Eric Stein �
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toba.zeroes.ca.ap.brid.gy
Eric Stein �
@toba.zeroes.ca.ap.brid.gy
I value science and public health. Software architect by day.

https://twitter.com/toba is me.

[bridged from https://zeroes.ca/@toba on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
Reposted by Eric Stein �
I retired from teaching 18 months ago, in part because it was becoming clear to me that the "AI" industry was undermining education in profound ways. This essay makes a convincing case that LLMs are a plague on learning -- and, not incidentally, higher education […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
December 5, 2025 at 1:43 AM
Oh man my Spotify wrapped is wild this year
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Actually what's wild is that you wondered for a second why I would support such a monstrosity of a corporation, when I have never had a Spotify account and neither should you
December 4, 2025 at 12:30 AM
how close to shooting a man on fifth avenue are we these days?

https://gizmodo.com/trump-crypto-bitcoin-btc-price-shit-piss-skin-can-wlfi-2000692230
A memecoin called Shit Piss Skin Can ($SPSC) jumped over 300% in price after World Liberty Financial, a crypto company backed by President Donald Trump, promoted the cryptocurrency in a tweet on Monday. Why is it called Shit Piss Skin Can? The phrase comes from an infamous rant by a crypto influencer back in 2018 about how you could sell “shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin” for a billion dollars at the height of the crypto boom. > Buying $SPSC because the trenches finally found religion in USD1 memes. > If they’re gonna make a coin in honor of our WLFI Co-Founder… we’re in 🦅☝️ > > — WLFI (@worldlibertyfi) November 24, 2025 World Liberty Financial was founded by Chase Herro and his business partner Zachary Folkman, with the backing of President Donald Trump, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. in 2024. Herro, who often spells his name “Hero” online, is a former weight loss guru and affiliate marketer who spent time in prison for selling marijuana, according to Bloomberg News. But Herro is now at the center of Trump’s crypto empire—an empire that the president himself promoted heavily on social media during the 2024 presidential election. Herro’s rant about selling literal shit and piss recently inspired the creation of a new coin. “You can literally sell shit in a can, wrapped in piss, covered in human skin, for a billion dollars if the story’s right, because people will buy it,” Herro said in a 2018 YouTube video while driving a Rolls Royce. “I’m not going to question the right and wrong of all that. All I’m saying is that as a human being, you have the ability to make a fucking shit-ton of money right now.” The video where Herro originally talked about shit, piss, and human skin has been set to private but it was played on MSNBC back in 2024 and is available to watch at the Independent. Bloomberg reports that Herro was introduced to the Trumps by Steve Witkoff, the president’s current Russia-Ukraine peace negotiator, who was recently revealed to have been coaching Russia on how to sell its version of a peace plan to Trump. Even crypto promoters seemed a bit disturbed by World Liberty Financial’s promotion of a shock token on Tuesday. “WLFI, the Trump crypto project ‘building the future of finance’ just promoted ‘shit piss skin can’ coin,” one crypto influencer wrote. Another X account complained: “Stop this boring insider trading. You’re insulting WLFI holders too much.” Crypto is struggling right now. Bitcoin has plummeted, down 22% on the month, and most other crypto prices have followed that trajectory. Michael Saylor’s company, Strategy, which buys ridiculous amounts of Bitcoin, has seen its shares fall 50% over the past three months. The company is now worth less than the Bitcoin it holds. The stability of the stablecoins that are often used to trade in and out of a given cryptocurrency is also concerning investors. The S&P Global Ratings lowered its assessment of Tether, the world’s most popular stablecoin, to 5 on Wednesday, which is deemed “weak,” according to the Financial Times. That’s the lowest rating on a five-point scale, with 1 rated as “very strong.” The concern is that much of Tether’s reserves are tied up in high-risk investments, including “corporate bonds, crypto, gold and precious metals, secured loans, and who knows what else.” Tether has often been a black box with little in the way of transparency, and yet the entire crypto system depends on it. And it doesn’t help that the company recently relocated to El Salvador, a country run by a far-right president who’s investing his national reserves into Bitcoin. The Trump family’s net worth has also reportedly taken a hit over the past couple of months, falling to about $6.7 billion from $7.7 billion in September, according to Bloomberg. Which may help explain the increasingly odd moves you’re seeing from the X account for World Liberty Financial. Anyone who remembers the crypto crash of 2022 will recall that things became increasingly weird as the liquidity pools of actual cash started to dry up. All of which is to say that there are big flashing warning signs for the crypto industry, which still hasn’t proved to be anything more than a way to gamble. Domino’s Pizza still isn’t taking Bitcoin. And when you see the president’s crypto company start promoting a coin named after literal shit, piss, and human skin, it’s probably an indication that things are about to get really bad.
gizmodo.com
December 3, 2025 at 1:04 AM
apes that see people's faces in the clouds and gods in the night sky and volcanoes should never have been trusted with talking sand
December 1, 2025 at 7:46 PM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
I will ask chat GPT
I will boil the last of our drinking water
Salt the soil of the scrub-lands
Tear the pages from books and feed them to my fire

