Preston Maness ☭

Free Software fan (love #linux). Spent 20 years in Austin, TX #atx. Now in #FortWorth. BSEE from #TXST, 2014. Currently ((2^5)+(2^2)) years old (354 ppm).

I used to sling #dotnet code. Then I did warehouse work at #amazon (DAU1) and #doordash. Now, I'm back at school to become a #nurse. Suffer from #ChronicPancreatitis #pancreatitis.

I'm a revolutionary #MarxistLeninist, #diabetic, #diabetes, #MarxismLeninism, #Marxism #Communism #Socialism

#osm #wikidata

🇺🇸 Eng (native) 🇲🇽 Esp (A2/B1)

Last Notes

2026-07-17 19:04:11 CEST

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@nprofile…z6pq >Half the movie was just some rando wandering around an office space designed by a freshman architecture student on acid.
I wasn't completely sold before, but now I know that I have to see it.

2026-07-13 20:38:07 CEST

https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-end-of-algorithmic-denialism/
It seems Professor Bender, et. al.'s work has gotten under some folks' skin.
>When it comes to denying cognitive value, the authors declare these tools “inherently unreliable, being designed to make shit up”. When it comes to documenting harm, they implicitly presuppose that the models work well enough to be adopted at industrial scale, to take commissions away from professionals, to pollute the information ecosystem. The two claims require incompatible premises; the book alternates between them according to rhetorical convenience without ever acknowledging the contradiction.
Those two claims are concordant with each other. LLMs are inherently unreliable. The commissioners of its products don't care. The resulting harm is real. There is no incompatibility or contradiction here.
>If, on the other hand, we admit that at least some users are capable of distinguishing useful output from useless output, and that they do so regularly by selecting, discarding, and correcting, then the usefulness of the models is an empirical fact and the thesis that they “do not work” collapses.
The usefulness of the *models*? The *models* aren't doing the distinguishing. The *user* is. The fact that the distinguishing needs to happen is the evidence of the model's unreliability.
>Crawford, like Bender, applies to AI a moral standard that she does not apply to other technologies. Nearly all of our technologies rest on analogous systems of extraction, consumption, and pollution, often on an enormously larger scale; yet we rarely subject intercontinental flight, video streaming, or 3D rendering to the same critical rigour.
The externalities of the tools du jour matter. Intercontinental flight is routinely subjected to critique of its externalities. Video streaming and 3D rendering both require fewer computational resources (I'd wager at least an order of magnitude fewer) than the training of AI models. That every other consumer of integrated circuits is stuck waiting in line to pay more for the same product, while AI data centers hoard the very foundations of general purpose computing itself (CPUs, GPUs, memory, storage), should be sufficient externality for observers to question just how useful the AI tools actually are in comparison to the known values of existing tools and workflows.
>The conclusion of The AI Con reveals the structural limit of the entire approach. Bender and Hanna propose “strategic refusal” as a political horizon: saying no to AI, drawing inspiration from Luddite movements and feminist struggles. The invitation is suggestive, but the question left unanswered is: refusal in favour of what? If AI is a technology that, as the book itself documents, is already reshaping work, healthcare, education, and cultural production, refusal without an alternative project risks being a symbolic gesture that leaves the field open to those who govern and deploy these technologies.
In favour of what we know works: what we were all doing less than a decade ago, before hyperscalers were in search of their next big growth opportunity. That is, human beings producing works with far greater reliability than AI can. We need not indulge the ruling class when it wishes to squeeze ever more out of us.
>The position I continue to hold is that these tools have concrete potential, and that precisely for this reason the politically relevant battle concerns who controls them and how they are governed. The denialism of the early period has delayed this discussion, sustained by the illusion that we are dealing with nothing more than an ephemeral and overrated fad. It is time to abandon what Benjamin Bratton has called the first stage of grief towards AI: denial.
The financials of AI alone should caution against a belief of this being a genuinely new stage of computing that's not only here to stay but here to become the new normal. Zitron's exhaustive work on just how out-of-wack AI's finances are makes a strong case that AI is a bubble.
CC @nprofile…5876

