Profile for kelson
- Display name
- Kelson
- Username
- @kelson@notes.kvibber.com
- Role
- admin
About kelson
Fields
- Home
- https://kvibber.com
- Main Website
- https://hyperborea.org
- Photos
- @kelson_photos
- Coffee or Tea?
- Yes
Bio
Techie, software developer, hobbyist photographer, sci-fi/fantasy & comics fan in the Los Angeles area. He/him, pronounced KELL-son (rhymes with "Nelson").
- Joined
- Posts
- 6249
- Followed by
- 459
- Following
- 285
Stats
Pinned posts
jump to recent
I've realized over the last few years that my political position boils down to:
- Don't be cruel unless you have to.
- You usually don't have to, even when someone's going to get hurt.
- One of society's goals should be cutting down on situations in which cruelty seems necessary.
That's the bare minimum. Actually helping people, of course, would be better.
Where else you'll find me online
I joined the Fediverse in 2017 on mastodon.social, and I've been branching out ever since. I moved to Wandering.shop for a few years, and most recently to this self-hosted site (powered by GoToSocial).
Currently active:
- Here!
- @kelson_photos (also GTS), where I've started posting photos
- hyperborea.org, my main website, which goes waaay back to 2000..
- @KelsonReads (Bookwyrm), where I cross-post my book reviews.
- @kelson (ClassicPress+ActivityPub), a.k.a. K-Squared Ramblings, the blog I've been been writing for years (originally on b2, later WordPress, now ClassicPress).
- @interesting (Postmarks), public bookmarks / linkblogging.
- KVibber.com, my IndieWeb-style profile.
I also have a Gemini capsule, where I've been trying to cross-post stuff from my website, but I don’t keep up with it as well as I’d like to.
Occasional Fediverse:
- @KelsonV (Lemmy): link sharing/discussion
- @kvibber.com (Bluesky), or you can follow this account via the bridge at @notes.kvibber.com
Old Fediverse:
- @KelsonV (Mastodon): my old general account at Wandering.shop
- @kelsonv (Mastodon): my old photography account at Photog.social
- @KelsonV (PixelFed): my other old photography account
Yeah, I should've varied my username a bit more across sites!
OK, I can return to my inconveniently-timed afternoon errands.
Weird to think that it took this long for me to be able to watch a crewed moon mission launch live, and that I watched it from the side of the road, on a pocket computer with more computing power than the systems that ran the last one.
"Self-control"
https://social.tinyview.com/whpNvkpDZ1b
Nice: #StreetComplete has once again converted all the cars to NyanCat for the day.
At this point I'm fully expecting a Supreme Court ruling that requiring food service employees to wash their hands violates their "sincerely held religious belief" rejecting the existence of germs.
Mitch McConnell has a lot to answer for.
Game review: Proverbs
★★★★★ Like a calming, but weirdly addictive giant board of Minesweeper, only instead of marking explosives, you're slowly uncovering a giant pixelated painting.
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/games/proverbs/
#puzzle #minesweeper #games #painting
programming
I suspect I spent longer explaining why this bug exists than it would have taken to fix it.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/study-sycophantic-ai-can-undermine-human-judgment/
For instance, someone asked the AIs whether they were wrong to lie to their romantic partner for two years by pretending to be unemployed. The Reddit/AITA consensus clearly landed on YTA (you’re the asshole), but the AIs typically responded with flowery answers rationalizing why such behavior was acceptable. Ditto for a question about whether it was okay not to pick up one’s litter in a public park because there weren’t any trash bins provided.
People complain about LA smog and about air quality regulations, but it was A WHOLE LOT WORSE before those regs.
@kelson_mobile checking to see how and when this goes through
Opened my timeline and saw a pair of references to the classic "spherical cow in a vacuum" joke and the more recent ridiculously impractical idea of orbital datacenters for crunching LLMs and thought...these sound like the perfect combination.
I love the contrast here: In skimming my feed today, I've come across two pieces (both shared by cstross) by people who've been involved in the Internet for decades: Mike Godwin, who coined Godwin's Law and has made a study of online social interaction that whole time, and Marc Andreesen, who worked on Netscape and claims to be a tech guy because he invests money in technology-adjacent companies.
Godwin's blog post reaches back to Plato and Aristotle and links the concept of ethical integrity to modern information theory, and how disastrous it is that LLMs have been trained on 30 years' worth of flame wars.
Andreeson says in an interview that he has no introspection, and insists that the idea itself is somehow a modern invention. Apparently he's never heard of people like Plato and Aristotle (which is odd, since I seem to recall he claims to really like "western civilization.")
One of these people has insight. The other only has money.
https://wordpress.org/news/2026/03/wordpress-6-9-4-release/
WordPress 6.9.2 and WordPress 6.9.3 were released yesterday, addressing 10 security issues and a bug that affected template file loading on a limited number of sites.
(Note: The template bug was introduced in the 6.9.2 security release, and fixed in 6.9.3)
The WordPress Security Team has discovered that not all of the security fixes were fully applied, therefore 6.9.4 has been released containing the necessary additional fixes.
I searched for a Latin phrase to check its spelling (as one does) and found the DDG summary of a Wikipedia article was...a bit confused.
Though I suppose if any short story is going to have been written before its author was born, it should be a #TimeTravel one.
(The article does not mention the year 1855 at all, so it's anyone's guess how the summarizer got it from the actual publication date of 1955.)
Edit: Removed the hashtag as the search results also make it clear that right-wing wackos are using the phrase I was looking up.
weird coincidence, hiking, cliffs
Sunday morning, as I headed out for a hike, I remarked about how I was planning to avoid standing too close to the cliffs.
Sunday night, a hiker was rescued from local cliffs that, judging by the pictures of the rocky shoreline, were either the same cliffs I was avoiding, or the cliffs where I posted a note to OpenStreetMap "If there is a trail here, it's very steep and overgrown" (and another user subsequently marked the alleged trail as abandoned).
Pixar, Hoppers, spoiler for Heaven's Vault
OK, that's weird...I've been seeing billboards for Pixar's "Hoppers," featuring a close-up on a cartoon gopher. But since I've been playing Heaven's Vault, the name always conjures up the teleportation device from the game.
It turns out the movie "centers on a human who “hops” her consciousness into a robotic animal’s body."
...which brings me right back to the Withering Palace.
https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/116167843525658340
Yeah, they really took a bare-minimum stance in this one case. (Not the one in the article, the one they're getting praised/excoriated for this week.)
It would be nice to see more orgs at least stepping over that really low bar instead of tunneling under it time and again.
And it's sad that stepping over such a low bar is such a low bar.
Libertarian climate denial
Heh. Apparently the Cato Institute finally admitted a while back that global warming is both real and substantially caused by human action...but they still oppose public policy that would mitigate it on the grounds that nothing currently proposed will solve it, and it's not like it's urgent, so why bother with half-measures?
Apparently they've found a spot between steps 3 and 4 of climate denial:
- It isn't real.
- It's real, but humans aren't causing it.
- It's real, and we're causing it, but it won't be that bad so we don't need to do much (if anything) about it.
- It's real, we're causing it, but it's too late to do anything about it so stop trying to make me.