@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2025-06-22 00:30:01
@timbray@cosocial.ca2025-06-26 17:42:02
In which I recommend that if you’re building or upgrading a moderately serious music-listening system, you use Qobuz and include a cheap Mac Mini: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/06/22/Qobuz-and-Others
@catsalad@infosec.exchange2025-06-26 11:44:53
Found a bunch of BSides with fediverse accounts I wasn't following. I should probably update my fediverse #BSides index... 😅
Bsides & InfoSec Cons by Region
📌 https://infosec.exchange/@catsalad/111
@primonatura@mstdn.social2025-07-26 14:00:50
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-07-25 10:57:58
Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.
@aral@mastodon.ar.al2025-08-26 14:47:09
Hey everyone, every Tuesday, my friend @… asks for your help to feed her family. She can’t do it today (they’re trying to stay alive during a genocide) so she asked if I could do it on her behalf.
They need $500 each week for their family of 6.
Every single dollar makes a real difference
If you’re unable to donate, please consider sharing – it might r…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-08-25 18:10:40
Filing: Intel warns the US taking a 10% stake could trigger "adverse reactions", including in international sales, which made up 76% of revenue last fiscal year (Chris Eudaily/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/25/intel-trump-deal-risks-stock.html
…
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems2025-07-26 13:30:55
New on blog: "EPYTEST_PLUGINS and other goodies now in #Gentoo"
"""
If you are following the gentoo-dev mailing list, you may have noticed that there’s been a fair number of patches sent for the #Python eclasses recently. Most of them have been centered on #pytest support. Long story short, I’ve came up with what I believed to be a reasonably good design, and decided it’s time to stop manually repeating all the good practices in every ebuild separately.
In this post, I am going to shortly summarize all the recently added options. As always, they are all also documented in the Gentoo Python Guide.
"""
https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2025/07/26/epytest_plugins-and-other-goodies-now-in-gentoo/
@usul@piaille.fr2025-06-26 04:53:58
Affaire de Bétharram : en 1998, les ratés de la justice face aux agresseurs présumés
https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2025/06/25/affaire-de-betharram-en-1998-les-rates-de-la-…
@timbray@cosocial.ca2025-06-26 18:11:47
More on the crisis in open-source maintenance as exemplified by libxml2: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1025971/73f269ad3695186d/
Some money *has* to start flowing into this community or the foundations we all rely on will start rotting away. Given the many-bi…