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@inthehands@hachyderm.io
2026-01-17 20:47:28

A lot of arguments in community chats broke out about who was supposed to be where, about what community was asking for people to show up or steer clear, about age-old militant vs. pacifist debates that have basically been stuck on loop since the 1960s (and are, IMO, just •incredibly• boring at this point, sorry).
But that’s organizing. It’s messy. People argue. People find consensus. People chaotically self-organize despite lack of consensus. People make good things happen.
And in the end, the people who believe in inclusion and reaching across differences and •building• community instead of destroying it — they have an intrinsic advantage.
7/

@memeorandum@universeodon.com
2026-01-16 16:46:11

Nick Fuentes suggests ICE killing Renee Good is "probably a good thing" because the "future is at stake, whether white people exist as a race" (Media Matters for America)
mediamatters.org/nick-fuentes/
memeorandum.com/260116/p53#a26

@kurtsh@mastodon.social
2026-01-17 17:53:20

If you need some *good* stories about *good* people to lift your spirits...
▶️ Finding People with No Customers, Then Buying Them Out - Steven Schapiro
youtube.com/watch?v=IpkQ20i5qh

@karlauerbach@sfba.social
2025-12-17 07:53:41

There are few good things to be said about US medical insurance or those awful Pharmaceutical Benefits Manager (PBM) companies.
However, the R's are pushing to create "savings" plans so that people can try to self-insure (probably many will buy some sort of additional "catastrophic" coverage.)
But there is at least one thing positive to say about existing medical insurers and PBMS - they have large numbers of people who go over doctor bills to see if they …

@grumpybozo@toad.social
2026-01-17 03:32:37

Good. Hopefully it means that they hired a few good admins.
The worst thing to happen to email was providers of other services bundling email at prices less than it should cost to provide high quality service.
It has deprofressionalized email. The pressure on email operations to cost nothing has squeezed out high competence admins and left the largest operations mysterious black boxes to the people who run them.

@memeorandum@universeodon.com
2026-01-16 15:11:08

The People Are Turning Against ICE. Will the Politicians Take Notice? (The Bulwark)
thebulwark.com/p/the-people-ar
memeorandum.com/260116/p44#a26

@stsquad@mastodon.org.uk
2025-12-16 11:49:46

This is a pretty good example to demonstrate why people are often shocked at the inference cost of #vibe #coding tools. I've been playing with #eca in

@hex@kolektiva.social
2025-11-16 21:08:22

There are 3 fundamental freedoms outlined in Dawn of Everything:
(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings;
(2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and
(3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.
I think these can all be captured in one statement when reframed as a system constraint: for a system to be free, participation must be optional for all members.
People must be part of *some* system. Even individualistic survivalism is itself a system (if not a very good one). Then there is a corollary as well: any system that is not free, that is not optional, can turn optional systems into mandatory ones, and thus (adopted from the MLK quote) un-freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.
Edit:
I'm gonna drop the #Philosophy tag on here because apparently that's where I went with it. Challenges and push-back welcome.
Edit:
Aaaaand Its a blog post
anarchoccultism.org/building-z
As usual, comments, typos, and questions are always welcome.

@gray17@mastodon.social
2025-11-17 07:49:09

at the moment, everyone having a phone camera is good evidence for reality. you can have multiple angles of the same moment and check them for consistency. it's hard to synthesize that, because gen-AI is bad at continuity.
I expect this to change within 5y. it's expensive to get continuity in high-res video of a 3d scene, but it's achievable.
people will keep trying prompt-to-video, but that will never work as well as prompt-to-scene-file-to-renderer.

@sjn@chaos.social
2025-12-18 01:30:37

TBH, I'd love to part ways with #facebook. The negatives are well known and too many.
Only a handful people and communities I'd like to keep in touch with are still there.
Strangely, the thing that brings me back, are the reels: Feel-good #music like Avie Sheck's cover of Creep and …

@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.it
2026-01-16 01:30:51

me: *low whistles*
me: "Damn, check out THOSE bollards!"
8yo: "What?"
me: "These metal things. they're nice, aren't they? No drivers parking on this sidewalk!"
8yo: *lays down on one*
8yo: "Yeah, they're good, I guess."
#SafeStreets

A manhattan street corner at night. It's fairly dark (what's up w/ the lack of lights??), but along the border of the sidewalk are some metal bollards that are rectangles on one side, and 5 sides on the other (one sloped side that you can lean on) on the other. They're spaced about 3ft apart, and they're probably 15" wide. One bollard basically divides the sidewalk in half.
Another angle of the bollards, this time taken FROM the street corner towards the end of the block. The bollards extend the entire length of the block, at least 30 metal bollards visible but you can't really see how many more go down due to distance and people walking on the sidewalk. The vertical side of the bollards face out towards the street, and then 45deg angled side faces towards the building.
Another shot taken from the street corner, this time facing the street and crosswalk. One bollard sits in the middle of the curb ramp top landing, which is absolutely an ADA violation. The ramp tactile mat also faces out towards the middle of the intersection rather than facing the crosswalks, but again - fuck disabled people, amirite?

