@ErikJonker@mastodon.socialFor me this age of AI is the time we should appreciate less polished handwritten texts for their authenticity. I see this happening during selection of job applications.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026…
@aredridel@kolektiva.socialFor those that don't know, I help run a large women in technology chat group on Slack. It's been going for 11 years now! (ask me for an invite if you want one and that's appropriate!)
It has deeply shaped how I think about technology, especially the social side. There is so much embodied knowledge in that community, it's amazing. And it's also such a window into how much the mainstream of technology writing is dominated by men. We talk about it differently! We're much more likely to be critical, and to be critical of the _structures_ in tech. Sometimes that comes off as kneejerk "Ugh BRIAN!" to some of the bullshit men to do women in the workplace, but also embedded underneath is an understanding of rarely-mapped power structures in the field. So much advice out there is written assuming that there is no dissent, no silent frustration, no quiet abandoning the job when the pressures are unresolved. And so much of the tech world, press and on social media alike, has no insight that this attrition even happens.
Women, collectively, though, understand it. We notice the patterns of promotions. We understand the way that if we're in our 40s, we're rather likely to have a manager who is a decade younger than we are, with no particular experience. We notice when men are lauded for spending time with their family instead of work on occasion, but women are expected to be present at all times and rarely seen positively for doing the exact same things.
And yet, any given instance is always shrouded in deniability. The pattern generally holds, but is this one my fault? Do I not measure up? Or is it sexism?
That's what these structures rob from us: we never have the clarity in feedback that it is accurate, that is us that must change. When we stick to our guns, are we being obstinate, or are we correct? That information is denied to us by sexism. It only becomes clear in aggregate, and even then it is very hard to find action to take on it except to acknowledge it and move on.
I don't think people talk about that ambiguity enough: we're always looking for the clear sexism, the man speaking over the women, the trading sexual favors for advancement, the clear pattern of pet-to-threat that so many women experience as they age or gain skill in the field. But the bulk of sexism that we experience is in the structural poisoning of feedback.
@joxean@mastodon.socialFor a tool I'm writing I need to do some web searches from time to time. Mostly from Python. What can I use without having to buy/get an API key? Anything as of today that still works?
@hex@kolektiva.socialSo one of the authors is Nicholas Carlini, who works for Anthropic. This is basically an ad for the three letter agencies to use Claude. It massively over-promises compared to what the actual paper says.
But, it is important. First, this is really about silencing people. The threat of identification is designed to make people afraid to talk online. There's a massive asymmetry between the fascists and the people. The fascists are weird racists and pedophiles who are obsessed with control. No one likes them. No one likes their ideas, because their ideas are creepy and bad.
When they talk about their ideas, that people should be murdered or kidnaped based on their skin color, that there should be a national dress code, that people's sex lives should be monitored, that children should be treated like objects that are owned by the parent (specifically, one parent), that people with different skin color or uteri should be considered as livestock, people fucking hate it because it's awful. When we talk about our ideas, that everyone should be able to eat and take care of themselves, that people who can't take care of themselves should be taken care of, that we should live in a society that values life, that we should live in harmony with nature, people like those ideas. When fascists out us for talking about those ideas, people support us. When we out people who are working as fascist goons those people have to face social consequences.
Everyone hates these people. The US government is currently less popular than it has ever been. The only way they can keep power is by making everyone think that they aren't extraordinarily unpopular. The only way to do that, the way authoritarian have always done it, is to make everyone afraid to talk.
But, yes, what this paper is saying is actually kind of bad. It looks like people who don't take any precautions at all in separating identities can be identified about 30% of the time (based on the results). It's unclear how this will actually work in the real world. Larger corpses will probably have more data, making connecting things easier.
This isn't as good as a human trying to dox someone. It's not going to work as well. It may only work in a small number of cases. There will be false positives (just like there are with people doing the work). It's probably not cheaper than hiring people. But it does mean that you can just dump money into a machine that has no ethical framework and get data out. That's the point. It's hard to find humans who will do evil shit like help dictatorships target human rights activists, but if a machine can do it for twice the price then it's a better deal for the dictatorship.
For most people, you just shouldn't care. This isn't for you. As long as you keep doing what you're doing, and you can keep everyone else doing what they're doing, then there aren't enough resources to actually target you. Even if they know who you are, there are just too many people who hate them and too few goons.
For people who might actually be targeted, there are a lot of things. First, keep in mind what you're putting into anonymous accounts. Any feature that's connected to your real life is a feature that can be extracted to identify you. This has always been true, it just may be easier to find now. Your identities should be totally siloed. It's also harder to identify you if you're writing anonymously as a collective. Collectives are better anyway because they can help check your thinking. When you write as a collective, you can help clean up each other's personal details and language. A collective develops its own voice, which is distinct from individual contributors. If you do this, and you also present your work as being from one "person," then it becomes even harder for anyone (systems or individuals) to really figure it out.
