JP

https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton

videogames nincompoop

website: https://jplebreton.com
pronouns: he/him

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jplebreton_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

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nprofile1qqsxrhkn5esrj9y3g4zl8fcfm0af7uwmy7q9fgyckxnumdt4r702egcprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmnttpkwl4

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Last Notes

2026-04-28 00:07:40 UTC

the jacobin piece is embarrassing. saved you a click.

2026-04-22 03:24:01 UTC

for those curious what stage we're at: "great news folks! dead internet theory is happening! be the first to optimize for it!"
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/446/209/589/940/231/original/b56a17720383ca41.png

2026-04-21 06:15:24 UTC

"My (3552M) ghola (1M) is plotting with my distant descendant (19F) to assassinate me and I can feel the Golden Path winking in and out of existence,"

2026-04-19 05:51:31 UTC

you should absolutely block any zionist you run across on fedi including the zionist instance, babka dot social. they support genocide and should feel unwelcome everywhere they go.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/429/797/785/884/865/original/9e0fa93a454c826c.png

2026-04-16 14:34:53 UTC

"So I told Mozilla it sounds like you're just feeding your users to the for-profit proprietary LLM companies and then his mascot Kit started crying"
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/414/877/792/406/302/original/e82668f33a6508f6.jpg

2026-04-12 03:19:30 UTC

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https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/389/571/531/756/744/original/ef35e47beccc6eae.jpg

2026-04-11 19:55:46 UTC

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altman is now using the failed attack on his home to muster pity and alternately distract from / blame the recent ronan farrow investigative piece where 100+ people corroborated that he's been a totally amoral pathological liar his entire career.

2026-04-11 14:50:35 UTC

"class traitor technologies" is a useful concept to install into your worldview: anything that invites you to think of yourself as a little dauphin, a temporary aristocrat reclining on a chaise of screaming human bones, languorous finger directing some new marvel of labor, anything that discourages you from thinking of that labor as the product of other humans' hands and minds, product of a real place with soil and air and human community. technology to invisibilize & obliterate all that.

2026-04-11 03:22:47 UTC

they arrested the guy who threw a molotov at sam altman's house and he's a doomer ie he believes it's so powerful it'll kill us all

2026-04-06 03:59:12 UTC

for those tracking John Carmack's descent into right wing total moral disorientation, he's now at "Palmer Luckey should buy Wired and do to it what Elon Musk did to Twitter".
he's full fash at this point. totally gonna deliver AGI by 2030 though.
increasingly disgusting that he named his shitass company after Commander Keen, a joyful little video game from before he became a millionaire and was empowered to become his worst self.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/355/737/341/368/455/original/08b8b863f10828d1.png

2026-04-02 13:40:57 UTC

https://tante.cc/2026/04/01/dissolving-the-social From the capitalist boss perspective the fundamental function of current "AI" is to dissolve worker solidarity, mutual respect, and trust.

2026-03-30 04:27:15 UTC

futures i still believe are possible:
- civilization no longer depends on fossil fuels
- food, housing, physical and mental healthcare for all
- no billionaires
- full reparations to the colonized and the enslaved
- computing without big tech
- an internet without advertising
- total liberation for gender nonconforming people

2026-03-25 00:34:28 UTC

RE: https://bne.social/@phocks/116286320449260193
working at Block with Jack Dorsey as your CEO and being worried tech industry bullshit might happen to you is like... you are already in Jason Voorhees' machete sharpening room. you are in greater danger than you can possibly imagine.
#note12h5…kp3e

2026-03-20 15:00:58 UTC

we're living in the world created by "the only real politics is engineering", which seeks at all costs to dissuade us from "the only real engineering is politics".

2026-03-18 15:03:29 UTC

a theory on the total demobilization of programmers (in aggregate, not you specifically) as a class:
- comfortable life (salary, benefits, retirement plan)
- never protested or resisted anything / did but it didn't seem to do much
- never organized their workplace / community
- computers are a solace from messy real world stuff
- suddenly computers are subject to this new political economy
- feel totally helpless and concede to what's happening right now as inevitable

2026-03-06 16:02:15 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/115577829870837997
Anthropic's product is now confirmed to have suggested targets in the first wave of US strikes that hit a school and killed 175+ children. Their marketing for this product is so deep into AGI cultism they insist on its human rights and employ a philosopher to maintain its system prompt. Essentially they're claiming their program is a real boy and that their Pinocchio is a mass murdering war criminal. Entire company must be obliterated and its apologists shamed out of public life.
#note182s…q4r3

