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Preston Austin

@gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
92 followers 31 following 2K posts

MUSICat architect and founder at Rabble LLC I work with public librarians who collect and share local music with their communities and visitors. MUSICat is a […] [bridged from mastodon.social/@gl33p on the fediverse by fed.brid.gy ]

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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 9h
"I want control over my computer" 🪾
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 9h
I think the normalizing grease of "everything sucks in some way, nothing works for everything, this is novel and cool and works for something, why not use it since it's novel and cool and lots of people are" is just winning, tbh It doesn't suck the ways that add early friction, it works well […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 9h
It turns out the answer to 'Can an expensive enough hammer smash free software into fragments that will fit into whatever ideological jar capital wants to pickle us in?' is 'Yep' There is a lesson here the people who need it most can't learn: Libertarian bullshit didn't protect free software […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Micr0byte @micr0.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026
the app sends a few anonymous numbers to my own server (minutes of read along used, downloads finishing, whether it crashed, only that it did, no crash logs) so I know when something’s broken, especially since a lot of you are installing outside Google Play. Nothing about your books, no IPs, no […]
wetdry.world
Original post on wetdry.world
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Micr0byte @micr0.wetdry.world.ap.brid.gy · 18/10/2026
A couple months ago I posted a clip of an app I made just for myself, and a bunch of you said “please release this.” So I did! Cava Reader is an ebook + audiobook reader for Android. You load an EPUB and its audiobook, and it highlights each word as the […] [Original post on wetdry.world]
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Adam Gurri @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com · 18/10/2026
We’ve already got our lineup for the second issue of The Reconstruction Papers, but perhaps in the third we should include a serious rethink about anti-trust laws and the regulation of ownership of media companies specifically www.liberalcurrents.com/editors-note...
Though audiences are indeed more fragmented than ever in terms of content, the ownership structure of media has never been more consolidated.

This is true even if we expand the category beyond traditional linear television. It is true that there are a zillion little accounts, podcasts, video influencers, and more. However, all of this occurs on a handful of platform companies. Alphabet and Meta alone account for the overwhelming lion's share of social media and video. Unlike the pre-Internet world, both of those companies also own the lion's share of advertising infrastructure in digital, as well.
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Stefano Marinelli @bsd.cafe · 16/10/2026
Ok, looks like this is the week of funny experiences. Customer: "I had an AI check our server and it says the SSH port is open and that's not very secure." Me: "Yes, you asked us to open it so you could access the server via SFTP (actually, you wanted FTP, but we discussed it a bit and found […]
mastodon.bsd.cafe
Original post on mastodon.bsd.cafe
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Erin Reed @erininthemorning.com · 16/10/2026
Iowa Democratic Congressional Candidate Christina Bohannan breaks with other Iowa Democrats and releases an ad that does NOT throw transgender people under the bus. She answers "unfairness in sports" with "unfairness in prescription drug prices." Subscribe to support our journalism.
erininthemorning.com
IA-01 Dem Candidate Christina Bohannan Answers Anti-Trans Ad Without Throwing Trans People Under The Bus
Her approach is markedly different from Sand, Turek, and Trone Garriott.
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myrmepropagandist @futurebird.sauropods.win.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026
Everyone can tell you used AI to do it. They just aren't saying anything about it because they want to be polite. (Do you know someone who needs this thought to pop unbidden into their head?)
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Bruno J. Navarro @bruno-j-navarro.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026
BEND, Ore. -- Three children are dead and one teacher following a mass shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School. www.centraloregondaily.com/news/loc…
centraloregondaily.com
5 dead, including suspect, in shooting at Silver Rail Elementary School shooting
Shooter is dead, multiple reported injured after Silver Rail Elementary School shooting.
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026
If "the shooter" (not a child in any telling I've seen yet) was in fact 16 and killed by "a bystander" (not a shooter in any telling I've seen yet), then "the shooter" is among "the children" dead because guns in this tragedy and it's depressingly telling that this child-killer child that our […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026
Anybody have dark sky connections around the Lone Pine, CA area? Can the town slap them with some nuisance lighting fines? That would be funny.
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Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 16/10/2026
I fucking hate this company. This is so fucking stupid for so many reasons. www.sfgate.com/tech/article/mount-w…
sfgate.com
Client Challenge
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Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth.bsky.social · 16/10/2026
Is it ~~bad~~ that people feed wildlife in national parks? Yes, absolutely. But is it funny that jays are like, “gimme trail mix”? Also yes.
A Stellar’s jay on a rock near a trail in Rocky Mountain National Park, looking like it expects a snack.
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Erin Reed @erininthemorning.com · 15/10/2026
A girl won the role of Seymour in South Grand Prairie High School in Texas. Then, the district freaked out because of Texas' anti-trans and anti-gay law. So they tried to strip her role and give it to a boy. She refused, so now they are cancelling the play. Subscribe to support our journalism.
erininthemorning.com
Texas School Kills ‘Little Shop Of Horrors’ After Girl Cast As Seymour, Citing Anti-LGBTQ+ Law
Following backlash, the school gave one young actress’s role to a boy—and told her to share the role of Audrey with another girl as consolation. Then they cancelled it altogether.
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myrmepropagandist @futurebird.sauropods.win.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
She likes to hang out here so she can look you in the eye when you come around the corner. #PicaTheCat
Pica the cat looks around the corner at eye level. She is cute, curious and maybe a little judgemental.
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Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 15/10/2026
prominent tech pundits could help journalists build alternative communications platforms free of fascist-coddling billionaire algorithmic influence but they might miss out on lazy boosterism by people completely disinterested in having honest conversations about the real-world impact of AI
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
I swear to pudding this kind of "neutrality demands we say nothing at all about this" headline feels better to Wisconsin's political journalists than clean dry cushy socks on a cold rainy day 😏
Screenshot of social media share saying 
Urban Milwaukee

