pleroma.debian.social

pleroma.debian.social

Jonathan Dowland | @jmtd@pleroma.debian.social

Principal Software Engineer on #OpenJDK #RedHat. #Debian developer (dormant). Computer Science PhD student. Amateur Computing historian (Computer Science and H/W, esp. Commodore Amiga). Guerilla archivist.

Home automation was a mistake. I bought a smart watering valve and now I'm 25 tabs deep in Zigbee code.

I do not want to sysadmin my house.

Just git bisecting my thesis. Totally normal.

I can't wait to be done with LaTeX's glossaries package.

Mastodon 🚀

Ever wondered what keeps federated platforms like Mastodon thriving?
My thesis is now officially available: Sustaining Decentralised Social Platforms – Analysing User Activity and Governance Structures on Mastodon. If you're curious, give it a read!
🔗 https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/detail/o:2118817

Huge thanks to everyone who participated in the survey – your voices truly shaped this work.
Special thanks as well to my supervisor @cypherhippie for the guidance throughout.

I hope it inspires you!

If heat pumps are part of the necessary green transition, then it is pretty clear the economic model for energy needs t change to make the switch a worthwhile project for households.... certainly they may be greener, but in the UK's economy, still experiencing an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, most households cannot afford to transit to heat pumps in the current market structure(s).

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/10/gas-boilers-heat-pumps-uk-grants-report?utm_term=67f767a3f8d312ccab00bd2718838348&utm_campaign=BusinessToday&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=bustoday_email

Hello

I'm a painter and game-developer. My dream is to make a gallery show and complete my first indie game. In the meantime, illustration is how I pay the bills.

If you want world-building illustrations or design sketches for games, tabletop RPGs, I can help bring your world to life. 🫡

Artic landscape digital painting of a glacier and mountains Digital painting of an ecological resistance allegory symbolic green hand crushing oil brands Digital painting of a beautiful city attacked by magical artillery from the sky Digital painting of a sorcerer commanding a spectral army

@hyperreal I’ve not played it but I was struck by how similar it looked to No Man’s Sky. I expect the similarity is mostly surface level but the optics of that (billion dollar studio ripping off beloved indie) put me off it at launch time.

@jwz not on your list, but “allow signal to [insert thing here]” -> No -> “we’ll ask you again later” is still a thing.

@stilgherrian web forms not accepting ‘+’ is still a problem even today. Worse, companies whose sites accept it one day and reject it later on (after you’ve signed up)

Laptop sticker installed.

A laptop palm rest area showing keys above. There is a sticker on the palm rest showing a cute cartoon duck holding a knife, with the caption, “This meeting could have been a knife fight.”

Is it time to buy the dip yet?

I just found a pile of limewire shirts

@algernon there is such a list, apparently. John Gruber blogged recently whinging about being on it

I continue to believe that Bitwarden's recent UI changes are objectively worse and I'm still grumpy about it.

@metacosm I should add that I was off sick for a long time last year, and my team-mates clubbed together and got me a voucher which paid for the Korg Minilogue XD. My team is awesome. IBM are lucky to be getting us.

@metacosm oh that's cool. The smaller one, the microfreak, was on my shortlist (https://jmtd.net/log/synths/microfreak/) — I might still pick it up one day, as it can be used portably with a powerbank

@revk Oh! I didn't notice (and I can't see the tag right now, in my client) — tagging is, I think, sufficient, so thank you.

@dneary @evan FWIW I don't personally believe WW2 started with Pearl Harbor, but I believe that many do.

@bencc @beasts that’s a good innings. I think mine is at about 12 years old. Still older than my flesh children!

@evan no option for Pearl Harbor?

@0xabad1dea @vaurora be it bias in a training dataset or a quirk of the implementation, it also affects other aspects of GenAI, which is pretty good because it helps to spot the slop.

Do LLMs have the same colour preference as humans?

A massive chart showing that humans have diverse preferences, somewhat favouring blue, but OpenAI's GPT exclusively or almost exclusively report their preference for blue.

Label: created by Peter Gostev, data from YouGov 2015

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