mcc

glitch girl

pronouns: she/her
main project: https://mermaid.industries
on bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/dryad.technology
avatar by: Dana

Public Key

npub1tq4yr3hv50gjeq9v6fy20j8nquxg8jzehxkpwwwtanq8fncf5arsdm6nqn

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs9s2jpcmk285fvszkdyj98ereswryrepvmntqh8897esr5euy6w3cpqq8npqps

Publishing to

Author Public Key

npub1tq4yr3hv50gjeq9v6fy20j8nquxg8jzehxkpwwwtanq8fncf5arsdm6nqn

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Last Notes

2026-07-11 15:06:08 UTC

"\@instance-app.wafrn.net\@relay.fedi.buzz"
What the fuck is this and is there a reason *not* to block it
EDIT: To be clear my reason for asking this question was the "instance-app" boosted an @-reply from me to another person, which seems to me like "aggro" behavior when done by a bot

2026-06-04 00:46:27 UTC

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You could add an item on the list but None of the Above in combination with multi-vote polls gets kind of strange. You'd prefer the interface enforce NOTA not being voted for simultaneous with another option.

2026-06-04 00:34:02 UTC

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I have a Mastodon PR with a proposal for this which has gone sadly ignored

2026-06-04 00:19:27 UTC

Poll: Which of the following music media, if someone suddenly handed you a piece of music recorded on it, would you be able to play without making additional purchases?

2026-05-29 22:28:11 UTC

By weird coincidence this last week I've been thinking about implementing rsync in Rust. Don't get excited about this, if I did it it would be a weird rsync. I had a need this last week for a weird rsync

2026-05-12 21:56:09 UTC

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Since the Google announcement wording also poses this as not just the future of Chromebook but the future of Android, this raises serious questions, for me, about how much longer using Android will continue to be an option. Google's been escalating removal of Gemini opt-outs and Android is almost the only one of their products I haven't yet dropped as a result. (This is, of course, happening at the same time governments worldwide are making citizenship contingent on owning an Android or iPhone.)

2026-05-12 21:52:37 UTC

Looks like Chromebook is being replaced with something called "Googlebook" and it is full-scale Microsoft-style Surveillance PC. Apparently anytime you "wiggle your cursor" anything that is underneath the cursor gets fed into Google's surveillance AI https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android/meet-googlebook/
One of these things that makes me consider detecting the platform from my webserver and blocking it entirely because the probability of whatever I wrote becoming an LLM input is too high

2026-05-06 22:21:43 UTC

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yeah, but what *i'm* concerned about is "AI code assistant" use in systemd, and my understanding is dropping systemd won't help there (because the Linux kernel is also infected)

2026-04-23 19:47:44 UTC

New Mastodon update… I notice they're finally implementing some of those new features from Bluesky
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/455/745/023/545/926/original/127a358dcbdaac8a.png

2026-04-22 22:59:45 UTC

- Using Windows
- Need to turn off external hard drive
- "The device is currently in use. Close any programs or windows that might be using the device, and then try again."
- Run the spy program that tells me what processes are making use of the drive
- It's "System" and "svchost.exe"
- …

2026-04-20 22:03:00 UTC

A thing I believe about online communities is when someone writes a big announcement saying they're quitting a site, that says they're *definitely* going to be back, because they're saying they care about the community enough they want it to know where they went and why. The ones you have to worry you've lost are the ones who just sorta quietly disappear one day

2026-04-17 23:31:52 UTC

A thing I can't talk about on social media is happening at that place I can't talk about on social media

2026-04-17 17:24:28 UTC

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By contrast, Bluesky optimized for the "build a big index" case, which means they optimized for the "everything ever said goes in the LLM trainer"/"everything ever said goes in a big FBI database of potential terrorist speech" case. The whole thing is *designed* around funneling everything to a firehose, and tapping the firehose for malicious purpose looks just like normal use. And you cannot, by design, hide *anything* from the firehose. Rudy/Blacksky did it…by breaking ATProto