2026-02-23 16:46:13 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@404mediaco/116120782085046907
if it hasn't already happened there's definitely going to be an important legal case where discovery was thwarted by some tech exec insisting that important emails about serious illegal activity were "deleted by an agent". yet another way in which this tech is an accountability sink!
#note1ld3…qzla

2026-02-17 19:29:40 UTC

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the SELC is suing xAI for "[setting] up the de facto power plant with no permits, no public input, and no notice to nearby communities that will have to deal with the consequences."
https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-to-power-its-data-center/

2026-02-17 17:22:49 UTC

I'm not a fan of the recent design trend of having a small margin of dead space between UI stuff that runs along a screen edge. KDE Plasma here "does the right thing" and treats any clicks in that little gutter as a a click on the icon, but that in turn is misleading - novice users might develop a needless habit of being careful with their mousing even though under the hood it's a Fitt's Law-affordant generous target because they're just going by what they see.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/087/110/652/138/489/original/4832fad54bdf0a2d.png

2026-02-06 20:17:32 UTC

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found a bit more context: they want to pay remote drivers from whatever country is currently cheapest, none of whom will have US state drivers' licenses. claiming that they're "advising, not driving" is the linchpin of their argument that that's not as illegal and dangerous as it clearly is. they're constructing legal fortifications before the deaths and lawsuits rise. https://eletric-vehicles.com/waymo/waymo-exec-admits-remote-operators-in-philippines-help-guide-us-robotaxis

2026-02-06 19:40:36 UTC

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just saw some video of Waymo's Chief Safety Officer having it laboriously dragged out of him in a court hearing that they do employ remote drivers and that a bunch of them are in the Philippines. and even still, the insistence on personifying their products eg "the waymo asks for help", "the human recommends" is such a conspicuous odd contortion that it's almost certain there are legal + business imperatives behind it that they don't talk about and won't until a regulator forces them to.

2026-01-24 19:35:00 UTC

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/24/latest-chatgpt-model-uses-elon-musks-grokipedia-as-source-tests-reveal some LLM proponents have tried to hold Grok, the racist ranting CSAM-generating model, at arm's length and insist they only use "ethical" LLMs. but there's no meaningful difference - the whole point of slop is that it's all the same massive bucket, the economic value lies in the bigger-the-better indiscriminate mass scrape and everything it outputs is laundering all the horrid shit within. claims to using it "the smart way" are delusional cope.

2026-01-23 23:45:28 UTC

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David Graeber (RIP) lived a few decades longer in that timeline and did a whole book about it

2026-01-23 23:40:54 UTC

alternate history where Oops! All Berries started outselling regular Captain Crunch during a particular period in 2006 that all >=21st century economic historians now refer as The Inflection Point

2026-01-17 18:49:45 UTC

if you haven't been paying attention to contemporary "anti communism" rhetoric, it's time to start. what kinds of people are saying this? what are their goals? who are they targeting with this language and the violence it threatens? to whom are they spreading this ideology and rhetoric; who all is susceptible to it?
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/911/907/253/975/078/original/b0a7119fac09f493.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/911/907/806/418/872/original/b8c21867352655aa.png

2026-01-12 16:18:19 UTC

some programmers are among of the most propagandized and subservient people on the planet right now.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/883/025/900/449/954/original/d2c4223cc322e9fa.jpg

2026-01-11 23:37:42 UTC

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we're living through a mass psychological engineering campaign and the results have been, and will continue to be, horrifying https://azhdarchid.com/are-llms-useful

2026-01-07 05:42:24 UTC

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there is a future where Google's corporate will, in all its incompetence and bureaucratic negligent cruelty (to say nothing of Tesla's outright bloodthirst!) is incarnated in thousands of 2½ ton oblivious bricks driving the streets of every major city, displacing public transit, entrenching car dysfunction, making surveillance even more pervasive.
we can still avoid that. but they're running ads during fucking AGDQ! the full court press is on. we gotta get loud and mean and go for the throat.

