Posts by angusm@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #AtI4mzhbR4jTR4r8SW by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-04-20T18:26:35Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
@futurebird Saying “the Internet is dead” is problematic for all the reasons you cite … but maybe “how MUCH of the Internet is dead?” is a more interesting question. What percentage of content is never seen by humans (AI slop, SEObait, random automated data etc)? What percentage of traffic is pointless bot activity, spam, click-fraud attempts etc? How much storage is devoted to duplicate data, unwatched videos & pics from everyone’s phones etc?It may not be dead, but there’s a lot of decay.
(DIR) Post #Au1bbx3xT1Resr2kDY by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-05-12T16:49:20Z
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@bruces Has BlueSky joined Discord in auto-suspending anyone who uses "CP” as an abbreviation for "cyberpunk”?
(DIR) Post #Au5sUpqYNFdOKSo03M by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-05-14T19:04:01Z
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@foone @pluralistic AI + Windows 98? There's a whole untapped seam of retro-cyberpunk waiting to be explored there."The sky above the port was the color of a Netscape 1.0 browser window, displaying an empty page …”"No one can tell you what the Matrix is. You have to … squeeeeee crackle crackle hissssss ding ding ding … log on and experience it yourself. At 14.4 baud.”
(DIR) Post #AuDsx4rVZK0Wv2CT7w by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-05-18T15:47:16Z
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@futurebird I was just thinking that things that ought to last ought to last forever, and thinks that shouldn't last should disappear as soon as they're no longer needed.Instead we get expensive devices that break the next day & can't be fixed, and 'disposable' plastic bottles that can't be disposed of because they’re all but immortal.Designed-in repairability & a culture of repair is an essential part of realizing the first part of the goal.
(DIR) Post #Auf01WUhS0iEoLMV2e by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-05-30T21:03:20Z
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I just referred to books written before the advent of generative AI as "the low-background steel of literature" and I’m not convinced it's a bad analogy.
(DIR) Post #AvGFc1HmWojAiOQDuC by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-06-18T16:08:28Z
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@Fledglingnerd @pluralistic A libertarian friend came to stay and spent about four uninterrupted hours trying to persuade me of the superiority of libertarianism. At the end of it, he was thirsty and went to get a glass of water from the tap. He stopped and said “Is the water here OK to drink?”It was 2AM and my filters had long since checked out. Without thinking, I just said “That depends on who bought the water company.”To his credit, he laughed and said “Touché.”
(DIR) Post #AvHeDeYm3ym9IHo9M8 by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-06-18T22:28:41Z
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Proof, once again, that ad networks are basically cross-site-scripting-as-a-service (XSSaaS).https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/114706420510048756
(DIR) Post #AvIX8zB7TJCRGvWyJc by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-06-19T18:00:40Z
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I just learned today that our galaxy is apparently located inside a vast region of unusually low matter density called the KBC Supervoid (more prosaically, the Local Hole).Which I guess means that wherever you scream, you are in fact screaming into the Void.Also, KBC Supervoid would make a really good band name. Just saying.
(DIR) Post #AvK6IE7ixxahmf2p84 by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-06-20T12:13:02Z
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Apparently, protesters have started throwing glitter at ICE agents. You can picture the scene at home.Agent's wife: Why do you have glitter all over you?Agent (sweating anxiously): I … I went to a strip club with the guys. And … I got a lap dance from a stripper.Wife: Huh. I guess that's OK then. For a moment I was worried that you'd started working for ICE.
(DIR) Post #Avpig2skMFkZAIl9Zw by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-07-05T15:30:56Z
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It is #caturday, and this is Frankie, who we are looking after for a few days while his regular fosterer is out of town.Frankie is a delight: affectionate, playful, well-behaved, easy-going, and absolutely beautiful, with elegant gray tabby markings. I do not understand why this cat has not been adopted yet.His one defect is that he pretends to be more erudite than he is. That’s not his library behind him, it’s mine. As far as I know, he doesn't even know how to read.#cats #CatsOfMastodon
(DIR) Post #AwVxLMMOg1HFNne57A by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-07-25T18:47:27Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
@jack_daniel @pluralistic Reminds me of one of my favorite sysadmin jokes:The Sysadmin Wilderness Survival Kit consists of a couple of meters of fiber in a carrying pouch and a small shovel.If you’re ever lost in the wilderness, you take out the fiber and bury it under a few feet of earth.Within two days, a backhoe will appear and cut the fiber, and then you just follow the backhoe back to civilization.
(DIR) Post #Awf0cd95lPFceNo6Ge by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-07-30T11:51:29Z
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Antivirus, except that instead of detecting viruses, it alerts you every time a commercial software vendor attempts to sneak "AI" features onto your computer.
(DIR) Post #AwfIM0uJxm6Sb97lVA by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-07-30T14:43:21Z
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@catsalad @pluralistic I had to annotate my couch to answer the question that my colleagues asked in Zoom meetings.
(DIR) Post #Ax8hbEvkEyZas5z9BA by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-08-13T15:40:51Z
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A colleague just referred to “My friend Copilot.” A former manager talks about “My friend ChatGPT”. Are they joking? Sure, but there’s something significant about the choice of that word ‘friend’. People are building parasocial relationships with these things, helped no doubt by the fact that they’re engineered to encourage exactly that.No wonder our judgement about when we can trust them is so bad. We don’t doubt our friends (mostly).Chatbots are a social engineering attack.#LLMs #AI
(DIR) Post #Azbgqjk0dvswmPpEHo by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-10-26T12:10:30Z
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“Hi! Your OS here! See that red badge demanding your attention?”"What is it?”"It's sports news! Isn't that great?”"I don't give a shit about sports. How do I turn it off?”"If you're not interested in sports, you can customize the alerts to show something you ARE interested in.”"I'm interested in an OS that does what I tell it. One that works for me. That doesn't track me or try to ‘maximize engagement’ or sell me crap or nag me about using AI or whatever. Got anything for that?”“…”
(DIR) Post #B0MyxIsaMFOX5omuBs by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-11-18T12:19:07Z
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@hn50 @cstross Turns out that CDN stands for "Can't Download Nothing”.
(DIR) Post #B0NAnAAV5bR0d86ASW by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-11-18T14:12:24Z
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@geerlingguy Eventually, the FBI figured out that all the recent high-profile Internet outages were actually the result of hacks carried out by Jeff Geerling as part of a plot to sell more "It was DNS” T-shirts."I hope that shirt's available in orange,” quipped the arresting agent as the cuffs snapped on …
(DIR) Post #B0NAnCSIaOrNiuRPTk by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-11-18T14:23:12Z
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@geerlingguyWe could probably monitor the health of the global Internet just by tracking your T-shirt sales. Any sudden spike indicates a major outage somewhere.It's like being able to tell when the US is about to launch a major military action by tracking the number of pizzas delivered to the Pentagon: a loosely-coupled, but generally reliable indicator.
(DIR) Post #B1NolUJunJCLHUpiWe by angusm@mastodon.social
2025-12-18T12:36:38Z
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@cstross “Gee, condoms are a bit pricey these days, I guess I better just start a family,” thought no one ever.
(DIR) Post #B21HPa95sKoIKnBbmK by angusm@mastodon.social
2026-01-06T14:20:26Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@pluralistic Somebody finally invented "Tech Debt as a Service”.