I will ask copilot
I will scramble your library
maim the faces of your favorite paintings
I will bury you in poor copies of your dreams

I will ask […]
Original post on sauropods.win
sauropods.win
November 30, 2025 at 11:56 AM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
shadows
November 27, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
People (left leaning media figures) stop calling "grok" responding to something on X "fact checking" just because the LLM happened to be right one time *challenge*

Difficulty? Impossible??

Even if it's funny. eg. "Elon go FACT CHECKED by his own bot" yes that's funny but no facts were checked […]
Original post on sauropods.win
sauropods.win
November 26, 2025 at 6:40 PM
Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late, the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect: like a man who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or, like a physician, who has found […]
Original post on zeroes.ca
zeroes.ca
November 25, 2025 at 5:20 PM
"Those in power recognized that oppression is best maintained by keeping the masses illiterate, and those oppressed recognized that literacy is liberation. To my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked […]
Original post on zeroes.ca
zeroes.ca
November 22, 2025 at 6:23 PM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
So my suggestion is that we recognize what is "dated" but not take it as a negative. There is something about something the way that dated design can catch your eye, make you cringe a little and say "wow we don't do that anymore" that's really exciting.

Why not lean into it if the space is […]
Original post on sauropods.win
sauropods.win
November 22, 2025 at 12:29 PM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
PSA to anyone who uses Gmail!

"Reportedly, Google has recently started automatically opting users in to allow Gmail to access all private messages and attachments for training its AI models. This means your emails could be analyzed to improve Google’s AI assistants, like Smart Compose or […]
Original post on stefanbohacek.online
stefanbohacek.online
November 20, 2025 at 10:22 PM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
Things you never want to hear a judge say about your defense:

"But the task they have given themselves in pleading the truth defence in defamation proceedings is to establish or prove, on the balance of probabilities, that that is objectively true. And they have made that exceptionally […]
Original post on infosec.exchange
infosec.exchange
November 20, 2025 at 2:26 PM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
Cloudflare just put up a blog post on today's incident.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/
November 19, 2025 at 1:45 AM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
"We're all trying to find the guy that did this"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy7vrd8k4eo
November 18, 2025 at 2:31 PM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
New Blog: the "Dependency Cutout" workflow pattern: https://blog.glyph.im/2025/11/dependency-cutout-workflow-pattern.html
Deciphering Glyph :: The “Dependency Cutout” Workflow Pattern, Part I
Deciphering Glyph, the blog of Glyph Lefkowitz.
blog.glyph.im
November 11, 2025 at 1:48 AM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
50 year mortgages seem insanely bad. Who doesn't want to pay a huge amount of additional interest and accumulate equity ridiculously slowly in exchange for a marginally lower monthly payment?

Caveat: I can see people doing this in high-growth markets like the SFBA - to flip houses. House prices: 📈
November 9, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Sandwich man vindicated!
November 6, 2025 at 9:37 PM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
Did you watch the unfuckingbelievable interview that 60 Minutes aired last night on Trump? The travesty is that the edited version should never have been edited, as we can see from viewing the transcript of the entire batshit crazy interview. Wherein Trump contradicts himself many times and […]
Original post on infosec.exchange
infosec.exchange
November 4, 2025 at 1:18 AM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
Thinking that I might start adding something like this to more of the software I write.
November 1, 2025 at 11:41 PM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
We literally do disagree about this, though. Some politicians want to take food from children and some politicians don't. Pretending this "isn't political" just allows the child-starving ghouls to get away with it.

Tell people who supports the *political program* to feed children and who doesn't!
October 30, 2025 at 11:24 AM
Fuck Zuck... If it's not a person... Then consuming what it produces is not even remotely "social". What kind of dehumanization mindset is this asshole on. Lord.
October 30, 2025 at 8:47 PM
What's your favorite book cooker 9000 prompt?
October 28, 2025 at 10:56 PM
Reposted by Eric Stein �
This is a figure from disgraced physician Peter McCullough’s report claiming that vaccines cause autism.

The red line, added by me, depicts maternal consumption of pumpkin spice products.

His group still does not understand correlation vs causation.
October 28, 2025 at 6:12 PM
If you are in Pennsylvania & eligible to vote PLEASE do. Vote to retain all on the supreme court retention election. MAGA is planning to rig the elections in this key swing state and the first step is to get their judges on the court. This is really serious. #uspol #Pennsylvania #authoritarianism
October 28, 2025 at 4:17 PM