My friend seems genuinely baffled that I am an AI researcher who refuses to use AI! Not only that, but I argue against it from theory, not experience. Why don't I just give it a try for a while, and see what it's really about before I judge it?

I guess I see where he's coming from. Part of the problem is the word "AI." LLMs are not my research focus, so it's less of a contradiction than it sounds. But I admit, being a non-user makes my arguments against LLMs less credible.

I just don't understand why I owe it to anybody to give AI a shot. I know how LLMs work in gory detail, and I don't trust them. I've seen the mediocre work they produce. I've read studies about the seductive illusion of competence and caring they create, and how people fall for that. I know it's all built on an incredibly exploitative business model.

I feel entirely justified in not giving them a chance. I guess I'm just as baffled by how badly he wants me to try it, and how sure he seems to be that it would change my mind.

That was odd.

After not using it for a couple of weeks, my steam deck wouldn't turn on. Not with a charger connected, not after leaving it to charge for 15 min. Not with the booting into bios combination, not with pressing the power button for 10+s.

reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comment… had the answer that helped, even 3 years later. Opening it up, disconnecting the battery, connecting a charger, and it boots as if nothing was ever wrong. Also after conncting the battery again and re-assembling it.

🤷

I'm moving a few domains away from Namescheap. Is Porkbun good? Or maybe a different registrar?
Looks like Porkbun is about $15 cheaper per domain than Namescheap.

#DNS #domainregistrars #Namescheap #Porkbun

Chrome is considering shipping JPEG XL support!

groups.google.com/a/chromium.o…

In the early days of the COVID pandemic, there was a brief but widespread outburst of solidarity; of people protecting each other, supporting each other through difficult times. In many cases across demographic boundaries. For a brief time, people could experience what widespread solidarity might look like, what it might be able to achieve.

And then suddenly, as if by magic, a disinformation campaign spawned - about masks, vaccines, the severity of the disease, and so on. A disinformation campaign that many (capitalist) governments gleefully participated in, all in name of 'the economy'. A campaign that quickly became explosive and drew lines in the sand, often with violent consequences.

And it seems like by now, almost everyone - including most leftists! - have completely forgotten that this period of solidarity ever existed. It doesn't show up in retrospectives, it doesn't show up in discourse. And everyone now talks about COVID purely in terms of "us versus them". As if there have always been 'teams', always been 'sides'.

I think about this a lot.

#CovidIsNotOver #DivideAndConquer #COVID19

#XMPP at #FOSDEM

The XMPP Community is very excited to announce the #Realtime Lounge at the coming FOSDEM 2026! Once again, many members will happily #welcome you!

xmpp.org/2025/11/xmpp-at-fosde…

#jabber #chat #interoperability #rtc #standards #federation #decentralisation #Brussels #Belgium

They were just sitting looking at each other.

A little #Caturday story about Ping.

Picture this:

Two or three days a week, I have a video chat of about an hour with my father-in-law 3000 miles away in England, who is soon 95, unable to move from his chair or wheelchair without assistance and with no friends or relatives to speak to. His only real contact is us, and his carers who come in four times a day to look after his needs. Sometimes I arrange his grocery shopping for him, sometimes I order him other things he needs, but mostly we just sit and talk and he reminisces. He struggles a little with the technology, but somehow we manage.

When it's my days to talk to him, I sit on a sofa with my tea and it's become a habit for Ping Pong to sit on my lap while I chat and stroke her. When I finish talking, she goes off. On the days when I don't speak to him, and Steven has taken the call somewhere else, she'll come meowing and meowing after me to get me to go and sit there with her. In the end, usually I have to give in, and take my tea and we sit on the sofa together. She doesn't often ask for cuddles, so this is a special time for her.

On Thursday this week, I was talking to my father-in-law when I realized that my bed cover that I had washed was ready to be hung up to dry in front of the fire, to be put back on the bed that night. As this was rather urgent, I asked him to wait and said I'd be right back after I'd hung the cover up. I lifted Ping up and went and got that sorted. After a few minutes when I came back, I was met with the scene of Ping, sitting upright, very proper, in my place on the sofa, just as you see her in this photo unblinking, looking at the phone screen at my father-in-law who was looking back at her. Neither was saying a word. They were just looking at each other. The two of them looked so funny.

It was as if she felt she was taking over from me. My father-in-law said "she's been looking after me". And that's just what it seemed like. She wouldn't move on her own to give me my place, so I had to lift her aside so I could sit down. My father-in-law is not a cat person, so obviously he didn't know what to say to her. And she didn't feel the need to say anything either.

Cats. Who can fathom them?

Have a happy Caturday, everyone! If you don't celebrate, have a great day!

#EllieKPosts #catsOfMastodon #PingPong #Pangolin #CornishRexCats
#catstodon #cornishRex

Wow. Finally, after 21 years, #Firefox 147 will support the #FreeDesktop XDG basedir specification to store the config/data/etc. in the standard locations in your home directory on #Linux, for fresh installations: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.…

Unfortunately this only applies to clean installs, existing configs are kept in place and not automatically migrated.

📰 "For years, the EU has taken a leading role in creating standards that protect our rights online. But the winds have now shifted. […] A corporate-backed wave of weakening digital rules is underway that threatens all of our rights - on and offline."

👉 techpolicy.press/why-civil-soc…

Why Civil Society Is Sounding the Alarm on the EU’s Omnibus Rollback

Under the guise of “simplification,” a corporate-backed wave of weakening digital rules is underway that threatens all of our rights, writes Joshua Franco.

^{Joshua Franco (Tech Policy Press)}

RE: mastodon.social/@DiabloRojo/11…

💪🏼 🔒 Welcome to the encrypted side.

'Andrew Tate loses everything on Hyperliquid: Inside his leveraged crypto liquidation meltdown

Arkham’s ledger shows $727k in Hyperliquid deposits, $0 withdrawals, and even $75K in referral rewards churned.'
cryptoslate.com/inside-andrew-…

I ❤️ crypto. The worst people on earth are losing money. 🥰

Andrew Tate loses everything on Hyperliquid: Inside his leveraged crypto liquidation meltdown

Arkham’s ledger shows $727k in deposits, $0 withdrawals, and even $75K in referral rewards churned.

^{Gino Matos (CryptoSlate)}

C'est l'heure du grand #debat du samedi:
Admettons que par simplicité, vous catégorisez les gâteaux en deux grandes familles: plutôt chocolaté et plutôt fruité.

Dans quelle catégorie se place le tiramisu ?

• plutôt chocolaté (90%, 9 votes)
• plutôt fruité (10%, 1 vote)