2026-04-17 17:22:31 UTC

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You could build such an index. You can't get everything. You get sent only posts from accounts you "follow". You can follow a lot of accounts, but people can detect you're doing this and ban/block you. You can scrape instance feeds, but these don't always exist and don't contain everything. You can't easily get followers only posts. You can't get mentions-only posts at all. You can't even easily make a map of all instances on the fediverse. Scraping the fediverse is all friction

2026-04-17 02:41:43 UTC

I need you to know that twelve hours ago Boards of Canada posted to their YouTube channel an unexplained video titled "Tape 05" containing three and a half minutes of previously unheard music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bghDcbzfEU

2026-04-16 21:08:01 UTC

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Having big indices of the whole network is nice. Having big indices of the whole network is harmful. I kinda liked the Mastodon compromise better. There are things I simply don't say on bluesky because I can't say them without them going in a big index and a lot of LLM training sets.

2026-04-16 20:56:20 UTC

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okay well, i want to have a system where i can escape from the clutches of big player A without needing big player B to need to help me.
why should i trust big player B more than big player A, after all? they're big, so probably eventually they'll act the same way.

2026-04-16 20:27:47 UTC

RE: https://c.im/@blueorangeblue/116416264014964812
In the primitive hobbitsian state, there is no government or source of moral authority, and persons revert to a primitive state of taking long lunches and lots of naps
#note1mh4…wumt

2026-04-16 19:16:14 UTC

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(And *how* does ActivityPub avert these problems? Well, ActivityPub has the "instance" abstraction. The federate-or-defederate relationships serve as a basic web of trust so some work, like moderation, doesn't have to be fully duplicated. Data is shared between instances only when a follow-relationship requires it, reducing work. Instances can still get too big and maintainers overworked, but you can fix that problem with more, smaller instances. As above, *there ARE no small Bluesky instances*)

2026-04-16 19:13:08 UTC

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TLDR
1. My definition of "P2P" or "Federated" is that if server A goes down, servers B and C can still talk to each other.
2. Bluesky/"Atmosphere" fails at this because Blacksky (B) utilizes Bluesky (A) to talk to me (C).
3. In order for Blacksky to avert this, they have to do something unreasonable and expensive.
4. Blacksky someday *will* do this, but will depend heavily on massively overworking Rudy and a few other people. This may someday fail.
5. ActivityPub has problems, but not these

2026-04-16 19:12:43 UTC

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This is why I believe Bluesky was never meant to be federated. To create a Bluesky "instance", like Blacksky is heroically attempting, you have to perfectly duplicate every server Bluesky runs. But Bluesky is a business operating at a loss by burning unlimited-for-now VC cash. That has always implied only a business with unlimited VC cash can create an instance. Blacksky is succeeding. Except on days where they aren't.

2026-04-16 19:01:09 UTC

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Because this is the other "we used future alien technology to make it worse" thing about Bluesky.
In the "natural", Hobbesian form of P2P, the more nodes you add the less work per node you need to do, because of work sharing.
But Bluesky's "federation" is like blockchain. When you create a second "instance", that instance must duplicate *literally all the work* of the first instance. It must scrape all the posts itself. It must archive all the posts itself. It must CSAM-scan the posts itself.

2026-04-16 18:56:59 UTC

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And it's extremely relatable why Rudy took this shortcut of "build out our own stuff, but rely on Bluesky's components until we're forced to drop it": *Because standing up your own Bluesky stack is nightmarish!* It is a borderline miracle that a team his size made this work at all; I'm not sure a third team could replicate to the extent Blacksky has (and even on non-outage days, there are still large technical problems with Blacksky which cannot conveniently be fit in this thread).

2026-04-16 18:53:42 UTC

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Now, interestingly, this means that Blacksky users can continue talking to Blacksky users. I can read Rudy's posts on Blacksky. Because that bypasses the relay. But¹ to read my *own* posts, *on a self-hosted PDS*, Bluesky is apparently required, because Blacksky relies on Bluesky's "relay" to scrape my PDS before it gets added to the Blacksky appview database.
¹ (if I'm interpreting Rudy's posts correctly, hardly a guarantee)

2026-04-16 18:50:02 UTC

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This appears to be the explanation:
https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3mjmztqnuwc2g
In Bluesky, the PDS talks to the relay talks to the appview goes to the client. Blacksky set up all four last year. But they only deployed their PDS and client, at first. They used Bluesky's relay and appview. This wasn't clearly disclosed. Then there was a censorship scare, and they switched to their own appview. But apparently they're still using Bluesky's relay. This wasn't clearly disclosed. Now relay death can screw Blacksky.

