MX Linux 25 reaches beta testing – complete with systemd www.theregister.com/2025/09/23/m... Fancy a taste? The version based on Debian 'Trixie' is nearly ready, but not all the changes may be entirely welcome <- by me on @theregister.com

ChatGPT is bullshit buff.ly/4vPda8F <- A professional assessment: this is a paper from _Ethics and Information Technology_

The Useful Idiots of AI Doomsaying buff.ly/Sg0GXvl Those who predict that superintelligence will destroy humanity serve the same interests as those who believe that it will solve all of our problems.

Bravo

Linux's love-to-hate projects drop fresh versions: systemd 258 and GNOME 49 www.theregister.com/2025/09/23/s... Init system update arrives behind schedule while desktop overhaul adds app and HDR polish <- by me on @theregister.com

Steve Jobs, Jef Raskin, and the first great war for your thumbs buff.ly/mKtfd2Y <- the 2 different generations of NeXT keyboard, the Canon Cat, & some truly scary Japanese kana keyboards...

I know antifa isn't a real organization because I don't get 40 texts a week from them asking for donations.

Please stop using OpenTorment!!! It's only open-core! TormentLibre is the fully FOSS alternative!

I’m not sure what is most awesome—that an unexpected mineral in an asteroid challenges prevailing theories about our solar system’s evolution, or how the rock sample was collected 350,000,000 km from here, and how it was returned to Earth: buff.ly/zMELY8c

If you mash the audio example buttons on the wikipedia page for the IPA vowel sounds you can create a choir of mildly disgusted men

In the #Rationale magazine, cartoonist Matt Bissett-Johnson gives his take on what’s happening in current affairs. Check out his other recent cartoons here: rationalemagazine.com/index.php/au... @mbjcartoonist.bsky.social

Tylenol was always one of those American things you didn't know what it was. Like Twinkies and Pottery Barn and Ted Koppel and whatever the hell a caucus is.

Spot the leech on this #echidna. Spines work great against predators, but they're not much use against parasites. 🪱 #Tasmania #MammalWatching #WildOz #echidnas

You can now test drive Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 www.theregister.com/2025/09/22/f... Spooky season is nearly here. Want to be scared? There are fresh betas to try <- by me on @theregister.com

Linux Mint picks up the pace with LMDE 7 and Wayland-ready Cinnamon www.theregister.com/2025/09/16/t... Devs sketch plans for two more releases this year, blending Debian foundations with modern display tech <- by me on @theregister.com

1st vs. 118th: On Gender Equality, Japan and Iceland Took Different Roads

John Edmark's strobe-animated 3D scultures buff.ly/Zu7nZBK <- I love these. Genuinely beautiful. Sound on. The best use of 3D printing I've seen yet.

I found this place 11 years ago. buff.ly/83uf0E2 Never stayed there. I hear it's good. I wonder who named it, and why?

The better I get at "roast potatoes" the closer I come to an uncomfortable truth: we are frying them under the cover of oven cookery. No regrets

In other news, sky is blue, sea is wet, and anyone who has worked with machine learning has known this all along

We raised our police officer son very well. He's very good with his manners, like he always calls us before coming over. Which gives me plenty of time to hide my weed from him before he gets here.

Bonus panel here: www.smbc-comics.com/comic/holy #smbc

He's a journalist like I'm a part-time lettuce farmer from Utrecht called Volslagen Onzin

If you're not totally aware of how bots try to sway minds, here's a good example.

I don't know which is more disturbing. Finding out that the catchy ditty Watermelon Sugar by Harry Styles is about cunnilingus or having my mother in law explain this to me via the medium of Charades

On X I used data to show London does not have the highest crime rate in the world. 10 mins later a right winger linked to my book. 10 mins after that I got 40 1-star reviews from unverified accounts (previously 4.9 star avg). Fair play to Amazon - they removed them all. But that's how it works.