2026-01-07 05:22:19 UTC

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it's great to finally see a major outlet cover this, i felt crazy seeing the reality on the street every day in contrast to the AV industry's bullshit and outright lies.
we hear about Waymo so much bc they're the company deepest into "good PR mode", taking no chances, never going fast. they're banking goodwill & indoctrination for when they reach too-big-to-fail status and can start killing people. always push back on the "safer than humans" bullshit. it's a fabrication.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-06/are-autonomous-vehicles-safer-than-human-drivers-we-don-t-know-yet
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/852/122/665/632/659/original/b19816d20bf64e95.png

2026-01-04 18:20:46 UTC

When a marginalized person online expresses weariness with a particular bad behavior that's frequently directed at them, and you decide to reply to them, your A#1 priority is to not make their day worse. If you're not confident you can do that, you simply shouldn't reply. "Doing the bad behavior but 'jokingly'" being the most common but far from the only pattern here.
If you insist on doing so, you're gonna get blocked a lot! Please go back to netiquette kindergarten.

2026-01-03 19:07:11 UTC

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https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/832/731/896/629/076/original/a14a3c16fa7bd6fd.png

2025-12-28 17:23:31 UTC

woody guthrie's 1943 new year resolutions are as relevant as ever
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/798/336/533/858/959/original/e44f0a7e6eb25d4e.jpg

2025-12-26 01:18:06 UTC

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important to understand here how tech product design + PR + investor relations exist in a feedback loop for companies like this. Waymo steadfastly refuses to admit they need remote human operators and gives them what seems like a weird bad interface for it, in the hopes that that more indirect labor can in turn be automated later. this is all because they don't know this whole experiment will ever work. so don't give them the slightest bit of benefit-of-the-doubt!
https://gizmodo.com/waymo-released-a-revealing-postmortem-on-its-san-francisco-blackout-meltdown-2000702801
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/783/212/863/506/053/original/ea7668a8f0c0d5bd.png

2025-12-22 04:31:34 UTC

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imagine The Big One happens in SF, and every waymo on the street instantly becomes a giant roadblock for emergency workers trying to put out fires and rescue and save the lives of seriously injured people all over the city. people will die - because these products aren't "safer than humans"; they can't do basic things even bottom-quartile human drivers can.
waymo corporate is betting they can PR their way past all that. our duty as citizens and humans is to make sure they can't.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/761/311/241/066/379/original/3ba3a356b8314d29.jpg

2025-12-18 05:24:56 UTC

and thus the interests of the pedophile rapist president, the warhawks, the neoliberals, the fossil fuel executives, the "defense" contractors, the anticommunists, the national security moms, the energy-hungry AI investors, the manifest destineers, the companies bent on preserving american car dependence, the "let's build drones and kill stuff with them" enthusiasts - all intersected, like a christmas miracle, to rain death on the people of Venezuela, in the name of the free market.

2025-12-17 01:18:35 UTC

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https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/732/264/480/184/934/original/e84a93ad3f20ca60.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/732/264/872/073/340/original/1970b25738f89164.jpg

2025-12-06 18:16:24 UTC

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very cool and positive interactions this would have with our political system for sure!
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/673/977/304/135/003/original/8e673aac521c5a58.jpg

2025-11-29 04:05:44 UTC

https://www.theverge.com/news/831364/dell-windows-11-upgrade-numbers-earnings-call-q3-2025 no matter how badly you fuck up at your job you'll never fuck up so badly that half a billion people would choose to stick with the older, now-unsupported version of your product than take the free upgrade to the new version.
unless your job is being a product strategist, project manager, marketer, etc on Windows i guess.

2025-11-20 07:09:36 UTC

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same energy
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/580/755/141/573/277/original/12b964804fbf1e64.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/580/755/510/995/548/original/bec8de1a033d6ccd.gif

2025-11-19 18:42:06 UTC

https://blog.lauramichet.com/thoughts-about-interfaces-acting-like-people it's honestly not hard to imagine a world where people are legally forbidden from selling software or hardware that refers to itself in the first person or is referred to as a person by any supporting materials (eg marketing), and where the intent embodied in such software is always explicitly attributed to the human beings who produce it and set its policies. i don't think that would fix everything but it'd help. that's a moderate position IMO.

2025-11-16 08:02:26 UTC

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-company-but-outside-work-im-actually-a-really-good-person this is good satire and all but fedi actually has people who are in this position. general categories:
- you actively build things that murder or incarcerate people. quit now, or sabotage/whistleblow and accept the consequences.
- you do something not murder-related at a murdering/murder-enabling company. unionize and demand they stop murdering. if after sustained effort that fails, quit.
- you empty trash cans at such a company. your culpability is near-zero.

