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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri

@perigee@rage.love

hometown 4.0.15+hometown-1.1.1

I'm just this (trans, intersex, nonbinary, queer, mixed, disabled, old, Chinese and white) guy, you know? I'm in the US.

You are welcome to boost, but if you are the sort to check profiles, keep in mind that I live and write in the US. That's my context, so please factor that in.

373 Followers

387 Following

40 Posts

Joined December 19, 2022

My identity:

https://geekblog.malcolmgin.com/about/identity-and-priorities/

My Rate Sheet (bitly -> GDocs):

http://bit.ly/3Iokb7L

How and where to find me:

https://geekblog.malcolmgin.com/about/how-and-where-to-find-me/

Ko-Fi:

https://ko-fi.com/tsaomao

Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@losttourist @zzt @MrBerard "just accept this tiny fragment of shit in your cereal. I promise you'll hardly taste it" (later, having accepted the shit) "now that we've established you'll accept a little shit, all your meals will consist of 50% shit as a cost containment strategy".

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@mmeier @frederic @Binder it's a bitter pill. I think a significant difference is that random strangers being helped by documentation and mentoring are not as emotionally satisfying as helping machines that are engineered to be directly grateful and endlessly complimentary. Which I believe is an intentional, manipulative choice by LLM service providers to encourage loyalty beyond reason.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@maxine@hachyderm.io @davidgerard@circumstances.run I don't know this but I suspect it's related to my experience as an antiracism and social justice and civil rights educator. If I don't establish capitalistic value of my work first (even if I plan to give advice and information pro bono) my advice and information is steadfastly ignored if I give it for free. If I insist it's paid for before giving it, then it is far more likely to be valued when given.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@PixelRobot @zzt I'm sure it won't turn into something devastating later. That never happens in exploitative capitalism.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@baldur@toot.cafe @Binder@petrous.vislae.town watch me compartmentalize the hell out of this while I try to get a job in tech in the US.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@Shrigglepuss @deliberately_me oof the apologists from hapless racists "he's just a good ol' boy, never meanin' no harm" (from the Dukes of Hazzard theme song btw) "he's not truly racist, just edgy" wow I'd forgotten how toxic that stuff quickly gets.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@guffo @zzt I think LLM "AI" and NFT are essentially the same grift, anyway. Just more backers for "AI" who should know better but are too greedy. Same as all the other late stage capitalism grifts and crises in the crumbling empires of the world.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@corbet @untitaker I moderate a fading Discord server with almost 2,000 members but only a handful of active chatters. The server is anti-LLM-based-AI, anti-cryptocurrency. In late 2025 we published a couple of data centric apps and then things petered out. But every couple of weeks or months someone shows up to promote a new framework for our "funding problem" since we are entirely volunteer run, and not a nonprofit. And it is almost always a framework obviously created in "AI". It has the pattern of deluging us with new concepts and buzzwords. And almost always relies on some blockchain implementation to "handle" funding in a money laundering sense. So we do the due diligence, ask clarifying questions, and after 0-1 rounds they ghost us. Every single time. They lose interest or find the challenge of answering pointed questions insurmountable or their pet AI's memory runs out. It's turning into a meme. I agree. Kick them out. They and their temporary machines won't be able to maintain the effort.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@peter @Binder citation: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.04125 Trying to get around my mobile browser's obsessive need to preview hyperlinks is failing. So I can't easily give you doi or arxiv citation format, sorry.

No "Zero-Shot" Without Exponential Data: Pretraining Concept Frequency Determines Multimodal Model Performance

Web-crawled pretraining datasets underlie the impressive "zero-shot" evaluation performance of multimodal models, such as CLIP for classification/retrieval and Stable-Diffusion for image generation. However, it is unclear how meaningful the notion of "zero-shot" generalization is for such multimodal models, as it is not known to what extent their pretraining datasets encompass the downstream concepts targeted for during "zero-shot" evaluation. In this work, we ask: How is the performance of mult

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@evan@cosocial.ca @SistaWendy@toot.cat finding out Banksy's secret identity is gonna be like finding out Fatboy Slim was not more interesting. (He's complex, but not earth shakingly so....)