The Sagrada Família Takes Its Final Shape buff.ly/Otqejtc In the century since Antoni Gaudí died, his wild design has been obsessively realized, creating the world’s tallest church—and an endlessly debated icon.

What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero buff.ly/jm6I8R9 The Old Leatherman, a sort of real-life Northeastern Sasquatch, gave me an excuse to step outside my own life.

This is wild. It's as if human females could mate with chimpanzees and give birth to either humans OR selectively to cloned male chimps. (The ant species are that far apart.)

These Ant Queens Seem to Defy Biology: They Lay Eggs That Hatch Into Another Species buff.ly/65vzARt Iberian harvester ant queens produce offspring of their own species and of the builder harvester ant, seemingly by cloning males

Bitten _again_ by my single most-hated characteristic of systemd: if it can't mount anything in `/etc/fstab` it waits & retries forever, so startup fails. You can't login. If you're lucky it might fail & then you can get into "maintenance mode" so no GUI or desktop for you.

The Math of Catastrophe buff.ly/L65Vu0H Tipping points in our climate predictions are both wildly dramatic and wildly uncertain. Can mathematicians make them useful?

CapyBatman. #art #capybara #BatmanDay

Had a boss who made my life hell. He regularly flew abroad on business so I removed the gunpowder from a firework and then rubbed it into the insides of his laptop bag. I didn't see the outcome but I do know that a FULL body search was performed and he missed his flight.

I think there's just a fundamental divide between people who can see LLMs for what they are – a fundamentally toxic technology that can only ever generate negative outcomes; a machine for lying at scale – and people whose brains shut off because the computer is talking back to them.

The more recent history of DR GEM buff.ly/Odh1TSY (One of my now fairly rare tech blog posts.)

as well as this, may I recommend the @eruditorumpress.com take: www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/capital...

Becoming increasingly clear we’re gonna have to build a parallel infrastructure for all the media we really love. The reason all of this is happening under the color of law is hyperconsolidation, dissent being traded straight up for merger approval, or fear of harassment.

I wanted to get a video of this ghost crab but every time I got close to their hole they scuttled back in, so I tried getting clever with it. I made a little sandcastle and shoved my phone into it, hit record, and walked away. Crab was VERY suspicious of this addition to their environment.

This is too perfect. But then I've been to a Chinese restaurant in Grand Forks and you probably haven't.

Oh fuck, you're still sad? buff.ly/Sj0VQJ8 Grief gets an expiration date. Just like us. (Everything Is An Emergency, by Bess Stillman)

cryptofascists are nazis too, they're just more genteel so instead of punching them it's a drink in the face

it is good for everyone, no matter what your gender is, to have female role models

I went and wrote a very short sequel piece to this, covering the developments that have happened since GEM went FOSS about 25Y ago. liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/96552.html

History of the GEM Desktop Environment buff.ly/bfswSFk How a gem was cut and then lost <- very good on the early history, but totally omits GEM-XM, X/GEM on FlexOS & the multitasking/RTOS line & later FOSS developments.

Are you aware what's been happening in Nepal lately? Are you aware that it was the kids. The kids. They did it. In a nutshell... GEN Z rose up, united, and they shouted "WE WANT JUSTICE". And they got it.

Yesterday I nuked the Windows partition on another of my Thinkpads & replaced it with Windows 10 IoT LTSC. Now I have a clean Win10 system, no Modern apps, no Windows store, no OneDrive, & it'll get updates until 2032. The download & the tools to activate it are here:

A pirate goes to the ship’s surgeon to have spots on his arm checked. The surgeon says, "They're benign". The pirate replies, "No, no doc. There be 11. I counted them before I came here." Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Jef Raskin’s cul-de-sac & the quest for the humane computer buff.ly/tc66cdi “He wanted to make [computers] more usable & friendly to people who weren't geeks.” <- long, deep, fascinating, as Dr Cameron Kaiser usually is