Tom Morris

Eternally damned techno-priest heretic, curly brace balancer, and pesky citation requester.

Public Key

npub187cryu7vlwfmgad5mgddh3msjhjejqg7knxn604nygqv604qge5q7x3rzp

NIP-05 Address

tommorris@mastodon-social.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsrlvpjw0x0hya5wk6d5xkmcacfteveqy0tfnfa86ejyqxd86syv6qpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ekk7um5wgh8qatz8w6e4m

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

relay.mostr.pub

Author Public Key

npub187cryu7vlwfmgad5mgddh3msjhjejqg7knxn604nygqv604qge5q7x3rzp

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-10-27 08:03:10 UTC

Major company assures people who bought expensive but defective smartphone that they will actually follow the Consumer Rights Act.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c893zwlev2xpo

2026-10-25 06:30:51 UTC

The magical thing about the current moment is people can write 3,000 word essays on how AI is changing software development and just plop “I’ve never written any code btw” in the middle of it and carry on regardless without any shame or self-doubt.
Like, I don’t rock up to an oncology conference and start telling them about helping patients through chemo, but maybe I would if I had the unearned self-confidence of a digital transformation consultant with a $20/mo ChatGPT account.
Unbelievable.

2026-10-22 15:39:58 UTC

Infosec this week
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/117/485/307/289/218/950/original/afd26e1fca945c16.png

2026-10-14 12:45:24 UTC

Radical idea: if a company is approved to supply products or services to the British government, and an employment tribunal determines they have engaged in discrimination, or unfair dismissal, or unlawful deduction of wages (or various other breaches of employment law), that company should be suspended from being a government supplier as an incentive to get them to follow the damn law.

2026-10-09 12:34:26 UTC

This looks remarkably useful - a collection of loads of those little "I need to convert JSON to TOML" type tools that you randomly search for, all as an offline PWA.
https://inbrowser.app

2026-10-09 09:20:13 UTC

I am watching a video where two people talk to one another in English. One of them is an Australian and the other is British.
I am watching it on a computer and browser with all the locale settings as English, UK or en-GB etc. My IP geolocates to the UK and I'm not using a VPN etc.
Under the video is an AI-generated transcript which is all in Hebrew, except the RTL settings are all wrong so it renders badly.
I know, let's have computers autonomously make more consequential decisions.

2026-09-30 16:28:12 UTC

Remember those stories about people driving halfway across Europe because their satnav made a mistake, and at no point did they think “I’m trying to get from Italy to Spain, why am in Calais getting a ferry across the English Channel?”
Thankfully people don’t get misled into thinking computers are omniscient anymore. Society has learned to be way more cautious about technology. Except if your job title contains the word “Chief” and “Officer” or “Senior” and “Manager”.

2026-09-09 07:32:20 UTC

The exact same thing is true of queer people online. The scary online world has been very comforting for LGBT people, while the “safer” offline world is taking a massive turn against us, based on lies pushed by grifting moral entrepreneurs.
Almost every time moral panics take hold, LGBT people have reason to be concerned. Every online safety mechanism ends up being controlled by people who do not care about our safety or wellbeing.
#nevent1q…q9x7

2026-08-03 16:03:42 UTC

In a few years time, we'll have a massive cybersecurity crisis that breaks important civilian infrastructure—emergency services, payment networks, food logistics etc.
Politicians will trot out "it's so complicated!" excuses. Hucksters will say AI caused it/could have solved it etc.
Meanwhile, people who recreationally run *BSD on their toaster will point to the NVD giving up on CVE enrichment and everyone that knows how computers work being made redundant. And nobody will listen. Yawn.

2026-07-24 19:16:36 UTC

“AI can build software as good as an average developer from 2026”
So it can build a giant pile of overly complex shit that barely works and uses up all my RAM for absolutely no discernible reasons. Good job.