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@vlrny @NilaJones eminently reasonable. I would be happy to (help) provide info dump material for any of my communities (being spectrum adjacent and having many marginalizations/memberships in marginalized communities, and being an old, I have many resources about very specialized disadvantaged communities).

Samples of topics:

Trans/nonbinary/genderqueer chromosomally and hormonally intersex culture, history, experience
mixed Chinese identity, ancestry, heritage and culture in the US
disability, age, cancer, science, and scientific literacy and research literacy and statistical interpretation of published findings
scientific background and formal education in scientific method, experimental design, data handling and data analytics, and other analytical considerations
food justice, both in terms of access and food deserts, as well as in terms of non mainstream supply chains and things like justice and access to formal and informal certification/vouching for sustainable practices in marginalized communities

Just let me know if such things are useful. I can provide pointers and bibliographies for most. Or would be willing to research and provide during non working hours.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Does anyone on Mastodon understand sound sequencing with StrudelREPL enough to look at code I tried to write (and failed) to procedurally reproduce the Amen Break versus just jamming a string literal in to make it happen?

It's been a few months since I noodled with it but I remember that's where I got stuck and discouraged.

They have a Discord too where I can ask. I just haven't gotten over the Impostor Syndrome hump.

I'm a reasonably skilled programmer, but not practiced with sequencing or thinking like a producer. I have musical training (piano, a tiny bit of violin, ukulele, vocals) but almost no music theory. I do love music of many kinds and love to watch/listen to producers like Andrew Huang, Switch Angel, and DJ Dave (who is a bit like George Elliot was, but to Strudel hacking).

(Boosts welcome!)

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@MTP The one that really grates my cheese is the many view-farming accounts (like LADBible) that constantly repost charming and lovely accounts like the vastly underappreciated Kaplamino account (marble powered Goldberg type machines) from Japan, almost exclusively without linking or giving credit. And I feel like Kaplamino would have to have a mountain of lawyers to take on all the copycats generating traffic with their original content.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@MrBerard @losttourist @zzt my tone is cool. I'm not proposing accepting a slipshod solution because "it's not that bad". It's going to start not that bad and become terrible because we gave it an inch and it will take a mile. As others have said, now is the time to oppose it. Not when it's gotten a foothold.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jonobie thanks for the link. Now I know why I'm warned off nsaids beyond just "you have kidney disease".

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@fasterandworse@hci.social @trobay@todon.eu yeah I want to get OOOUT!

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@venetiana @thief_of_time one of my favorites is Cyteen, by C.J. Cherryh, but it is a psychological thriller and long and clever and the protagonist is a significantly nicer clone of a wicked and abusive original so it's a sustained tension and some abuse is described. So it may skirt your stated preferences. It's not my favorite because if its identity politics, but that's a bonus for me. I like how reading it makes me feel clever and emotionally articulate. Also old school but Le Guin is pretty casual and exploratory about sexuality and identity. And of course, Octavia Butler, especially the xenogenesis series. But because for them, identity was sort of primary in their generation, I guess they're not that casual. Newer school, Elizabeth Bear or Emma Bull have some good casually queer novels. Or at least identity is not the primary plot.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@mawhrin@circumstances.run @baldur@toot.cafe @davidgerard@circumstances.run I helped moderate an anti-"AI" and anti-cryptocurrency Discord in October 2025. Formed via TikTok. Those were the requirements and we got a steady stream of that claim during the whole 4-5 months we stayed relevant. Soul-killing.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@jwcph @chirpbirb can you talk more about your career change?

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@jwcph @chirpbirb and to be honest, at this point? I'd love to pivot my career to consulting as far away from tech as possible. If I could figure out a way not to be involved in the entire industry I suspect my life and satisfaction would be much greater and more reassuring and rewarding for me.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 33mo ago

Replying to

@julia @nicole very similar to the description of one of the most secure, water gapped computers: encased in concrete, unplugged, at the bottom of the deepest part of the ocean.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 41mo ago

