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11 posts total
Clive Thompson

Since there’s been a resurgence lately of the “mastodon is mostly just for folks who use Linux” thing …

… i’m now curious about my community here

(i’m offering intentionally crude and ungranular options in this poll)

“I use Linux …”

(Please boost!)

Anonymous poll

Poll

Every day
131
42%
Occasionally
72
23.1%
Never
109
34.9%
312 people voted.
Voting ended 2 December at 4:45.
1 December at 4:45 | Open on saturation.social
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liferstate

@clive These days I don't touch Linux except for when I boot up my old Windows laptop with its new Mint install, so I can access tarballs archived from two laptops ago when Linux was my everyday OS.

I keep telling myself I'm gonna do some command line heroics to either get my Bluetooth speaker linked up to a computer or make the computer tell me why it isn't working, but I haven't yet gotten around to any applied research.

Yes, this is a long-winded way of saying "occasionally."

1 December at 5:18 | Open on mas.to
Dave

@clive Yes, I use Linux, but that's not why I'm an insignificant part of the Fediverse. I'm here because the Fediverse doesn't have the trappings of other social media - yet. Tomorrow is another day.

1 December at 5:23 | Open on mastodon.world
Joshua Leung

@clive
Personal machines still on Windows. Will consider again moving the desktops to Linux when Windows 10 goes EOL

I do however use Linux at work every workday

1 December at 5:25 | Open on mastodon.nz
Clive Thompson
Clive Thompson

Navy SEALs have disproportionately been dying by suicide …

.. with a similar pattern: Each seemed healthy until their early 40s, when — abruptly — a host of severe mental health issues arose

One wife suspected brain damage, and had her husband’s brain quickly frozen

She unlocked it all

It’s a new form of brain damage

You can read about her story in this superb investigation by Dave Phillips in the New York Times;
gift link here: nytimes.com/2024/06/30/us/navy

Navy SEALs have disproportionately been dying by suicide …

.. with a similar pattern: Each seemed healthy until their early 40s, when — abruptly — a host of severe mental health issues arose

One wife suspected brain damage, and had her husband’s brain quickly frozen

She unlocked it all

It’s a new form of brain damage

A screenshot with text reading: The lab depended on tissue donations from the families of war veterans who had recently died, but few families knew it existed, and the lab's bylaws barred it from cold-calling grieving families to ask. Brain tissue deteriorates quickly; by the time most families found out about the lab, it was too late. Ms. Collins's quick decision meant that her husband's brain was soon packed in ice and on its way. That single brain revealed a pattern of damage that the head of the lab, Dr. Daniel Perl, who had spent a career studying neuropathology in civilians, had never seen before. Nearly everywhere that tissues of different density or stiffness met, there was a border of scar tissue - a shoreline of damage that seemed to have been caused by the repeated crash of blast waves. It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.
30 June at 15:39 | Open on saturation.social
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cobalt

@clive Knowledge about brain damage is limited at this time. My son has congenital brain damage, but over the years had a semi-normal life and far more abilities than expected. Then over time, many neurosurgeries. Over decades more than a few falls with concussion. Now at almost 45, he has ALSO acquired early-onset Alzheimer's and an unknown mixed dementia. Yet he continues to function with support. Now whatever happens, who knows the cause. Go research!

30 June at 22:30 | Open on awscommunity.social
Julie R

@clive thank you for sharing this.

30 June at 22:41 | Open on wandering.shop
ShinyBlueThing

@clive It's worth noting that the VA is deeply, *deeply,* resistant to diagnosing anyone with service-connected TBI if they ever had any other risk factors. Ever played a sport in school? not their problem, even with documented service-connected blast exposure or head injury.

I know this because of people I know. One did get medically retired, another didn't, and should have.

1 July at 14:27 | Open on dice.camp
Clive Thompson

A terrific investigation at @WIRED finds that Perplexity scrapes and (sometimes with bullshit added) summarizes web sites that it has been explicitly told, by those web site owners, not to visit

wired.com/story/perplexity-is-

Excellent work by @dmehro and @timmarchman

19 June at 15:57 | Open on saturation.social
Clive Thompson
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Clive Thompson

Excellent investigation by the New York Times into all the ways major AI companies are frantically grabbing, copying, and stealing text to feed their AI models: nytimes.com/2024/04/06/technol

(Gift link there)

apparently Meta considered buying Simon & Schuster

6 April at 14:51 | Open on saturation.social
Nazani

@clive
What AI really needs is 1 copy of Strunk & White.

6 April at 14:58 | Open on universeodon.com
Steve Williams

@clive
I was wondering about #Apple’s automagic Podcast Transcription feature. I bet they are scraping all those podcasts for #AI juice.

No doubt as a condition of playing in their walled garden.

6 April at 15:12 | Open on toot.community
Clive Thompson

“The Literary Style of Alt-Text”

For years, I didn’t add alt-text to my online images

But I’ve started doing it all the time now — being on Mastodon is what showed me how important it is!

Along the way, I’ve started noticing …

…. what an oddly *literary* activity it is

Here’s an image I wrote alt-text for when I blogged a few weeks ago, below

My essay on alt-texting: clivethompson.medium.com/the-l

A free “friend” link in case you don’t subscribe to Medium: clivethompson.medium.com/the-l

“The Literary Style of Alt-Text”

For years, I didn’t add alt-text to my online images

But I’ve started doing it all the time now — being on Mastodon is what showed me how important it is!