2026-07-19 14:26:55 UTC

"The generative AI systems are bad, but the predictive ones are useful!"
Nope. Every time someone tries to build predictive algorithms for use in the criminal justice system, it takes a very small amount of effort to scratch the surface and find it is just a technological wrapper for discrimination, usually based on race.
Algorithms for bail, sentencing, offender risk management, predictive policing etc: discrimination masked behind automation bias.
https://breachmedia.ca/black-prisoners-are-assigned-harsher-living-conditions-in-ontario-jails-thanks-to-ai/

2026-07-19 13:27:52 UTC

Apparently, AI-enabled software development involves... waiting for a guy called Tibo to tweet that you can write software again.
Letting one or two venture-backed and unprofitable companies (led by the sort of people who tell themselves sci-fi ghost stories around a fire and then fail to realise they are fiction) be a chokepoint over the world's entire software development processes seems... somewhat ill-advised.
https://codex-resets.com/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/946/863/816/987/794/original/141f2014101273d0.webp

2026-07-15 16:34:22 UTC

Just to give an idea how LLM nonsense is affecting #Wikipedia, perhaps a quarter of threads on ANI, the Administrators' Noticeboard for Incidents, involve LLM use—either crap articles generated by LLMs, or people using LLMs to write extremely wordy, unhelpful replies to concerns about their behaviour.
That's a huge externality right there - whatever uses AI tech has, it has enabled a DDoS attack on the hardworking volunteers trying to maintain the commons-based project the damn LLMs trained on.

2026-07-15 12:32:12 UTC

A few months ago, the Metropolitan Police Federation objected to the use of Palantir's AI-based surveillance tech to monitor officers to prevent corruption/misbehaviour (after Sarah Everard, can't imagine why...), on the basis that police officers deserve some privacy (and Article 8 rights) while off-duty.
They're remarkably silent on whether ordinary innocent-until-proven-guilty Londoners deserve similar privacy protections against live facial recognition cameras.
https://metfed.org.uk/news/mpf-statement-on-use-of-ai-to-monitor-police-officers

2026-07-14 08:29:31 UTC

Pervert glasses wearers are unhappy about being described as pervert glasses wearers. Oh well.
https://www.engadget.com/2212604/the-meta-glasses-backlash-is-changing-how-or-if-people-use-them/

2026-07-10 13:20:01 UTC

I shall give Ann Widdecombe as much respect in death as she gave LGBT people during her life.
Almost none, in other words.
Save us from the mawkish tributes from hacks. Oh, she was nice to you at a dinner party and gave lots of money to donkey sanctuaries… I do not give a toss.

2026-07-03 08:38:33 UTC

DCMS leaving X. This is good. After all, the only culture left on X is the type one studies in a Petri dish in a secure laboratory.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jul/02/lisa-nandy-culture-social-media-x-abuse-misinformation

2026-07-02 08:19:12 UTC

It’s pretty close to journalistic malpractice to do a piece on “how AI (whatever that means) is affecting {some profession, e.g teaching}” and not talk to the people who work in that field.
Literally saw a piece broadcast a few weeks ago and they talk to someone at Google about AI in Google Classroom but don’t talk to any actual teachers.
The people doing the job know their own reality in a way even the most honest tech folk never will, and the corporate sales droids are not honest tech folk.

2026-06-28 09:54:52 UTC

Apparently, some people are very unhappy about Burnham's suggestion of moving more of government north.
As a Londoner, I'd be more than happy to have fewer politicians here. Mancunians, Liverpudlians, Glaswegians, Brummies: please, take some politicians. They're a damn nuisance.
Also, forcing them to have to use some of our country's expensive and abysmally shit trains might prompt some soul searching.

2026-06-25 08:48:39 UTC

American AI company who paid $1.5 billion to authors for infringement of their intellectual property rights alleges rival infringed their intellectual property rights.
The representative for cosmic irony was last spotted unconscious in an alley after drinking an entire bottle of vodka.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyklykn5dwo

2026-06-18 17:03:34 UTC

The good digital sovereignty: the bit where governments host their own critical infrastructure (to avoid the US shutting it down) and use reasonable open source alternatives to expensive commercial software.
The bad digital sovereignty: the bit where technically clueless politicians get hustled at Davos into thinking bad ideas are actually good because they're hosted in a data centre in Amsterdam rather than one in Virginia.
If only we could talk in specifics rather than generalities.