I'm not going to do a full deep dive on this because I just don't have time, but your existing threat model should *already cover these threats* if you need to make sure your writing remains anonymous.
This paper doesn't present any novel methodologies. It just extracts a bunch of features, which a human would extract as notes, and tries to correlate those between identities, which is how human researchers work. Linguistic forensics were mentioned (not by name) in the paper, but the actual methodology doesn't actually seem to use them.
So a thing with less ethics can do a worse job for more money (when adjusted for the real, not investor deflated, price of tokens). It's worth knowing. It's not the end of the world, but it is a good reminder to check your threat model and make sure it's up to date.
@cdarwin@c.imMartha Lillard had just turned 5 when she was diagnosed with polio
and depended on an iron lung to live.
She died June 26 in Oklahoma,
the last U.S. polio patient who used the machine, her sister said. She was 78.
“They told her she wasn’t supposed to live past 20 years old,”
Lillard’s younger sister, Cindy McVey, told The Associated Press on Friday.
“She had the enthusiasm and the drive to continue living and make the best of her life.”
McVey attri…
@bourgwick@heads.socialmy final dispatch on dylan & the dead’s misbegotten 1986 shows for @…'s wonderful newsletter, in which dylan finds a new way to get booed, plays (to my ears) his best set of the run, & i rediscover my fave paul williams passage (& an all-time fave piece of rock writing, really), where he champions uncritical listening & hears genius in the specific w…
@jredlund@social.linux.pizzaWriting an ERWC-Style Module: Choosing Texts
I have written four ERWC modules and substantially revised several more. Most of my own modules turned out to be about full-length works, including Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, George Orwell’s 1984, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Writing a module around a novel is an interesting, complex, and time-consuming task. I will take that up later.
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioI still think it’s a miracle that this never happened. But then…having been on the ground here, well, we knew what the stakes were. There was a kind of cold clarity during the siege that’s…hard to convey.
When they murdered Renee Good, I could almost hear their giddy anticipation: “At last! Now they’ll snap!” And after they murdered Alex Pretti and a few days had passed and •still• nobody had murdered an ICE agent…well, that was the first time I felt like the writing was on the wall for the siege to relent.
5/
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.it
@anildash@me.dmTomorrow marks 10 years since Prince passed. For the first time, I gathered nearly two decades of my writing, podcasts, talks & more into one curated resource, including playlists, rarities, a review of every video he ever made, and collaborations I did with his estate. I close it out with a talk I gave in Minneapolis on Prince’s birthday just after he passed – one of my most personal ever, and one I’m most proud of. I hope you’ll check it out.
@almad@fosstodon.orgI have not expected to be engulfed by writing of a Pope, but here we are.
It is the best and clearest corporate AI strategy doc I’ve seen, a compassionate declaration of a moral compass and one of the best AI critiques I’ve read. Transhumanism and cryptocurrencies included.
Also I wonder if it’s a start of a schism.
Start with chapter three if you’re impatient.
@rasos@fairmove.netI've been spending quite some time debugging fairmeeting, which seldomly forced all users to re-join a room. I found out that a plugin of prosody was writing too many messages in high volume instances. Moving those to memory fixed it. After some testing I notified the #Jitsi developer community and they integrated the fix upstream
@underdarkGIS@fosstodon.orgWriting up an overview of the whole @… ecosystem. I'm bound to forget something. but it's definitely time for an update to the old 2019 paper
@jeang3nie@social.linux.pizzaSo among the things that got seriously neglected when I started school were my blog and Gemini capsule. I've been trying to get a bit more active again with programming (hence the Sunstone project) but I also really miss writing. At least, I miss writing about what interests me, and not just writing endless essays and term papers about subject matter that only half the time really aligns with my interest.
But the blog was already kind of hard to maintain -before- I started school. …
@detondev@social.linux.pizzaone of my family's most recent church buddies is a tunisian immigrant who was converted to christianity by mormons then left when he realized they were mormons then got affiliated with some egyptian coptic church at some point so he got a greek bible verse tattooed on his neck cuz he thought it was coptic and also does cross motions one would do in a catholic church and also goes amen every time the pastor speaks in a way that suggests he mighta been in a black church at some point too and he's also implied he recently got released from prison and we don't know how much any of that shit has to do with the searching. my lil bro bonded with him over writing out arabic names and verses with church pens that broke in 2 seconds. love this guy i know the feeling bro
@relcfp@mastodon.socialWriting Travel in the Twenty-First Century: Mobility and Authenticity in a Time of Crisis
https://ift.tt/8BEDhOS
updated: Thursday, April 30, 2026 - 12:53pmfull name / name of organization: Rune Graulund /…
via Input 4 RELCFP
@thesaigoneer@social.linux.pizzaUltraGeeking:
Using Slackware Mango to ssh into a new Gentoo install (musl, openrc, rust, cosmic, zfs if it all works out this time) and writing a install manual is a very nice way to spend this Saturday morning 🤓
#slackware #gentoo
@cdarwin@c.imThe War Powers Act does not give presidents an indefinite time to continue their military ambitions.
