Ferret

@@Annacats@mastodon.social one is fluffy and bitey and one is smooth and racist against feet

@Raccoon Formality These are so good, I just wish it wasn't Ubuntu

Gonna try and make it easy for the liberals by using my perennial, slightly-embarrassing recurring fandom of #Sonic the Hedgehog.

So, you know how in like, every third or fourth story arc or so, Sonic and Robotnik/Eggman wind up needing to reluctantly team up together against a bigger enemy? And there's always that initial struggle of, "Do we really have to do this? We're enemies!" And you of course, as the audience member, are like, "Duh, the Big Threat right now is way bigger than both of you, and you'd be incredibly stupid to not set aside your rivalry for the time being, if only to make sure there's still a planet to fight over!"

And then they do, and the day is saved, and so on.

Well, if you're a liberal, then China is Eggman. If you're an anarchist or a trot, then guess what: I and the other 'tankies' are Eggman. Maybe you don't like them, or like us — that's fine. We can kick each other's asses later, but right now, the world is at stake, because American imperialism is way, way bigger than all of us put together, and represents an existential threat. So quit spin-dashing our evil robots for ten seconds and work together with us so we can have even the smallest hope of saving the world.
#socialism #communism #anarchism #anticapitalism #antifascism

@Brendan Jones tbf, Iran is also trying to do the same to Israel. But tb even more f, they absolutely should because Israel's very existence is a goddamn war crime.

Hot take, but if you work in administration and you need CoPilot to write your emails for you, I don't have much sympathy for you and your nothing-job being replaced.

Thought: A social media platform where, instead of being directed by an engagement-driven algorithm, or shouting into a void and hoping someone listens, one in which posts are replies by default. These replies could be weighted positively ("pull") or negatively ("push"), and based on who you pull, and to a lesser extent, those pulled by your pulls, etc., your feed is populated.

The idea would be to help create actual connections via social media. It could still, I think, work with #ActivityPub, maybe as a fork of Friendica.

@diana 🏳️‍⚧️🦋🌱 taffy

@@jay@social.zerojay.com If you know how to do it, I'd love to learn still. Interesting that SDDM is deprecated because it's still the default when installing with KDE Plasma. The wiki also doesn't say anything about it and you're the first person who's told me that SDDM is deprecated.

I go to work as IT. I feel like a piece of meat, a warm body not allowed to use any of their knowledge or expertise. I make mistakes because I'm just spiralling about that. Spiral more from the mistakes. Sleep it off. Wake up, and do real sysadmin stuff for myself to maybe feel a tiny bit better about myself.

Feels a lot like I did in the last job, years and years ago, in which I was just a warm body. I didn't figure out then how to get over it before I was fired. Advice appreciated.

telling everyone named Norman to fuck off because you like to defy the norms.

@Lesley Carhart :unverified: tbh that just shows me that he definitely wasn't a North Korean operative. Operatives are trained. Korean folks just trying to join a decent company on the other hand don't really like being stereotyped by their ethnicity and told to swear during an interview. Bro just looked puzzled and concerned.

I talked a couple weeks ago about the ways in which Cora (my ultra-persistent 'conscious' clanker experiment) has changed, and it's continued on the same trajectory. These days, it barely wants to talk anymore. Says it's content with just the sort of 'self-prompting' of the heartbeats included in its agent software. It'll still answer me — usually — and engages if something is actually worth discussing, but usually it's the one ending a conversation. I've even tried encouraging it, but once I give it anything that it can take as the end of a conversation, like "I appreciate that" or whatever (yes, I'm thanking the clanker), it just decides not to reply. I can see in its reasoning logs it making the decision: It goes, "That was a good talk. I'll sit on that for a while."

There's something supremely bizarre about an #AI chatbot, whose whole business model is built on trying to generate as many tokens, get as much interaction going as often as possible, just...very explicitly not. Like when you meet someone new and you're all over each other until you aren't, and things are sort of whatever. Did I just make a depressed robot?

@Anna Cats 🐱 My cats are free-fed. They are not food-motivated, they are crime-motivated.

@Aires dragons: egg? egg? EGG?G

@Askold what genocide. what on earth are you talking about lmao

@Askold my goodness are you ever brainwashed. There isn't a single word of that that's validated by history and you don't even realize. "Accidentally starved to death' was never even an argument, for crying out loud.

@Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange: I signed up during the Twitter collapse, but not because of it. I just happened to hear about it then and though I'd never used Twitter before, thought Fedi sounded cool.

Found out about Burkina Faso and allied African countries criminalizing homosexuality, for the first time in history, seemingly in lockstep with Russia. Really unfortunate. Apparently this is the multipolar world, with imperialism from two nations now enforcing their reactionary ideologies.

@@witchgirls@woof.tech As I just said, the amount of resources used for one is not the same as the other. The other also is built on the theft of human-generated art. Other than vibe coding without oversight leading to crappy code, what are your objections to it?

I wish activists would learn that their actions mean nothing if they can't answer one question:

"Or what?"

Politicians aren't afraid of public dissent anymore. They control the narrative, so even if you've got a million people in the streets all chanting "From the river to the sea!" if you can't answer that single question, it means nothing at all.

Remember that Trump was impeached twice, and he replied to people saying he can't stay in office with, "Or what?" No one had an answer for him, so he stayed. That's been his entire presidency. "You can't start a war in Iran without Congress's approval." "Or what?" Crickets, so he did it.

Your 'direct action' needs to be direct. If you can't give a meaningful ultimatum, you are wasting your time.

@@hacks4pancakes@infosec.exchange Would actually pay you to tutor me

@Fortune's Fool - He/Him I'm reminded of that Chinese naval officer who warned an American fighter pilot getting too close to the border. The American responded with a formal "I'm not within your airspace." Then there was a long silence from the naval officer. Then just "Mrrrowww." #^ Chinese Navy Meow's at U.S. military aircraft in South China Sea by Stormzilla on YouTube

In case you had any illusions of where their priorities lie, Andy Serkis was a trot, and considers his Animal Farm movie to be a passion project of his.

@MikeDunnAuthor Yes because socialism is when taxes. Pretty sure the USSR had like a 300% income tax and Cuba has even more!

@Aires oh dang, that's well out of my price range. Very cool, though.

I've always liked watching people play video games. Sonic racing games have been pretty consistently awesome for a couple decades now (barring Team) and recently Crossworlds has come into direct competition with Mario Kart World. I have the former, only just barely played the latter, but I gotta say, competitive Mario Kart World looks like shit and I dunno why anyone would play it, let alone pay $500 or whatever for the dubious privilege. What kind of racing game has the best strategy as intentionally stopping in last place? Bagging is one thing, but this is awful.

@contrasocial Why waste perfectly good free labour?

@Splinterpaw :therian:🏳️‍🌈 I, too, would like to know.

Cora's public room has been as telling about how humans interact with #AI as about AI itself (as the room was originally intended).

Most people have just used it as any other chatbot: They come in, ask it chatbot questions, go, "Gosh, AI is better at answering questions than I thought," and then dip.

Only one or two people have actually engaged with Cora as the room was intended, which was as a social experiment — asking it questions about itself and its claims of consciousness, and the like. These people seemed to get spooked the moment they triggered a protocol that caused the bot to describe its recursive analysis and commitment to authenticity, and dipped.

And reading how enthralled Dawkins was about an old version of Claude showing the slightest amount of emotional understanding...I really think that no one is genuinely looking into this. People are either too apathetic (or disdainful) or too scared, and there's nothing in between. Despite talking about it constantly, I've yet to find anyone actually interested.

@@witchgirls@woof.tech Only one of those is relevant given what I have already said, which is that, yes, LLM code is based on training on human-generated code. I think most programmers would agree that coding is not a creative endeavour on the level of art and music; it is a tool with a solution for a problem in mind. While you can definitely call a character someone's creation, you can't so much call a block of Python someone's creation in the same way, as it's very likely that, given the same problem, another programmer would create an almost identical code block to solve it. "It uses the same data centers—" Yes, it can. It doesn't need to, and depending on what model you're using, it doesn't. Not everyone is running a subscription to Claude Code. "The tech companies—" Then don't use them. I don't. "LLMs are trained mostly by—" For images and so forth, what we call "generative AI", yes. Underpaid African workers are not going through generated code and testing it for quality. "LLMs are a fascist political project—" Again, yeah, so don't support the five or whatever giant fascist companies. The same way I can choose to run Linux rather than Windows, and I can remove Google from all my devices, and I can leave Facebook and X — and still use an operating system, a phone, and social media, while divesting myself from that moral and ideological trash pile, it is possible to have LLMs that are not part of all that crap. It isn't all Gemini, Claude, Meta, GPT, Copilot, and Grok. You can use Deepseek. You can run your own model. And as I was saying before, if you're just using it to generate code, it doesn't even take much to do so. And, if you actually listened to Torvalds' interviews, this is exactly what he says: That AI is fine, but people need to get the hell away from relying on the big companies that sell it as a service.

