sam ✅🇬🇪
@sam@chven.us
sam ✅🇬🇪
@sam@chven.us
That's 5D-educational chess.
#FuckGenAI #ChatGPT #GenAIsucksCamelDong
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r/technology
Al's Biggest Threat: Young People W...
4.3k upvotes + 442 comments
| recently heard about a teacher who instead of
trying to circumvent students using ai, which is
impossible, she made assignments by going "ask
ChatGPT to write a report on this subject, and
then research how and why it's wrong".
Not only did the students discover that chatGPT
is extremely wrong a lot of the time, it also lead
them to realize that they should not use it as a
primary source.
"Astronomers discover a cosmic 'fossil' at the edge of our solar system. Is this bad news for 'Planet 9'?"
The sednoid (Sedna-like object)'s orbit limits the possibilities for a large planet past Neptune. Its orbit means a large planet has to be much further out, or has been ejected, because otherwise the newly discovered sednoid's orbit would not be possible
2023 KQ14 is between 220 and 380 kilometers wide
As a "fossil," it is nicknamed "Ammonite"
"I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ - which is so much better"
-found on Bluesky
CC: @avery@mastodon.sdf.org @FediFollows@social.growyourown.services
The answer to your paper title is an emphatic "No", Avi Loeb.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12213
BAHAHAHA oh gosh he's escalated to making alien doomsday predictions!! Though at this point I think many of us would welcome a "hostile" alien takeover in December 2025....
edit: It seems our new overlords might be space fairies! How cool! https://hachyderm.io/@astronomerritt/114867843138275867
@FediTips@social.growyourown.services has some lists of accounts to follow by topic and other useful tips.
And I've also brought back Mastodon's famous "toot" button. Yes, the one with the elephant 😏
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Screenshot of a post in snac2's web UI, buttons' captions are replaced with colour emojis.
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Screenshot of a post in snac2's web UI, text on the submit button is replaced with elephant passing wind.
Fediverse Report – #125
Mastodon has released a new major update with version 4.4, that come with a variety of tweaks to make existing systems smoother, focusing on profiles, lists and some improvement to navigation. The update introduces profile featuring, with adds a ‘featured’ tab to a profile, and allows users to highlight specific hashtags they post about and other accounts they want to promote. Mastodon has also reorganised pinned posts into a carousel, making it quicker to navigate between featured content and recent posts on profiles. Profiles now also show how many people you follow are also following that account. List management also sees some improvements, making it simpler to organise accounts into custom feeds. The audio player also has gotten a visual refresh with better controls and new keyboard shortcuts, and the mobile web interface now features a bottom toolbar that mimics native apps and provides more timeline space.
Mastodon is also adding the long-requested feature of quote posts. However, this will be done in two phases: the current update 4.4 properly displays quote posts made by other fediverse software, such as Misskey. In the next update, 4.5, Mastodon will add the ability to create quote posts as well.An important new features of this update is not mentioned in the announcement post, and are hidden away for server admins to manually opt-in to. Mastodon server admins can now set referral headers, which means that when people click on a link on Mastodon the other side will see that people came from that Mastodon server. Up until now other websites such as news organisations had no insight in how much of their traffic came from Mastodon, which makes marketing departments less likely to invest in platforms like Mastodon. However, since the setting is opt-in and not being promoted that it is worthwhile for Mastodon server admins to turn this setting on, it is unclear how many servers will actually enable the setting.
The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) will go into effect later this month, which has requirements for all platforms that handle user-generated content and have “links with the United Kingdom” to conduct and publish a risk assessment. If a platform is “likely to be accessed by children” and permits pornographic content, the platform is required to implement “highly effective” age verification. Bluesky announced their implementation of such an age verification system this week, and I wrote about the different responses from within the communities to the requirement and implementation. When I asked Mastodon on how they are handling the OSA for the mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers, Mastodon said: “Mastodon gGmbH has made efforts to understand the requirements of the UK Online Safety Act. As a small community-funded non-profit we are still aligning on a way forward for people in the UK who have accounts on our owned/operated Mastodon servers.” Mastodon also referred to work by IFTAS and the Open Rights Group as guidance for other server operators. I personally have found this guide by Russ Garret helpful in understanding the OSA as well. To me it seems likely that at least some fediverse servers would meet the requirements of the OSA to implement an age verification system (IANAL!), and that this will likely be a story that we’ll come back to over the coming weeks.