Replying to

@aby@aus.social I return the whole lot for the same reasons I don't police how people use monetary charity. My assumption is the wallet represents a request for the money it holds and represents and it belongs to the person whose Id it is. Since I cannot know their circumstances, I do not have the authority to redistribute their wealth. I've been poor, had fancy things, and practiced foolish security. You can be poor or needful and still carry thousands of dollars and have a fancy wallet or a utilitarian one.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net @flowerpot@mas.to caveat: I am spending to get to the protest (and home): public transit. And I planned poorly so all I have to eat at home is cheese. But I will make do there. I do have some likely pantry foods.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@losttourist @zzt @MrBerard I'm neither a hater nor a conspiracy theorist. I just know what evil lurks in the hearts of [humans], especially the exploitative, surveillance capitalists. But hey, if we (FOSS) would choose to comply in advance, I can only assert that I know that in this climate (the geopolitical one) that compliance in advance is a poor idea.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@lottie@social.vlhl.dev this reminds me strongly of the Taskmaster NZ task where Laura stole everyone's girlfriend. https://youtube.com/shorts/ro8xYLqVqpE

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@gloriouscow@oldbytes.space It's definitely a thing where I sit in my circles. I'm very anti-LLM-based-AI. Very skeptical. I was in ML in 2022, just before OpenAI started using and promoting LLMs for unethical uses and exploitative capitalism/con artistry. I now do adversarial prompting as a hobby. It's laughably simple. Anyway, just last year, I had a colleage and workmate whom I worked with on technical contracting (network engineering, security analysis and analytics - our output mostly not tainted by AI slop) who pivoted his consultancy almost entirely to "AI". Pre-"AI", this man was one of the most disciplined and capable technical consultants I knew, and I quite liked working with him even though I'm at root a socialist anarchist trapped in a dying exploitative capitalist empire by my disabilities, and he's a nervous small fish capitalist libertarian swimming in shark infested waters. But now he's all-in with "AI" and cannot see how his machines' mistakes are seriously diluting his intellectual capital and capabilities. I can't make him see it and I've given up trying. It _is_ heartbreaking. And I'm sorry. And I wish I knew what to do, for both your and my sakes.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@greg@wikimedia.social Is this the only opportunity your group is posting? I am looking for ways to get a warm introduction or referral to teams or recruiters within Wikimedia that do security or data analytics or systems/business analysis roles. And as you note, it's very difficult to be notable among the throngs of applicants.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@frogglin @deliberately_me my therapist (trauma) suggested I may be, after all, on the spectrum and then suggested I think about it but not do anything about it. Honestly diabolical. It's been bothering me low level for weeks. Of course I must be. Because at 57 having assumed I wasn't for so long, what am I supposed to do about it?

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 7mo ago

Replying to on discuss.systems

@dan@discuss.systems @sharon@discuss.systems @amanda@discuss.systems @bright_helpings@mspsocial.net For me, an outsider, Cheeto is giving Boothby.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net @flowerpot@mas.to yeah. And I'm bringing cash and maybe a bank card in case I need to buy food. I'm a type 2 diabetic in renal failure. Health is more important than principles. You can do an injustice if it's a matter of survival in most ethical/moral systems. Leftists can be _wild_. Sorry you had to deal with these weird expectations.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@csk Magnificent!

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

ai and art

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social @deliberately_me@blackqueer.life or actually a nearly infinite number of worms.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@marquisdegeek the chances are miniscule that you'll never make it!

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 6mo ago

Replying to

@maxine@hachyderm.io @davidgerard@circumstances.run also there are bosses and project managers who make a career of sabotaging time originally devoted to providing clean documentation, forcing developers who insist on providing it to do it on their own time in the name of "efficiencies" who have existed almost as long as programmers. These folks have consistently contributed to devaluing the work, leading poor managers and profit driven leadership to omit proper documentation from the definition of "complete technical tool or product" such that now customers have to make do with chatbots who are up to 80% accurate and no access to internal "proprietary" or trademarked documentation or notes from the original engineers (if any exist).

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@MrBerard @losttourist @zzt Sorry, couldn't respond earlier due to downtime on my hometown instance. All footholds are footholds. You don't climb a mountain with just one. Life, politics, and tech are a series of moments where we can choose to be mindful and design features where we don't comply with fascism and surveillance capitalism in advance. Or we can sigh and let it slide. I'm not generally a "let is slide" kinda person.

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Mal 甄/kalessin/Peri @perigee@rage.love

· 7mo ago

Replying to

@SecondUniverse@autistics.life @Lana@beige.party I feel like a solipsism pun lives in there somewhere...

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