2026-06-17 21:26:21 UTC

Why do I need a large language model to get a list of World Cup fixtures?
If only there were some way to publish information on sports matches in a standardised human and machine readable format that could be delivered through an international network of computers.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/767/543/362/171/189/original/dc63324ddfa0f172.png

2026-06-17 07:48:11 UTC

Been listening to testimony from ethnic minorities caught up in the Belfast race riots explaining how they feared the possibility of death and violence.
Perhaps the politicians who have humoured all this anti-immigration horror show could explain to them that they had to go through mortal fear of their lives because rioters had “legitimate concerns”.

2026-06-16 17:43:34 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…w3h4 I did, and it's... wild.

2026-06-16 15:03:29 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…w3h4 Given how terrible it makes the mother look, the true mystery to me is why she wrote the piece or agreed to have it published.

2026-06-16 14:07:57 UTC

We've seen the revving up of narcissistic "woe is me for having to put up with my child's queerness" nonsense for trans people, and now the same glossy magazine-style sympathy treatment is being rolled out for plain old homophobia too.
Because the opposite story is worth telling: "someone who is supposed to love me treated my earnest attempt to share an important aspect of my life and identity as equivalent to my own death and dealing with the sheer narcissism of that is a whole thing".
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/760/106/713/893/248/original/f76ac0def21b6e08.png

2026-06-15 13:17:06 UTC

I'd say "think-of-the-children online harms legislation accidentally harms closeted queer teenagers" but I couldn't possibly justify the use of the word 'accidentally' in that statement.
It is deliberate. Moral panic derived internet 'safety' legislation harms young queer people by making it harder to get help from support services and the wider community. These days, this is deliberate. They deliberately want to hurt queer people.

2026-06-13 08:11:33 UTC

A sad indictment of the AI buzzchasing corporate husk #Mozilla has become.
"Leadership was convinced that the people in our Community were just customers, and maybe fans. This pissed off so, so many folk, and rightly so. They had given hours or years of effort and time without compensation, because they believed they were part of a larger effort."
https://blog.unitedheroes.net/5751

2026-06-12 11:46:24 UTC

"One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms" (H.L. Mencken)
This is more than a few horse-laughs (and a very large AWS bill) pointed in the direction of the most fervent agentic AI enthusiasts.
https://lantian.pub/en/article/fun/ai-agent-bankrupted-their-operator-scan-dn42lantian.lantian/

2026-06-10 11:05:22 UTC

We need to massively ramp up enforcement of consumer rights protections. If you pay money for a software product, a company shouldn't just be able to lock you out of using it.
https://www.theverge.com/news/947518/microsoft-office-2019-for-mac-end-of-support-no-edit

2026-05-15 06:58:04 UTC

Parliamentarians are welcoming the ability of AI to scrutinise bills so they can spend more time on their core competencies - day drinking, and explaining why drinking at work is actually totally fine.

2026-05-08 07:41:48 UTC

Every so often, someone writes an essay about how AI is inherently fascist and the standard reaction is "sure, interesting, but perhaps a little much".
Meanwhile corporations are now using algorithms to mask the accents of ESL speakers at call centres because god forbid someone hear an accent that's different from their own.
https://mobilesyrup.com/2026/05/06/telus-digital-using-ai-to-mask-accents-of-offshore-workers/

2026-04-27 07:11:09 UTC

When someone tells me we need to replace unpleasant American surveillance tech with the exact same thing but open source and hosted in a data centre in Brussels.
My heart swells with pride when we can get the drone murder decider running on a GPU in a Welsh AI growth zone with a picture of the Queen Mother on the side. It’s very important that human rights are undermined by your own government rather than a foreign corporation, after all. #SovereignTech
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/475/385/599/305/929/original/1e9c50ddedd4e4d5.jpeg

2026-04-23 18:35:41 UTC

$ cat metaverse_strategy.txt | sed "s/metaverse/agentic AI/g" > ./ai_strategy.txt

2026-04-21 16:40:41 UTC

Was reading a AI coding thread, and saw someone describe how they're using Claude to change a function signature and all the code that calls it.
They're gonna freak when they learn about the refactoring functions built into IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ, or these days into LSP. Or just the old reliable faves, grep and sed.

2026-04-17 08:20:30 UTC

If you buy a chainsaw or a bicycle or a power drill, and you don’t spend time learning how to operate it properly, harm may come to you. If you give your child a chainsaw or a bicycle or a power drill without imparting said understanding, great harm may come to them too.
Somehow we’ve decided computers are different and this is a problem we need the government to fix by breaking computers for people who do know how to use them.