2025-11-13 17:29:30 UTC

I don't think a SteamOS landslide is inevitable or even likely but I definitely think MS doesn't realize how much they're playing with fire making Win11, their flagship and historic unbreakable monopoly, the "turning a big dial taht says 'user hostility' on it and constantly looking back at shareholders for approval like a contestant on the price is right" OS.

2025-11-10 22:54:45 UTC

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guy really has been talking like his brains are dribbling out of his ears for 10+ years now

2025-11-03 04:29:00 UTC

https://bolha.one/@cadusilva/115481273902006842 uhh, please be careful, if you DM someone a quote-postable post link mastodon 4.5 will notify the person whose post it is. seems like a potential major user safety risk.

2025-10-26 16:47:08 UTC

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and unfortunately if eg RMS had had more explicitly leftist anti capitalist goals the movement would not have played out as it did. it would not have been so broadly useful to capital. it antagonized a small number of monopolists and everyone in the movement missile-locked on that. the various statements from the past decade that open source "won" are in fact moments of total defeat.

2025-10-26 16:40:51 UTC

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yeah i think that post is profoundly wrong and politically ignorant/naive in the same way the original founders of the free software movement were, and that moral-political blind spot is why we're now living in a world where every cluster bomb and surveillance system and wealth concentration system runs on "open" code.

2025-10-14 22:43:45 UTC

Lots of decent "how to install Linux on a computer that Windows has given up on" tutorials but if you're a lifelong Windows user (ie not already a Linux user), a step that's really important to not skip is to try out a few different DEs and distros in a live USB environment to figure out which ones you most like the look and feel of, and which ones work well on your hardware (esp if you're on a laptop) - eg if your wifi or display have issues out of the box. Often fixable, but important to know.

2025-10-10 16:19:19 UTC

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hate that i know what all that means

2025-10-07 19:14:10 UTC

Greta Thunberg could have, by now, carved out a very comfortable life for herself as a liberal grifter-celebrity offering platitudes about personal responsibility at Davos. Instead she connected the dots between ecocide, capital, and empire, aiming squarely at the heart of the beast. And now fresh out of captivity she downplays her own suffering to recenter the urgency of aid to the Palestinian people. No wonder she's hated by the fascist+lib coalition that rules this world.

2025-10-01 19:12:22 UTC

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personally i'm looking forward to proudly reciting an oath of citizenship to MegaChile
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/300/490/283/523/455/original/11b65cb98969085f.png

2025-09-30 16:45:59 UTC

even the most statistically average human being on the planet is profoundly capable in so many ways and anyone telling you otherwise is acting to make the world worse.

2025-09-20 01:34:50 UTC

"every human-to-human interaction is customer service" is incredibly socially corrosive and we must destroy the forces dragging us towards that

2025-09-18 16:52:55 UTC

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thank you for saying this. what i've seen in my years of being a broken record about it is that people either genuinely care about it or consider it such a non-issue that they have an almost philosophical position against it, the whole "everything is ephemeral, this is all a sand painting", etc - which is fine so long as they don't sandbag the effort to allow people to *not* just be constantly abandoning everything they've said.

2025-09-13 22:51:32 UTC

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in the vein of "it's easier for [some] to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism", SV people can't imagine a world where their luck has run out, where they are despised and shunned and blamed for much of what sucks in the world. in their minds they are making a final massive grab for power that cannot fail. i think that's what the apocalyptic "AGI" talk etc is really about.

2025-09-13 22:48:33 UTC

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i think the mass-psychology of Silicon Valley may be in a far more precarious place right now than many realize. Trump hasn't offered them a clear path to total power as they were hoping, AI is an existential bet that feels increasingly like the wheels are falling off of, and they've burned through so much of their credibility with the rest of society. there's a sense that nobody knows what lies past the present moment.

2025-09-12 15:57:28 UTC

Pretty disappointed that Mastodon went with "quoter's text on top" for QTs rather than text on bottom. I think there's a good chance it will lead to a steady rise in dunk culture on Mastodon that will make the atmosphere here permanently nastier and more clout-farmy. I would love to know what the rationale there was, besides "that's the way it works on [other deeply toxic platforms that mastodon is attempting to position itself as a better alternative to]".