2026-06-25 23:53:28 CEST

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@nprofile…qzwa Really? Inverters? What cybersecurity risks exist for inverters?
>The rationale: China-made inverters are deemed a cybersecurity liability, since manufacturers might be able to remotely manipulate them or even switch them off, destabilising energy grids and potentially causing blackouts.
>
>But the Commission's push to phase out so-called high-risk inverters has alarmed EU officials involved in development projects, as it remains uncertain whether European producers can meet demand.
Uh... how?
/me digs into the references
>The report [by cybersecurity firm Secura] follows a recent probe by investigative journalism platform Follow the Money that shows that a hacker could have gained control of millions of Dutch smart solar panel systems using a backdoor into their online system.
>
>https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/08/21/europes-leading-solar-power-grid-is-vulnerable-to-hackers-this-is-what-a-cyberattack-could
/me looks for the report
>This scenario is a combination of situations which have previously occurred. Vulnerabilities in interfaces of solar panel installations that were connected to the internet were exploited by the Mirai botnet and were then used for financial gain (Brumfield, 2024). In another example, a manufacturer remotely provided 800,000 micro-inverters with a new update on the same day in order to resolve certain problems (Fairley, 2015). A previous investigation by the Dutch Authority for Digital Infrastructure (RDI) (RDI, 2023) also demonstrated that if a malicious actor is able to access an inverter, they are often able to hijack it. The recent attack by anti-Israel hacktivists on PLC systems (Counter threat unit research team, 2023) is another recent example of opportunistic hacktivism, which could also impact the Netherlands even if the Netherlands were not the direct target.
>
>https://www.energy-innovation.nl/documents/1299/2024-Secura_Report-Cybersecurity_threats_and_measures_for_the_solar_power_sector.pdf
Well damn. So those things *do* have network connections. Why? Apart from the obvious "don't connect these devices to a network" approach, the report actually makes a case for requiring the firmware to be open source, which is nice I guess:
>Countermeasures would therefore need to be taken to counteract this – for example, a technically enforced four-eyes principle when issuing new firmware, not simultaneously updating all equipment but using a phased approach, or even making firmware open source so that independent parties can also investigate and contribute to it.

2026-05-15 18:41:59 CEST

"Maycember" is a strange way to say that traditionally winter ailments are becoming year-round ailments.
https://cdn.tenforward.social/media_attachments/files/116/579/580/776/694/060/original/f0cf8a69c62974cb.png

2025-12-01 00:52:28 CET

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@nprofile…dfpj @nprofile…sh0h @nprofile…k6m6 Alas, so far as I know, it's been dead for over a decade. It was popular in the early 2000s.

2025-12-01 00:51:08 CET

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@nprofile…dfpj @nprofile…sh0h @nprofile…k6m6 It feels kinda reminiscent of Wormhole (from Centerfleet/Centerscore).

2025-08-09 12:12:06 CEST

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@nprofile…495n @nprofile…g4yp Sounds like a more sustainable way of building multi-platform codebases, honestly. There are probably some trade-offs, particularly if a specific platform doesn't support something the core library needs, but otherwise, minimizing the amount of platform-specific code needed likely means more platforms supported and faster iteration.

2025-06-09 01:43:38 CEST

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@nprofile…l7mq
https://cdn.tenforward.social/media_attachments/files/114/650/388/679/249/734/original/6caf85b599bb91eb.jpg

2025-05-10 12:45:26 CEST

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@nprofile…asy0 Having flagship instances at the top of results isn't likely to help with federation 🤷

2025-03-26 09:58:17 CET

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@nprofile…asy0 It'd be a lot cooler if it actually was banned for "christian nationalism," aka white supremacy in bible drag.

2025-03-15 12:54:01 CET

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@nprofile…6naz >They drain resources from maintainers of those common repositories often without any compensation.
Projects like #wikipedia (and the broader #wikimedia ecosystem, like the Commons and #wikidata), along with #OpenStreetMap #osm, probably have to spend millions annually dealing with AI content scrapers.

2025-02-25 07:38:46 CET

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@nprofile…dyep @nprofile…4fxs Keep in mind that its implementation of Privacy Pass leaves significant room for improvement presently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43040521#43044368

2025-02-20 06:35:24 CET

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@nprofile…ug6l Me watching the empire self-destruct in real time, as NED, USAID, and even the DOD (and maybe even NATO if we're lucky) get shut down or cut, year-over-year, finally giving socialist projects across the world more room to breathe:
#socialism #communism #marxism
https://cdn.tenforward.social/media_attachments/files/114/034/579/064/298/352/original/1f539c46af76e454.png

2025-01-19 23:16:58 CET

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@nprofile…3qtz The resistance to changing to federated applications is often political rather than technical. The original organizers of a group want to remain in control of the medium, regardless of what the medium is. Which means that even if you built the alternative yourself, they won't bite, because they are no longer in control. You are. And when leaders are comfortable with the levers of control they have over one medium, they typically aren't incentivized to learn how to use alternative mediums either.
Basically, changing the medium of an organizing unit is a guaranteed struggle session. At best, you might be able to set up parallel mediums that some fraction of the org elects to use in addition to the medium under the control of the leadership.
#socialism #communism #marxism #organizing #activism #SelfHosting #BigTech #antifa #anarchism #fediverse #floss #mastodon #nextcloud

2024-12-21 13:31:42 CET

Gonna exercise my first amendment rights at some point this weekend.
#luigi #UnitedHealthcare #DenyDefendDepose
https://cdn.tenforward.social/media_attachments/files/113/690/815/353/700/916/original/078d41d13e9584b0.jpg

2024-12-21 05:14:55 CET

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@nprofile…4fxs I mean, y'all put AI bullshit right at the top of results too. Gotta go into settings in order to disable it. #kagi

2024-12-19 08:41:53 CET

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@nprofile…vrgz Tactical belt on a hanger, multiple rifles by the bedside, desk pistol. Definitely preparing for something.