2026-04-16 18:45:46 UTC

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P2P is a world where naturally the more people use it, the faster and more resilient the network becomes. Load gets distributed. Working nodes talk to each other and ignore nonworking nodes. That's how the primitive, BitTorrent era systems worked.
Bluesky somehow applied superfancy alien future technology to invent P2P traffic jams. When one node goes down, the others go down because they depended on it. Because it's a mesh of interoperating microservices by different providers, not federation.

2026-04-16 18:40:28 UTC

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There's a bit in Terry Jones' "Starship Titanic" where an alien gets caught in a traffic jam on Earth, and explodes "your transportation system is so poorly designed! when more people use it, it goes *slower*! you should design it so it goes *faster*— to accommodate the extra load!".
It's funny because the former seems like the obvious, natural way transportation works, and the latter seems to require magic alien future technology.

2026-04-16 18:34:30 UTC

Bluesky is down today. "Hah", I think, "since I use a self-hosted PDS for posting and Blacksky for viewing posts, I can go on using the service just fine".
Blacksky can't show me my own posts. I can make them and they show up on my PDS, but my profile shows none more recent than last night.
I wonder if Blacksky is coincidentally having server problems, or if Blacksky has a still-undisclosed dependency on Bluesky services. (It *does* have disclosed use of Bluesky moderation; maybe that's it.)

2026-04-16 00:37:10 UTC

An orgy, but it strictly follows Robert's Rules of Order

2026-04-14 20:30:44 UTC

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So I've always wondered if the name of "lithium" implies it has some kind of historical connection to "lithuania". But I looked it up and it doesn't. The two aren't even etymologically related. "Lithuania" comes from Latin "litus" for "shore" (think "littoral") and "Lithium" comes from greek "lithion" for "stone" (think "monolith").
I hope this post helps you but strongly suspect it will not

2026-04-14 20:29:18 UTC

Okay I'm going to make a really really boring post

2026-04-14 17:27:06 UTC

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This (type `for(;;);` into the Javascript console, triggering Firefox's "script in infinite loop" detection, causing it to offer to halt all Javascript on the page) worked perfectly
and I fucking hate that it not only works but appears to be the best way to do this
https://gts.woodland.cafe/@untitaker/statuses/01KP6GBF6W0YGKZAB7400C49NA

2026-04-14 17:20:40 UTC

Is there a way in Firefox to halt javascript execution on a page that has already loaded? What a web search suggests is pausing the debugger, but in current Firefox this grays out the entire page, disables things like scrolling, and overlays the page with a "DEBUGGER PAUSED" box. I want to continue reading the page I just want to stop Javascript.
The debugger has a "disable Javascript", as does uBlock, but both of these appear to entail reloading the page, which may stop it from loading at all.

2026-04-12 02:17:46 UTC

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🤔
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/389/328/210/710/013/original/35a278ac649421df.png

2026-04-12 01:33:00 UTC

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It does, yeah. What I mean is the difficulty-adjustment mechanism is supposed to be a check whereby the Bitcoin mechanism can correct for things like a sudden increase in the cost of energy. (But of course the fact it's *intended* to have this effect does not mean it *will* have the effect.)

2026-04-12 00:51:43 UTC

Filling out a form and it is asking me if I am deceased

2026-04-11 22:34:32 UTC

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Out of curiosity, is this still the case? This article is about three weeks old… doesn't the Bitcoin hash difficulty adjust itself every two weeks? My understanding is the hash difficulty mechanism is *supposed* to serve as a check on mining going cash negative, so it's interesting if the mechanism fails. (Also, the BTC price itself has gone up a chunk since Mar 22.)