2026-03-31 16:32:20 UTC

The OnlyOffice vs Euro-Office dispute is ridiculous. A requirement to preserve a trademarked logo (use of which is conveniently excluded from the license grant) is not within the scope of the "reasonable legal notices or author attribution" requirement of (A)GPL 3+ IMO.
(A)GPL 3 defines legal notice—copyright notice, disclaimer of warranty etc.
FSF spent a decade moaning about the advertising clause in the original BSD license, they're not going to accidentally reintroduce one in (A)GPL 3.

2026-03-31 12:38:52 UTC

Years ago, software developers came up with the metaphor of "tech debt" to describe all the important corners one cuts—code quality, maintainability, testing, documentation, security—when in a rush.
The metaphor no longer works as a warning, since we've got a managerial class that likes tech debt so much they've made a fully leveraged, collateralised tech debt market, with derivatives and futures, and entire teams dreaming up exciting new ways of getting into even more tech debt.

2026-03-04 16:18:07 UTC

Luddites are just fighting the inevitable. The metaverse is the future. Especially when combined with NFTs.

2026-03-04 12:29:37 UTC

Removing physical buttons from hardware was one of the worst product design decisions in history and everyone involved should be publicly shamed.

2026-02-21 09:38:17 UTC

Can't imagine why the American tourism industry is in freefall.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/21/karen-newton-valid-visa-detained-ice

2026-02-20 11:33:17 UTC

The NHS has decided that apps are more usable than websites so everything must be in an app now.
The great thing about this is having to do family tech support on “how do I get the letter my consultant sent to my GP that lists my follow up appointments out of The App and print the damn thing out?”
Which is remarkably hard to do, despite the fact the NHS App wraps a third party web view that then just shows a PDF.
But, yes, apps are a lot better than the web. Because reasons. [citation needed]

2026-02-20 09:22:45 UTC

Jesus, the entire #OnlineSafetyAct regime barely scratches “big tech” but causes innumerable headaches for small website operators. That’s the entire point.
If you want to hurt “big tech”, go after their cash money. Enforce competition law. Enforce really strong privacy laws. That hurts them far more than age verification nonsense or getting irate about 15-year-olds watching too much TikTok.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdr2gm4y4ygo

2026-02-17 11:51:25 UTC

My "this emerging technology is nothing like blockchain or the metaverse" t-shirt is raising questions already answered by the t-shirt.

2026-02-03 12:10:29 UTC

Mozilla still haven't provided any numbers showing the existing "AI" stuff in Firefox is being well received by users.
Again, if the telemetry data told a positive story, they'd be singing from the rooftops about it. It is perfectly reasonable to infer from @nprofile…8ksv's silence that the existing work is a flop... and a giant distraction from the actual supposed purpose of making a great browser.

2026-01-26 08:08:11 UTC

There are people who are directors of five companies and that’s considered a good work ethic. But if you’re an ordinary person and work two jobs to make some more money, the powers that be start calling it “fraud”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy09qx1nz1qo

2026-01-20 14:04:15 UTC

Man with a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Chicago discovers supply and demand.
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2026/01/20/ai-boom-could-falter-without-wider-adoption-microsoft-chief-satya-nadella-warns/

2026-01-17 08:47:12 UTC

"The fact that a black market can sell illicit substances to a small minority cannot possibly be the justification to make abuse of the substance a legitimate mainstream habit."
Always good when the reductio ad absurdum that university debaters would use to point out the silliness of the war on drugs is actually government policy.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3387lrz5g4o

2026-01-16 12:03:24 UTC

The future of software development is Gemini adding and removing the "status/needs-triage" tag from an issue on GitHub 5,000 times.
Gemini is made by Google, a company once famous for incredibly high quality software engineering.
https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16723

2026-01-13 18:47:58 UTC

- reply

Before people start shouting at me, I use Signal. It’s the least bad of a series of bad options.
The main thing that would improve it would be allowing people to sign up without having to use what’s basically a government issued IP address for legacy call routing.