@urbanmilwaukee.com@bsky

Tiffany, Crowley Split On How To Fix Wisconsin’s Wildlife Funding Gap
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Alexander Karn @xankarn.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
Cutten derided social security as a “degrading” tool for “parasitic paupers” and condemned modern medicine and philanthropy. Bemoaning the rise of multi-culturalism in the 1920s, Cutten said, “what this melting pot has accomplished is to permit persons of different races and intellectuality to […]
mastodon.online
Original post on mastodon.online
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Reposted by Preston Austin
Alexander Karn @xankarn.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
Nazi eugenics drew heavily on the work on American theorists, including George Cutten, who served as the president of my current institution from 1922-42. Cutten, whose anti-immigration rhetoric is cited at the Immigration Museum on Ellis Island, said that Americans had made the word democracy […]
mastodon.online
Original post on mastodon.online
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CelloMom On Cars @cellomomoncars.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
Equitable transition to a low-carbon life: "The research assesses existing evidence through four dimensions of justice: how costs and benefits are distributed; how harms are repaired; how decisions are made; and whether communities' identities and values are respected." […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Indio Gringo ® @paninid.mastodon.world.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026
chnge.com/products/abcdefuck-ice-t-…
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/08/2026
I really prefer the term "unwarranted surveillance" to most of the terms critical of all these cameras everywhere because it's necessary to both morally and legally impugn the core practice here - which is watching everyone everywhere all the time, without a legal warrant and without a public […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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oschene @oschene.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
Three-sided Poincaré Disk Bowl #origami @origami Done this model before, but this one is a little different -- I made the arcs equally distant at the midpoints, instead of at the ends. Works rather better.
Curved surface origami model.Three-sided Poincaré Disk Bowl Crease Pattern.
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
But but but open weights free range locally grown organic hormone free ethical models 🙄
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
3. DOGE made false claims about employee performance in order to fire them, but did not want to put their names to these emails. So they would coerce civil servants into doing so. If the civil servants refused, they were fired. (Not just DOGE, other Trump appointees like Kash Patel did this).
The revealing moments in the civil service were lonelier. They occurred inside people’s hearts and minds, and seldom leaked to the press. After his arrival at the IRS, one of Gavin Kliger’s first acts had been to demand that the agency fire its 6,700 probationary workers, who had yet to be granted civil service protection. By law they could be fired only for poor performance. Gavin had asked Traci DiMartini, in her capacity as head of human resources, to agree to put her name on an email to the mostly young employees telling them that they had failed at their jobs. The Doge people played this trick often. They’d use or try to use civil servants as a kind of ventriloquist dummy so that they, the Doge workers, could keep their names off official documents. But Traci took one look at the email, saw it was plainly a lie, and refused to have anything to do with it. The price of that single act of resistance was her job. Gavin didn’t have the authority to fire Traci, but his new acting commissioner did. “He asked Melanie to fire Traci, and Melanie did it,” said Kathleen.
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Bikepedantic @pedantic.bike · 14/10/2026
By fighting so hard, they’re showing all the other North American fascist leaders that this stupid populist easy win is neither popular nor easy. Thank you, Toronto. bsky.app/profile/cycl...
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Bikepedantic @pedantic.bike · 14/10/2026
This is incredible. Go Toronto!
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
He does only burst into houses after being invited 🤔 @corbden
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Mx. Luna Corbden 🪿🐸 @corbden.defcon.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/10/2026
There is only one way to kill the Kool-Aid Man. It's similar to how you kill vampires. You have to spike the punch.
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Daniel Lakeland @dlakelan.mastodon.sdf.org.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026
My younger kid has realized that school is at least in part, a prison where kids are kept so parents can be farmed by capitalists, and that the grading, testing, major, and degree system serves to normalize and perpetuate hierarchies of importance among people. Also that many people have no […]
mastodon.sdf.org
Original post on mastodon.sdf.org
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Debbie Goldsmith 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 @dgoldsmith.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026
This is a work of art. Two big thumbs up.
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026
Like, there are insects that will eat poop when they can't get the food they like, and some that eat dirt when they can't get poop even. These are perhaps desirable capabilities when starving, but a good society does not result from making eating dirt out to be a virtue 🙄
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026
Oh no oh no are we entering the "food is expensive so people should eat the funny looking vegetables" part of the inflation news journey?
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026