But at least the bollards are nice!
@inthehands@hachyderm.io
2025-12-16 20:37:25

This is a really good question from @…. The first thing I keep telling everyone in other cities who wonders how they can help, what they can do:
Get organized NOW. Meet your neighbors NOW. Get your neighbors set up with secure messaging NOW. Form multiple hyper-local neighborhood social groups NOW. Organize a block picnic or community craft night or repair workshop or whatever NOW. Get contact info for the human beings who physically show up for neighborhood events NOW.
Form all those local connections ASAP, so that they’re there when you need them. The hardest lines of communication to establish will be the ones with the people closest to you. If you get local lines open in advance, you’ll be in a far, far better place.
infosec.exchange/@mathaetaes/1

@scott@social.linux.pizza
2026-01-16 23:24:09

rare good news bsky.app/profile/dropsitenews.

@rasterweb@mastodon.social
2025-11-15 16:45:52

Hey I managed to lock up the Finder on two different Mac at the same time! I'm getting really good at this...
Sometimes I think I just use computers to their limits way more than other people do.

Over the past year, the biggest victories against Trump have come
not from the elites or institutions,
but from college kids and office workers, cat ladies and Uber drivers.
When Trump tried to censor Jimmy Kimmel, it was the pumpkin latte drinkers whose ire forced ABC to bring him back on.
When the president sent National Guard troops to terrorize cities like Portland, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago, people who still wear skinny jeans turned off Netflix, inflated the…

@hikingdude@mastodon.social
2026-01-15 19:54:32

It's been quite a day today. Quite ... challenging. But with a good end.
The mood of this photo is now exactly what I needed: a calm, chill hike in low hanging clouds. Just a few people - no stress, no expectations, no talking, no phone ...
#landscape #photo

A serene winter morning unfolds in this tranquil countryside scene, where a light frost delicately coats the landscape. Tall, leafless trees stand in a row along the edge of a gentle hill, their branches dusted with a thin layer of frost, creating a beautiful contrast against the pale winter sky. The trees, with their intricate network of branches, add a sense of depth and texture to the scene.

The hill slopes gently downward, covered in a patchwork of frost-kissed grass and earthy tones, hint…
@elduvelle@neuromatch.social
2025-11-14 18:00:51

Workplace is asking if anyone wants three #GuineaPigs. I am tempted to say yes but could people who have them tell me more about whether that's a good idea, and what do they need to be happy?
Also, can people be allergic to guinea pigs?
(#CochonDInde pour les Français)

@aral@mastodon.ar.al
2026-01-10 10:49:55

Jonathan E. Ross, 43, who murdered Renee Nicole Good, is an Enforcement and Removal Operations agent with ICE.
He has been granted “absolute immunity” by the fascist USian regime.
There’s a reason we have a system of courts and laws for dispensing justice. It’s to stop people from dispensing it using the barrel of a gun.
🤷‍♂️

@compfu@mograph.social
2025-12-14 12:31:09

Posts like this, where knowledgeable people talk about their area of expertise using appropriate tech jargon, are a good reminder of what VFX people probably sound like to others when we‘re debugging a fluid sim, some Python code or why Nuke keeps crashing. friend.camp/@aparrish/11571437

@rberger@hachyderm.io
2026-01-14 20:49:36

Good message on using fear as a guide. And even people you think are fearless can also have anxiety being in public / public speaking.
A little bit uncomfortable
In hindsight, these scary (and occasionally terrifying) moments are the ones that we all learn the most from. - DR. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon.com
allthingsdistributed.com/2025/

@Mediagazer@mstdn.social
2026-01-08 20:50:52

An apparent disinformation campaign falsely identified Steve Grove, CEO/publisher of The Minnesota Star Tribune, as the ICE agent who shot a Minneapolis woman (David Gilbert/Wired)
wired.com/story/people-are-usi

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
2026-01-13 02:21:53

RE: hachyderm.io/@boztek/115885366
It’s so good to sometimes read about people with a true moral compass that stand for what the believe in. It’s uplifting to see people do the right thing even when it’s difficult.

@scott@carfree.city
2025-11-14 03:46:56

I don't see a big conflict here. BART is right to focus on keeping the lights on, but Oakland advocates are also right to think long-term. It's good to give people a future with better BART to look forward to in the runup to the funding measure.
"BART’s fiscal crisis could close 9 stations. So why are people pushing for a new one [San Antonio] in Oakland?"