2026-01-13 18:42:02 UTC

“Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike wants to do for AI what he did for messaging”
Require you to sign up with your bloody phone number? Flog you a shitcoin?
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/01/signal-creator-moxie-marlinspike-wants-to-do-for-ai-what-he-did-for-messaging/

2026-01-13 09:24:46 UTC

It’d be incredibly useful to have a list of every MP who publicly supported the #OnlineSafetyAct, alongside their current views regarding the Grok/Xitter situation, and whether they continue to post on the Nazi deepfake CSAM website.
Match up past statements, current statements and actual behaviour.

2026-01-10 08:12:28 UTC

We’re barely into the second week of January and OpenAI have already got a strong entry for worst idea of the year.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpqy29d0yjgo

2026-01-07 11:35:19 UTC

According to Newsnight, the UK government say they can't block X—despite the deepfake CSAM—because people could evade such a ban using VPNs.
But the #OnlineSafetyAct is working just fine even though people can use VPNs to avoid having to upload photos of their passport (etc.) to some shady unregulated age verification company.
The UK government's internet policies are totally rational and coherent. Nothing to see here. Please don't ask us any more annoying critical questions.

2025-12-31 09:40:35 UTC

I very much hope 2026 is the year when corporate criminals who unjustly enrich themselves to the tune of millions of pounds—dodgy PPE spivs, Post Office executives etc.—end up getting at least the same kind of treatment from the government as, say, those who went a fiver over the earnings limit for Carer’s Allowance.
Won’t hold my breath though.

2025-12-24 11:45:46 UTC

I'd be curious to see a Venn diagram showing the overlap between people mentioned in the Panama Papers and the Epstein Papers.

2025-12-17 07:52:29 UTC

George Osborne - the man who gave us austerity - has gone to OpenAI. His experience at the British Museum is invaluable, combining their long tradition of exploiting the cultural artefacts of marginalised peoples with failing to secure the contents of the museum.
Also he was pushing crypto nonsense up until about a week ago. Perfect.

2025-12-16 12:27:28 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…7vc6 literally every programmer worth their salt will write a crappy little script that randomly fires off some templated queries to the chatbot a few times a day.

2025-12-14 09:07:58 UTC

Government departments are unable to get off nazi social media, but we can totally pass a law to stop 15 year olds.

2025-12-13 18:33:47 UTC

Spoke to a former colleague recently. Their employer monitors employee AI use and wants to see number go up.
Since the obligatory AI nannying, multiple product teams have fallen apart and they’ve stopped delivering new features of value while users are leaving.
A whole layer of middle management are destroying good products to make a Potemkin village of fake automation to justify their bosses buying crap enterprise software. It’s as if the entire industry had their heads kicked in by a donkey.

2025-11-26 10:45:30 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…59m0 Haven't tried it - don't really need k8s (yet) - mostly use containers for cross compilation/running unit tests etc. on mutliple OSes and architectures.

2025-11-25 12:55:16 UTC

Docker Desktop apparently now has an AI chatbot built in. And, no, you can't turn it off because fuck you.
You know what doesn't have an AI chatbot built in? chroot. LXC. Podman. FreeBSD jails. Literally every other attempt at OS-level virtualization in the last 40 or so years.
Why I need an AI chatbot for taking some software on a Mac and running it in a Linux container, I have no idea.
No more confirmation is needed: we're in a goddamn bubble.

2025-11-16 08:13:29 UTC

For advocates of the #OnlineSafetyAct, having other people’s passports, driving licences or other government issued IDs leaked is collateral damage they can tolerate.
Presumably they’ll be quite cheesed off when it happens to them. (I am hoping they’re smart and just use a VPN instead.)
This is entirely predictable and also incredibly stupid.
#nevent1q…0z93

2025-11-03 12:01:00 UTC

Parliament is today debating the Public Office (Accountability) Bill. It introduces new criminal offences, including one forbidding public authorities and officers from misleading the public.
MPs are not considered "public officials", nor are elected members of local councils. Thankfully, they only rarely mislead the public about serious matters. And on the rare occasion they do, they are properly disciplined so as to not require any threat of criminal punishment.

