mastodon - Link to source

GenAI, The Snake Eating Its Own Tail: How tools like ChatGPT and Claude are destroying the ecosystems they rely on, and what to do about it ybrikman.com/blog/2026/01/21/g…

Great blog post. This one explained how Google, OpenAI and other AI companies killed the open web, which was once made of independent forums, news sites, wikis, blogs, high quality journalism websites, books, and fan fiction or art.


GenAI, The Snake Eating Its Own Tail: How tools like ChatGPT and Claude are destroying the ecosystems they rely on, and what to do about it

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have two superpowers. The first superpower is a boon: they can dramatically increase ...
Yevgeniy Brikman

mastodon - Link to source

Hey #believeinfilm friends,

Eastman Kodak Company has just announced that it will be distributing Tri-X and Ektar!

That's great news for folks who know about Alaris and its diminishing role as a 3rd party distributor, but does that really mean cheaper film?

My findings suggest no. This is not making film cheaper right now. It's making it more expensive.

The breakdown: analog.cafe/comments/2p2r

#filmphotography #analogphotography #photography

new kodak films

Eastman Kodak Company begins self-distributing Tri-X and Ektar; I hope that doesn’t mean pricier film!

Last year, we learned that the Kodak factory shifted its film distribution from outsourcing to Kodak Alaris to doing it in-house. Today, the company announced two new films that will be sold under a new packaging.
www.analog.cafe
#photography #filmphotography #believeinfilm #analogphotography

akkoma - Link to source

neat piece of invisible infrastructure: the Rust portable-atomic crate

your platform doesn’t support a particular type of atomic natively? not a problem, this crate gives you an implementation anyway

how? well there’s a global lock, you see. or, rather, 67 global locks, and which one gets used depends on the address of the atomic mod 67.

but, that’s kinda inefficient, so you wouldn’t want to use it unless it’s your only choice, right?

so they have a bunch of platform specific implementations, such as β€œlet’s detect at runtime if cmpxchg16b is supported” or β€œthis is a microcontroller so if we read it within one instruction we’re fine, and otherwise just disable the interrupts”

and as a result you can just use it and not really think about it, because in 99% of cases it’s gonna do the same thing as what you’d end up with if you bothered to optimize it manually

the ratio of elaborate internals to unassuming API surface is so great here you could easily blink and miss the fact that someone is pulling off heroic feats to make this happen

mastodon - Link to source

It’s interesting to me that Trump has so quickly backed off on the threat of using force in Greenland. Someone talked him off the ledge. Maybe the massing European troops raised the stakes enough for his advisors to hesitate. Maybe the generals said they would not attack a NATO member nation (a clearly illegal order). Maybe he never had military support at all, and was talking out of his ass all along. Who knows? The point is, they called his bluff, and he folded like wet napkin. I think people need to learn from this. Calling Trump’s bluffs works, especially when you team up with other communities to call his bluff together.

#kakistocracy #greenland #davos

reuters.com/business/davos/det…

#greenland #kakistocracy #davos
This entry was edited (52 minutes ago)

mastodon - Link to source
What's the most useless thing

  • The "L" in salmon (16%, 2 votes)
  • FBI warning on a DVD (50%, 6 votes)
  • A Twitterer's opinion (41%, 5 votes)
  • Nipples on the batsuit (16%, 2 votes)
  • A spork (0%, 0 votes)
  • Adobe updates (16%, 2 votes)
  • This poll (8%, 1 vote)
  • 1 ply toilet paper (33%, 4 votes)
  • an ICE agent's testicles (75%, 9 votes)
12 voters. Poll end: in 23 hours

mastodon - Link to source

(serious) Question.

If you run Linux servers without outside network access, how do you keep them up to date?
If a software vendor give you access to a repo to install their multi-package software, how do you do it? Or better, what do you expect from the vendor (but may not get)?

Thanks

(Edit: just to clarify. I'm not the sysadmin here. I have no control on any of these system, I'm just trying to figure out a way to make it easier for these customers)

This entry was edited (46 minutes ago)
in reply to Hubert Figuière

mastodon - Link to source

Owen

Putting my sysad hat on for a second, what I would want from a vendor ideally is either a package repository (ppa, apt repo, yum repo, etc) that I can enable, which integrates well with vendor-provided packages. What I regularly _get_ is a tarball or a loose binary that I have to install by hand, and the dependencies are my problem.

I do think it's reasonable for vendors to abdicate on the issue of limited/no network access. There are many, many ways to do that.

in reply to Hubert Figuière

mastodon - Link to source

Owen

The usual advice for site admins who are managing devices with limited network access is usually to either set up a package repository that the devices _can_ access, or to set up an installation image that contains all the packages the devices need and to reimage them as needed. Either approach has some pretty significant operational tradeoffs. If devices can be allowed internet access intermittently, things get easier: use vendor repos during those windows.

mastodon - Link to source
health rant

Sensitive content

This entry was edited (2 hours ago)

mastodon - Link to source
Every time I install a new piece of infrastructure for my homelab as part of becoming more independent from Big Tech, I see a hint on the homepage of that new piece of infrastructure that mentions they received sponsorship from @nlnet almost as if NLNet has been silently preparing Europe for #DigitalSovereignty with Open Source projects ;) I like!
#digitalsovereignty @NLnet
in reply to Joseph King

gotosocial - Link to source

Nolan Darilek

Pretty big. Their app is a PITA too--had to hand my phone to my partner mid-listen because my phone's cast connection dropped and I couldn't find the play button. They asked for a bunch of feedback on their app a while back, and I kinda hoped they'd fix the accessibility issues, but I didn't chime in because fixing issues of this scale isn't on your users IMO and I didn't want to do more unpaid consulting. Guess it's in prod now and we're stuck with it though, yay us.
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