2026-04-11 00:08:04 UTC

NASA has just successfully landed a manned craft on the planet Earth

2026-04-10 20:55:01 UTC

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Had to stop using the Lady Bathory Body Wash

2026-04-10 20:47:54 UTC

Shampoo company bragging their product is "gluten-free and vegan"

2026-04-10 20:00:50 UTC

Convince me it is more in my interests to help build the future than to try to prevent it

2026-04-08 16:35:33 UTC

If you are in Massachusetts please call your House representative to oppose this. The Senate ban on cell phone use in schools (not happy about that myself) has grown a monstrous ban on social media use for kids under 14, "among the most restrictive in the entire country" according to its own Democratic advocates, featuring age verification for adults and a requirement platforms "give parents access to data submitted by minors" (in other words, out every queer kid).
https://www.wcvb.com/article/mass-house-social-media-ban-children-under-14/70941188

2026-04-06 17:50:49 UTC

Encountered a person on Mastodon who said Mastodon should be inclusive of "AI" users. So I blocked him

2026-04-05 00:28:10 UTC

Is it possible that Microsoft Windows is not a very good computer program

2026-04-04 04:28:40 UTC

Today I saw a picture of a cat on the Internet

2026-03-31 21:05:45 UTC

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Okay admittedly I only ate two scones but they were large. Scones

2026-03-31 20:49:32 UTC

I ate all these scones

2026-03-31 03:01:17 UTC

Email subjects that will get me to unsubscribe from your list instantly
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/321/552/998/434/444/original/15e0ebd7556c8cff.png

2026-03-30 00:08:16 UTC

*Company makes my life worse through their product*
I will boycott this product
*Company continues making my life worse, now through externalities*
How do I boycott an externality

2026-03-29 19:58:38 UTC

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When I think about "AI" I often think about how we had cities built to be navigated by people, and then we rebuilt the cities to be more easily navigated by cars, and now people without cars can't navigate the cities because we specifically designed them to require cars

2026-03-25 03:02:09 UTC

So there's this guy who made a tool where someone punches in their bluesky or mastodon credentials to his website, and it auto-crawls their feeds and produces an LLM summary of everyone it finds posting there. He was asked what people should do if we don't want to be mulched as content for his summary feeds. He said we should block him. I replied, I can do that, but that only stops *you* from running the tool on me, how do I prevent *your other users* from running your tool on me? He blocked me.

2026-03-23 20:48:48 UTC

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okay so confession I'm only blocking about 800 people and the remainder are the "jesse singal followers blocklist", which I would highly recommend for anyone considering using bluesky as it is a *very* strong antiquality signal

2026-03-23 20:36:21 UTC

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Hm. I'm blocking 11,142 people, so maybe that has something to do with it. Have you considered blocking 11,142 people?

2026-03-23 20:32:25 UTC

My desire to use Mastodon is basically at zero now because post-"Claude", hanging out here means inevitably I'm going to have a conversation with someone who tolerates, or even uses, "generative AI". And what's the point of being in a community where that's a risk. Interestingly* there is absolutely no chance of this on Bluesky, because there are artists there
* And oddly, given how "AI"-brained the *admins* there are

2026-03-15 21:22:52 UTC

If the computer is a prosthetic (and it is) then this means we legitimately have to be careful about what software we run, because we are deciding what to make part of our selves, part of our minds

2026-03-13 00:38:27 UTC

You know you're at a good barbeque place if there's one of these at the table
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/219/070/379/141/730/original/a83cd4d2c7f379a1.jpg

2026-03-12 19:42:16 UTC

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Me: I want to go to CHICAGO and see BEAN
Houston: Come to Houston we have BUDGET BEAN
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/217/906/386/540/934/original/7d94584eeff018f6.jpg

2026-03-12 19:03:13 UTC

Tomashi Jackson exhibition at Houston CAMH is incredible. Definitely a better experience than Toronto CAMH
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/217/752/695/065/530/original/3605d2d7472b8be0.jpg

2026-03-12 16:40:31 UTC

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The repeated lesson here is that a company, organization, computer program, or person who uses the privacy, environmental, and trust disaster sold as "generative AI" for one thing, can no longer be trusted for any thing. If it is tolerated for one thing, it will eventually be used for all things. If a program adds an optional "AI"-branded feature you *have* to stop using that program completely, because if (when) the company feels the use metrics are too low they will stop making it optional.