2025-10-30 08:20:47 UTC

Imagine how much more stupid this story could have been had the government injected AI into the nation’s veins?
Also, the UK government are ransacking advanced passenger information from airlines for tax and benefits enforcement. They’ll be just as respectful of privacy promises on #DigitalID, I’m sure.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/30/uk-woman-who-booked-oslo-flight-but-did-not-fly-loses-child-benefit-because-she-emigrated

2025-10-29 17:25:42 UTC

Satya Nadella says AI use is "no longer optional".
Microsoft lays off 15,000 employees in the last year.
And today Azure shits itself. Enjoy.

2025-10-19 13:42:50 UTC

A programmer wrote a function. It worked.
An OOP Design Patterns enthusiast came along and turned it into a class.
Then they wrote a Builder to instantiate the class.
Then a Factory to set up the Builder.
Then an Adapter to wrap the Factory.
Then a Strategy to select the Adapter.
Then a Visitor to query the Strategies.
Then a Proxy to abstract the Visitor.
Then a DI framework to select different Proxies, Strategies, Visitors, Adapters and Factories.
Now there's a bug nobody can fix.

2025-10-17 07:58:27 UTC

Enforcing the minimum wage, and publicly naming the employers who stole money they owed to their employees - love to see it.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/6-million-repaid-to-workers-as-government-cracks-down-on-employers-underpaying-their-staff

2025-10-09 09:08:24 UTC

Oh, look, the entirely predictable consequences of age verification that everyone said would happen. Bravo for all involved with the #OnlineSafetyAct.
https://www.theverge.com/news/797051/discord-government-ids-leaked-data-breach

2025-10-07 14:49:19 UTC

Microservices adds lots of benefits to the development process like:
- network call overhead for every operation
- more cloud infrastructure to manage—IAM policy writing, costs accounting, etc.—on all those services
- submitting PRs on 50 Git repos in order to make cross-cutting changes
- reimplementing a type system in a YAML file
- buying developer laptops with 64GB of RAM to spin up 50 containers to replicate the functionality previously provided by a damn bash script

2025-08-28 09:23:31 UTC

"LLMs allow dead (or non-verbal) people to speak" - spiritualism/channelling
"what happens when the AI turns us all into paperclips?" - end times prophecy
"AI will be able to magically predict everything" - astrology/tarot cards
"...what if you're wrong? The AI will punish you for lacking faith in Bayesian stats" - Pascal's wager
"It'll fix climate change!" - stewardship theology
Turns out studying religion comes in handy for understanding supposedly 'rationalist' ideas about AI.

2025-06-20 10:00:27 UTC

Genuinely useful thing someone could build as extension to existing feed readers (like FreshRSS): topic clustering. Find all the posts from feeds you are subscribed to that are about the same thing.
Could be as simple as “do thy all link to the same source?” combined with some named entity recognition.
The alternative to dominance of The Algorithm (controlled by search or social media giants) isn’t no algorithms, it is open source filtering/clustering/prioritisation etc. controlled by users.

2025-06-15 08:47:47 UTC

Good news: GitHub Copilot is scared shitless of the concept of gender.
Instead of foo, bar and baz, use “genderqueer”, “demisexual” and “leather_daddy” and you’ll reduce the likelihood of getting a spammy PR from a sad robot.
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/72603

2025-06-11 10:46:55 UTC

LLM-based search will rule. Have a bot, that has been trained on bullshit, incorrectly summarise ten AI-generated bullshit SEO spam links rather than generate novel AI SEO spam bullshit—clearly a route to accurate and reliable information.

2025-05-30 11:53:04 UTC

AI company CEOs: "we're concerned that our souped-up version of Siri might accidentally turn out to be a deity that might hack into nuclear missile silos and kill everyone. That said, this is definitely the future. And we need to cram $10/month AI feature subscriptions into everything so we can help create the conditions for communing with the reincarnated techno-Jesus and/or get capital from Masayoshi Son."
Commentators: "There's a depressing lack of nuance in discussions around AI."

2025-05-30 08:46:24 UTC

Misunderstanding simple emails was a function previously done by senior managers with MBA degrees. Now the computer can do it for you.
https://mastodon.social/@verge/114595883663423193

2025-05-27 10:04:00 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…fe8t @nprofile…x759 ah... they already exist. And rather lack waterproof-ness and privacy (both physical and electronic). Wonder how many people actually use them.