Link aggregator platform PieFed has added support for a plugin system. This allows people to build extensions and new features for the platform without it having to be integrated into the main codebase. Plugin systems can be powerful for social platforms, but also depend on what plugins people will actually build. Lemmy has also been building a plugin system, which will likely be released as part of their upcoming 1.0 launch later this year. PieFed also released a configuration for Anubis, a system to prevent AI scrapers from accessing a website. Meanwhile, the foundation which hosts the most popular Lemmy server, lemmy.world, has started a PieFed server as well.
Rimu, the developer of PieFed, has also released a demonstration of how scaling over ActivityPub can be more efficient, by bundling activities up in chunks. ActivityPub is a “chatty” protocol, which can quickly result in a large number of requests made over the network. As Rimu explains: “The problem is that if 20 people cast 5 votes and those votes are federated to 500 servers, the instance hosting the community needs to do 20 * 5 * 500 = 50,000 network requests.” By batching the activities into chunks, the number of requests over the network can be significantly lower, at the cost of less-than-realtime federation.
Independent fediverse developer Steve Bate wrote a long article on the state of ActivityPub, focusing on the Client-to-Server part of the protocol, that I think is worth a read. The ActivityPub protocol consists of two major parts: Server-to-Server (S2S) and Client-to-Server (C2S). The S2S part of ActivityPub is concerned with federation: making sure independent servers are compatible by providing a standard format on how different softwares can communicate with each other. This part of ActivityPub is widely used, and when people talk about the ActivityPub protocol, they are almost always exclusively talking about the S2S part of the protocol. The C2S part of the protocol is concerned with how clients (mobile apps for example) can communicate with any fediverse server. This part of ActivityPub is almost unused, and almost no platform in the fediverse supports C2S. Instead, all platforms have developed their own standards for how clients can interoperate with their platform. In practice this means that people building a new microblogging platform on the fediverse will have to implement the Mastodon API in order to make the current apps (for example Ivory or Phanpy) compatible with the new platform. The article by Bate goes into more detail on how this situation came to be, why C2S still matters, and how to move forward with C2S adoption.
The Social Web Foundation is experimenting with a geosocial ActivityPub client. It allows users to log in with their existing fediverse account and check into places. These places are tagged with geo-data, based on OpenStreetMap data that has been translated into ActivityPub format (ActivityStreams 2 objects, technically speaking). The goal of the project is to provide more exposure to parts of ActivityPub that have gotten less attention. It is also an illustration of the problems with C2S mentioned above: testing the new project of the SWF requires a fediverse account on a server that supports C2S, of which there are very few.
Upcoming social networking platform Bonfire is getting closer to an official release, and while the platform is working on getting the software ready for release, major new features are still being added. The latest update adds long-form publishing (the update itself was published on Bonfire), new custom feeds for events and blogs, and more. The challenge with Bonfire has never been a dearth of cool new features however, but to get the platform ready and used by the public.
StartHereSocial is an onboarding service that helps people pick a fediverse server to join. It asks the new user to make a simple choice for their biggest priority: communicating in their own language, connecting with people from the same region, connecting with people over a shared interest or place that is large and reliable. Based on this selection the service shows a curated list of servers to join. The service is created by IFTAS founder Jaz-Michael King, and King also published an accompanying blog post on some of the challenges with helping people onboard to a fediverse server.
GitLab will not be adding ActivityPub to their platform. GitLabis a popular code hosting and collaboration platform that has had a popular feature open for years to add ActivityPub, which also saw quite some work already done by the community on the feature. GitLab said that “While this feature may have merit, we need to prioritize our efforts elsewhere at this time.” Other code collaboration platforms like Forgejo are working on adding ActivityPub support, with some basic social features already implemented.
The WordPress ActivityPub plugin released their v7.0. The update mainly lays groundwork for becoming a fully-integrated fediverse platform, as it features the technical building blocks for managing and sending follow requests from WordPress. These features are not active yet, but show the direction the team is taking: that of making a WordPress blog a fully social part of the fediverse. The team also added support for the new standard for HTTP Signatures, explained in a new blog post.
