Alien vs Predator

Hantaviruses are zoonotic viruses that naturally infect rodents and can occasionally spread to people. Here’s what you need to know about #hantavirus What they are, how they spread, the symptoms, and how to prevent infection

Your phone is about to stop being yours. https://keepandroidopen.org/en/ 125 days until lockdown Starting September 2026, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed […]

"It's called _vibe plumbing_. I'm not even a plumber. Soon, all swimming pools will be done this way! Get onboard or get left behind." (a real life version of the 'vibe construction' comic from https://mandatoryrollercoaster.com/). Photo taken from plumbers fails)

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ScienceScholar/116461768263929100 > "Where people live also seemed to make a difference. Higher risks were observed in studies from Asia, Africa, and North America, while studies from Europe and South America actually showed a lower risk.“ This close to realising […]

When you are the first to boost something that goes viral (for fediverse standards...) 🥹

RE: https://meta.masto.host/@GamingNews/116399551743157830 Life-goal:

This all really good, love this. It's all analyzing social behaviors, not code at all. "Five git commands that tell you where a codebase hurts before you open a single file. Churn hotspots, bus factor, bug clusters, and crisis patterns." https://piechowski.io/post/git-commands-before-reading-code/

If an astronaut sent you an email or loaded your website, could you tell from the IP or anything?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@silverspookgames/116347850521162254 NEOFEUD 2 HAS BEEN RELEASED THIS IS NOT A DRILL PLAY NEOFEUD PLAY NEOFEUD 2

'Illegal inhalation of privatized air may result in violent repossession of your 1.3 gallons of rented, corporate blood.' Screenshot from Neofeud 2, my #cyberpunk #adventuregame which is RELEASED! https://silverspook.itch.io/neofeud2 #indiedev #art #scifi #indiegame #retrogame

do you make music on Linux, and what's your favorite software to work with? and what do you miss the most from Linux music/audio software that exists on other platforms?

_If any PhD students are following your account, boosting would be appreciated._ **Fellow PhD student:** hello! ​:blobcat_waverev:​ I hope you had a good Monday. 0) In which country are you pursuing your PhD? 1) What is the official duration of your PhD programme? Does it assume you already […]

[Ruminations (tiresome AI BS)] I feel we've reached a point where many if not most of the organizations we rely on are being overrun by toddlers. We're constantly bring sold the belief that a chatbot is a viable substitute for thinking, skill, and hard work, of expertise and competence. I've […]

they claim "Zero exposure to original source" but surely all popular Open Source project has been read and parsed by every LLM in existence many times over

"Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch" https://malus.sh/

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116217477822586442 The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever. It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation […]

Quote in September last year for a high-memory compute server. £28,000. Quote today for the _exact same machine_. £90,500 This is for medical research. Saving lives. When I say LLMs are killing people by killing research computing, this is what I mean. @davidgerard.co.uk @edzitron.com

one of my favorite things on fedi is seeing an enormous infodump that is almost totally incomprehensible to me, where someone is just pouring out their heart about a topic that they love, in some gigantic thread of intense nerdery. sometimes I see people post self-consciously as if they feel […]

Worth repeating: Claims of "AI" democratizing anything (coding, creative endeavors, etc) are always BS. The thing locking out people from doing that is not having the time/resources. You want to democratize coding/art/creativity? Give people paid time off to do it and access to infrastructure […]

The dumbest take I've ever heard is "but what if I harm them further while doing CPR?" A person who needs CPR is functionally dead. If they come back to life, a couple of broken ribs is a small price to pay.

My son bought a second-hand Windows 11 PC for games, and has been having BSOD issues with the graphics card since he got it. Out of desperation he tried installing Bazzite on it, which I encouraged, but was also trying not to get his hopes up, telling him that the some things might not work. But […]

By the way, if you have time and energy and farting in the general direction of the FCC sounds fun, instructions on how to post your own comment to the FCC on Reflect Orbital or 1 million new SpaceX sats are here […]

"My colleague Julius" is now available in French, Korean and simplified Chinese! Thanks to the translators for that work! https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en.html

token anxiety https://jkap.io/token-anxiety-or-a-slot-machine-by-any-other-name/

in 2017 a popular twitter game was to type a partial phrase then see what your phone auto-completes it with. this proved so popular that it is now the only business model in the US.