2025-05-26 17:13:42 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…x759 the giant blue boxes look like an excellent place to sit inside when it is raining to while away the afternoon consuming substances of varying levels of legality while also having enough bandwidth to stream your favourite TV shows in 8K.
Can’t imagine why any local residents would have the temerity to object.

2025-05-26 10:10:07 UTC

My take on AI energy consumption FWIW is roughly as follows:
1. We won’t know until companies tell us. They won’t tell the truth unless forced.
2. It is reasonable to assume it is quite bad because if it weren’t, the companies would say.
3. The damage GenAI is causing to our epistemic environment is the most worrying issue for me. We can (and should) build renewable energy, but a broken epistemic ecosystem has grim social consequences and is very hard to fix.
https://mamot.fr/@Khrys/114569802947548969

2025-05-24 14:17:27 UTC

Nick Clegg says that a law requiring tech companies to ask permission to train AI on copyrighted work would ‘kill’ the industry, according to The Times.
Okay, maybe let it die then. Maybe we can get back to building tech that actually works rather than hyping up hallucinating plagiarism machines in order to fluff up corporate quarterly reports.
If generative AI just went away tomorrow, it would be a net positive for the world.

2025-05-21 09:40:13 UTC

A thing I’ve been thinking about: when someone says “this is a good use case for generative/agentic AI”, that’s usually a sign that the process could be improved.
Like, people use LLMs to write overly fluffy covering letters for job applications. OK, just have an application form.
Or people use LLMs to understand errors when coding. Okay, that’s a sign to make the error handling more readable/helpful. E.g. the Rust compiler has pretty excellent errors compared to “syntax error on line 37”.

2025-05-19 10:40:24 UTC

We deeply care about your privacy, which is why we are sharing data on exactly which buttons you click while using our website with 1,000 closely selected industry partners including Totally Not Evil Inc, a subsidiary of Nothing To See Here International.

2025-04-25 17:56:14 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…28h9 @nprofile…x759 Context: the Act has much lighter rules for below-the-line comments on articles by established press and broadcast media compared to others.
The justification for this—"the need to safeguard media freedom outweighs the limited risks that may be posed in any comment sections", apparently.
If the people who run independent hobbyist forums talking about cycling etc. wanted their media freedom safeguarded, they need the deep pockets and political influence of a newspaper baron.

2025-04-25 17:31:32 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…x759 Excellent lobbying on the part of the press to get an exemption from the OSA.
Funny how the Murdoch-owned press was very strongly in favour of the age limits on teenagers using social media. Absolutely no business incentive for existing media to crush new media/social media.

2025-04-25 08:32:19 UTC

Perplexity is garbage software produced by awful people. As they have nothing but contempt for users, I wish them nothing but failure.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/perplexity-ceo-says-its-browser-will-track-everything-users-do-online-to-sell-hyper-personalized-ads/

2025-04-23 14:16:21 UTC

NiceGUI is a pretty neat GUI prototyping/RAD/hack-it-together tool in Python.
There's choices I wouldn't necessarily make (e.g. Tailwind) and practices you wouldn't necessarily want in production code... but if you have some data and want it rendered in a browser or a WebView app (for personal or internal use) with minimal faff, it's really quite handy.
I needed to do a little data visualisation thing—got a rough prototype working in 75 quite hacky lines of Python.
https://nicegui.io/

2025-04-18 12:28:12 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…x759 I am glad artificial meat and fish is a thing for people (whether they identify as vegetarians/vegans) who wish to have a meat-like experience but have reasons (ethical, environmental, religious etc.) they'd rather not eat meat.
I mostly have "I don't really like it" reasons for, and have no desire for not-meat things to taste like meat.
(I'm used to my preferences being out-of-step with the majority...)

2025-04-18 12:14:19 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…x759 reminds me - there's a chain in London, Bleecker St, that used to do a pretty good tofu burger. It was just a slab of fried tofu slathered in hot sauce. They've replaced it with some hi-tech fake meat thing now, but 'twas good.
https://ldnveggieburger.com/2014/11/26/bleecker-st-burger/

2025-03-18 07:05:16 UTC

Ofcom guidance: "service providers should not host or permit content on your service that directs or encourages child users to circumvent the age assurance process or the access controls, for example by providing information about, or links to, a virtual private network (VPN) which may be used by children to circumvent the relevant processes."
If you run a forum about technology, say, your #OnlineSafetyAct obligations include censoring discussions of VPNs, Tor or other privacy-preserving tech.