2026-03-12 16:35:52 UTC

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Now one *assumes* these buttons don't activate unless pressed, but there's a problem. First, the checkbox to disable "Gemini" in Messages itself only turned off an activate-on-select button. Second, on a phone— where "scroll" and "tap" are both taps— accidental activation of buttons is a part of life.
This happens to me again and again, with Google, with Copilot in VS Code, with everything. A company adds an "AI"-branded feature with an off switch, you turn it off, they later enable it anyway.

2026-03-12 16:33:29 UTC

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Related, consider the Android "Messages" app. This has checkbox settings for "Smart Reply"; two additional checkboxes for "suggestions" of stickers and "actions"; and a fourth checkbox, "Gemini in Messages", for explicitly turning off Gemini. I have turned off all of these. Despite this, this week I discovered that if I long-press or open ANY image in Messages, there are two buttons, "Remix" and "Create", which Google's documentation explicitly says network-sends the image to, quote, "Gemini".
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/217/148/312/655/463/original/b9022ec5b13226f7.png

2026-03-12 16:28:41 UTC

Google Mail / "GMail" has no fewer than nine settings for "Smart Features and Personalization", e.g., Gemini. I have these all turned off in order to prevent Gemini ingesting my emails. To do this, you now have to opt out of benign machine-learning or even pattern-matching-based features, like sorting promotional emails from regular ones or spellcheck.
Despite this, as of today, Google is offering a Gemini smart compose feature on all my emails, despite me having turned off smart compose.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/217/131/956/571/810/original/cadcdcb54eb774f8.png

2026-03-11 04:54:47 UTC

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I have a Steam Deck for games. But I still need to be able to run OBS on the laptop, what if I run the Steam Deck into it

2026-03-11 04:54:04 UTC

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I need vulkan, webgpu, sdl_gpu and complex audio routing. If I can't run flatpaks I'm going to have really big problems. I have a webcam, I have a video capture card, I stream using OBS, I expect my AMD video compression acceleration to work. I expect to use my computer as a computer. I *am* looking at btrfs for my backup drive :(

2026-03-11 03:28:00 UTC

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Thanks for this information. I cannot describe the extent of my sadness at the idea of having to use BSD, but thank you for this information.

2026-03-11 03:25:15 UTC

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thank you for the information; i will be removing linux from my computer at the earliest opportunity

2026-03-11 03:23:34 UTC

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I thought this was only for documentation, for now?
To be clear, it is my intent to eventually move entirely to software which is either no-AI by license or forked from pre-AI code. If it means I have to throw away Linux I throw away Linux. Linux is an inferior product I am *only* using because Windows added AI. Why the fuck am I using Linux if it's also AI?

2026-03-11 03:02:05 UTC

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If it were my project i would ban the contributor. One line or not they are not following the DCO as written which this project requires. So either the DCO is violated, the DCO has a "you can do anything as long as it's through a hole in a sheet" exception for AI, or the DCO is not enforced at all, or most likely this crept up on OpenZFS and they have never thought about this and did not notice the claude line.

2026-03-11 02:54:08 UTC

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So
1. It's installed on at least one dev's computer
2. The presence of a header-disclosed commit could imply non-disclosed commits possibly from the same developer
3. The project is not filtering for such code even when it's disclosed

2026-03-11 02:53:55 UTC

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Ah.
I deleted because if there was any chance of error, I didn't want to leave it up, but a PR'd one line change is still enough for me to complain.
The thing is, my understanding is you have to use the tool in a particular way for it to actually create the committed-with header. For more complex uses I believe the header does not show up.

2026-03-10 23:29:10 UTC

This has happened to me at least 3 times with Google.
- They offer a free service.
- I sign up for the free service.
- A couple years later, they say to continue with the free service you must now do something I don't want to, like pay monthly or agree to put my home address publicly on the Android store.
- I decline, and my account on the service is deleted.
- For literally the next 15 years, I periodically get inscrutable emails about service changes or minor pricing changes in Bhutan
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/207/468/917/659/735/original/89d35a68e9a42edc.png

2026-03-10 16:40:11 UTC

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amazon just formalized this. my criticism. "they tweeted it out". if what the junior vibecoder does is review the generated code, but amazon must mandated the senior engineer does the actual review, then why do you have junior engineers at all? the senior engineer in this case now does the junior engineer's entire job as amazon defines it.

