Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason
Justin Mason
@jmason.org
Dublin-based software engineer; still linkblogging at https://jmason.ie/ . Nerdy stuff on https://mastodon.ie/@jmason . Been on the internet far too long at this stage. Opinions my own.
1.6K followers844 following1.9K posts
Justin Mason reposted
“Polymarket, a major crypto-betting platform which is not currently regulated to operate in Ireland, also posted about it on Tuesday.” Why on earth is Polymarket posting about a DRCC video on consent? 🫠
Thanks to Ciara Ní Bhroin for writing this piece on the DRCC consent ad row - props to @aidanobrien.bsky.social who gets a mention www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...
Justin Mason reposted
It has come to my attention that many people are unaware that the person who figured out that the private key was 4 was a Something Awful forums goon: forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.p...
Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason reposted
more info on this; looks like it's a Google/Lidl issue, Google have an allow-list for networks which can use 5G and Lidl/1Global aren't on it yet. www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixe... -- @adrianweckler.bsky.social, this might make a good story :)
Justin Mason reposted
Just to be very explicit, my claim is that the one simplest and best explanation for this, which resolves any apparent strangeness entirely, is that whoever is “speaking” in LLM output is a fictional character, and the real life thing called an LLM is a machine for writing lil stories about that guy
BTW these are the settings I used, if anyone else winds up in the same boat jmason.ie/2026/10/15/1...
Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason reposted
If you're in Ireland with a Virgin 360 cable box you'd like to run seamlessly through your Google TV then I made this* #Spéirghorm github.com/benwalsh/360... * (in the @nedroid.com sense)
Justin Mason reposted
something that fascinates me about this is how, for many years, whole teams inside giant tech companies were devoted to preventing exactly this scenario you didn't 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 most of your traffic to be from bots trying to game the system, so people worked hard to prevent it
the "agentic" vision of computing is a spam world where everyone has their own personal army of spam bots working 24/7 on their behalf choking everything with spam to try and get one over on the next guy. and that's just not something that can really... exist, long term?
Justin Mason reposted
terrible move. history tells us the correct play is to abandon the city and defeat your adversaries at sea
Kimberly Giulfoyle is reportedly "holed up" at the official ambassador's residence in Athens after being asked to resign by President Donald Trump, as new allegations emerge about her efforts to get wealthy businessmen to cover a luxury SUV debt.
Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason reposted
This will be handy - native Markdown support in gdocs: workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2026/10/prev...
Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason reposted
Those of us with kids aged....pretty much any age within "kid" are going to have friends who grew up with an AI-dad and they'll have their own characteristic traits (at no fault of their own)
It's telling that men would rather try to invent tech to replace humans' role in caregiving than step up as equal partners in parenting. Telling, that is, in that it shows how financial capitalism and patriarchy work together to dissuade men from doing "unprofitable" labor, like the work of care.
Justin Mason reposted
Writing code hasn’t been the bottleneck in software production since the 1980s; RAD, IDEs, OOP, and off-shoring made code (in corporations) a relatively cheap quasi-commodity long ago. The bottleneck has always been making software that’s actually useful.
Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf
Justin Mason reposted
🚨 Half of all new cars registered in Ireland in September were fully electric (49.3%)! Car sales here are concentrated in January and July, so a single month is misleading, but I pulled out the BEV sales share for July-September sales for the past years: 2024 - 14% 2025 - 22% 2025 - 35% 📈↗️👆‼️
Data updated through September so far: ▸Chile ▸India ▸Ireland ▸Italy ▸Norway ▸Portugal ▸Spain ▸Sweden ▸Switzerland ▸Thailand
Justin Mason reposted
This is the infuriating thing about the whole Heather Humphreys saga. "They call us sectarian just because we're in the Orange Order" YES BECAUSE IT'S A SECTARIAN ORGANISATION. If you can't understand that and interrogate what that means then you're not getting anywhere.
The way some people are talking about the Orange Order, they must think 'The Orange State' refers to some kind of fruit-driven agricultural policy pursued by the six county state from 1921-1973
Justin Mason reposted
this is by far the best "I quit my AI job over safety concerns" essay yet because it is the first one that is able to talk about safety concerns in practical terms and that understands "safety" as a topic with extensive literature in analogous fields www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...
Justin Mason reposted
Replying to @bdowney.bsky.social
If you believe instead that you are on the path to a machine god, traditional security & safety controls are the sad delusions of the final days of humanity: it's alignment or bust. But if you think otherwise you are building a *tool*, you will think 'time to build real safety controls'.
Justin Mason reposted
The techno-dystopia I actually fear is a future where most people think truth is whatever Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok say, and the very small number of people who control those systems use that to manipulate for their own ends, making our current epistemic crisis seem small in comparison.
Justin Mason reposted
There is no counterargument that satisfies his followers because his argument is elaborate question-begging and him and his followers don’t know enough about the real world to see this. There is no counterargument to “a malevolent supernatural entity would be very scary and dangerous”. It would!
I'd think if Yud was wrong about AI being a potential threat, *someone* would be able to construct an actually decent counterargument against him This "what a weirdo", "haha so dumb" shit would obvs exist either way, but there would *also* be, like, somebody who could formulate a coherent rebuttal
Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason reposted
HALF of all the young trees planted by @treesforcities.bsky.social in the last year in London died in the summer drought - for almost all of the city's trees, their days are numbered www.newscientist.com/article/2591...
Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason reposted
Why yes, of course you can build out your gigantic 72,500 m2 energy and resource-sucking data centre, but be sure to “encourage staff to use public transport, cycling & walking”. Beyond parody from the crack squad at An Coimisiún Pleanala. www.irishtimes.com/business/202...
Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason reposted
Justin Mason reposted