«Computers suck and they’re terrible. I’m speaking as a professional. I’ve got stuff to do. If I ever notice the computer, it’s failed me.» Aye, the best tools are those you don't have to be aware of. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/10/if-users-notice-your-software-youre-already-a-loser/

«White supremacist dating site profiles linked to Tory and Reform councillors» Yes, that nazi dating website that was taken down at #39c3. And what a surprise that there's a Tory politician among the "pro-white" dating pool! […]

In a dog walkers messaging group someone shared a picture of some unidentified mass their dog had partially eaten. And someone else just dropped that photo in ChatGPT and pasted a screenshot of the LLM output that claims it to be a harmless fungus, without any further context. Yeah, surely […]

«you probably don't need to shoot someone in the face, to do the thing that you're calling a job» Strong CSNY's 'Ohio'-vibes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El0CLduLgew

[ukpol, lols] «Voters say they have little confidence that government can control borders despite sharp falls in net migration» You really need to be a racist prick to believe that anyone still really *wants* to come to the UK. Not a single one of my former, non-UK-born neighbors in London […]

One is never too old for a themed birthday cake. In this case, @eugecovernton made an OpenStreetMap-themed one for me. 😍🎂 #openstreetmap

sorry for the *stack link, but many writers i like from developing countries are on it, and this is an impt post: every time someone says 'hey it's so cheap to have a nice villa in bali' here's the exploitative math behind it […]

It's been raining a lot here in the last 48 hours, and the "river" - that really is more of a little stream most of the (sunny) days - has grown to a stream that deserves that label.

[uspol] «Whenever police of any kind make a public statement, the presumption should be that they may be lying, because lying is something police often do. But even by the usual standards of cops, immigration agents, and their defenders, the statements the Department of Homeland Security has […]

Another little before/after view close to home, this time the increase in mapped landuse/natural features over the past 6 months. #openstreetmap

Together, the CoMaps contributors have developed some ideas of what to focus on in 2026. Beyond focusing on setting up long-term sustainable governance, a focus is on pushing back against tech debt - and on-boarding more developers. Especially iOS developers could help to improve parity […]

Die Anmeldung zur #FOSSGIS2026 freigeschaltet: https://fossgis-konferenz.de/2026/anmeldung/#Anmeldeformular Neu ist, dass am Dienstag, den 24.03.2026 180-minütige Workshops stattfinden, wir sind gespannt, wie das Format ankommt. Siehe Programm […] [Original post on mastodon.online]

Do you use methods of participatory science to study AI? Are you curious about doing so? If so, join us Mon Jan 12 @ noon ET for a meet-up with others who do this work! Megan Price of @hrdag and I have been wonderfully overwhelmed by all the enthusiasm about a meet-up of researchers who are […]

I have no doubt that this analysis of the problem regarding teaching "how to write" is spot-on, having seen the same dynamics time and again in STEM disciplines. The problem is: Not a single academic institution in the world wants to (or can affort to) move away from the mass-"education" model […]

Today is ± the second birthday of this little gremlin (as we found her, the vet's best guess for her birthday is as good as any). In Peru one of our guides told us that her name, Nina, means fire in quechua and it's spot on for her personality. 😅 And once my […] [Original post on scholar.social]

I have no doubt that this analysis of the problem regarding teaching "how to write" is spot-on, having seen the same dynamics time and again in STEM disciplines. The problem is: Not a single academic institution in the world wants to (or can affort to) move away from the mass-"education" model […]

Today is ± the second birthday of this little gremlin (as we found her, the vet's best guess for her birthday is as good as any). In Peru one of our guides told us that her name, Nina, means fire in quechua and it's spot on for her personality. 😅 And once my […] [Original post on scholar.social]

Not that I think anyone here would be tempted but: obviously don't, this is a horrible idea. https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/857640/openai-launches-chatgpt-health-connect-medical-records

«nonconsensual sexual images of real people, including minors, is the cost of doing business with AI image generators. Some companies do a better job of preventing this abuse than others, but judging by the exploits I see on Telegram, when it comes to Grok, this problem will get a lot worse […]

The Democratic leadership of this country would walk out of the Wannsee Conference saying “I’m concerned this isn’t focused enough on the economy”

I'm sure you are all as tired as I am of Mozilla's bullshit. But this is a good look into the deceptive patterns they use in Firefox to please get anyone to use their "AI" stuff: «Architecting Consent for AI: Deceptive Patterns in Firefox Link Previews» How about that for a kill-switch […]

«Github Banned a Ton of Adult Game Developers and Won’t Explain Why» - keep in mind: 'adult' content and porn is generally a good canary in the coal mine for further oppression… https://www.404media.co/github-ban-suspension-adult-modding-games-illusion/

Another to add to the list of things ruined by sparkling autocarrot. A wedding. Well actually not legally a wedding anymore, cos sparkling autocarrot. https://nltimes.nl/2026/01/07/court-zwolle-rules-couple-married-chatgpt-written-ceremony

Reading that blog post feels like my guesses weren't too far from the reality. Thanks for sticking up for the iNat users and all your work @kueda, I know how hard it can be to walk away when the time has come!

