Posts by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #AmoDtmTET1D0ARuhCy by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2024-10-08T21:29:28Z
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@foone we want to make sure that we don't discriminate against you for your sexual orientation. So please, help us, the people who might discriminate against you, not do that by telling us what your sexual orientation is. We also forgot to include asexual. Whoopsiedoodle!
(DIR) Post #ApyfknLo9JOCEHpMSe by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-01-11T16:10:14Z
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@stux lately, I've been obsessed with those sorts of use cases too. Non-federated or intrenet/lan-only networks.
(DIR) Post #Aq4Ib101PuzFfOlS1g by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2024-04-02T18:21:34Z
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@foone @cadey If you told me that some software could open those anyway because of a weird quirk in the pdf specification, I'd have no choice but to believe you.
(DIR) Post #Aq980UHbYDUK1RjQlE by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-01-16T17:12:14Z
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@lain worse, every few months *I* forget why and refresh my memory by probing into it, because I have the memory of a goldfish.
(DIR) Post #AsQ0RomTz0mpApJ5mq by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-03-25T16:23:36Z
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@futurebird @WhyNotZoidberg people treat the major gaps in information about Minoans as an excuse to make shit up in their head. And sometimes Minoans are to liberals what Romans are to conservatives. I think the truth is more interesting than our idealizations (I'm also obsessed with Minoans just the same and love their art style).
(DIR) Post #Asx7JuJO2AIRKTk1M8 by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-04-10T15:46:04Z
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@futurebird Awesome! I will actually use this.I also made a horrible thing that makes numbers, but it's base-4 and shows how to say numbers in Ventureño Chumash and some other languages (you can even type it in hex, like 0xF) https://thomasjwebb.github.io/baseFour/
(DIR) Post #AvG46HUTe37QD81Vya by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-06-18T14:53:48Z
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@Nonilex well, that went precisely as we all knew it would *sigh*
(DIR) Post #Ax2j9i7r8L6WGqtKbo by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-08-10T19:49:43Z
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It's wild that some people in the tech industry *want* us to believe that they have sapient beings running on their computers which, if true, would make them guilty of slavery.
(DIR) Post #Ax2j9myp5LqjKHhgiu by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-08-10T20:51:59Z
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"I'm a villain from a dystopian sci-fi. Gimme money!" is a weird angle and weirder that it sells to a certain audience who we're led to believe are experts at putting money in all the right places.
(DIR) Post #Ay3TvQzEnjOqhu4PRI by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-09-10T00:05:51Z
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@rolenthedeep it's like someone screaming "you'll never make it making weird music like this!" and the local band not being able to hear them over the delighted screams of the audience.
(DIR) Post #AynlZkKPtXfsPnQDFA by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-10-02T14:42:35Z
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@futurebird I worked on an app for a company that provided people with a fun way to make content (more fun than genai imo). It had a cult following for awhile, but any attempt to have a social media around it didn't make sense because people never want to stick to just one way of making content. At best, you're one of many ways to make content for already-popular social media. At the end of the day genai tools and what we made both are the same kind of software as imgflip, replaceable.
(DIR) Post #AyoXelyG0j8Sl0WGhs by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-10-02T23:41:25Z
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@futurebird I think that might just be a variant of radicchio? Are you talking about the narrow kind of shape, not curly endive?
(DIR) Post #AysAFg07Y6WUglILnk by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-10-04T17:38:01Z
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@futurebird it’s also often used as an argument that guns aren’t that dangerous, playing into people’s intuition that private pools are generally safe. But I think both private pools and guns in homes are heavily dependent on safety procedures that many people neglect. The gun equivalent of a public pool would be a shooting range with instructors and safety measures.I don’t like private pools because they’re bad for the environment. (Guns also are; they should ban lead bullets).
(DIR) Post #Ayyj21pWFsdlgEK6yW by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-10-07T21:35:50Z
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@futurebird dammit you had me until that last line because I was wondering how we'd go about making them behave. It seems like there must be agricultural uses of them. Like who knows, maybe one of their cultivated fungi are delicious.
(DIR) Post #Az8RX2MoS9syjE8EeO by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-10-12T14:06:59Z
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@futurebird I very much relate to this. I go out of my way to find people who want things I don't want anymore rather than dropping off at goodwill in hopes that it won't just end up in a landfill. I will even make a point of doing repairs on it if needed first. It makes sense environmentally but that's not the whole story.This is one thing I like about old stuff. Because it's often designed to be repaired ("they don't make it like they used to" is partly survivorship bias but not just that).
(DIR) Post #B0AinLzRqkdMRKjgvI by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-11-12T14:21:59Z
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@futurebird it was, but sadly I don't get any signal here, at least not with the cheap antenna I had.
(DIR) Post #B1ZvXo77hg2OezY0Tw by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-12-24T16:04:43Z
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@futurebird it's also very misleading when you think about what a person is. The LLM doesn't train itself on your input and eventually the things you said fall out of its context window. You don't get to know it and it doesn't get to know you. Any "he" there is ephemeral.I might feel differently if it ran on my machine and continually gets trained by me. As it is, nearly any life form or colony has more personhood than it. My sourdough starter is a character. An off-the-shelf LLM model isn't.
(DIR) Post #B1Zyw215xrn4aiyEeu by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-12-24T16:31:29Z
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@neckspike @futurebird yeah and humans are easily fooled by language. We fail to see the intelligence in animals that can't talk to us, but we spuriously see it in a chatbot.There are more subtle forms of this, some of which probably harmless others kinda iffy. Like corporate mascots or creators creating parasocial illusions.
(DIR) Post #B1gfLV2mXbtOseLUvY by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-12-27T22:06:10Z
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@futurebird I relate! My turtle brumates and it makes me miss her. The good thing about brumation is it's also not as total as hibernation. But I usually don't catch her right as she gets up to drink water, but just see the aftermath (water gone, her in a different position).
(DIR) Post #B1kIobRAKTkOnFV0bo by thomasjwebb@mastodon.social
2025-12-29T16:11:58Z
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@aral Hitler is a person but colonialism isn't. I think an equivalent might be would you kill Christopher Columbus (which wouldn't be sufficient to stop colonialism, but would have saved many Taino lives). It's just so easy to kill a baby. Like no one talks about going back to stop antisemitism because that's a much broader thing.So I think the real issue is that stopping evil never actually looks like killing a baby. It's always a lot more involved. Hitler didn't even start the Nazi party.