@graue@social.coop
@graue@social.coop avatar

graue

@graue@social.coop

The tech account of @scott.

Programming stuff here, bikes/transit/local politics over there.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

danluu, to random
@danluu@mastodon.social avatar

How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT:

https://danluu.com/seo-spam/

graue,
@graue@social.coop avatar

@danluu I appreciate this post for making me aware the indie search engine Marginalia existed. https://search.marginalia.nu/ It looks like it'll be a delightful way to find internet gems, depending on topic.

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

Finally, Mastodon is about to have a normal search function that actually works!

Well, almost. You'll have to opt into it by making your account "discoverable," which is off by default. That's not ideal imo because most people will want to be found and not know to turn this on.

Still, progress! You can also opt individual posts out by setting their privacy to "Unlisted."

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26344

luis_in_brief, to random
@luis_in_brief@social.coop avatar

This is just laughably bad, Google.

graue,
@graue@social.coop avatar

@luis_in_brief Oh no, save us. This technology is too powerful and will take over the world

timnitGebru, to random
@timnitGebru@dair-community.social avatar

Good thing they got rid of "don't be evil" am I right?

https://time.com/6966102/google-contract-israel-defense-ministry-gaza-war/

graue,
@graue@social.coop avatar

@timnitGebru "Google recently described its work for the Israeli government as largely for civilian purposes. 'We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for...ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education,' a Google spokesperson told TIME...on April 8. 'Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.'"

So, Google lied.

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

Is it just me or did scrolling with touchpad get way worse in the Firefox update (121 on Linux)? There's way too much inertia: after I release, it keeps scrolling for a long time, past where I wanted to stop. It's making my timeline on here almost unusable

graue,
@graue@social.coop avatar

@cheeaun actually yes, I think. The excessive inertia issue isn't happening in Bluesky. Scrolling my feed or notifications over there is fine.

Sideways scrolling in the boosts carousel is also super jerky now. I can have a carousel with 10 boosts and just do the smallest little two-finger scroll gesture and it goes all the way to the end immediately

graue,
@graue@social.coop avatar

@cheeaun, you didn't change anything recently about scrolling in Phanpy, did you?

I think it's a Firefox change but just checking

graue,
@graue@social.coop avatar

@cheeaun playing around some more, I think this might indeed be Firefox's fault. I don't know another site that uses left/right scrolling, so I'm not sure about that. It's specifically far too sensitive left/right and really messes up the boost carousel, which is the only part of it I can't figure out how to work around. I saw something scroll-related in your recent commits, but if you say it's unrelated, I trust you. Sorry for a false report.

graue, to opensource
@graue@social.coop avatar

Good points by @edward on how the git/GitHub/pull request monoculture is holding us back.

I have an account on Codeberg, the co-operative, fully open source, code hosting site, but it’s basically a GitHub clone—what if, freed from the monopoly, we found better ways to collaborate?

https://blog.edwardloveall.com/lets-make-sure-github-doesnt-become-the-only-option

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

I love that OpenStreetMap supports mapping in so much detail. You can map individual street trees, even individual surveillance cameras. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:man_made%3Dsurveillance

But will there ever be enough volunteer time to maintain those entries? Basic business info seems so out of date. Last week I added a 115-seat theater to OSM that opened in its current location in 2015. It apparently had no presence on the map for 8+ years.

graue,
@graue@social.coop avatar

@Andykmcc It would be cool if there was a fediverse app with functionality similar to Yelp, Foursquare, or Instagram location tagging that integrated with OSM business/point of interest data and allowed making updates.

enobacon, to random
@enobacon@urbanists.social avatar

wow Perl is getting fancy

graue,
@graue@social.coop avatar

@enobacon are they still not on Perl 6? that's sad.

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

@phanpy feedback: I'd like to be able to collapse the follow requests at the top of notifications.

I always have a backlog of follow requests since it's so tedious to go through them (having to open each original profile in a new tab to see any posts). The follow requests take up almost all my vertical screen space, making it hard to see the latest notifications.