On May 1, a 60-day deadline will be met, at which point Trump must take further action if he wants the war in Iran to continue.
Per the law, hostilities must come to a close if Congress doesn’t authorize the war.
Trump can request a 30-day extension, requiring him to certify, in writing, that the current campaign is the result of an “unavoidable military necessity.”
T…
@hex@kolektiva.social- Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government
This is explicitly defined in your legal documents. It's the way in which you "govern" things that are legally owned by the "church." If you're going to start a church with some people, you need to have a way of working together. The more formal you are about writing all this stuff out, the easier it will be when you *inevitably* have conflict. (Conflict is normal, so everyone should expect it.)
I also wrote something up about this. Again, it's an example (using the term "coven", because I like it more) so take it for what it's worth:
Group agreements are collectively defined rules that describe how members should interact. They may function to simplify interactions, ensure access needs are met, or to protect against the emergence of hierarchical behavior.
You can use the following prompts, or define your own:
- How should we interact with each other?
- What are your access needs?
- What would help you feel safe and respected?
- How should we deal with conflict?
- How do we deal with unanswerable questions?
- What is the process by which we update these agreements?
Write down these agreements. Edit them until you reach consensus. If it isn't possible to reach a consensus, the group may need to break apart to form separate covens.
Keep these available to refer to as they may be needed during services. These agreements will change over time. Keep them updated and be sure to check in regularly, perhaps even through a specific yearly ritual, to make sure they all still apply and no more are needed.
@arXiv_csOS_bot@mastoxiv.pageAgent libOS: A Library-OS-Inspired Runtime for Long-Running, Capability-Controlled LLM Agents
Yingqi Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03895 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.03895 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.03895
arXiv:2606.03895v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are evolving from request-response assistants into long-running software actors: they maintain state across model calls, fork subtasks, wait for external events, request human authority, generate tools, and perform side effects that must be resumed and audited. This paper presents Agent libOS, a library-OS-inspired runtime substrate for LLM agents. Agent libOS runs above a conventional host operating system; it does not implement hardware drivers, kernel-mode isolation, or a POSIX-compatible operating system. Instead, it treats an agent as an AgentProcess: a schedulable execution subject with process identity, parent-child lineage, lifecycle state, a tool table derived from an AgentImage, typed Object Memory, explicit capabilities, human queues, checkpoints, events, and audit records. Its central design rule is tools are libc-like wrappers; runtime primitives are the authority boundary. Filesystem access, object access, sleeps, human approval, JIT tool registration, and external side effects are checked at primitive boundaries under explicit capabilities and policy.
We describe the design, threat model, Python prototype, and safety-oriented evaluation. The current prototype implements async scheduling, namespace-local Object Memory, runtime-integrated human approval, one-shot permission grants, per-process working directories, shell and image-registration primitives, Deno/TypeScript JIT tools over a libOS syscall broker, filesystem/object bridge tools, an injectable Resource Provider Substrate, deterministic demos, real-model smoke scripts, and 123 regression tests at the time of writing. Rather than improving planner accuracy, Agent libOS demonstrates a runtime substrate in which long-running LLM agents can be scheduled, authorized, resumed, and audited without treating tool dispatch as the trust boundary.
toXiv_bot_toot
@hex@kolektiva.socialEvery now and then someone brings up #EffectiveAltruism, #TESCREAL, #RokosBasilisk, #Rationalism, or some other #Musk related nonsense. I ridicule it, or laugh, and move on. The whole evil god of Roko's Basilisk is so silly it doesn't feel worth writing about. But people started a whole cult over it and killed a bunch of people.
Since then I've been meaning to actually spend time tearing it down. So I think it's time to go kill a god. Fortunately it involves making fun of Elon Musk specifically and all the #AI-pilled #TechBros more generally, so that's nice I guess.
Also, I make the argument that we're all in a simulation that only exists to torture Elon Musk.
#NoAI #Singularity #longtermism #Yudkowsky #Zizians
@teledyn@mstdn.caThe ‘Analog Warmth’ of Vinyl Has Been Mostly Digital Since the ’80s, Says Sound Engineer | Headphonesty
I'm not giving up on a pure analog signal path, but this confirms my worst fear:
"The shift to digital processing in vinyl production began in 1979 when Ampex released their ADD-1 Digital Delay. This device, built specifically for vinyl cutting, soon became standard equipment in mastering studios across the globe."
They cite one and only one at-time-of-writing holdout; there must be more!
#theVinylFrontier #vinylrecords #analogaudio #musicianslife
https://www.headphonesty.com/2025/02/vinyl-records-gone-digital-process/
