there is.

* e.g.: "Who needs western medicine? $youtuber is always the answer."

Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source

Maybe the best way to fight AI taking over our media, is to stop supporting the arts with clicks on ads and subscription fees?

Go see a new band.
Watch a play.
Visit a gallery and talk to an artist.

Maybe if we made it more about supporting artists, and less about cammodifying the arts for our convenience, we won’t have to lose one of the things that makes humanity great?

reshared this

in reply to Mr. Funk E. Dude 🤷‍♂️

mastodon - Link to source

viva supeR

The digital domain forces a change of model.
Y BUT Y, that is: digital leftcopY BUT physical rightcopY.
The digital domain is freely accessible, but commercial exploitation remains the prerogative of the author; in all other domains, all rights remain with the author or artist.
Public Administration should then monitor the circulation of digital works and citizens’ preferences, and accordingly fund the artists who publish under a Y BUT Y license.
Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source

The US TikTok sale has been signed. The company will be controlled by a joint venture including Oracle, Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, Abu Dhabi-based MGX. Adding a UAE company really makes it clear that this was never about national security concerns.

axios.com/2025/12/18/tiktok-sa…

reshared this

Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source
The media in this post is not displayed to visitors. To view it, please go to the original post.

Mozilla right now.

#firefox #mozilla

#firefox #mozilla
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe

mastodon - Link to source

Laurent Cimon

while the recursive name certainly helps, pizza developers use proprietary ingredients while mac and cheese development is fully free. The source code is in the name!

Although you could argue that Kraft Dinner is proprietary, but that's like a proprietary version of UNIX. People just go to it for nostalgia knowing it's way outdated, and any attempt to replicate it will give a better result.

Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source
The media in this post is not displayed to visitors. To view it, please go to the original post.
I swear to you, my hands are freezing cold right now.🥶I'm sleeping without a blanket.Ieven put my blanket on my baby so Ican keep him warm.Life is truly so unfair😞
I'm freezing! 🥶😭Oh world
I'm freezing!🥶😭Oh world
I'm freezing!🥶😭Oh world
Please, let your kindness warm me tonight so I can buy myself a blanket🙏🥺
chuffed.org/project/161145
Please🙏😞🙏 @gvenema
@tekul @AnnaLion
#Gaza #Palestine #GazaVerified #genocide #famine #warCrimes #StopIsrael #StopTheGenocide #mutualAid
@kathimmel
@divya

Help us save my family in Gaza from hunger and killing.

Chuffed
#famine #Palestine #Genocide #WarCrimes #Gaza #mutualaid #StopIsrael #stopthegenocide #gazaverified @kat donegan 🇵🇸✊ @Dr. Divya 🍉 is offline @Anna Li-On @Gerrit 🇪🇺🌍🍉🔻 @小羊肖恩
This entry was edited (4 months ago)

reshared this

Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.

akkoma - Link to source
The media in this post is not displayed to visitors. To view it, please go to the original post.

If you want a rigorous analysis of why statistical #AI models collapse when continuously trained on their own data without external supervision and constraints, read this amazing paper from last year.

If you want to get a visual intuition of how model collapse looks like, look at this video.

When AI stares at its own reflection for too long, and its inference is purely rooted on statistics rather than reasoning, this becomes statistically inevitable.

Keep this in mind whenever you hear someone talking about “AI models learning from their own outputs” without addressing the statistical parrot issue.

AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data - Nature

 Analysis shows that indiscriminately training generative artificial intelligence on real and generated content, usually done by scraping data from the Internet, can lead to a collapse in the ability of the models to generate diverse high-quality out…
Nature
#AI
This entry was edited (4 months ago)

reshared this

Jonathan Lamothe reshared this.

mastodon - Link to source

posted about my Apple ID woes, please share widely?

hey.paris/posts/appleid/

20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple

Here’s how Apple “Permanently” locked my Apple ID. I am writing this as a desperate measure. After nearly 30 years as a loyal customer, authoring technical books on Apple’s own programming languages (Objective-C and Swift), and spending tens upon ten…
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison (hey.paris)

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
elisp nonsense

I've been playing around with keymaps. Apparently they can be used to create menus that give the user a visual list of options. The canonical way to make them is aparently with make-sparse-keymap to create the menu and define-key to add options to it, but this causes some confusing behaviour.

Take the following example:

(let ((menu (make-sparse-keymap "My menu")))
  (define-key menu "a"
    '(menu-item "Foo" foo))
  (define-key menu "b"
    '(menu-item "Bar" bar))
  menu)

Yields the following:
(keymap (98 menu-item "Bar" bar) (97 menu-item "Foo" foo) "My menu")

Each new entry is added to the top of the list, so when the menu is displayed, they're listed in reverse order. This is very counter intuitive.