FediCon 2025 is a new fediverse conference that will be held on August 1-2 in Vancouver, Canada. It features some well-known names within the fediverse community as speakers, including ActivityPub co-author Evan Prodromou, Pixelfed and Loops creator Daniel Supernault, Damon Outlaw and Sean Tilley of WeDistribute, Anuj Ahooja from A New Social, and many more. FediCon is organised by Charles Iliya Krempeaux, also known as @reiver.
The FediForum conference is expanding into the physical world, by partnering with SFSCON, an established free software conference held every year in Italy. FediForum will be hosting a fediverse track for the conference, with the goal of both educating potential new users about the fediverse as well as building more connections within the existing fediverse community.
The Fosstodon server is now owned by a new parent organisation, the Fosstodon Foundation. With it also comes a voting platform for the members of the Fosstodon. The Fosstodon server switched ownership in recent months after the previous admins came under criticism from the wider fediverse community regarding one of their moderators. At the time, I noted that fediverse servers need governance systems that can handle admin burnout better, and creating a foundation as the owners of a community server helps with creating a more sustainable ownership structure for the long-term health of the community.
The Canvas Event was this week, where people could collaborate on artwork by individually placing pixels on a shared canvas. The final result gives an indication of the wide variety of communities that participated and are active within the threadiverse side of the fediverse.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-125/
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detail of a building in Brugge Belgium
Feel free to leave a comment here!
#bodbe #sakartvelo #saqartvelo #georgia #notthatgeorgia #wine #village
Do I know a web designer/WP developer with a library or two in their portfolio? If so, and you are interested in pursuing a library website redesign project, speak up. This is an experiment to see if I can find someone here instead of on LinkedIn.
How many parked (unused) domains do you own? I have an idea and want to know if my assumption is correct.
Boost generously, please.
| None: | 2329 |
| 1-5: | 2627 |
| 6-10: | 382 |
| Over 10: | 233 |
Huge AI blocklist for importing into UBlock Origin.
https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist?tab=readme-ov-file
https://www.androidauthority.com/why-i-use-grapheneos-on-pixel-3575477/
Doctor Anderson woke up to her phone pinging. Careful not to disturb her husband she checked it, and saw that it was a new supernova. She slipped out of bed and went to the kitchen, where she logged into the observation database.
Almost at once she could see something wrong. The report only came from the visible light observatories. None of the radio telescopes - not even the wide-field one - had reported anything.
By morning it was clear that this was not any sort of object that was normally her field of interest. It was, however, not one she was going to stop studying. For starters, it was clearly inside the solar system - well inside the orbit of Jupiter. For another, it was accelerating - at about 1.5G if the repeat observations were correct. It was also getting brighter - a lot brighter, almost as if it were getting bigger.
Her husband found her staring at her laptop in the morning, a half-empty and stone cold cup of tea next to her.
"We have to get the kids up for school."
Without looking up "Can you? I've got something here" she replied.
He looked over her shoulder. "Um, that's not an FRB. Or a supernova," he paused, clearly doing maths in his head "That's a powered trajectory."
"Yep. It's not heading for us, we don't think. It looks like it is planning a slingshot."
"So how come you're heading it up?"
"I spotted the anomalous behaviour first."
"And by anomalous, that it was accelerating."
"And getting brighter. We're re-pointing a couple of the orbital scopes."
"I'll get the kids ready."
"Thanks - you're a wonder."
By the time breakfast was over, she was able to show her family a picture - a flower-shaped object, with a dark core, and fourteen bright petals around it. She printed three of them off, so that the kids and her teacher husband could take them with them.
"Our initial estimate is that it is about two hundred metres across. And it is holding a constant 1.5g acceleration. That is an insane amount of energy."
By tea time, there had been no response to radio transmissions, and there had been no change in the trajectory. The following morning brought a dramatic change, though. Overnight the acceleration had changed to a deceleration.
"It will stop just inside the Mars orbit around about midnight tomorrow. We've got a good look at it now, though."
The petals now appeared bluish, and the dark core now appeared to be a grey colour.
The following night, after getting the family up, all four of them clustered around the laptop watching the feeds from the telescopes as the craft finally slowed to a constant velocity. As they watched, the petals suddenly folded back. A few minutes passed - a sudden burst of violet light - and it was gone.
"Mummy where is it?" the youngest asked.
"I don't know, sweety. I just don't know."
"Did it explode?"
"There's no sign of debris, so no" It had vanished completely..
"Maybe they were recharging their engine."
"Maybe. Maybe."
