"#europe cannot buy #sovereignty off a shelf, it has to build it. In an age of geopolitical volatility and rapid innovation Europe must play to its strengths, including world-leading researchers and a rich history of #opensource development. It faces a choice: use these strengths to carve out […]

Musk, his DOGE gang, and Marco Rubio are responsible for a staggering death toll. It should be reason to refuse association with any of Musk's products, but large death tolls become statistics. In the short doc "Rovina's Choice", Atul Gawande shows what happens when you suddenly withdraw aid […]

Chabeau 0.6.0 (open source chatbot TUI in #Rust) has been released. This is another feature-packed release. Most notably, it ships the `/refine` command (quick in-place revision of an assistant response using a prompt) and in-place editing of assistant messages […] [Original post on social.coop]

The thing I'm learning about TypeScript is that you can spend a lot of time with TypeScript. But, I don't hate it. It does feel like it gives real payoffs. Just not nearly as "oh, it's just plain JS at the end, super easy to work with!" as people sometimes make it out to be. Right now I'm […]

Detailed investigation from Sky on how X boosts extreme right-wing content into user's feeds. Unsurprising, of course. The bigger questions is why so many journalists, politicians and institutions (including SkyNews) feel the need to continue to legitimize X through their presence -- a platform […]

Gee, I wonder why billionaires want to control the encyclopedia. (Kudos to the contributors of this very astute section of Zohran Mamdani's Wikipedia bio.)

The first release candidate for Dangerzone 0.10.0 is out, and we’re looking for feedback from users, especially on macOS and Windows. Thanks! https://dangerzone.rocks/news/2025-11-03-0.10.0-call-for-testing/

Managing focus and scrolling in a terminal UI (TUI) is tricky, but I think I landed on a reasonable approach for Chabeau (https://github.com/permacommons/chabeau). It's very subtle, but you can see it in this video: - "›" indicates focus, "·" indicates out of […] [Original post on social.coop]

Sometimes it's the little things .. made myself a little helper script using `yad` that I can use to quickly bounce the dev env for @lib_reviews :) One minor annoyance this helps address is the "oh, dev env isn't running" problem when hitting the browser; now I […] [Original post on social.coop]

Got my first scam call with a spoofed "Kaiser Permanente" caller ID today. Apparently quite common. Nice reminder not to put too much automatic faith in any form of "identification".

Whenever you're feeling lost, like you don't have a clue Remember, somewhere out there, is a guy Typing into a small box @grok Is this true? He'll always be more lost than you

Canada has made its national school food programme a permanent part of the federal budget, committing to C$1 billion over five years and ongoing annual funding thereafter. The initiative will provide healthy meals to up to 400,000 additional children while supporting local producers, and marks a […]

you've heard of the banality of evil meet its twin brother, the cowardice of institutions https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/us/politics/university-of-virginia-trump-agreement.html

Three weird things about social websites: 1) If you run a a social website, you don't actually have to allow nazis and demagogues to sign up. 2) If the nazis and demagogues sign up anyway, you can kick them out. It sounds weird, I know, but it's totally a thing you can do! 3) If you've signed […]

Chabeau 0.5.1 is out (chatbot TUI compatible with many APIs). A few goodies in this release: - Built-in presets. You can still configure your own, but Chabeau now ships with three sample presets: short (quick responses followed by a numbered menu), casual, and […] [Original post on social.coop]

[uspol, shutdown] The shutdown is one plausible pathway to full autocracy, and the Trump gang is already laying the groundwork for it with illegal appropriation of funds. As more essential government functions are threatened, the executive can just keep asserting more and more authority to […]

"All people, however fanatical they may be in their zeal to disparage and to fight capitalism, implicitly pay homage to it by passionately clamoring for the products it turns out." - Ludwig von Mises

Took me long enough, but I am _finally_ learning to love `systemd`

Chabeau 0.5.0 (my open source terminal chatbot TUI) is the first version that supports character cards, personas, and presets. Here's a simple preset in action that 1) keeps responses concise, 2) facilitates menu-style exploration. `cargo install chabeau` (full […] [Original post on social.coop]

You wouldn't know it from how it was covered in major news outlets, but: "No Kings Day on June 14 was one of the largest single days of protest in United States history." Let's make October 18 the largest […]

People tend to think of ALT text as a "good thing to do for people with disabilities". That is true, but also reductive. It is useful for everyone, as is generally the case with accessibility. I sometimes see posts with screenshots of text in a language I don't speak. If they had ALT text, I […]

Trump got his COVID19 vaccine today. He will always have access to everything he needs to maintain his health while denying others the same.

Bubbles!! and bubbles pop @eloquence

At this rate it's honestly surprising that none of the major #ai players have issued an "AICoin" yet (aside from Altman's aspirational spycoin). Maybe that's the final step after institutional investment dries up. (Graphic from Bloomberg: https://archive.is/Pagn7)

Credit to /u/Im_so_little/ for this light edit showing the war zone outside the Portland ICE facility.