Now, I understand that the nature of lists in lisp make inserting an element at the top of the list less computationally expensive, but when you've already got to walk the whole list anyway to ensure the key binding isn't already present, this no longer feels like an adequate excuse.

Am I missing something?

#emacs #elisp

#emacs #elisp

Wes reshared this.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
I virtually never set custom keybindings in #Emacs preferring instead to rely on M-x function calls because I had such a hard time finding key sequences that weren't used by something else. Since learning that C-c /[A-Za-z]/ is reserved for user-defined keybindings, I've gone mad with power.
#emacs

reshared this

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
nerdy computer stuff

I've long known that certain ASCII control sequences could be mimicked by holding control and pressing a key, e.g.: backspace is CTRL-H, newline is CTRL-J, but I was today years old when I learned that the ASCII control code is just the ASCII value of the key being pressed along with control bitwise and-ed with 0x1f.

It feels weird that I hadn't caught onto this sooner.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
more venting

Welp, it looks like our Instacart account is probably cooked. We need to find a replacement for that income quickly.

Fortunately, we were already in the process of trying to do that because of the wear and tear it was putting on the car. I have a few irons in the fire, but nothing concrete yet. We need something we can do on an on-demand basis so that we can work when our mental health permits.

I'm notoriously bad at interviewing for jobs. It always involves some element of exaggerating the truth (a.k.a. lying) which I suck at. It turns out for instance that the honest answer to "why do you want to work here?" (so I don't starve and end up homeless) isn't a good answer. 🙃

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
venting about the medical system in Ontario (vague for privacy reasons)

My partner has been dealing with $condition for a very long time. In that time we have tried many therapies and medications without much success. We have found $medication_a which actually helps, but causes $side_effect which is not sustainable. Fortunately, we've found $medication_b which makes $side_effect tolerable.

She's been on a waiting list to see a specialist for a while and finally had her first appointment today. After a single 30 minute appointment, his solution was to increase $medication_a while completely stopping $medication_b. When she objected about $side_effect (which she'd already told him was the reason for $medication_b) he said to just do $obvious_thing as though we hadn't tried that already.

What's worse is that he faxed the order to our pharmacy canceling her previous prescriptions.

Of course, I am not a doctor but what the hell is this guy thinking??

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source
Long-winded post about Emacs and gripe about modern computing

I think I've been able to pin down what it is that I like about #Emacs so much. When I first started using computers, I was using a TRS-80. If you didn't have a cartridge inserted, It'd boot directly into BASIC where you could program the machine directly. That wasn't a bug, it was a feature.

Modern computing seems to do its best to hide all that stuff away. Everything is treated more like a simple (albeit specialized) appliance, not a powerful machine that can be made to do literally anything you want. Instead, it's about what the various software vendors want it to do.

Emacs by contrast not only gives you all the tools you need to modify it in any way you want, but actively encourages you to do so. It feels a lot more like the computing systems of old. Perhaps that's not for everyone. There's a reason computers were so niche back in the early days. Most people just didn't care to learn what was going on under the hood, and that's valid. There's something to be said for a tool that just works effortlessly out of the box. Also, to be clear, you don't strictly speaking need to dig into the internals to use Emacs, but I prefer for my technology to serve me, and I'm willing to put the effort in to make that happen.

That's why it's a good fit for me.

#emacs

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Welp, I guess it's finally time to retire my jacket. I keep fixing it and it keeps tearing in other places. I got four years out of it, which isn't terrible by modern standards, I suppose.

It turns out they still sell that exact same style of jacket, so maybe Santa will be nice to me this Christmas. In the meantime, I'll just have to fall back on my older coat and just layer sweaters and such underneath.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

I use a giant #org-mode repisitory to keep myself organized. I synchronize this repisitory between multiple devices using #git because occasionally I'll find myself out without an internet connection and it's useful for merging when they fall out of sync.

To that end, I frequently find myself issuing the command git commit -am stuff, which makes me feel kind of dirty, but it's just the easiest thing to do.

Luckily no one but me will ever see this repisitory.

#VersionControlCrimes

#git #org-mode #VersionControlCrimes

notoriousGIT reshared this.

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

So I cancelled my YouTube Music subscription a while back. Interestingly enough, it still works without a paid subscription; they just add anti-features (i.e.: a ton of ads and the inability to navigate away from the app without stopping the music).

As it turns out, all these anti-features go away if you use it through a browser with an ad-blocker. I wonder how long it'll take them to lock that down.

This website uses cookies. If you continue browsing this website, you agree to the usage of cookies.

⇧