tess

tess, 4 months ago to random

PSA for visual artists:

Nightshade is out!
https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/

Nightshade is an ML-poisoning algorithm that causes models trained with treated images to malfunction. Use in conjunction with Glaze to protect your work and give a big "fuck you" to the capitalists stealing your shit for their own profit.

#mastoart

tess, 7 months ago to random

Proud to be on Marc Andreessen's enemies list

Tag yourself, I'm "tech ethics"

tess, 3 months ago to random

If your EVs aren't selling maybe that's because you're making giant fucking trucks and SUVs and hyper-expensive luxury sedans and the kind of people who want EVs mostly just want a compact car for getting to work and running errands.

Just sayin'.

tess, 10 months ago to random

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of Mastodons

tess, 3 months ago to random

iRobot facing "death" because it only has 46% of the market is bonkers to me; capitalism has forgotten what to do with a mature company.

"We sell vacuums to half the population" is no longer a valid business model, evidently.

tess, 8 months ago to random

Has anyone (other than me) proposed making bottom-posting the default when quote-boosts are implemented?

Bottom-posting is IMO the difference between "hey look at this" culture and "yes, and..." culture. It's a small difference, but I think it frames conversations in a very different way.

tess, 11 months ago to random

Given that the streaming services are now permanently memory-holing shows for tax write-offs, it becomes a moral imperative to pirate these shows (if only for archival purposes).

Headline: "Paramount+ Cancels Second Season of Star Trek: Prodigy, Will Remove Series from Platform"

https://www.tor.com/2023/06/23/paramount-cancels-star-trek-prodigy/

tess, 10 months ago to random

Even acknowledging the dick-measuring (figurative and literal) and strutting about from these absurd billionaire manchildren lends credence to the core ideas of the current hypermasculine neofascist movement.

I do not care about Musk's hog, or how ripped Zuckerburg suddenly is, or who would win in a fight. Men with unlimited money and free time can surely mold their bodies to whatever ideal is fashionable to their most base worshippers.

The only valid reaction to any of this is derision.

tess, 5 months ago to random

Just saw a post that contained the line: "most of the people on Mastodon are here for ideological or privacy reasons"

I want to be clear: I'm here to talk to cool people and shitpost.

I do care about features, because they make it easier to talk to cool people and shitpost.

tess, 3 months ago to random

If you told me a year ago that right-wingers would be upset because a football team from red state middle America beat a football team from San Francisco and one of the players on the winning team was a straight white man who was dating a famous, conventionally attractive straight white woman country singer...

I would believe you, because the Right is irrational and conspiracy theories don't have to make sense.

But it's also a useful demonstration of how fascism eventually comes for its own.

tess, 9 months ago to random

You know what? I'm gonna say it louder for the folks in the back:

THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT WRITING SOFTWARE THAT MAKES US BETTER THAN ANY OTHER WORKERS.

Tech Workers Stop Thinking We're Somehow Not Workers Like Everyone Else Challenge 2023 (difficulty: quite easy, actually)

tess, 5 months ago to random

Gonna say it again because it's important: negative sentiment about the economy isn't about macroeconomic numbers like employment rate or median wage; it's about the perception of precarity.

The gigification of work, difficulty in finding and affording housing and health care, thrash between remote and mandatory in-office work, and frequent layoffs are making people feel less secure, even if their average purchasing power hasn't actually declined.

tess, 6 months ago to random

I'm seeing some people posting shit like "help your family this Thanksgiving by logging onto their computer switching their default browser from X to Y" and: PLEASE DO NOT FUCKING DO THIS.

Do not switch them from Edge to Chrome. Do not switch them from Chrome to Firefox.

Literally, these are different software environments with different features and access to different data, and if they suddenly cannot log into their bank because they saved their password in Edge, you have just fucked them.

tess, 10 months ago to random

If you see someone spouting bigotry on this platform,

Do:

• file a detailed report
• block them

Do not:

• argue with them on a public thread so that I see bigotry that targets me in my feed

I understand that "drawing out the poison" is sometimes necessary to get a good report, but these tools usually have pretty incriminating post histories.

tess, 2 months ago to random

This slaps.

Indigenous people really just said, "our people need housing; fuck your zoning laws".

https://macleans.ca/society/sen%cc%93a%e1%b8%b5w-vancouver/

tess, 6 months ago to random

The difference between common law and civil code:

tess, 16 days ago to random

manic pixie torment nexus

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/13/24155652/chatgpt-voice-mode-gpt4o-upgrades

tess, 7 days ago to random

Amused at how Altman helped himself to a woman who denied him multiple times, because he was fond of her*, and despite the fact that she was literally the only person in recent history to sue Disney and win - and that no one else in his circle tried to dissuade him (or had enough pull or made enough effort to be successful).

Says a lot about the people at the helm of the "AI revolution".

• or perhaps I should say, "Her"

tess, 9 months ago to random

I posted a rant in someone else's mentions which I regret and then deleted but I need to vent.

I use git every day. I'm very comfortable with git.

Also: git is fucking terrible, and I suspect it's the reason a lot of people get scared away from writing software.

tess, 10 months ago to random

tess, 3 months ago to random

The issue with the bsky bridge isn't that it's opt-out; as people have pointed out much of fedi is opt-out by default.

The problem is: who do you send a moderation report to? The problem is: it's a server which most fedi servers will have to immediately block for basic policy reasons. The problem is: it's a technical solution to a cultural divide.

And, unless things like blocking, muting, and notifications are done very carefully, it will be easy for bad actors to exploit.

tess, 5 months ago to random

Even CNN is picking up the "hey, uh, Netanyahu actually helped fund Hamas to destabilize the peace process" story:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/11/middleeast/qatar-hamas-funds-israel-backing-intl/index.html

tess, 6 months ago to random

Y'all, I think I just figured out a scheme to get rid of all of the Mastodon reply guys.

It's kind of complex, but it involves a fake project to rewrite all of Linux in Rust, permissive software licenses, and possibly forking Edge.

tess, 3 months ago to random

Normally I see people being ridiculous on social media over israel-palestine by equating zionism with judaism (which, as a Jew, sucks).

But a new thing I'm seeing is people defending israel sending special forces dressed up as doctors to assassinate militants in a West Bank hospital (because the guys they killed were "bad")...

How do I explain to people that you don't get an exception from the Geneva Convention because the dudes you war-crimed were naughty?