@cdarwin@c.imSome US politicians have reacted with alarm and questioned the US president’s mental state
after Donald Trump issued an abusive, expletive-laden threat to Iran in which he called on the regime to
“open the fuckin’ strait [of Hormuz], you crazy bastards”,
as he threatened to further attack the country’s energy and transport infrastructure
It comes as the Trump administration hurtles towards another self-imposed deadline
– this time, Monday
– for Iran to r…
@grumpybozo@toad.socialThis is the story of my whole life. Aside from my wives and kids of course.
And in writing this I came to realize that other than a scattering of travel alone (work, dead relatives, eclipse chase) I have not done the “in public alone, not lonely” thing very much for a long time. Odd that it seems so familiar still. Now I really miss it…
ht…
@cellfourteen@social.petertoushkov.eu"writing custom code for each [browser] was hellish work before. now u can force your AI slaves to do it"
Reading sarcastic comments of professionals in trades I barely understand are my favourite comedy time of the day 😁 ->
He just crawled through hell to fix the browser… | Fireship
https://www.youtube.com/w…
@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.
@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.
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.it
@danyork@mastodon.socialAVFTCN 040 – Returning From A Hiatus, and Plans for 2026
I'm back. After a self-imposed hiatus for most of 2025, I'm returning to something I've been deeply missing... writing and speaking. If you've been following me for any length of time, you know that not writing or speaking is, for me, a kind of pressure that builds and builds until I am ready to explode. 🤯 So what happened? The short version: my role at the…
@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
@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
@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.
@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.
@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. …
@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
@brian_gettler@mas.toAs a first-year undergrad, I took intro to film. We had to write about a movie of our choice. For whatever reason, I chose "Mr. Mom." My memory of it, which I'd seen as a kid when it came out, was of playful subversion of gender conventions. Holy shit was I wrong. So I wrote a paper about sexism, with some xenophobia I'd totally missed the first time thrown in too. It probably wasn't a good paper, but writing it really helped flush my system of a certain kind of pernici…
@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…
@aral@mastodon.ar.alMe: Let’s see how the FairPhone folks are doing… maybe I was overly harsh on them and they’ve used the time to wean themselves off of Google… what with being Waag and all…
Also me: fucking what the fuck now?
*sigh* 🤬
@barijaona@mastodon.mgGreat piece of writing : “Let’s talk about LLMs” https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/apr/09/llms/
It reminds me of a time when software development meant that some people had the role of “analyst” and others the role of “programmer”. The expected increase in the volume of generated…
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io“How may the compulsive programmer be distinguished from a merely dedicated, hard-working professional programmer? First, by the fact that the ordinary professional programmer addresses himself to the problem to be solved, whereas the compulsive programmer sees the problem mainly as an opportunity to interact with the computer. The ordinary computer programmer will usually discuss both his substantive and his technical programming problem with others. He will generally do lengthy preparatory work, such as writing and flow diagramming, before beginning work with the computer itself. His sessions with the computer may be comparatively short. He may even let others do the actual console work. He develops his program slowly and systematically. When something doesn't work, he may spend considerable time away from the computer, framing careful hypotheses to account for the malfunction and designing crucial experiments to test them. Again, he may leave the actual running of the computer to others. He is able, while waiting for results from the computer, to attend to other aspects of his work, such as documenting what he has already done. When he has finally composed the program he set out to produce, he is able to complete a sensible description of it and to turn his attention to other things. The professional regards programming as a means toward an end, not as an end in itself. His satisfaction comes from having solved a substantive problem, not from having bent a computer to his will.”
—Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 1976
@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?
@ErikJonker@mastodon.social
@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/
@cellfourteen@social.petertoushkov.euAmazing Stories vol. 24, no. 10 (October 1950), by ed. Howard Browne
Entire issue from here: https://zirk.us/@SFFMagazineCovers/116196673150408723
@hex@kolektiva.socialThis remains much harder to talk about, family violence I hadn't really had in my mind for a long time. I had several entries from most days, writing after each treatment, fragments of thoughts that I may expand on later.
CW for the lined text: abuse dynamics, gun violence, #PTSD/#CPTSD stuff
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/decisions-ptss-5-day-1-entry-2
@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