2025-09-11 16:15:28 UTC

A lot of people who are on TV are uniting in fear and anger because one of their own, a guy who was on TV, got shot. We have been filling the streets to get these people to acknowledge the basic humanity and rights of people who are not on TV. To them, being on TV makes your life worth more. They want you to accept this premise. You must not.

2025-09-11 01:03:58 UTC

"auto hide taskbar" has always felt really bad to me, like a non life threatening version of those retracting car door handles

2025-09-02 15:05:43 UTC

[quickly solves the easiest 75% of an automation problem, realizes that the remaining distance to baseline human performance is a vast uncrossable chasm] oh. hmmm... AGI. i think we're gonna need AGI for this part. guys can you make AGI? i'm blocked on not having AGI. my company's product... i only get the billion dollars if you guys make AGI.
5-10 years? [inhales through teeth] that's not gonna work for me. can you guys make AGI sooner than that? ideally Q2 next year for, haha, contract reasons

2025-08-27 20:43:28 UTC

"using an app": sounds passive, boring, vaguely like a bodily function
"visiting a website": you are an explorer in the infinite realms of human thought, there's no possible way to be uncool when visiting a website, honest

2025-08-19 21:29:12 UTC

Don't be Fediverse HOA about people promoting their own work on here. Don't make people who are just trying to make a bit of money from their art, or get the word out about a talk they gave or a project they just released, etc feel unwelcome. Do the opposite, even.
If a person is actually an unscrupulous grifter then trust that they are due other social consequences that have little to do with something plenty of other people manage in a reasonable sociable way.

2025-08-19 16:25:52 UTC

next Mastodon update will add a "reason for deletion" data field that people accessing a deleted post will be shown. choices include "I am ashamed I said this", "Post got too popular", "I thought of a better version of this joke", "I got yelled at", "I am just one of those people who deletes things", "Erased from history by the World Government", "NaN"

2025-08-10 15:17:35 UTC

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for non game programmers unfamiliar with what our corner of the world is like: a majority of game dev projects have a large pile of binary files - that eg artists, designers, sound designers etc add to and change incrementally where branches and merging are usually of little value - alongside the actual code where conventional dvcs is more or less the ideal paradigm.
keeping GBs of art assets etc in the same git repo as your game code sucks real bad.

2025-08-10 15:12:26 UTC

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if you reply "git lfs" i can't promise someone won't piledrive you in the replies

2025-08-10 15:11:34 UTC

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most game devs i know use perforce for that which while not bad, seems like shouldn't be the only game in town.

2025-08-10 15:09:08 UTC

wonder if "non-distributed version control for repositories of large binary files with space-efficient diffs" is something programmer(s) with the skillset to pull that off could be persuaded is worth their time

2025-08-09 19:35:25 UTC

his current position of power within the industry aside, something about this coming from the creator of ZZT feels uniquely awful.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/000/471/061/860/687/original/e65cef27caccc9a8.jpg

2025-08-02 15:51:35 UTC

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boo, default mastodon web ui doesn't show the alt text i wrote for this.

2025-08-02 15:41:54 UTC

https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/959/926/535/511/452/original/f26873d8c493cd88.mp3

2025-07-29 15:45:05 UTC

shout out to the guy about a year ago who replied to me "boy are YOU going to feel dumb in a few years when 'knowledge graphs have solved the hallucination problem' in LLMs" and i asked him to point me to some research or working examples of that. he replied "it's not my job to educate you" and that was that. i bookmarked the exchange to check back on in a few years but a month or two later he deleted his account.

2025-07-29 05:25:26 UTC

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note how even the "AI" in Pac-Man is being elevated and mystified here in a way that nobody in the industry really did at the time; the techniques it used were impressive and of interest but there was no mystification, because ultimately it was a very understandable set of techniques. the complexity of the current bullshit is meant to muddle, mislead and impress the gullible.

2025-07-29 05:21:11 UTC

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"most experts acknowledge", yet only one of the three big companies you reached out to was even marginally in accord with this, the one pouring billions into the dirt on it, who is currently in last place in the console space. hmm
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/934/830/520/789/676/original/51989511ff98f30b.png

2025-07-29 05:14:29 UTC

https://archive.is/xjRGH a fraud is being perpetrated in this industry.
it's important to say that plainly and not forget it, because the people perpetrating it currently have the credulous ear of the NYT and others.