Virer les voitures

If decentralization is the future of social media, where millions or even billions of people share knowledge, then we can learn a lot from how the Open Knowledge Foundation (@okfn) and the Wikimedia Foundation (@wikimediafoundation) built cross-border, international movements with clear missions […]

Bravo to the Spanish Supreme Court for its Sept 2025 decision establishing four important principles: "[1] Access to source code can be needed to verify automated government decisions; [2] “Intellectual property rights” do not automatically block transparency; [3] Security concerns must be […]

Hot take: the #steammachine is technically still "positioned closer to the entry level of the PC space.” as Valve promised. It's just that the price of "entry level PCs" has now shoot all the way up to "both of your kidneys and a testicle" thanks to the current #rampocalypse

This should be the mainstream #marketing position.

Okay, I'm calling it. Musk is an agent of the Great Filter, sent here to trigger a Kessler Syndrome and trap us on this planet. https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-eyes-1-million-satellites-for-orbital-data-center-push

I wonder how long Mattias Krantz will keep his fingers. At least he has a cool fridge magnet now. 🤣 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueCO4spGNPs #music #musicalinstrument #guitar #electricguitars #magnet #magnets #diy #diyinstruments #diymusic

Les pubs vont arriver dans Whatsapp cette année en Europe. Il est temps de passer à la version Premium qui: - n’a pas de pub - n’a pas d’IA intégrée obligatoire - ne vous espionne pas et ne récolte pas vos données - améliore grandement votre sécurité et votre vie privée. - permet de discuter […]

Good Morning, Mastodon. And happy #pushtoprodfriday to all those who celebrate!

@jeczjan.bsky.social the problem with Mike's argument imo is that ATproto seems much more complicated than ActivityPub, especially coming from the perspective of the web/email. and the fedi is already much more decentralized. perhaps the ATmosphere could look like the web does, but it doesn't […]

@olegendo do you have some rough estimate when you'll be selling the SEGA Nomad's upgrade boards?

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots How I managed to give an exam while giving the students the choice to use a chatbot or not. And what I learned in the process. https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html

Hey folks, when you come across a cool blog post, please - link it in your blog if you have one - Post a link here I've found the best blogs from links here and also when an article referenced other blogs. Keep in mind, the inter-NET needs links. Otherwise it's no net. #blogging

honestly the best countermeasure the EU could take right now without any losses or monetary requirements, is to remove all the USA-mandated anti circumvention laws, and remove any legal power USA companies have here, as @pluralistic suggested. I wish there was a way to amplify that message […]

Yay! Tooter β version 1.3.0 on #sailsifos now supports Alt-text (and a bunch of other modern features: votes, miniatures, quoted posts, ...) That's improvements!

This is your periodic reminder that when posting a link of any sort you should include at least a sentence or two describing what it's about, because many fediverse apps (including e.g. the Mastodon web app) don't display useful previews for many types of links. Be polite: don't make people […]

I'm sympathetic to #NIH-funded authors who want to publish in #APC-based #openaccess journals and can't find the money to pay the APCs. But it's false to say that they must publish in those journals, in any other APC-based OA journals, or even in OA journals. Shame on _Inside Higher Ed_ leaving […]

I very much believe that if capitalism hadn't tried to turn large language models into infinite money and they were strictly in computer science land, people would find it really cool the idea that weighted sums can independently figure out relative meanings of words via context clues is […]

The Nextclade dataset for Enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) has been realeased and is available on Nextclade!! Enterovirus is an RNA virus that mostly causes respiratory illness, but is also suspected of causing a polio-like disorder called acute flaccid myelitis (AFM): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterov...