But have you signed up for the Thunderbird Appointment beta yet?

appointment.day

About the mass layoff at fly.io last month, which I just learned about (see my last boost, gts.thewordnerd.info/@nolan/st…), I don't know what to make of this except that they must have recklessly tried to grow too fast. Anyway, it makes me much less inclined to use this infrastructure provider, especially since a friend was one of the ones laid off.

Nolan Darilek

2024-08-29 15:54:30

Well, that's a first. Today I was part of a mass layoff at fly.io.

I guess the only consolation, if you can in fact call it that, is that most of my team seems to have gotten laid off too, including my manager. So it didn't have anything to do with me.

Still processing everything, but I was planning on leaving Texas next year and this definitely messes with those plans.

I'm not anywhere near dire financial straights, so there's that, but as someone with a severe disability I'm used to exploitative employment situations, and Fly wasn't that, so I don't know where I'll look next if I want to avoid the "hire disabled folks because they're desperate" trap.

Gonna keep breathing, taking it one day at a time. That's all I can do right now.

From a Mailing List:

As some of you may already know, System76 is working on their new Linux graphical interface, the COSMIC desktop. They have created a form with some questions related to accessibility. If anyone is interested in participating in the survey, please access the address below:

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAI…

#accessibility #Linux #foss #orca #blind

Well, not the happiest intro but I’l cut/paste this here while I still remember then add a proper intro spoons allowing..⬇️

Please #boost and share to other platforms spoons allowing.

Seems I’m desperate enough to go to the media for help. Yes, the trapped woman in the article below is me.

My story: thecanary.co/global/world-anal…

More info on how to help:: buymeacoffee.com/halcionandon/…

I’ve tried every level of government and they simply won’t help. Please ask people if they have a spare room or somewhere to go. Maybe you have somewhere?

Is anybody a #DisabilityAdvocate? #SocialWorker? Need help.

Please don’t give me contacts for domestic violence orgs. They don’t help disabled people with housing & only offer counselling. Also, that list of disability advocates going around for #Melbourne #Australia (where I am) is outdated - there aren’t any in my catchment. So I’m looking for volunteers with some background.

Thanks for reading

#PwME #LongCovid #MECFS #Hypothyroidism #ChronicIllness #Neisvoid #NacissisticAbuse ##Housing #Dysautonomia #SocialWork #MedMastodon #PWLC #MutualAid
#HumanRights #Press

@mecfs @chronicillness @neisvoid
@disability @disabilityjustice @socialwork @dyssupport
@mutualaid

(If I’ve broken any rules in posting this, please let me know.)

Very pleased with the news that iOS on the newer phones will use JPEG XL instead of HEIF.

Now we wait for the chrome team to change course and for image optimizers and CDNs to support and process JPEG XL images.

one of my regrets is when i wrote that article on stylometric fingerprinting. i should have waited to get better at stylometric mimicry and focused on how i did that to improve anonymity and make it harder to connect alts (a bunch of custom vale.sh rules to remove style and conform to a boring technical style, then reintroducing a target’s style). instead i kind of spawned this community of people interested in using it for forensics.

i know they’ll see this post but idc at this point lmao

“You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.”

When people call you a “snowflake” just remember they're quoting Fight Club.

Fight Club.

A satire written by a gay man about how male fragility causes men to destroy themselves, resent society, and become radicalized. And that Tyler Durden isn't the hero but a personification of the main character's mental illness.

His “snowflake” speech is a dig at how fascists use dehumanizing language to breed loyalty from insecure people.

#FightClub #MentalHealth #ToxicMasculinity #Psychology #MentalIllness #Snowflake

Sensitive content Click to open/close

Something to look forward to! 🥳

Enjoy your weekend everyone. 👯

#teaser #theme #design #comingsoon

The “free” WiFi at the mall won’t let me connect unless I give them my:

- email
- home address
- phone number
- full name
- date of birth
- gender
- annual household income

This isn’t feeling so free to me…

While Mastodon has been moving slowly in this direction over the last year or so, nothing (here or elsewhere) has managed to replace before-time Twitter for breaking news, local emergency alerts, or a getting a quick general sense of what's going on in the world.

Yes, I know there are some people who don't want real-world information here, but I think this is a real, significant loss.

I’ve never understood the “Sellout Singh” moniker. From the position of having (only!) 25 seats in a Parliament of 338, the NDP has seen real substantial action on key elements of their platform: national dental care, pharmacare, and childcare programs. This seems to me like a job well done!

It’s only a ‘sellout’ to ideologues who don’t want these things. So every time PP launches that phrase he’s telling Canadians that their health and wellness are not his first priority.

#CdnPoli #ABPoli

The term you are looking to dislike is "Generative AI". AI/ML has been used for decades and continues to be used for many useful, ethical, and not at all wasteful purposes.

It's what makes your low-light photos less noisy, it's how OCR works, it's how speech recognition works, it's how low-cost motion capture works.

Remember the original Kinect? That was powered by ML (paper).

GenAI, specifically, is the grift.
hackers.town/users/calcifer/st…

calcifer

2024-09-17 16:54:35

Please stop demonizing “AI”; the stuff you have a problem with isn’t AI research or AI tech, it’s a very small subset of that domain that (a)has ethical issues with training data sourcing and (b)is being horribly misused/way overly trusted

AI research is valuable and important, and MOST of it doesn’t have these problems. It’s doing things like increasing the reliability of cancer screenings, helping astronomers make better observations, improving assistive technology, accelerating medical research, etc.

Not all AI is “train a chat bot” or “train an image generator” for nefarious or stupid purposes