@migueldeicaza@mastodon.social
2026-01-09 23:51:54

Troubling signs that the Linux demographic at the Register is now made up of people yelling at the clouds.
linuxmom.net/@vkc/115867723149

@jake4480@c.im
2026-01-10 22:08:23

I was thinking this morning, there should be more things like Goodwill, more thrift stores like that everywhere, for even LESS things going to landfills. Just people getting together, even as a trade or barter system, things like flea markets or garage sales-- people do some of this already.
Reusing things is so important, and repair, when possible-- I've been seeing some cool self-repair fix-it meetups on here, too.
As I was talking to my wife about it, and I remembered thi…

Snip from Wired piece that says 'how will these smaller groups of happier people be monetized? This is a tough question for the billionaires. Happy people, the kind who eat sandwiches together, are boring. They don't buy much. Their smartphones are six versions behind and have badly cracked screens. They fix bicycles, then talk about fixing bicycles, then they show their friend, who just came over for no reason, how they fixed their bicycle, and their friend says, 'Wow, good job," and they make…
@shriramk@mastodon.social
2025-12-15 01:04:47

The best description of Brown University, from Bess Kalb. (And to be clear, the heirs and star's kids are invariably also in that carton.)
besskalb.substack.com/p/brown-

Brown is the best kind of cult: Bright teenagers who want to do something creative about the world in a place that indulges and guides them in equal measure. A handful of them are Greek shipping heirs or a movie star’s kid but most are just the best people I have ever met. It’s just a giant carton of good eggs.
@tante@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-08 10:00:05

"chatbots over-rely on this kind of sensory-immaterial conjunction because[IT] impresses people passing superficially over a text--exactly the kind of fake-deep crowd-pleaser for which L.L.M. output is being fine-tuned."
(Original title: Will A.I. writing ever be good?)
maxread.substa…

@steve@s.yelvington.com
2025-12-14 19:37:33

Now would be a good time to remember that the 2nd Amendment is about maintenance of an organized militia so that local authorities can put down uprisings, particularly those of enslaved black people, and not about an individual right to own a murder weapon.

@stefan@gardenstate.social
2026-01-11 02:47:32

"Saturday night, a federal judge prevented the Trump administration from revoking “parole” as many as 15,000 people who don’t have legal immigration status but have been permitted to remain in the U.S. for family reunification."
- Joyce Vance

@ubuntourist@mastodon.social
2026-01-13 13:49:15

Hyattsville residents protest ICE murder of Renee Nicole Good
streetcarsuburbs.news/hyattsvi

@kubikpixel@chaos.social
2025-11-13 21:20:37

There is One Fediverse. There are a Million Pickleball Courts.
OK, maybe not a million, but over 100,000 and growing fast. And they are displacing tennis courts, because you can get four pickleball courts where one tennis court existed, and more and more people think that’s a good thing.
— by @…
:mastodon:

@PaulWermer@sfba.social
2025-12-11 17:10:43

Just one of the reasons I will not use #Meta products.
And why I am so disappointed in the number of good people - people I know and respect, people who are outraged at this #censorship- who still use #Instagram

@paulwermer@sfba.social
2025-12-11 17:10:43

Just one of the reasons I will not use #Meta products.
And why I am so disappointed in the number of good people - people I know and respect, people who are outraged at this #censorship- who still use #Instagram

@me@mastodon.peterjanes.ca
2025-12-15 17:24:05

Somehow Bill Watterson published this Calvin and Hobbes comic strip about generative AI 40 years ago.
#genAI #CalvinAndHobbes

Panel 1
Hobbes: "What's this?"
Calvin: "A generic snowman."

Panel 2
Calvin: "I used to make original snowmen, but it was time-consuming, hard work, so I said, heck, this is crazy!"

Panel 3
Calvin: "Now I crank out crude imitations of what's already popular! It takes no time or thought, and most people don't care about the difference anyway!"

Panel 4
Hobbes: "So cynical, yet so practical."
Calvin: "And what good is originality if you can't crank it out?"

There’s nothing good about him. Good people hate him.
bsky.app/profile/possumavenger

@mapcar@mastodon.sdf.org
2025-11-14 17:54:15

The Vergecast of October 31. («God will be declared by a panel of experts») has a bit funny and very good discussion of the bizarre joint press release between Microsoft and OpenAI and the insanity of the panel that is to verify if AGI has been achieved or not.
A choice quote about the problems of finding people to put on such a panel:
“A bunch of the world's best drunks have verified that you made whiskey is not a thing that you can do.”

@aredridel@kolektiva.social
2026-01-11 20:56:00

RE: phpc.social/@syntaxseed/115855
I have such conflicted thoughts on this.
What happened? Gross. It's very much a harm as a systemic effect of "AI"
But also _open source industry_ is in fact a thing I think has been deeply destructive and somewhat replaced the collectivist work done before. We could go back to that. That was good stuff.
But TailwindCSS is super popular.
I also think it's a bad technology, meant to undermine the foundations and design of CSS, leading us to technically worse places.
Also the business? It is selling themes and components.
That's a really hard business to be in. The time to buy a license comes in a project's lifecycle too early, so people avoid it. It's a weird business. Not one I think people should plan to have work.