One thing about something like Facebook or Twitter or "AI" having so much capital and/or network-effect generated gravity is that the folks who don't feel its pull are probably the ones falling toward it It takes quite a lot of anyone's power to accelerate away just to keep one's distance from […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026
“the rest of us can see it” “you think you're the exception” “It is making your mind worse” “you understand less” “I'm sorry to hear it” The sentiments in this sad (not mean) post by @anildash over on Blooskie resonate for me way beyond the specific network he wrote about It's painful to […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Lyle Solla-Yates @lyle.cville.online.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026
I don't talk about game development stuff here much, but I've (mostly) wrapped up the code work for a giant project for Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead's DinoMod so that sauropods 🦕 take up five tiles instead of just one teeny tiny tile. It was a ton of work but hopefully it's really fun […]
cville.online
Original post on cville.online
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026
Lots of things would mean slower going to hell, but eliminating DHS is among necessary table stakes for unweaving the hand basket we're in 🧺
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026
This is an interesting example of the sort of unclarity caused by treating absence of a religious conviction as an element in a set called "faiths" mastodon.social/@SeanCasten/1174336… Like, the US House is a secular humanist institution. It's constituted under secular […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026
Software eats the world. Software scarfs the world down nervously and way too fast. Software regurgitates the world on the carpet then runs into the dining room and coughs up a wad of hair and some shiny blue threads from that one sparkle ball in a little wet puddle of world goop. Software […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Prof. Sam Lawler @sundogplanets.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026
I asked a trusted colleague for comments on a written document and they fed it in to chatGPT and sent me back that output and I just want to cry. Guess I won't be asking that person for help or advice on anything anymore. Enshittification happens in people's writing skills too, I guess. I also […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Elizabeth Spiers @espiers.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Okay, I am looking at this gendered reading piece by Ross Barkan and I have many thoughts and questions. Part of the thesis is this:
A more challenging question can be asked: If more books were published by men with explicitly masculine themes, would there actually be a wider male readership? It’s the old chicken-and-egg dilemma. The audience won’t emerge because the product isn’t there, and the product isn’t there because the audience is elsewhere. Men, obviously, can read and enjoy books by women, but there is the sticky biological reality that, on balance, women will probably prefer reading women, and men may prefer reading men. Boys, especially, seem to long for male teachers and role models in the classroom. As they age, and if they want to read, they might be drawn to the fiction of writers like Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, and McMurtry. They might want literature that, at the bare minimum, seems masculine.
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Eleanor Saitta @dymaxion.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026
Another essay! This time, I'm talking about what happens with social engineering now that voice cloning is a thing, and some basic tools to prevent it. This one is a fun one, and not just for corporate security, as these attacks are starting to be aimed at individuals too. Along the way, we'll […]
infosec.exchange
Original post on infosec.exchange
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Lesley Carhart :unverified: @hacks4pancakes.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026
Rather be poor and not famous than have anyone question in twenty years where I stood on human rights, or if I was afraid to take a stand against evil.
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Adam Gurri @adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com · 12/10/2026
Congrats I guess. Enjoy feeding Elon’s CSAM generator your data. Instead of actually using your position of influence to help push more of a defection, you’re declaring victory for X and acting like it’s diagnosis rather than exactly the kind of thing that produces the reality.
liberalcurrents.com
The New Epstein Island Is Right in Your Pocket: It’s Time to Abandon Elon Musk’s Paradise of Abuse
It has long been time to leave X. Now, it’s essential.
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026
» October is National Pedestrian Safety Month. You might see news or posts about this telling you to be safe by being predictable, being visible, or only crossing in crosswalks. I’m not here to give any safety tips. Instead, I’ll let ilajue on tumblr do that in their artwork titled “6 Tips for […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Preston Austin @gl33p.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12/10/2026
“ALPR camera surveillance networks exist in Canada, where Sistilli resides, prompting him to build his own device, but... encoded to exclusively track police cars” “He detailed the build in several TikTok videos, describing it as “a personal Flock surveillance camera to Flock the Flockers.” He […]
mastodon.social
Original post on mastodon.social
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
DHS has repeatedly falsely claimed that people were weaponizing their vehicles to justify shooting those people. Also DHS is weaponizing its vehicles to run people over.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 11/10/2026
"If they don't want to be called nazis they should stop doing nazi shit, and the media should ask themselves why heated language bothers them more than nazi shit."
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