If you're still on speaking terms with friends or relatives who have gone MAGA, this may be a good article to send them on the 0.1% chance it opens an eye by a degree or two. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/portland-not-war-ravaged-trump-1235438405/

Pritzker pointing out that ICE lies first and immediately, knowing journalists will catch up later if at all. Coming from a sitting US governor, that’s an amazing breakthrough […] [Original post on mastodon.murkworks.net]

Vox dot com, explained in one image

The canceling of ICEBlock is more evidence, were any needed, that the Web is the platform of the future, the only platform without a controlling vendor. Anything controversial should be available through a pure browser interface. #uspolitics

It's pretty clear from the #bluesky CEO's shitposting that she really would rather not have all those uppity trans folks and their friends on the platform. Instead she'd prefer to proudly talk to investors about how even J.D. Vance has an account. It's the digital town square! Everyone is […]

Mario Guevara is being punished for speech by deportation to a country he fled decades ago: El Salvador, a dictatorship that operates horrific gulags the US has previously made use of. You can read Guevara's letter from detention in English here […] [Original post on social.coop]

Apple: And you'll see why 2025 will finally be like 1984. Think ... identically. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/us/politics/apple-iceblock-app-store-trump.html

Any reporter covering the US Supreme Court should take notes from this Slate summary. (Most will instead cover it with legitimizing, normalizing "analysis".) "The challenge will be to seek out that which the court is obscuring in this performance of business as usual this term, and to […]

Jane Fonda, with a large coalition of celebrities, revives the Committee for the First Amendment - a key group from the McCarthy era. Fonda: "I wish there were a secret playbook with all the answers – but there never has been. The only thing that has ever worked – time and time again – is […]

Apple has built this mythology of a user-friendly OS. But as I'm setting up a test Mac for development builds, I'm struck by the many tiny UX papercuts. Case in point: 1) Erase Mac -> connect to WiFi and enter password. 2) Install: select WiFi again, enter password you just typed again (!); no […]

@eloquence I think this is a really good framing. Any path forward needs to acknowledge that the systems we had, which have been or are being dismantled, were not producing democracy. We need to be asking and envisioning what actually will.

I don't really think it makes sense to talk about "protecting democracy" in a two-party system where one party has fully given up on the idea of democracy and is steadily building out authoritarian rule. Nor does success at pushing that party out of power while it remains fundamentally […]

Wrote up my initial impressions of the brand new Claude Sonnet 4.5 - I think it may live up to Anthropic's claims of being the "best coding model in the world", for the next few weeks at least! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/29/claude-sonnet-4-5/

In a democracy, this would be enough to launch investigations and topple a president or a prime minister. In Trump-land, it's just Saturday night. (The grift is a separate website where the marks can buy "Med Bed Cards" that look exactly like the ones shown in the AI-generated "news" video.) […]

@Nonilex I just woke up to see the announcement that troops are being sent to Portland. We are in Portland now. Yesterday we walked around the Pearl District, visited Pioneer Place, and enjoyed the peace and beauty of a NW autumn day. Below are a few photos I took. As […] [Original post on mas.to]

Populist authoritarianism is a cruelty exchange program. You cannot understand it unless you reckon with the fact that their cruelty is what keeps these people in power. Friends, family, neighbors who support authoritarian governments harbor this cruelty, seek this cruelty, desire this cruelty […]

#ennis Friary, #ireland

The goal, as always, is not just to silence her, but to send a clear message to future whistleblowers that Meta's army of lawyers will make their life hell. Politicians that keep posturing about reining in "Big Tech" could start by strengthening whistleblower protections. Instead they pursue […]

the head of ICE getting filmed accepting $50,000 in what appeared to be cash bribes from undercover agents is the least surprising news ever > "On Sept. 20, 2024, with hidden cameras recording the scene at a meeting spot in Texas, Homan accepted $50,000 in […] [Original post on universeodon.com]

Why #freesoftware for public services? ✅ Ensures transparency 📖 ✅ Avoids dependency on single vendors 🔄 ✅ Allows collaboration & improvement 🤝 ✅ Saves money in the long run 💰 Taxpayer-funded software should be for the public Public Money? Public Code! […]

The investigative newsroom I work for, @ProPublica, is raising money right now. This is the last few days of our pledge drive. We report on abuses of power in the public interest. We reported on who works for DOGE and revealed Clarence Thomas’s conflicts of interest. It was the first outlet to […]

The Jimmy Kimmel firing, Colbert's show, what's happening at WaPo, CBS... legacy journalism is slowly but surely coming under state control. It is more important now than ever before that we support the independent journalists out there doing the work not beholden to a fascist's bidding.