@pre@boing.world
2026-01-13 23:36:36

Watched Solar Opposites, a cartoon started by Justin Roiland like Rick and Morty with lots in common.
Including Roiland being kicked out after a couple of seasons for his crimes, and being replaced. This time not with an impersonator but just a new more british actor. Stayed pretty much in vibe with his style though.
Four aliens stuck on earth, plus the adventures of the tiny people that one of the aliens shrunk to keep in his wall like an ant farm. And the Silver Cops.
Pretty good fun. Watched the five seasons on Netflix in a couple of weeks. Apparently there's another if I search or wait.
Interesting how the machine can just keep churning it out even when the lead folks disappear. That's the ideal I suppose. Create the show then let it run on without you.
#watching #tv #solarOpposites

@rainerzufall_le@mastodon.social
2026-01-14 06:33:22

"Members of the public have reportedly also shared information about agents in hotels and even neighbors.
“I’ve had hotel staff sending post-it notes, bar staff sending DHS IDs, and loads of people saying their neighbour is an agent,” Skinner said."
rawstory.com/ice-agents-data-l

@rachel@norfolk.social
2025-12-13 19:07:29

So, I think we are really, really close to a 1.0 release of drupal.org/project/config_warn that adds a nice little warning to admin pages that will alter the running configuration.
It would be really, really good to get more people testing it on their

@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems
2025-12-10 13:29:12

Do you recall the good old days, back when the worst embarrassment you could witness was someone booting up a laptop in a train, and being greeted by the Windows startup chime?
Nowadays we have to suffer a whole spectrum, from the embarrassment of people taking photos with their "shutter" sound enabled and hitting random advertisements on full volume, to the absolute rudeness of watching random stuff or playing music on their speaker.
Not to mention all the annoying, loud ringtones and notification sounds, repeated far too often. Or people who don't want to pick up their phone, but they won't bother silencing it either.

@joe@toot.works
2025-12-12 18:42:20

Johnny Harris (he doesn't seem to have a presence here) has a really good video out right now on public transportation in Switzerland. "By law, every village in Switzerland, which has people living all year round, they have the right of public transportation. It can be a train, it can be a gondola, it can be a bus. Whatever." That's pretty cool.
#Switzerland #PublicTransportation #JohnnyHarris

@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io
2026-01-06 15:07:56

Such a bummer when people lie for no reason.
Found out today that a client I previously ended our work with had lied to us about their plans and why they wanted to stop our engagement.
The truth wouldn’t have changed anything for us. We still would have parted ways on good terms and done our best to offboard. In fact, we would have been able to help them more by properly instructing people coming to take over.
So now that the lie came to light, long after the engagement ended, I have a bad taste in my mouth and no longer feel good about how things ended and or them as a past client.
I just wish they told the truth.

@matthiasott@mastodon.social
2026-01-01 23:33:50

This piece by @… just hits different. So good.
“The "problem" was that creating art—real, human, meaningful writing—is slow. It is expensive. It is unpredictable. And it is diverse. It requires dealing with people. People with traumas, people with political opinions, people with voices that don't fit into a corporate style guide. [……

As Trumpism and technology erode our shared understanding of the world,
ordinary people in Minneapolis put their lives on their line to record the truth.
theverge.com/policy/859055/min

@restorante@social.linux.pizza
2025-11-14 11:10:29

I do not really understand what is happening to me. From these past several days, I have a great desire to talk to people.
Is this because of daily commuting with bycycle for hours? I am not sure.
My social anxiety is extremely low. I am somewhat bewildered with this new good development.
I feel like I am a new person.
#Autism

@hikingdude@mastodon.social
2025-12-10 20:37:33

I've been on a business event / meet up.
It was really good, met a couple of interesting people and had really good conversations. It was good to just speak with strangers.

@ErikJonker@mastodon.social
2026-01-06 22:08:41

The EU should make clear the people of Greenland are not "for sale". Ultimately the people of Greenland decide for themselves what is good for them that is not decided by the USA/Trump. We should support Denmark and Greenland in anyway we can.
#greenland #denmark

@timbray@cosocial.ca
2025-12-09 17:44:24

Just ran across openwebsearch.eu/news/ for the first time. A small number of years ago I would have called the idea ridiculous. Now I think that, if you got the right people together, it could have a good outcome.

@jrm4@mastodon.social
2025-11-07 21:12:16

Now perhaps might be a good time for the reminder of a truth always obscured:
Black People (not Black "women" -- ALL BLACK PEOPLE - you have to watch how they do black men dirty here) are the practical always-voting correctly BASE of the Democratic party -- which in turn makes them the moral center of voting in America.
#uspol

@jensilber@mastodon.social
2026-01-12 14:37:06

I am trying to find a primary source for this, because if it's not wishful thinking it's pretty good.
(Seen on meidasplus.com/p/this-weekend-)

… RFK Jr: “Reports coming out of Germany show a government sidelining patient autonomy and limiting people's abilities to act on their own convictions when they face medical decisions. That is why I sent a letter to Germany's Federal Minister of Health, Nina Warken. In my letter, I made it clear that Germany has the opportunity and the responsibility to correct this trajectory, to restore medical autonomy, to end politically motivated prosecutions, and to uphold the rights that anchor every dem…
@servelan@newsie.social
2025-12-27 18:15:26

