RIP Gary Larson's inbox.

This is the post that opened my eyes & all others by Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior.bsky.social & she has always been right y’all. This was and still is great advice in thd times we are in and facing in the future. She knew and still knows . She has a PhD in all this shit we’re going through and

Some people say Keir Starmer has been dealt a bad hand. We're still in January and he's already signed a defence deal with Palantir - knowing full well how unpredictable and dangerous the US President is. We're way past the point of giving pleading appeasement speeches.

Heavy agree with this and I think it is a big issue actually. That’s the way our system works and hang the modern marketing bullshit. Churchill and Atlee and Wilson and Thatcher all coped. Why can’t today’s politicians?

Trying to get some real technical work done on why we make shared libraries and then waste them by packing them into a file system and pretending it’s a file. Why not just make a decent static library? Oh yeah. Build systems. :)

People here might not like Tony Blair.

Thank you so much to @zackpolanski.bsky.social for inviting me onto his podcast. We talked about critical issues the media & political establishment is ignoring such as the extraordinarily dumb & dangerous UK defence deal with Peter Thiel’s Palantir

Someone suggested that Europeans aren’t good at software yesterday. Just reminded of this as I hack on Curl on Linux. Both massive open source projects and both European.

One of the worst things about Silicon Valley "journalism" is that it's mostly just stenography. No one with a meaningful platform writes critically about Big Tech. And failure in Silicon Valley is entirely memory holed. Like, what ever happened to Zuck's billion dollar Libra/Diem crypto push?

"Under the weather" is a funny way to spell "chicken"

A wise and wonderful Ukrainian woman has taught me that resistance is as much about culture as it is about munitions, so I’ve changed my profile header to the bookshelf which you will pry out of my cold dead hands.

A real shame if this photo went viral again today.

If we’re going to war with America does that mean we’ll finally arrest Tony Blair?

More than 200,000 Danish citizens have signed a petition to buy California as a response to Trump’s attempt to take Greenland. They say they will provide Californians with “rule of law, universal health care, fact-based politics, and a lifetime supply of Danish pastries.”

Keir Starmer did everything he could to be US poodle and his strategy has ended in total humiliation. Both him and Farage are puppets of a hostile foreign nation. It's obvious that if someone is a bully - you don't just keep appeasing them. Disastrous strategy by Labour.

EU must wake up

Amazing speech from @zackpolanski.bsky.social in Sheffield just now - no notes whatsoever - on the politics of care - inspirational 💚 #VoteGreen @greenparty.org.uk @sheffgreenparty.bsky.social

Ahahahahahah

Is this the moment we can finally get serious about furthering democracy, structuring markets so they work for people, and getting started on tech sovereignty? We know how and we have the means. Trade appeasement hasn't worked. Let's get moving! 🇪🇺

"i saw a bad post on x" ok well i saw a turd in the toilet but i'm not making you look at a screenshot of it

Absolute dumbest timeline

Off to a great start, @MothinAli BBC Any Questions says "people are fed up of the two party system. They're looking for a pary to offer hope. They're looking for a party ready to take on billionaires. A society where work pays. And a society where we tax wealth." 🔥 #BBCAQ

"Anything Donald Trump says should be a concern for us all. Keir Starmer should actually get a back bone and stand up to Donald Trump." - Mothin Ali #BBCAQ

We have choices to make. Do we invest in our communities and people who live across the country? Or do we provide tax breaks & subsides to billionaires? The Green Party will always push the right choice. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Good blog post. "Senior executives at Salesforce have admitted that they massively overestimated AI’s capabilities. They have found that AI simply can’t cope with the complex nature of customer service and totally fails at nuanced issues, escalations, and long-tail customer problems."

"I kind of think of ads as like a last resort for us as a business model," - Sam Altman, Oct. 2024 Well, it seems every other business model has failed, because they're polluting the chatbot's answers with targeted ads. Apparently AI isn't useful enough that people will, you know, pay for it.

