← Feed

Posts

• View post

  It has only now occurred to me to construct a joke about a carny being the only person trained to manage a clown and his circus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carny

• View post

  Charlie swimming in the spectacularly clear water of Lake Ontari’io. #dogs #dogsoffedi #dogsofmastodon #canada #ontario

• View post

  It is said of Russia, “Every country has a Mafia, but with Russia, the Mafia has a country.” And it is said of the United States, “Every country has a parasitic billionaire class, but with the USA, the parasitic billionaire class has a country.”

• View post

  Polish Tophat Dandy and Polish Tophat Punk. 🎩🐔 @sundogplanets@mastodon.social

• View post

  The Agile Manifesto: We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value: - Individuals and interactions over processes and tools - Working software over comprehensive documentation - Customer collaboration over contract negotiation - Responding to change over following a plan That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. https://agilemanifesto.org (1 of 2)

• View post

  Bard Mehldau met JS Bach. And it was good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-6Ts64lm9g

• View post

  Blackmailing into silence those who point out dangers to patient safety is a *totally normal* way to handle the rollout of a system that you sincerely believe is a radical improvement in medical care. https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/mayo-clinic-whistleblower-says-staff-015900709.html https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/07/09/lawsuit-alleges-mayo-clinic-cut-corners-with-ai 🎩 @whiskeysailor@reefahoy.boats

• View post

  Coming soon: Defunding public education in favour of vouchers that redirect tax dollars to consumption pricing from tech companies. It is highly significant that Mr. Miklas’s pitch implies that giving money to AI vendors is better than kids sitting in classrooms being taught by humans. Just another step towards dismantling everything that actually made America great in favour of restoring the Gilded Age. https://xcancel.com/ycombinator/status/2079963722253214112#m

• View post

  “What could be more disrespectful to the Homeric works Musk claims to love than stripping them of humanism that has made them immortal. Musk's ideal Odyssey is one rendered entirely in the hallucination of a computer that, like him, is unable to comprehend the very story it is telling, without the intimacy of human art and labor… As far as art is concerned, it's worth less than the water a data center polluted to make it.” Rolling Stone’s Nikki McCann Ramirez is taking no prisoners.

• View post

  “You people are never happy. You asked for us to be inclusive, and here we are including Nazis, a reviled and persecuted group! Also, who the hell is this Karl Popper you keep mumbling about?" —The Firefix Media Team #mozilla #firefox #twitter

• View post

  "We took a little time away from the Nazi Bar, but we noticed there's less pushback now for partying with the fash. So, back inside we go. Something-something, aren't-we-virtuous." #firefox #twitter #mozilla

• View post

  “I no longer think freedom and democracy are compatible.” —Peter Thiel, Fascist Translation to English: “In order for the .01% to do whatever the fuck we want, we must strip the 99.99% of their rights, their freedoms, and especially, their ability to form governments that place any limitations on our power, whatsoever.”

• View post

  RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116935681120949448 > comments that say "this is bad to do" and then doing it right away. AI may not actually think, but it writes and comments code exactly like a human—to be more specific, a human trapped in a feature factory where good code and sustainable architecture is always “something we’ll fix later,” in a calendar that doesn’t have a month named “Later.” 🧵

• View post

  “I never assumed that some huge clanking monster would stride down Fifth Avenue, devouring New York; I always feared that my own TV set or iron or toaster would, in the privacy of my apartment, when no one else was around to help me, announce to me that they had taken over, and here was a list of rules I was to obey. I never like the idea of doing what a machine says. I hate having to salute something built in a factory.” —Philip K. Dick discussing “Service Call” https://theworlddickmade.com/s...

• View post

  “I recently read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was oddly sad to read. The enthusiasm and optimistic view of open source and the future of software and craftsmanship. Looking at it in 2026… incredibly sad. “Forget the bazaar. Back to the cathedral.” —bitbasher on Hacker News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar 1/2

• View post

  Recently, I was asked to attend a two-day course in “spec-driven development with agentic AI”. If you’ve not heard of it, spec-driven development is the idea that waterfall software development is good, actually, as long as you do it fast enough. —@samir@mastodon.functional.computer https://functional.computer/blog/llms-cant-program

• View post

  Back in the 🍁 Day: 2015-07-01

• View post

  WAY back in the day: Expo 67 in Montréal. That experience planted a seed that grew into the idea that one can be proud of one’s country and culture while welcoming and admiring other countries and their cultures. Happy Canada Day, and wherever you are… I hope you feel the same way about your place in the rich, varied tapestry that is humanity.

• View post

  “For my fellow citizens, the law. For our oppressors, everything.”

• View post

  Just because it’s old enough to vote doesn’t mean it’s wrong:

• View post

  “The US is also a one-party state. But with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.” —Dr. Julius Nyerere, first President of Tanzania

• View post

  RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116821892237077177 To paraphrase the late Marjane Satrapi: "The difference between Buffalo Springfield and America is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between Gil Scott-Heron and America is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our Americas are very much the same."

• View post

  And just like that—surprise!—one AI company bails out another AI company's grift. Google agreeing to rent compute from xAI (cough, "SpaceX") magically makes them eligible for inclusion in the S&P500. Americans, they are looting your life savings, the ones you earned through labour that they are gleefully replacing. Your descendants will never have the chance you had. https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/05/google-will-pay-spacex-920m-per-month-for-compute/

• View post

  A joke I used to tell every coöp student and early-career person I interviewed: “We only hire senior developers. The trick is, we hire them earlier in their careers.” The same thing, without trying to be hip: “Senior engineers are what you get when you hire a junior, give them interesting problems, surround them with people who know more than they do, and wait. That's it.” https://andrewmurphy.io/blog/ai-didnt-kill-your-junior-pipeline-you-did 👇🏽

• View post

  AI is the great regression to the mean. AI works best with English that looks like other English. It works best with code in languages where it has read the most code and the most words about code. AI leverages its training set. More training material is better. So it creates local optima where everything looks the same. It's ideal for organizations that value fungibility. That's not surprising, it appeals to those who want to eliminate the idiosyncrasies and unique gifts.

• View post

  How do ya like them apples? 🧢 @jd

• View post

  What AI has taught me is how poorly equipped most leadership teams are to assess, manage, and lead disruptive transformation. It's not just that some companies are trapped, unable to adopt the change. It's also that some companies are trapped into bungling the adoption in catastrophic ways.

• View post

  RE: https://mas.to/@carnage4life/116579065965977226 If everyone else is reporting 85% success, and since surely we're doing as well as our peers, we can get away with reporting success based on the people's subjective assessments. We certainly wouldn't expect that saying we're betting the company on AI and firing the naysayers to distort the incentive to be truthful.

• View post

  The Bullshitosphere is not new. Nicholas Negroponte built the Media Lab on its border. Wired Magazine was its State Medium for a decade. TED built a media empire within it. AI is not "the same old same old," it's different. https://www.todayintabs.com/p/it-s-lamer-than-you-think But what everything within the Bullshitosphere has in common is pandering to a culture hungry for cheat codes and the feeling that we found a crack in the universe that lets the light in. What...

• View post

  The shrill whistles that Americans use to alert their neighbourhoods of invasions by brownshirts should inspire us to find collective ways to alert the public when someone is wearing RayBan/Meta glasses in public spaces. It's upskirt photography all over again.