"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...

Avrilcadabra - 20 mins of glorious chiptune | Bitscape 2025 https://youtu.be/Kk0HUPxJn_0

My prediction: When the new Steam Controller, "GabeCube", and Frame hit the market, #SteamDeck might get a 2nd refresh most likely with the same TMR analog stick as the rest of this products line-up, probably improved wireless (dual radios to facilitate streaming like the Frame?), perhaps […]

Pour répondre à la clameur populaire, j'ai fait un petit site qui présente mon cours / atelier sur l'IA : > Les tenants du bon sens et de la modération répètent que « la question n’est pas d’être pour ou contre les IA, mais de savoir comment les utiliser ». Je propose la perspective inverse […]

Thinking that I might start adding something like this to more of the software I write.

@Viss @catsalad yes but for your consideration:

I know there are a lot of CSS magicians on the fediverse, is anyone open to freelance work? we're looking for some help with https://wizardzines.com share a link to your site?

π

With great power comes great electricity bill

Bruce Schneier has a good high-level look at threat-modeling under an authoritarian government. Alas, it’s not amenable to a simple recipe approach, but involves carefully thinking through the tradeoffs […] [Original post on infosec.exchange]

We’re happy to announce our study on tracing influenza A from wastewater has been published in Water Research. We developed a novel tiling amplicon approach, enabling deep genomic coverage and our method is now part of Swiss-wide wastewater surveillance efforts. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Congratulations to Xiang Ge Luo for the Outstanding Student Paper award at ISMB/ECCB 2025 in Liverpool (www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2025...) for her work on the Bayesian inference of fitness landscapes via tree-structured branching processes published in Bioinformatics at doi.org/10.1093/bioi...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... In our new study, we use mathematical modelling, simulations, and Swiss wastewater data to show that that key epidemiological metrics are not biased by differences in virus shedding. This highlights the robustness of wastewater monitoring for pathogen surveillance.

Attention Gen Xers and boomers with registered domain names 🚨 If you, like me, put a fictitious organization in your domain name registration 25 years ago because NetSol or ICANN did not allow you to leave that field blank, recent policy changes will make that organization name the *legal […]

Lorenzen: unlike polar bears, Bowhead whales had stable environment suitability and genomic population size until very recently. Then human hunting (whaling) arrived, leading to a demographic crash. Modeling predicts that population recovery will be very slow at best. #bc2basel

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

Science peeps who are NOT in the USA: biotech is apparently circling the drain here, so I'm wondering about other places. We have two cats, and that's honestly the main reason I haven't focused on ex-US jobs until now. I'd be grateful for any and all information on moving to where you are for a […]

This is the completely unofficial Mastodon Cat Verification Service. If you have or are a cat, please verify by posting photos. Failure to do so will have no effect on your Mastodon service. I just want to see photos of cats.

On my way back ... I think, such a retreat / hackathon is needed more often. Particularly in my home country, Germany. The RSE landscape is shifting, becomes more divers and flourishes. Still, compared to our colleagues in the Netherlands, I dare say, such retreat/hackathons are needed more […]