This is my biggest pain point in an otherwise excellent app, thank you; grouping of threads/boosts is amazing.

jalcine, to random
@jalcine@todon.eu avatar

> Open Source has become synonymous with GitHub, and we are too small to change that.

https://www.pypy.org/posts/2023/12/pypy-moved-to-git-github.html

I hate that this has become the (accepted) case. And it feels like the routine one for so many other projects (commerical is better because yes it is, fuck you, it's in English)

graue,
@graue@social.coop avatar

@jalcine We've gotta start calling it Microsoft GitHub. I think people would have a very different reaction if it were explicitly stated that open source had become synonymous with a Microsoft product.

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

AI can't take over the world, because someone can just unplug the computer. And that's it. Problem solved. It requires constant human labor to keep the overhyped technologies marketed as AI running.

Now, there are wealthy, powerful people who want to keep those computers plugged in. They have lots of resources to use to prevent us unplugging them, even trick us into believing it's a bad idea to try. But that's a different problem, and an old one. That's not an AI problem. Just capitalism.

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

@cheeaun @phanpy Suggestion: Either modals should not change the URL, or closing the modal should "pop" the location history, so that my Back button doesn't reopen a modal I just closed.

(I've been working around this by using the Back button to get out of modals, but this is awkward and doesn't always work because the profile preview modal that slides up doesn't change the location, unlike the others.)

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

Any suggestions for an inexpensive service to send mail for a small (<100 person) Mastodon server? (Email confirmation at signup, etc)

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

New paper finds most "open source AI" isn't open. Even when it is, "the resources needed to build AI from scratch, and to deploy large AI systems at scale, remain in the hands of a few large companies."

This is my worry about AI. Not the dumb idea that it's going to decide to kill all humans 🙄 but the increased concentration of corporate power it's giving rise to right now.

QT @Mer__edith https://mastodon.world/

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

“we must extend the useful life of our computing devices”

Doing my best. I had my last iPhone for 5 years until it got stolen, and my laptop is even older, though its wifi interface and resume from hibernation are starting to get pretty flaky.

QT @Brendanjones https://fosstodon.org/@Brendanjones/111175916953831081

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

I'm probably the most pessimistic about technology I've been.

2015: lots of tech companies are fine. Even Facebook is a reformed evil company that's not that bad now. We're [I worked there] helping people connect!

2021: for-profit tech is bad, but we can collectivize technology for the greater good! Co-op all the things!

2023: a lot of tech is inherently centralizing, which tends to centralize power and alienate us from one another, and has little value other than that.

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

Something @pluralistic said at yesterday’s book talk that stuck with me: cryptocurrency is an attempt to replace human trust with math. Yet when the Ethereum team and their early adopters got scammed out of $50 million via a smart contract bug, it was trust that saved them: they all agreed to fork the ledger.

Somehow their takeaway was “we really need to be careful not to write bugs” and not: “trust is better than math.”

kagan, to security
@kagan@wandering.shop avatar

Oh, great. Computer security researchers have developed a proof-of-concept for a type of ransomware that would act when you try to upload a file. It would be able to encrypt any files in the folder you uploaded from, and any subfolders of it.

This is a proof-of-concept; the researchers have not seen any such attacks in the wild. But stay careful out there, okay?

Affects Chrome and Edge, but not Firefox or Safari!

https://theconversation.com/cybersecurity-researchers-spotlight-a-new-ransomware-threat-be-careful-where-you-upload-files-219560

graue,
@graue@social.coop avatar

@kagan What were they thinking with this File System API?! This offers no benefit that's worth opening this new attack vector. Web apps could already "open" and "save" files by selecting them for upload and download. I hope Firefox doesn't implement this and the W3C retracts the draft.

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

More programmers should take liberal arts classes or read postmodern novels... learn to move beyond the idea there's one objectively correct answer to everything

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

"If you focus on the present... you see in terrifying clarity that generative AI isn't a society-altering technology, but another form of efficiency-driving cloud computing software that benefits a relatively small niche of people." https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/

graue, to random
@graue@social.coop avatar

Web standards seem so haphazard. Neither Date nor Intl.DateTimeFormat has any method built in to handle the string format used by <input type="datetime">. There has also been a standard <progress> bar for a decade but there's still no consistent way to style it, so no one uses it.

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