Thanks for all your work on snac!
I've done a guide to it here: https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-verify-my-account/
TL:DR - If you link to your website from your Mastodon account AND if you link to your Mastodon account from your website with a specific format, the link will turn green on your profile. This also works with two-way linking to accounts on some other platforms.
#saqartvelo #sakartvelo #georgia #bodbe #sighnaghi #kakheti #nottbilisibutheresahashtagfor #tbilisi
Boosting is really important on the Fediverse because it makes whatever you boost federate to the entire servers of all your followers. A boosted public post appears on your followers' timelines, but also becomes searchable to everyone on the servers of your followers.
Instead of an algorithm, the Fediverse relies on human beings sharing stuff they find interesting. This process creates a wonderful chain of discovery.
To boost something here, click the 🔁 or 🚀 button below the post.
In Georgia a few days ago I was wearing the shirt and met some British guys who asked where I'm from. I said "USA, but trying to pretend I'm from Canada."
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drywall screw anchor or whatever it's called
'Knock it off!' Trump ally begs ICE to stop raids as farmers panic - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/knock-it-off-trump-ally-begs-ice-to-stop-raids-as-farmers-panic/
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250618-how-the-grateful-dead-shaped-social-media
I buy a lot of cheap "DIY Electronics" Kits on Aliexpress put them together, the more confusing the more fun it is. But I write up better instructions and observations so if students want to build the same kit they can.
Some kits I do not tell anyone about because they are terrible. But really? Most of them are great. If you don't mind reading a datasheet or doing some detective work.
But I think blogging about "Kit Adventures" might be interesting.
It's amazing the fun you can have.
I like how we took something computers were masters at doing, and somehow fucked it up.
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ChatGPT 40 › 9.11 and 9.9 - which is bigger 9.11 is bigger than 9.9. subtract them To subtract 9.9 from 9.11, you perform the following calculation: 9.11 - 9.9 = 0.21 use python The result of subtracting 9.9 from 9.11 in Python is -0.79. This discrepancy is due to the way floating-point arithmetic is handled in Python, which can lead to small precision errors. The actual intended result should be 0.21. (›-)
In summary, Musk has been boasting about being personally responsible for getting a paedophile elected President of the United States.
But then the paedophile was not 👏gracious👏 enough.👏
Truth Social has crashed from the traffic surge and in so doing accidentally created a hauntingly poignant image.
#audiomo day 2
Hashtag following also allow URLs to RSS feeds of ActivityPub objects (like e.g. https://mastodon.social/tags/ThankYouTuesday).
Users can now configure a webhook to receive an HTTP POST for every notification. This can be useful for implementing bots that react to activities, like autorepliers, chatbots or interactive textual games (see snac(1) for more information).
The number of pending follow confirmations is shown next to the "people" link.
Faster performance metrics (contributed by dandelions).
Improved lowercasing in hashtags (contributed by postscriptum).
A search-by-url tweak for implementations that return 200 for invalid webfinger queries (e.g. piefed).
Mastodon API: added follow confirmation endpoints, fixed collisions in attachment file names.
Fixed potential crashes in attachment uploads.
If you find #snac useful, please consider buying grunfink a coffee or contributing via LiberaPay.
#audiomo day 1
I think this is the first dedicated event about the fediverse by a national political party I can remember. Felt good to be there and discuss how we can improve Mastodon further. Thanks @bjoernsta @eskensaskia @madspankow #rp25 #republica
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Five panelists on a stage and an audience at an event by SPD
Parenting.
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A piece of paper attached to some furniture, with following text printed on:
Mom’s Gone Weekend Rules
* Don't add to the population
* Don't subtract to the population
* Don’t damage or destroy physical property
* Stay out of the hospital, the newspaper and jail
Just now I saw an article describing Bluesky as the “billionaire-proof” social platform - you should have seen my eye roll. Sure, “billionaire-proof” (quote marks necessary) AND funded by the crypto bros at Blockchain Capital.
I wonder if the person who came up with the hype of Bluesky decentralization is the same who built up the myth of Space Karen as a genius.
Sure Jan - but you can’t fool me.
Media literacy and digital literacy are more needed than ever. I miss the late Neil Postman 🥲
edit: most of my posts are missing. I thought they were there after the move, but maybe it was just browser cache? I'll have to hook up the old drive to my laptop and see if I can resync
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