Along the way, I’ve started noticing …

…. what an oddly *literary* activity it is

Here’s an image I wrote alt-text for when I blogged a few weeks ago, below

A cyclist going rapidly down a city street. The photo is taken from the side, and the cyclist is in the center of the image, heading towards our right. In behind the cyclist we see a bus stop and a brightly lit store. Interestingly, despite the fact that the cyclist is moving quickly, they are unblurred and crisp in the photo - while the background is blurred. The ultimate effect is curious: It's as if the store were moving quickly, while the cyclist was standing still
A screenshot of a story written by the author, describing how he wrote alt-text for the attached photo. I reads: And at first I just wrote a simple description, something like "a cyclist going down the street." Then I added more details, including that the cyclist is in the center of the picture, and behind them are a bus stop and a brightly lit store, and that the cyclist is moving quickly. But as I was writing that last clause - "the cyclist is moving quickly" - I realized something curious about the composition of the photo: The cyclist is crisp, while the background is blurred. That's not an easy effect for the photographer to achieve! And it' precisely what gives the image its power. So I wound up writing the alt-text thusly ... “A cyclist going rapidly down a city street. The photo is taken from the side, and the cyclist is in the center of the image, heading towards our right. In behind the cyclist we see a bus stop and a brightly lit store. Interestingly, despite the fact that the cyclist is moving quickly, they are unblurred and crisp in the photo - while the background is blurred. The ultimate effect is curious: It's as if the store were moving quickly, while the cyclist was standing still” One could critique this alt-text for being too damn long. Fair enough! And there's something a bit narcissistic about me focusing on the internal experience I have while puzzling over how best to describe this image.
2 Nov 2023 at 16:14 | Open on saturation.social
Clive Thompson
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BruceBear 🐻🌟💙🏳️‍🌈

@clive okay old guy here, what is this thing?

13 Jan 2023 at 7:16 | Open on mstdn.social
Patrick O'Doherty

@clive nice work! I my N-Gage was not lost to the sands of time

14 Jan 2023 at 2:26 | Open on infosec.exchange
Григорий Клюшников

Is it only for N-Gage, or can I install it on my Nokia 5800?

14 Jan 2023 at 19:20
Clive Thompson

A battery filled with algae is somehow managing to power this computer for months: newscientist.com/article/23195

No-one's quite sure what's going on. Possibly the algae is serving as the medium catalyzing the interaction between the anode and cathode in the battery.

Except research shows the anode isn't degrading, which suggests ...

... the *algae* is producing the electrons.

Some thoughts on this in my blog post here, item 6: clivethompson.medium.com/lavaf

A battery filled with algae is somehow managing to power this computer for months: newscientist.com/article/23195

No-one's quite sure what's going on. Possibly the algae is serving as the medium catalyzing the interaction between the anode and cathode in the battery.

Photo of a set of devices sitting on a windowsill. One is a small microprocessor that has a green main board. It has a yellow cord going up to a small black rectangular box about the size of a pack of gum, which has a clear circular window in it, though which one can see that inside is some algae. It has a black cord going out of it back to the computer board. The algae box is sitting on top of an inverted clear-plastic cup
21 Nov 2022 at 3:15 | Open on saturation.social
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tech himbo
Charles U. Farley

The first thing one should think upon seeing something like this is that it's either a mistake or outright fraud, until it's independently reproduced.

21 Nov 2022 at 15:06 | Open on retro.social
Britt Elizondo

@clive I live on a floating Algea lake. This could be a wonderful source of energy… maybe… very exciting!

21 Nov 2022 at 15:28 | Open on mastodon.sdf.org
Clive Thompson
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Clive Thompson

I built this tool a year ago but I feel like Mastodon folks would like it

The "Weird Old Book Finder"

Type in a search query, and it'll find one randomly-chosen public-domain book that matches the query -- and present it for immediate reading: weird-old-book-finder.glitch.m

Why only one book? To prevent the paradox of choice! Just *start readin'*

Can't promise every book will be weird, but most are

A longer essay on how/why I developed it: debugger.medium.com/a-search-e

This was a search for "mastodon"

I built this tool a year ago but I feel like Mastodon folks would like it

The "Weird Old Book Finder"

Type in a search query, and it'll find one randomly-chosen public-domain book that matches the query -- and present it for immediate reading: weird-old-book-finder.glitch.m

Why only one book? To prevent the paradox of choice! Just *start readin'*

A screenshot of the Weird Old Book Finder, showing the book returned for the search "mastodon" -- the book is "Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man"
9 Nov 2022 at 17:57 | Open on saturation.social
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pandion (formerly toorsdenote)

@clive omg I cannot wait to read this book and/or get a tattoo of the illustrations.

"a Shakespeare may be but an oyster raised to the one-thousandth power, or even a Darwin the cube root of a ring-tailed monkey."

The Fall of Man: or, The Loves of the Gorillas. A popular scientific lecture upon the Darwinian Theory of Development by Sexual Selection, by a Learned Gorilla
9 Nov 2022 at 20:01 | Open on kolektiva.social
Peter Butler

@clive This is awesome. Thank you!

Look how all the Englishmen used to hold their ping-pong paddles. Nary a penhold grip amongst them. (I went for "table tennis.")

Picture of five different old-fashioned British table-tennis grips, from the book Table Tennis and How to Play It With Rules by M. J. G. Ritchie and Walter Harrison.
9 Nov 2022 at 20:05 | Open on mas.to
Sascha Freudenheim

@clive Ok, this is great! And thanks to @anildash for boosting it!

9 Nov 2022 at 20:07 | Open on mas.to
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