2025-07-27 15:22:43 UTC

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"[the Biden admin's USAID] strongly recommended that the organization responsible for the report change the title to say “risk” of a famine instead ... when the report published without changes to the title, the Biden administration ordered the famine warning be deleted from FEWS NET’s website — the first such retraction in the organization’s 40-year relationship with the U.S. government." https://archive.is/TiokA
the denial of what's happening now has been an ongoing, fully bipartisan effort.

2025-07-27 14:45:34 UTC

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it's beyond sickening to see so many establishment libs suddenly wake up to the horror that's been going unabated since October 2023, hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians murdered by the IDF armed by the US, and justify that contortion as "well before the left was crying wolf but now it's real". the stain of their prior support for this genocide will never wash off.

2025-07-25 19:13:33 UTC

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https://www.theverge.com/news/713125/google-url-shortener-links-shutdown-deadline the idea that you would break a link on a webpage because it wasn't getting any traffic is so anathema to the bedrock idea of the web as a conduit of information rather than... a conduit of capital, apparently - ad companies have taken human history as a hostage.

2025-07-25 17:42:42 UTC

line graph covering 2001 to the present where the Y axis is "how much is Google like a library"

2025-07-19 15:29:01 UTC

when reactionaries talk about the network state, the patchwork, freedom cities, etc they're talking about rich-guy-accountability-free zones and what that means in practice is things like epstein's island, dark places where the light of human rights and labor power and democracy does not reach. that is their ideal society. they'd be fine with a world divided into epsteins and epstein victims.

2025-07-17 22:44:38 UTC

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"imagine if half of what i, your teacher, told you was flat out wrong and would set you on a miserable path to finding out exactly how it is, but everything i said was with utter oblivious confidence. and if you asked me for clarification or came to me with your findings, i'd have the same equal chance of being wrong. and imagine if my overall competence was approximately a pure statistical average. would you be okay with that? would your future employers be okay with that?"

2025-07-17 17:16:26 UTC

israel is a rogue state committing indiscriminate murder of innocents every day, only possible via the full support of american empire

2025-07-11 00:30:05 UTC

extremely uncool how this office win11 workstation's "update and shut down" behavior isn't actually update and shut down, but rather "update and then reboot and just sit on the login screen, burning power all weekend if you did it on a friday". infuriating how flagrantly this OS ignores / violates user consent. will never willingly put this on a machine i own.

2025-06-09 20:57:28 UTC

Tech people must resolve to treat Palantir employees in their spaces - conferences, meetups, hackathons, etc - identically to how they would treat the masked gun-brandishing irregular-uniformed gestapo out there right now arresting every latina mother and child they feel like.
Palantir are the computer job counterparts of those thugs and one wouldn't exist without the other, and they should experience 100% identical social consequences.

2025-06-09 06:46:52 UTC

digging around in my 2K Marin-era (2008-ish) archives and came across this outstanding error message, props to whatever IT(?) person decided to phrase a simple seat license conflict as "Human Combat Required":
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/652/054/014/621/754/original/118ac67f9d65fbf4.png

2025-06-02 15:17:16 UTC

when the social-economic maelstrom that is the current LLM hype wave fizzles or collapses there's going to be so much "how could so many smart people be so wrong?" and it's imperative you do not accept their framing of themselves as "smart people" - they are, in judgment and values and intellect, deeply compromised from living inside a machine that harms humanity for profit.

2025-05-19 05:54:10 UTC

if your "beautiful, elegant, futuristic" huge ring-shaped HQ requires a truly colossal fuck-ugly parking garage that dwarfs it, it's not actually a very beautiful elegant futuristic HQ now is it
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/532/931/252/276/583/original/415816888a93bbe1.jpg

2025-05-16 13:56:49 UTC

incapacitating despair at how many people wake up every day to do lucrative jobs that make the world unambiguously worse

2025-05-13 21:44:41 UTC

somewhere a guy is waking up, putting on the title theme from "Rocky", logging on to his infosec dot exchange fedi account and posting stuff like "a good chunk of the far left are pro-trump"

2025-05-06 16:05:02 UTC

think about the army of people all around this deeply mediocre man who had to work night and day to make him seem impressive. think about what all those people could accomplish instead, individually and collectively, in a society that enabled them to self-actualize instead of having to earn a living as a brick in some pathetic asshole's pyramid.
that society is possible, and there are small things each of us can do every day to help bring it about.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/461/710/793/572/917/original/d1c7bb4686aadfe0.jpg