2026-03-10 16:39:07 UTC

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"without senior engineer review"
okay so this hits on an issue i've been thinking a *lot* about
i won't use LLM code generators. i believe i can find a job where i don't have to use LLM code generators. but i would probably still be forced to *work with people who do*. and if someone on your team vibecodes, you vibecode. the work of a vibecoder is code-review and checking. but everyone checks everyone's code. so they're pushing their work onto me. i'm vibecoding for them.

2026-03-09 05:03:54 UTC

*posting quietly as the clock hits midnight* its my birthday

2026-03-07 20:22:51 UTC

The motto of the modern tech industry is "You can just do things to people"

2026-03-06 17:07:24 UTC

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Consider:
- Sokol, early 20th century, Czechia
- Falun Gong, late 20th century, China
Both organizations that are fundamentally about outdoor calisthenics, their activities expanded and/or the government viewed their sheer size as a threat, and the Nazis/Communist Party of Czechoslovakia/Chinese Communist Party oppresses them.
How this fits into the Boxer Rebellion, where boxing self-improvement clubs *did* try to overthrow the government, you'd have to uncover through research.

2026-03-06 17:04:27 UTC

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If you'd like a video I can endorse, here's a good Tim Traveler video about the largest stadium in the world (now abandoned). Things of interest here:
1. I am entirely captivated by the abandoned piano at 2:35, evolved into a sort of permanent planter like the art car that lives in Toronto's Kensington Market
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF0rGhFf0c4&t=145s
2. The British pronunciation of "Funicular"
3. I am now very curious to see someone do a history of athletic self-improvement orgs being oppressed by governments

2026-03-06 17:01:58 UTC

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For the record, if this wasn't clear: If I ever post a YouTube thumbnail without a link, it's because I only post links when I have actually watched the video and I know it's worth recommending. Like what if it's terrible or poorly researched or racist and I've just linked it to you, like a fool, because of the funny thumbnail. I don't want to post a link unless I can endorse the video.

2026-03-06 16:58:53 UTC

When the youtube video has an intentionally funny thumbnail but you're pretty sure you know what the video's about and they're actually just very straightforwardly describing what happened
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/183/284/217/317/899/original/0a0c58d4ad3fccab.png

2026-03-06 01:04:21 UTC

Welcome to Canada. Okay so what you need to understand is that if you see a link to "the Walrus" that's a real news article but if you see a link to "the Beaver" that's a fake news article

2026-03-05 18:47:38 UTC

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meanwhile people I talk to are like "wait why do you want guarantees your open source supply chain doesn't have LLM-sourced code in it. it has literally never occurred to me that this would be a thing someone would desire"

2026-03-05 03:06:05 UTC

RE: https://lgbtqia.space/@alice/116174173831789756
There are many types of security one might consider: Physical security, information security, operational security. But regardless of what you're doing or protecting against, there's a cross-cutting rule which applies to all such disciplines:
WATCH OUT FOR THE PERSON IN THE BEAR KIGURUMI
#note1xtj…lk6g

2026-03-03 03:57:05 UTC

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Cannot *believe* the shit y'all put up with to use software. I spend half my time trying *not* to use software, and y'all want to use software so bad you'll agree to "binding arbitration" for it

2026-03-03 03:56:16 UTC

Re: https://social.nouveau.community/@andnull/116161245796027671
Well that's a good thing because: https://bsky.app/profile/notnite.com/post/3mg4jiuv7meow

2026-03-02 14:11:56 UTC

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I think the basic casios are great! A lot of them look unobtrusive and they're so cheap you can get a couple $30 ones and swap them out.

