Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

CS Researchers: Here're some programming languages mathematically proven to make the computer do exactly what you say.

Programmers: «create vast complexity that no one person could comprehend in order to render a web page»

Also Programmers: What if we made the programming language English, required that the compiler run on a monstrously huge array of GPUs, and set it up so it only did what we ask sometimes, and other times just do nonsense, but we don't know which is which?

Hacker News: Neat!

When I talk about digital privacy, there is always some smug genius who shrugs and tells me, "Who cares? We all know we don't have any privacy anyway." Nothing could be more wrong. Convincing you that the fight is already over to the way people in power get you to stop resisting.

Slack is now using all content, including DMs, to train LLMs.

They offer a thing they're calling an "opt-out."

The opt-out (a) is only available to companies who are slack customers, not end users, and (b) doesn't actually opt-out.

When a company account holder tries to opt-out, Slack says their data will still be used to train LLMs, but the results won't be shared with other companies.

LOL no. That's not an opt-out. The way to opt-out is to stop using Slack.

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-principles

Mozilla has released Thunderbird 127. I hope there will be a build 127.0.0.1 and then we’ll see how many scripts break

carpenter who's so fed up with the constantly changing wood specifications, and the way the 1 year old wood saw is not compatible with the latest wood version, and the people who were gifted a small table for no reason suddenly showing up with a huge questionnaire and wanting the table to be certified for potentially safety-critical industrial use free of charge just because, the carpenter just leaves all of that behind and starts a new career with computers.

I so often see people argue about JavaScript frameworks being easier to learn than HTML/CSS, whilst showing they've never bothered to actually learn HTML/CSS!

I think they're making things harder on themselves, not easier.

What’ll really bake your noodle is when you realise how much DARVO is not just weaponised by angry men, but it’s been built into the structure of society.

It’s not that corporations spent decades colluding to bury the evidence of climate change, it’s that you don’t recycle enough.

It’s not that companies have repeatedly cut corners & staff to increase profits, and C-suite salaries, it’s that you don’t work hard enough to justify a salary increase.

It’s not that governments have collectively and consistently preferenced the wealthy landlord “investor” class in their policies, and made housing precarious and unaffordable, it’s that you ate too much avocado toast.

It’s not that the economy is structured around having a permanently unemployed pool of people, it’s that people are lazy and just don’t want to work.

I swear, people have these super computers in their pockets and home, and use them as dumb terminals to just rent other people’s computers and then are shocked when the person that owns the computer takes their stuff, or decides to shake them down for more money.

Fuck the cloud. Fuck streaming. Fuck subscriptions.

Got very excited by @matt demo of AccessKit integration in #GTK

AccessKit is a cross-platform abstraction for accessibility infrastructure written in Rust.

His work will bring a11y support for GTK on macOS and Windows as well as for the new accessibility architecture on Linux code-named "Newton".

https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-architecture-for-modern-free-desktops/

#GNOME #rustlang #accessibility #a11y #Linux #Windows #macOS

THIS IS INCREDIBLE 😃

"an mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida successfully reprogrammed patients’ immune systems to fiercely attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor" through "...use of a patient’s own tumor cells to create a personalized vaccine...."

FUCK CANCER. And let's see anti-vaxxers reject *this* one.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/cancer-vaccine-triggers-fierce-immune-response-to-fight-malignant-brain-tumors/

people always tell me "mathematical notation is just like jargon, its just more efficient." no, mathematical notation is not like jargon

1. jargon are words. anyone can put a word into a search engine and find a glossary of terms explaining what that jargon word means in some context. you can't do that with math notation unless you already know math notation

2. jargon is almost never overloaded like mathematical notation is. the same letter or piece of punctuation can mean wildly different things in any given context and can even vary based on the *font the symbol is displayed in* inside one context

imagine if someone in software engineering used the symbol ⍼ instead of "garbage collector", except it only maps to "garbage collector" if it's written in sans serif. if it's written with serif, it means "compute shader" instead. but if its in comic sans it means "SIMD divide"

and also 98% of the time they used the ⍼ symbol it was inserted as a picture, not a copy/pastable unicode glyph. *that's* math notation

Random key generator

Universal basic income mitigates tunneling, meaning that people are more able to think beyond just one focus. The need to earn survival income tends to function like blinders that block out everything else but your focus on basic needs. Until they're obtained, we can't think beyond.

Today we are releasing an exciting enhancement for Distributed Press: the Social Reader - a new way to read posts on the Fediverse.

The Social Reader is a privacy-first personal reader for subscribing to content published on federated social media.

The Social Reader is ideal whether it's your first step into the Fediverse, and you want to browse without creating an account, or you just prefer to use tools that are private-by-design.

Skip the need to manage a digital persona with this free, no sign-up tool: just follow and access all the beautiful content you want.

Local-first

Works offline

No account

🎉

This tool also works without internet connectivity: you'll have your own database locally, so you don't need to go online to read posts.

In addition, it has native support for subscribing via peer-to-peer feeds if you use Agregore, Galacteek or any other p2p browser. This makes use of the peer-to-peer published versions of people's sites, fostering the ecosystem to gradually adopt decentralized publishing flows. Consequently, streams are more resistant to outages or attacks, given that their data is distributed across multiple nodes. 💪

🎉

Try it out here: reader.distributed.press

Watch a brief demo 👀

Curious about operational details? Check out our documentation

Disclaimer: it is important to note that Distributed Press does not host any of the content accessed through Social Reader. Therefore, Distributed Press bears no legal responsibility for the appropriateness, accuracy, or legality of the content accessed or distributed through the use of this tool.