2025-05-01 15:14:11 UTC

even if you think it's fine to use LLMs for something like coding it's critical you understand how widely the tech is being deployed in human-to-human cases where it's egregiously unfit for purpose, frequently in ways that are outright insulting and disrespectful.
if you find the backlash scary, regressive, or excessive you have not made sufficient effort to understand peoples' very real and legitimate anger, and that is a moral failure on your part.
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/01/seattle-worldcon-science-fiction-convention-vets-panelists-with-chatgpt/

2025-04-25 21:14:55 UTC

- reply

the early stages of a programming education are to be celebrated and valued, they are important moments of discovery and consciousness-building that reverberate over decades, even if their actual products are rudimentary. vibe coding sucks insofar as it treats this entire period - the very process of learning how to think - as unnecessary/undesirable, an annoyance to skip past, and by extension that the details and deep intentions of a codebase don't matter, are interchangeable.

2025-04-22 20:39:32 UTC

- reply

i've never used "do not disturb" and realizing that once again i've subconsciously routed around a UI deficiency: my phone is set to vibrate 24/7, and there are no situations where i can't tolerate it vibrating. (ie if there's a situation where the decibel difference between a "ring" and a vibrate would mean me missing a call, i keep my phone close enough to me i can hear it vibrate. because i hate basically all phone ringing sounds and behaviors. for smartphones, vibrate *is* ring, to me.)

2025-04-18 15:17:18 UTC

https://gameboat.org/2025/04/17/another-mildly-silly-article-about-ai-disinformation-but-at-least-this-one-gives-you-something-to-think-about "what the AI industry has done for us is create a person-shaped information actor who has read anything that can be read but has never read anything other than information available on the internet, actively holds itself out as an authority on everything, and will not stop talking everyone’s ear off about literally anything at literally any time."

2025-04-13 15:13:17 UTC

"bitcoin is the ultimate freedom technology", which is why the most fervently pro bitcoin head of state is currently operating a zero-human-rights penal colony for illegally + unconstitutionally deported citizens of another country whose depraved corrupt empire he hopes to curry favor with, so that he can sink yet more of his nation's treasury into it and further enrich himself.

2025-04-09 17:58:38 UTC

when a country creates a gestapo and multiple administrations let it continue existing (because they insist there is some actual legitimate, just use for it) it is inevitably going to start saying this kind of very overt nazi shit
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/309/290/959/470/798/original/fe9a310a42a15d2e.jpg

2025-04-02 15:15:12 UTC

the primary function of state violence is to protect capital
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/269/013/012/919/923/original/ef1473633d4d2156.jpg

2025-03-21 19:11:59 UTC

still one of the best ever illustrations of the dangers of using a computer program to turn less data into more data
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/201/997/530/701/534/original/bf855cfc81d0ecc4.jpg

2025-03-19 06:20:23 UTC

cost-externalizing is one of the core verbs of capitalism, and the deepest truest reason that LLMs have excited capitalists so much is that they are, despite being garbage in so many other respects, extremely effective at externalizing costs. the dream, by the people who already own everything, of never having to pay for anything ever again. https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html

2025-03-18 12:53:34 UTC

exposing yourself to traumatizing atrocity imagery doesn't "make you more empathetic". it is not some duty you must do in penance for your relative comfort and anyone who claims that is trying to manipulate you. the biggest proponents of "bearing witness to suffering" are comfortable wealthy people who don't want the world to change. it's condescending and cynical to say that people have to see traumatizing images to develop empathy and take action.

2025-03-16 17:39:18 UTC

New bot! [@vintage_lego](https://mastodon.social/@vintage_lego ) posts a random page of LEGO assembly instructions, once a day at 10:30am PST, from an archive of over 1500 sets spanning 1958-2010. Follow if you were ages 4-99 any time during that period. 😀

2025-03-13 19:55:25 UTC

If we really were living in the world that a very large number of tech people believe we are, companies wouldn't be having to sneak these features into tools we rely on under our noses, like hiding a pill in cat food. Enabling them would spread naturally and virally, like a videogame cheat code - something people seek out.
We are not living in that world.
And it doesn't matter how much tech execs have set our economy teetering on that delusion, the truth will assert itself eventually.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/156/847/804/447/787/original/154832ddd9557d45.webp