2026-03-02 05:01:30 UTC

Started trying to figure out if I could get a watch that is also a compass. Started looking on different shopping sites and did find a lot of options but I noticed a weird pattern, is that they were all explicitly branded as MANLY RUGGED OUTDOOR MILITARY WATCH FOR MEN. Additionally they *tended* to follow designs which are bulky and greebly to no obvious end other than to "look rugged". Are there not women who live in cities and sometimes get confused about which way is north

2026-03-01 19:45:17 UTC

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Even without the "Clyde" problem it's hard to talk about because there's a historical notion of a probabilistic algorithm where you have stochastic behavior operating with proven bounds and a provable distribution of behaviors, and the new type of statistics-based software where the software just sort of does whatever and we don't even discuss it as if it were statistics-based we call it "intelligence"

2026-03-01 19:42:29 UTC

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I do think there is an interesting perspective where computer software based on deterministic execution of instructions *can* be aligned with the goals of a user but computer software based on a trained statistical model cannot, technically, be aligned with anything at all as there is inherently random behavior. But we can't conceptualize that problem because the capital class is lying and saying that their computer has a soul because they named it "Cylde" and drew googly eyes on it

2026-02-23 19:02:42 UTC

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When I say "fork every software project containing code by by 'AI code assistants', starting at the commit before the slop is known or believed to have been added, and resume from there", I really do mean every project
https://donotsta.re/objects/8e2166c6-3e0f-4ea3-8a29-3008702a39f7

2026-02-22 22:17:03 UTC

Everybody seems to like "the bear" and "the pit"

2026-02-22 17:26:56 UTC

By the way, if you go to https://github.com/claude and "block this user", every Github repo you visit containing code credited to Claude will actually have a warning sigil
CF
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/115/451/116/370/911/original/ad8056ce2afbfc7c.png

2026-02-21 22:33:26 UTC

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RE: https://wellduck.me/@greyduck/116110983001607000
I would like the answer to this question as well.
#note1sxl…kvvp

2026-02-21 22:12:08 UTC

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My understanding is that Bitwarden and KeePassXC, the two open source password managers, are *both* using random code generators at this point, which is terrifying as those are the exact tools where a small error could have the largest negative impact, and also tools that once you've committed to using it you can't quickly back out if they enter a code quality decline
https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/tree/main/.claude

2026-02-21 22:07:44 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.scot/@kim_harding/116108957641748718
I want this but as a Linux distribution. I don't think I'm asking for much here. I am just asking for the "open source community" to be to the left of Goldman Sachs
#note1usz…aug6

2026-02-20 21:36:07 UTC

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Based on this visualizer I issue you a challenge.
Bluesky's post limits work like this: You can fit 3000 bytes OR 300 graphemes, whichever is less. I thought at first that hitting the byte limit would be nigh impossible, but it turns out to be pretty easy with emoji: 🤷🏾‍♀️ is 1 grapheme but 17! bytes, thanks to stringing an emoji, a skintone, a gender, and two ZWJs.
My challenge: Can you hit the 3000 byte limit, without hitting the 300 grapheme limit, using only *natural human text*, any language?

2026-02-20 21:29:12 UTC

Got nerdsniped by a request from [@thisismissem.social](https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/thisismissem.social ) and made a little visualizer tool demonstrating the various ways you can represent "how long is this string?" in Unicode:
https://data.runhello.com/bs-limits/
- Bytes (in the standard UTF-8 recording)
- UTF-16 (irrelevant except in JS, where it's relevant)
- Codepoints (unicode characters)
- Grapheme clusters (the visual "characters" you see on screen)
And how the divergence of the two relates to Bluesky's "unusual" post limit rules.

2026-02-20 18:19:21 UTC

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This turns out to be a very good video. The YouTuber does not assume you have chess theory knowledge going in. I did not laugh out loud until around 8:30 but I did laugh out loud https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQ9gGwpDGA

2026-02-20 17:47:13 UTC

YouTube thumbnails I am cracking up at today
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/104/205/280/482/709/original/d3ac0b833f8921ee.png

2026-02-20 16:12:42 UTC

This is a very funny page https://unicode-explorer.com/list/large

2026-02-17 19:08:34 UTC

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AI will allow us to reach such high "velocity" that one single engineer can write as many bugs as previously took the entire industry working together