The Good People – Digby's Hullabaloo
digbysblog.net/2025/12/27/the-

@chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.ca
2025-11-06 19:52:39

This John Catsimatidis guy can just F right off. If he cared so much about the birds he could have sent trucks to have them taken away... of course.. good luck with US Border agents letting birds in that have been exposed to Avian Flu and have an active CFIA cull order on them.
I feel bad for the people who feel so connected to the birds themselves. Some people simply won't understand and I feel sympathy for them. But the owners of the ranch have always known better and they have used this to raise money and increase their profile.
And now we get the crocodile tears as the adults have finally taken over.
I hope this is the last we ever hear about Universal Ostrich.
cbc.ca/news/canada/british-col

@bobmueller@mastodon.world
2026-01-12 15:30:04

Good. That report from NINE YEARS AGO needs to be examined closely and the recommendations need to be put in place. Ideally, we'd end the death penalty, given the state's record with putting innocent people on death row, but I'm not hopeful Oklahomans will ever come to their senses about that.

@hex@kolektiva.social
2026-01-08 18:26:26

The fascist who killed Heather Heyer at Unite the Right helped turn the tides against the last Trump administration. He said there were "very fine people on both sides." The resistance grew, antifa doxxing fascists started getting those fash fired.
But some of those fash didn't stop. They kept organizing their terror cells. The fash who killed Heyer was with a group called Vanguard America. Patriot Front is a Nazi group that split off from Vanguard America. They started terrorizing people by loading up in box trucks and piling out for spontaneous marches.
That box truck tactic probably sounds familiar. Patriot Front basically disappeared at the same time that ICE started recruiting hard.
Let me make it more clear. The very same Nazis from UTR who killed Heather Heyer, who Trump called "very fine people," are now employees of DHS. They've been carrying out the ethnic cleansing they always dreamed of, and they're being paid by the government, *with your tax dollars*, to do it. And now, just like in Charlottesville, they've murdered an unarmed protestor.
This feels similar because it is. These are the same people killing daughters and mothers. Killing unarmed protestors, out of rage not fear, then lying and claiming self defense. This is the same tactic it's always been. This is the same thing they've always done.
It seems like we may have reached the Heather Heyer point of this administration early with Renee Good. Now would be a good time for everyone to get into the streets and stay there until this is over. Everyone turned the tides before, and now he's so much weaker.
This can all be over if we fight like hell to end it.
#USPol

@aral@mastodon.ar.al
2026-01-13 07:40:19

Adelaide Festival board resigns and Adelaide Writers’ Week cancelled after 180 authors pull out in protest of Zionist board decision to disinvite Palestinian author.
Remember this, if you’re a Zionist: like the Nazis before you, you are committing genocide, you are on the wrong side of history, and – as long as there are people of good moral character and conscience to oppose you – you will not succeed. Your only allies are the MAGAs of the world and those too spineless to stand up to …

@crell@phpc.social
2025-11-09 22:52:59

This is a tricky balance. Some level of skepticism and counter-culture is good and healthy, both for people and society. But when it goes too far, it always seems to end up in the same place.
theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2

@curiouscat@fosstodon.org
2025-11-04 16:12:21

"The greatest statistical analysis is nothing if it can’t be implemented by people. But people learn in different ways. Some like good stories, others like pictures. Only a few like equations..."
management.curiouscatblog.net/

@memeorandum@universeodon.com
2026-01-11 03:15:52

Safeguarding Venezuelan Oil Revenue for the Good of the American and Venezuelan People (President Donald J. Trump/The White House)
whitehouse.gov/presidential-ac
memeorandum.com/260110/p56#a26

@sofia@chaos.social
2025-12-27 18:44:04

pet peeve: "good intentions".
if the intentions consistently cause bad things, then they just aren't very good. yeah, it's based on bad reasoning/understanding. it always is, that's how evil happens.
how else are these intentions supposed to be "good"? by making people feel good about themselves?
even people who think they "do evil on purpose" are just semantically confused. they still act according to their own values. though their…

@markhburton@mstdn.social
2026-01-09 12:20:43

This is good advice received from a local retrofit organisation. I'm always amazed by how many people don't appear to understand this simple fact.
MONTHLY TOP TIP
Did you know how much of a difference closing curtains and blinds can make ?
In summer leaving window coverings closed can reduce the heat input to prevent overheating and in the winter closing them before dark can keep heat from escaping and keep your home feeling cosy.

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
2026-01-11 22:17:46

wonder how these people who vague-reply “why would you use Apple products” when you post about good or bad things with Apple products fare at parties

@pavelasamsonov@mastodon.social
2025-12-08 17:04:03

Process creates friction, so we got rid of process. But that friction was necessary for holding workslop at bay.
Because without slowing down, we can't ask "is this good? is this right?" We can only ask "when will it be done?" And that's a world where #LLM outputs will always beat people.
Fortunately, an "optimized" process moves slowly, because prod…

@cowboys@darktundra.xyz
2025-10-23 05:05:01

Media Mash: Cool to See Good People Win dallascowboys.com/podcast/medi

@portaloffreedom@social.linux.pizza
2025-12-11 13:19:36
Content warning: Machine learning, but positive. Potentially controversial

My controversial take on "AI" ray tracing helpers are that it's a really good idea.
First some background: keep in mind that machine learning tecnologies excell at tasks that have a high reward for success and a small cost for failure. In this case getting most of the rays right improve performance, at the cost of some few rays being shot in nothing.
Secondly, light rays are way too many in real life to be simulated in their entirety, so using some statistics to approximate the lighting model makes a lot of sense here. Plus at the lower quantum scale even phisicists use statistic to explain this stuff, so it's not that irrealistic either.
Finally the source data for this stuff is entirely other games, so ethically sourcing the training data set should not be a concern here.
Here, technology can be good or bad. It's not the tech, it's the use of the tech by the people (but that I mean oligarchic corporations) that makes them good or bad.