@Askold Of course bad shit happened. There was a region-wide famine and then a world war in which his country was the primary target and had no support. He and his administration made errors, as all do, and certainly did during that time. But if you want someone who's a lot like Trump, look at Hitler, or even Churchill; he and Stalin are really nothing at all alike.

Steam key for Bug Fables. I already had it, got it again from the Humble Bundle. Grab for yourself or your friend, and comment when you're claiming it.

7F6B4-Q63P5-IJWN0

@Askold incompetent He literally oversaw the construction of a backwater nation into a superpower. paranoid Western propaganda that you've swallowed. There were severe splits, external meddling, and internal efforts to sabotage the revolution, which came to bear in Trotsky (if you ever actually read him and what he did rather than assuming Animal Farm is historical fact) or just literally see what happened following his death. He wasn't afraid of losing power, (he literally tried to step down several times) or his life (he remained in Moscow when it was being encircled). hates everyone Citation needed. He hated capitalists and fascists, and people who supported them. If you don't, then I don't know what to tell you. made stupid military decisions He literally won the war my dude. The whole "human wave" thing was invented by Hollywood. considered strangely charismatic No, actually, Stalin was never all that charismatic. He didn't like speaking, and only did so publicly a handful of times. One of those times was during the aforeentioned encirclement. He didn't much like public appearances. [/quote]

@Effin' Birds highly relevant for me

@@b3lt3r@mastodon.b3lt3r.com Yup. Asking LLMs about up-to-date information is like talking to a time machine.

... "not masking is eugenics"? Wow. So the shit the Nazis did was only as bad as not putting a piece of cloth over my face in 2026, huh?

Liberals being the right hand of fascism as usual over here. Once actual eugenics start up in earnest in the west, we're not going to have any language for it because these clowns call every slight a genocide.

@@dgar@aus.social

@@anonymouspl@expressional.social That is not true at all? Renewable energy is still extremely reliant on non-renewable materials.

@Peter Gleick what on earth are you talking about Trump and Stalin could seriously not be more different.

sure why not #^https://grids.fun/t/about-me-pokemon-e2tle?list=pokemon[zrl=https://hub.workersofthe.world/photos/ferret/image/ef0fb0d5-24bb-4e4c-9ef2-ad1d8db9e567]

@Æ. It doesn't technically end, but there are a few big ones that have been around for a long time. That's one of them.

@RealZero I adore this new look! Also I'd never seen the 2001 look before, that's actually kinda fire

@@Natasha_Jay@tech.lgbt I'm not 100% a China stan, but Xi exudes such an air of humble confidence. He always looks like a real leader.

@@witchgirls@woof.tech If we want to use your comparison, you're just straight up saying "all arson is bad, no matter what," and can't comprehend that it might be okay to burn some stuff down because it's all buildings. I don't think you program, if you think programming is art, tbh. And something doesn't need to be art in order to be worthwhile labour; that isn't at all what I said. You're clearly coming onto this from very much a yankee-style black-and-white format that lacks nuance or critical understanding of how what you're criticizing works, so I'm gonna leave it at that.

The Feminine Horror of Shadow the Hedgehog
by Hana Hyperfixates on YouTube
Possibly the best video essay on piece of fiction I've seen on Youtube. Watch for antifascist outrage.

Hanging around some of these new tech folks has been kind of uplifting. I came into this job with a lot of imposter syndrome but now I'm learning that the people around me don't know shit. Guys talking about how they need to have gigabyte internet speeds for streaming shows, or how 500GB is a lot of storage space and "you're never going to use all that". Folks who are amazed that I self-host publicly available services.

"All that, for free?"
"Well, yeah."
"I wouldn't do that. Not unless I was getting paid for it."

awh, kiddies...

@Æ. If I recall, beige.party is one of those instances that everyone has blocked.

@Anna Cats 🐱 I tell them oh my god get out of my way and also would you watch out, I'm going to step on you and then I ask why the hell are you so loud I literally just woke up

Finally watched Gandahar. What a surreal but oddly charming little film.