2025-03-08 19:02:30 UTC

News from the unending "kids shouldn't be using smartphones" debate.
The Commons debated a private members' bill this week. It is one of the strangest bits of tech-related UK law I've seen recently. Given how silly the #OnlineSafetyAct, that says something.
https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3778
It would simply the UK's Chief Medical Officers to "prepare and publish advice for parents and carers on the use of smartphones and social media use by children".
Why on earth does that need primary legislation...?

2025-02-20 12:00:49 UTC

“A person who is good at programming computers is naturally clever and able to transfer that cleverness to solving problems in any domain without any need for education, training or experience” has to be one of the silliest idea of recent decades.
I know a fair few programmers who now successfully do other things, all of which took time and effort (and sometimes formal education/training) to get good at. There are transferable skills, but programming is not a magic cheat code for smartness.

2025-02-05 20:50:53 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…x759 fun hypothetical time: Person A operates an old school mailing list through email server S1. Person B archives mailing list traffic on web server S2 for public view.
For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate we are reasonably confident S1 is out of scope based on the email exception.
S2 though, 🤷‍♂️ dunno m8.
On the jurisdictional scope question, is B supposed to decide that on the basis of accesss logs to S2? Or email domains? Again 🤷‍♂️

2025-01-31 13:03:50 UTC

“Apple iPhone sales dip despite AI rollout”
Dunno, maybe AI generally and Apple Intelligence specifically are things which people either don’t care about or actively want to turn off.
Microsoft have had to spend millions in advertising to try to convince people they want Copilot in spite of the fact they very much don’t.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn57l2nreglo

2025-01-28 10:12:47 UTC

OpenStreetMap is a thing. OrganicMaps is free and doesn’t spy on you. Enjoy.
https://flipboard.com/@forbes/breaking-news-0a3e6bmaz/-/a-tKVkm5FfT3CEp94eXm87Ig%3Aa%3A3199486-%2F0

2025-01-20 19:22:08 UTC

"We just let the AI decide—if someone is unhappy with it, they can appeal/request a human review" seems to be one of the ways people are arguing for the use of AIs by public bodies or courts.
But if the protection for those whose case is being decided is the ability to appeal/request human review, you don't neeed an AI, you can just have a random number generator tossing a proverbial coin.
`return random.choice(["claimant", "defendant"])` uses a lot less energy than an ML model.

2025-01-18 13:32:57 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…x759 would it even work as an assignment without the necessary formalities?
can’t imagine our courts would be keen on reading such a dramatic and sweeping effect into a click-wrap, if push came to shove etc.

2025-01-09 09:23:30 UTC

Every teeny tiny forum owner and Mastodon instance operator: “how is the OSA gonna apply to my site? Very concerned about this”
Facebook: “fuck it, go wild kids, we do not care”

2025-01-04 10:03:10 UTC

In 2028, the entirety of Western society took the advice of LinkedIn influencer guys and podcast bros and gave up their jobs and professions to pursue the life of being e-book marketing influencers.
We no longer had doctors, nurses, bin collectors, teachers, shelf stockers, plumbers, bakers and so on—just people selling AI-generated e-books to one another about how you can make money selling AI-generated e-books, with a side hustle in referral codes for undrinkable green vitamin juice.

2025-01-02 07:53:50 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…x759 in the deep distant past, I remember subscribing to a podcast where they had a separate low quality feed. Think it was something like 64kbps MP3 while the normal quality was 128.
The overhead of managing is likely grossly disproportionate to the number of people who will use it.
When I’m in a context with minimal bandwidth, I don’t download podcasts and listen to one of the thousands I already have cached.

2024-12-29 11:01:10 UTC

Just saw that mastodon.social blocked a #Nostr bridge called Mostr.
I had a look at the trending posts on Nostr. Most are pumping cryptocoins of some description, or spamming crappy AI art.
Imagine all the worst TikTok/Instagram reels/Facebook Pages slop but posted exclusively by the sort of people who put "blockchain entrepreneur, AI thought leader, Forbes contributor" on their LinkedIn bios. Pure dogshit.