@azonenberg@ioc.exchange
2026-01-07 11:17:20

Math people: If I have a bunch of sampled data that I've found a local maximum on, and I want to interpolate the peak location to sub-sample precision, what's a good way to do that?
I know how to interpolate a zero crossing linearly but this is a bit more complex, I feel like I'll probably want to fit a sinc or gaussian or something to the data somehow?

@katrinakatrinka@infosec.exchange
2025-11-04 17:30:09

Dick Cheney is a good example of why rich people live so long. [ETA: Rich people in the US.]
If he'd just been a regular person, he likely would've died without a heart transplant, if not before from one of his many heart attacks.
#uspol

@davidaugust@mastodon.online
2025-12-03 00:51:43

Today, I designed, built and launched a small software application within very strict financial, security, hardware and software constraints.
Then I helped people with all levels of tech skill, and different hardware and software configurations, get it running with their own setups.
That's a lot of corporate speak and being vague, but it feels good to have it out in the world helping people: letting them get a very specific thing done better.

@chiraag@mastodon.online
2026-01-10 03:28:59

Nebula: nebula.tv/videos/jdraper-selli
YT: youtube.com/watch?v=3HoOhLNA…

@grahamperrin@bsd.cafe
2026-01-09 21:29:13

@… no, I was here to help you.
You're now shooting yourself in the foot by making false assumptions about people. Never a good move.

@nelson@tech.lgbt
2026-01-08 15:05:33

@… I'm using groups.io for the first time. (I know! Sorry, I usually avoid mailing lists.) It's very good, thank you for running this valuable service.
I found the locked topics feature very interesting. It never occurred to me to have that in a mailing list, since the underlying tech doesn't allow it. Does it work well in practice? Do people use it? The group I'm on uses it extensively.

@pre@boing.world
2026-01-15 11:39:06
Content warning: ukpol party defections

Robert Jenrick has been sacked as shadow minister on account of the shadow leader thinking he's thinking of defecting.
Presumably this encourages him to defect really? Even if he wasn't planning to leave, why stay around in a party that can't win and is sacking people on paranoid presumptions that they will leave?
Seems like all the rats at the Conservative party are jumping ship to Reform. People will be voting Reform at the next election and literally getting the exact same ministers as when they voted Conservative at the last one.
This isn't like the usual "Vote X, get Y", where the broken electoral system lets the least popular party in because the popular political wing is divided. This is literally "Vote reform, Reform win, but you get the exact people who were standing as Conservative last time"
Is this really good for Reform? It's voters are trying to avoid voting Tory, surely? Adding all the old tory ministers to their ranks has to hurt rather than help?
#ukpol #defection #reform #conservatives

@memeorandum@universeodon.com
2026-01-08 19:55:52

DHS Officer Seen on Video Kicking Memorial Candle for Renee Nicole Good, Woman Killed by ICE: 'Don't Give a F--' (Liam Quinn/People)
people.com/dhs-officer-seen-ki
memeorandum.com/260108/p102#a2

@joe@toot.works
2025-11-11 12:36:05

I went and saw the "marcus mystery movie" last night. You don't find out what movie you're seeing until you see it. The movie started with two elderly people driving to their kids' house for a gender reveal party. One of them has terminal cancer but doesn't want the children to know, yet. It was around this point where I questioned if I made a good choice. 🤔
For what it's worth, I liked the movie. I never would have seen that otherwise but I liked it.

Increasingly the victims of the administration's campaign of terror are people just trying to survive when their daily life is upended by the presence of masked federal agents.
Those agents are ambushing immigrants after court appearances,
crashing into drivers while trying to escape protestors,
or abducting children if they seemingly impede the arrest of their own parents by dint of simply existing;
The people in the cities in which this is happening are just t…

@rasterweb@mastodon.social
2025-12-08 20:23:23

A family member of mine made a joke about trans people and I shut it down so fast I think they are still reeling a day later.
I got extremely serious, and loud, and told them it was bullshit, and I don't want to hear that sort of garbage again.
They tried to defend it with "Oh, it's just us, we're cool" and I called bullshit on that too.
We talked about it later and I think I got my point across. I ended with "We know you're a good person, so …

@grumpybozo@toad.social
2025-11-06 13:46:07

Reminder: BHL is a rape apologist who has said that the hijab is an invitation to rape.
That's why we don't cite X. It is entirely made up of the worst people in the world. If you still use a functioning X account, you are *ONE OF THEM*, no matter how good your intentions.