About a year ago, Sam Altman said ads in ChatGPT were a "last resort for a business model," and that ads "fundamentally misalign user incentives with the company." He went on to say that he found "ads plus AI uniquely unsettling." Today OpenAI is rolling out ads in ChatGPT.

Meta is winding down VR and its metaverse. 10 years and $100 billion trying to brute force a new platform netted jack shit. Apple is also bailing on VR, after spending 10 years and $30 billion. For years both told us that VR was the next big thing after smartphones. LOL AI will go the same way.

Cursor claims it's AI built a browser from scratch. This is entirely bullshit. First, it's hardly from scratch, pulling in Servo's HTML and CSS parsers, QuickJS, tiny-skia, and more. Second, it takes considerable effort to compile. And third, it can't load web pages. Don't believe the hype.

I just realized he's the only guy the have both a fifa peace prize AND somebody else's nobel prize talk about amazing don't limit your goals people dream big use being infamous for corruption and unauthorized military force to do war crimes to take other people's awards you want anything is possible

While the pasty incels who work the federal agencies continue to churn out feeble, bloodless AI pastiches of Axis propaganda, here’s how a living breathing artist powerfully invokes design history. This is by illustrator Emily K in South Philly, a free poster-sized download on her website: →

Amazing article.

The Danish foreign minister, coming out of a meeting with the Americans: "It's clear that the president has this wish of conquering Greenland." I don't think that people have quite measured the severity of what is happening nor the intensity of the required response.

ICE all over Phoenix metro and outlying cities today. Major surge. Warn your neighbors, get your whistles, sign up and get involved. #AZ

Today, Meta shit-canned ~40% of its VR division. There are deep cuts to Quest hardware and OS, and Horizon Worlds, and full disposal of 3 large VR game studios. VR is gutted at Meta and the pivot to AI and see-through AR glasses is nearly complete. Zuck's "metaverse" hubris is laid bare.

I am really disconnected from the cool “web” kids now. They’re all AT this, AT that. Idk. It seems a bit shit. I just want people to own their data and there are ways to do that without all this implementation complexity. Which also doesn’t mean people own their data.

Giving up privacy, feeding Big Tech our personal information, is deciding we want our purchases directed by the most effective sales teams in the world, and they should have all available ammunition to bend our will to their wares at their prices. Targeted advertising is hostile to your interest.

Guy who went to mime school: that’s a video. That’s a picture. That’s an octet stream.

We don’t have to accept Big Tech garbage.

Keep rejecting Big Tech. They're not used to being told "no" and expected our dependencies on their last platform would let them push their next on us unimpeded. That hubris makes them vulnerable and your push back is landing, hard. Keep it up, loudly, boldly. We don't have to accept their garbage.

The Home Office’s new TikTok account wants you to see migration through a negative lens. We refuse this toxic narrative. Migration is a positive force in this country.

Carole Cadwalladr is one of the most valuable journalists of our times - she was the first to spot the unholy alliance between big tech & the far right, & she did great work exposing the links between Brexit & Putin's regime (for which she paid a heavy personal price). This will be a must-watch.

If you want to understand why the Ministry of Defence’s ‘strategic partnership’ with Palantir is so profoundly dangerous, please read my latest piece open.substack.com/pub/broligar...

The best kind of Nigel Farage is a scared Nigel Farage.

The government sits and watches as Heba dies. It's heartbreaking, horrible, almost impossible to compute. Didn't people vote in the hope (however forlorn) of ending the Tories' psychopathic mode of government? Yet on it goes, under Keir Starmer. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

The UK government is letting these people die. They know it. They're pretending it's not happening.

I have done all the hard work (I think!) on my acme client implementation so very soon I shall have my webserver on the Internet. That’ll be an exciting landmark.

My chickens started laying after a protracted winter break. It’s always nice because it heralds the turning point. Tho usually they start on Christmas Eve so this has been an acknowledgment of the last few weeks harsh weather.

Many of us have learned this for physical and mental well being. Seems to me it’s the answer a lot of the time. Be “mindful” of efficiencies.