What stuck with me: «I also think the board should follow Wikimedia’s lead and commit to a majority of community-selected members, instead of selecting their own membership from people like them. Users should have more power in the organization. Right now they’re barely even informed about what […]

Wow, iNaturalist co-founder @kueda goes into detail why he quit the project he started. The tl;dr is that the leadership and governance seem ill-equipped for the task at hand. https://kueda.net/blog/2026/01/06/why-i-left-inat/ #inaturalist #citizenscience

Wow, iNaturalist co-founder @kueda goes into detail why he quit the project he started. The tl;dr is that the leadership and governance seem ill-equipped for the task at hand. https://kueda.net/blog/2026/01/06/why-i-left-inat/ #inaturalist #citizenscience

I really feel like most people from ‘good countries’ shouldn’t try to justify their patriotism by saying ‘I went to (some Asian country), we are incredibly lucky here’. No, you are just a condescending fucker

«Maintainability isn't just a matter of hard-won experience teaching you where the pitfalls are. It also requires the cultivation of "Fingerspitzengefühl" – the "fingertip feeling" that lets you make reasonable guesses about where never before seen pitfalls might emerge. It's a form of process […]

«We used to be able to learn about our hobbies and interests from hundreds of experts on a wealth of websites whose only shared motivation was their passion. […] Now, Learning On The Internet often means fighting ads and endless assaults on one’s attention — it means watching […]

I need university administrators (and probably some other people too, but definitely university administrators) to understand something: you cannot motivate your faculty to do more research or better teaching. They are already maximally motivated people. They did not get the job by being […]

Trying once more with the right hashtag: Does anyone have have recommendation for a CLI/TUI RSS Reader that can tie into FreshRSS? Currently trying Newsboat, but would like to see if there's alternatives I'm missing out on! #rss #cli #tui

I wrote about the @CoMaps map distributor tool that I wrote to make it easier to download & serve map files in a local network - and also about why one would want to do that in the first place! https://tzovar.as/comaps-map-distributor/ #openstreetmap

That reddit thread about how delivery riders/drivers are exploited by Uber et al.? Sounds like it's likely a fake, based on the week evidence the "whistleblower" produced. But it's fascinating/depressing how much the writer of this article relies on "I asked another LLM if this was […]

We are looking for an experienced Android UI developer for https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-android. Native Java, close to the system, with minimal deps and fluff. Networking/encryption/persistence is not part of the job as it happens in https://github.com/chatmail/core Remote collab is […]

After enjoying tooi that much (thanks @ihabunek!), I've started playing around with newsboat as a TUI RSS reader. Are there better/more modern alternatives I should check out?

"Anna’s Archive Loses .Org Domain After Surprise Suspension" - Still up in .li, .se and some other domains. https://torrentfreak.com/annas-archive-loses-org-domain-after-surprise-suspension/

How my students taught me that Github’s monopoly is hurting the Open Source ecosystem even more than I thought. https://ploum.net/2026-01-05-unteaching_github.html #github #floss

Wish I had seen these before placing an order for stickers on the weekend! 🤣 https://bitbang.social/@NanoRaptor/115828881875398663

I wrote about the @CoMaps map distributor tool that I wrote to make it easier to download & serve map files in a local network - and also about why one would want to do that in the first place! https://tzovar.as/comaps-map-distributor/ #openstreetmap

This morning we can feel like we're in the big city in our village of 3,000 people: The power outage already lasted long enough to deplete our UPS batteries. It's basically like we'd be living in Berlin 😅 https://www.dw.com/en/germany-power-back-for-some-berliners-but-others-freeze-on/a-75382671

I looked at exactly two pages, in a single PR, on GitHub before being hit by "You have exceeded a secondary rate limit. Please wait a few minutes before you try again; in some cases this may take up to an hour". The irony of a company that pushes LLMs based on scraped code so hard putting this […]

[global pol] «If we condemn Putin for trying to depose governments that fall outside of his “sphere of influence,” how can we tolerate a president who does the same? Why should any government around the world not just invade countries when it wants their assets? Trump’s actions will take us […]

overly in-depth (i love it) explanation of why usb-c audio dongles/headsets hit USB-FS bandwidth limits https://epenguin.imalone.co.uk/2025/06/audio-dongles-and-ghost-of-usb-1.html

Ah yes, "World ‘may not have time’ to prepare for AI safety risks" says dude who is a crypto-bro and for some reason is now allowed to cosplay as an 'expert' at the UK's 'Advanced Research + Invention Agency'. If anyone still had doubts about how deep the UK's rot in academia & politics is. If […]

The idea that other countries should take in Americans as refugees, other countries that are rejecting most refugees at this time, is as problematic as all the people calling themselves ‘Twitter refugees’

Gobernantes del mundo analizando qué declaraciones dar para no perder su acceso a sus correos y datos en Microsoft 365

Trying out tooi, a cute TUI (terminal user interface) client for Mastodon! https://codeberg.org/ihabunek/tooi

This is so amazing: In 1970, the city of Paris organised a photography competition, splitting the city into more than 1700 squares of 250 meters length. Now you can browse the images taken in 1970 in this super cool/simple map, square by square! I already checked out my old neighborhood ❤️ […]

Para mejorar mi español estoy escuchando a episodios de Radio Ambulante. Creo que este episodio sobre #wikipedia es perfecto para la gente de Mastodon 😉 https://radioambulante.org/transcripcion/guerra-de-ediciones-transcripcion