@markhburton@mstdn.social
2025-11-02 09:22:16

"Wherever we looked for the prominent flaggers and leaders of this movement, we found people smugglers and sex doll salesmen, people with dubious criminal pasts and people willing to put in a good word for Adolf Hitler. Farage told us the flag-raisers were just ordinary folk sticking it to the system. A few months worth of local journalism later, that now looks like a shaky claim."
The men who raised the flags

@PaulWermer@sfba.social
2025-11-10 02:56:18

People tell me that Wiener is a smart guy.
So why does #Friedmanist, devoutly trusting developer to do …

@inthehands@hachyderm.io
2026-01-10 04:43:12

Renee Good is a crisis for the Trump regime: not because they care about her life, but because ICE murdering her makes ICE look bad. They’ve been telling all these stories about all the imaginary violence ICE officers face. In their minds, it’s the people on the streets who were supposed to lose their cool first. Now they’re falling over themselves to make that happen.
We just want ICE gone, but their bosses want them dead. And no, I’m sure they do not understand this.

@aral@mastodon.ar.al
2025-11-04 16:49:32

One of USA’s last remaining independent journalistic outlets… *checks notes*… Teen Vogue… is shuttered. romancelandia.club/@herhandsmy

@ErikJonker@mastodon.social
2025-11-03 06:50:31

A great quote from the book Autocracy Inc from Ann Applebaum, a recommended read. A good description of the atmosphere the Trump administration tries to create.
#trump #autocracy #applebaum

Quote from Autocracy Inc from Ann Applebaum,
Many of the propagandists of Autocracy, Inc., have learned from the mistakes of the twentieth century. They don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and they don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade people to mind their own business, stay out of politics, and never hope for a democratic alternative: Our state may …
@tante@tldr.nettime.org
2025-12-04 15:40:05

"It's not that any of the other streaming services are good, but Spotify is almost certainly the worst. Do not trust it. Do not let it turn your enjoyment of music into stats and algorithmic playlists."
(Original title: Spotify Haters Club)
knru.polin.ski/spotify-haters-

@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.it
2025-11-03 05:45:04

I'm no math surgeon, but there's 342mil people in the US. 70 of 342 is around 20%, or 1 in 5 Americans.
fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app

Screenshot of the linked skeet, which has a link to The Atlantic article titled "Why Do So Many People Think Trump Is Good?", and the skeet itself quotes David Brooks from the article saying, "How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn't find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable."
@hex@kolektiva.social
2025-11-07 19:30:14

This is also a good way to make the protests actually valuable. The #NoKingsDay protests let people see how big the resistance was. It informed a section of the elite that their best bet was to resist rather than comply. The shutdown is already hurting the economy. The an economic blackout could be enough to break it... and we're all still waiting for the AI bubble to pop. It's gonna get really hot, really fast.
The great thing about the economic blackout as a strategy is that they don't have a mechanism to compel people to buy stuff. So it turns out that "make the economy scream" is a two player game. Go fucking figure.

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
2026-01-02 15:51:35

One of the overall most prolific and never-ending enigmas for me is which speakers people think "sound good".
Like you can have the most garbage tinny piece of shit speakers in a TV or on a laptop and the reviews will be "sounds great!".
Or e.g. Sonos speakers—they sound horrific and people go on about how they're the best thing they've ever heard.
These aren't subjective opinions by the way, you can measure the frequency response etc.

The joy and promise of the Internet is that marginal and marginalized people can find each other
and form communities.
If you're the only goth klezmer fan in Toad Suck, Arkansas, you can find others.
If you're het up about a neglected social issue, you can find others.
The trouble is a lot of communities used to be marginalized for extremely good reasons,
and it probably would have been better if they stayed that way.
Dumb pipes can't tel…

@inthehands@hachyderm.io
2026-01-09 20:51:58

I •think• the most important people for MN residents to call right now are MN Gov Walz and MN AG Ellison. Those numbers again:
Gov: ‭(651) 201-3400€
AG: ‭(651) 296-3353€
My points when I call:
- We don’t trust Trump’s FBI
- We want an independent MN-based investigation of the killing of Good
- Thank you for steps you’re already taking in this direction
- Do more, try harder
- Do so in outright defiance of the FBI if necessary
(To be clear, this is all just from Paul; if I get better guidance from more informed folks, I will share/update.)

@hex@kolektiva.social
2025-11-20 22:27:26

After #Trump finally crashes and burns (I'm still saying I don't think he makes it to the mid terms, and I think it's more than possible he won't make it to the end of the year) we'll hear a lot of people say, "the system worked!" Today people are already talking about "saving democracy" by fighting back. This will become a big rally cry to vote (for Democrats, specifically), and the complete failure of the system will be held up as the best evidence for even greater investment in it.
I just want to point out that American democracy gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile, who, before being elected was already a well known sexual predator, and who made the campaign promise to commit genocide. He then preceded to commit genocide. And like, I don't care that he's "only" kidnaped and disappeared a few thousand brown people. That's still genocide. Even if you don't kill every member of a targeted group, any attempt to do so is still "committing genocide." Trump said he would commit genocide, then he hired all the "let's go do a race war" guys he could find and *paid* them to go do a race war. And, even now as this deranged monster is crashing out, he is still authorized to use the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
He committed genocide during his first term when his administration separated migrant parents and children, then adopted those children out to other parents. That's technically genocide. The point was to destroy the very people been sending right wing terror squads after.
There was a peaceful hand over of power to a known Russian asset *twice*, and the second time he'd already committed *at least one* act of genocide *and* destroyed cultural heritage sites (oh yeah, he also destroyed indigenous grave sites, in case you forgot, during his first term).
All of this was allowed because the system is set up to protect exactly these types of people, because *exactly* these types of people are *the entire power structure*.
Going back to that system means going back to exactly the system that gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile *TWICE*.
I'm already seeing the attempts to pull people back, the congratulations as we enter the final phase, the belief that getting Trump out will let us all get back to normal. Normal. The normal that lead here in the first place. I can already see the brunch reservations being made. When Trump is over, we will be told we won. We will be told that it's time to go back to sleep.
When they tell you everything worked, everything is better, that we can stop because we won, tell them "fuck you! Never again means never again." Destroy every system that ever gave these people power, that ever protected them from consequences, that ever let them hide what they were doing.
These democrats funded a genocide abroad and laid the groundwork for genocide at home. They protected these predators, for years. The whole power structure is guilty. As these files implicate so many powerful people, they're trying to shove everything back in the box. After all the suffering, after we've finally made it clear that we are the once with the power, only now they're willing to sacrifice Trump to calm us all down.
No, that's a good start but it can't be the end.
Winning can't be enough to quench that rage. Keep it burning. When this is over, let victory fan that anger until every institution that made this possible lies in ashes. Burn it all down and salt the earth. Taking down Trump is a great start, but it's not time to give up until this isn't possible again.
#USPol

@hikingdude@mastodon.social
2025-11-09 07:41:01

RE: mastodon.social/@reiseblog/115
This is an annual event I grew up with.
Lots of people but also lots of tradition and pretty nice to watch (especially in good weather). I never participated myself if you are wondering.

@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io
2025-11-26 15:30:16

The whole thing is optimized for scams, deception and other criminal behavior:
- user interface that deceptively pretends it's a human you're talking to
- claims from companies highly exaggerate capabilities
companies and "experts" constantly hype "AGI" which they (funnily enough) do to both make investors greedier and spread fear and as a distraction because these algorithms can't actually do what they keep promising
- large-scale accounting and financial fraud (e.g. what Nvidia is doing with circular selling)
- biggest case of copyright infringement in history
Note: I think the underlying technology is really cool, and definitely has use cases and can be used for actually good things. But: some technology just has more downsides than upsides, and some should only be used by experts in controlled environments. Leaded gasoline, asbestos and chlorofluorocarbon are also all really cool technology.
In this case perhaps the techology itself doesn't do anything inherently bad, however the people making it are lying about what it can do, the people selling it are motivated purely by greed and the people using it (often forced to do so) are being deceived.

@aral@mastodon.ar.al
2025-11-03 23:57:58

I’m old enough to remember when antisemite meant someone who is bigoted against Jewish people, not a person of good moral character who opposes genocide regardless of who is committing it.

@memeorandum@universeodon.com
2026-01-09 14:30:57

ICE is not the victim -- MAGA lies can't hide the real damage done to people like Renee Nicole Good (Amanda Marcotte/Salon)
salon.com/2026/01/09/ice-is-no
memeorandum.com/260109/p32#a26

@hex@kolektiva.social
2025-12-20 23:22:58

So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
iheart.com/podcast/105-it-coul
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.

@inthehands@hachyderm.io
2025-11-06 21:56:55

Whatever happens to our democracy, history will remember our 3 good SCOTUS justices as a voice of clarity when civil society was unraveling around them.
Future generations will point to their writing and say, “Look at this. It’s not like people didn’t understand what was happening at the time. They knew perfectly well.”
EDIT: I said Sotomayor at first; this is Jackson!! “What would you do with a brain if you had one, Paul?” I’m sure I have no idea.
journa.host/@chrisgeidner/1155

@aral@mastodon.ar.al
2025-11-03 15:01:31

Remember folks, Israel and the US can do whatever the fuck they want to anyone for any reason and there is fuck all you can do about it. If you oppose Israel, you’re Hamas and if you oppose the US you’re a commie. These aren’t good people we’re talking about, they’re fucking monsters – the dregs of humanity – and guess what, they don’t give a shit; they’re proud of it… they’re belly-laughing in your face after ripping it off with their teeth. They’re stronger than you and that’s all that mat…

I think being an egocentric asshole as a service is finally falling flat
and people want to hear more about what real living is about.
hachyderm.io/@suzannealdrich/1

@hex@kolektiva.social
2025-10-30 10:05:59

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol