some humor from Threads:

My fellow men: if you want to know what living in a man's world might feel like, I recommend reading Lucy Ellmans' MT in The Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/8497/mt-lucy-ellmann (it is paywalled. If you can, read it all the way through to the end.)

[US politics] today's socials gem: ‪Audrey Farnsworth‬ ‪@audipenny.bsky.social‬ America keeps trying to get me to go to her birthday party and I’m like no girl u need to go to the hospital.

JA Westenberg: Turn off your AI notetaker. I'm trying to have a conversation.: > When we record every casual encounter, we’re optimizing for “Information Retrieval” at the expense of “Relationship Formation,” treating our friends // colleagues // loved ones as data sourced to be mined, rather […]

todays' threads gem:

today's "hachy-ask": please post times for public meetups as UTC.

In response to Trump's 2025 "Restoring Gold Standard Science" executive order, the NOAA shut down the Climate.gov website. Former staffers have now set up a nonprofit to provide reliable climate information in its stead. Here's more. https://flip.it/mNCHRu #trumpadministration #climate #science

I would rather see government break up monopolies, loosen IP laws, support public options for education, &c

We're seeing a lot of account takeovers of old, unused accounts. If your account has elevated privileges (eg admin or moderator access) we strongly advise you enable multi-factor authentication. Please boost for visibility. #fediadmin #fedimods #mastoadmin

The idea of banning minors from using social media is at its heart an attempt to punish victims instead of going against the perpetrator. If minors are more easily victimized by the predatory practices of large tech corporations it's not their fault. The blame lies squarely on the corporations […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@RuthMalan/116719728852269955 social engineering always sounds creepy, and not in a good way ....

It's 1998, you make a website in the copy of frontpage express that came with your computer, it's just like Word and it's very easy, you figure out how to upload it to the couple megs of web space that your ISP gives you (the instructions are on their website), you visit your site in your […]

today's literary gem: "The unthinkable is something we carry with us always. It has already happened: we are improbable, we have emerged from a cloud of unbelievable coincidences." - page 33 Solvej Balle, On the calculation of volume. < […]

"The truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. […] When you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the […]

today's free association: new work: "primitive.ai" - thinking straight from the brainstem (with music from The Velvet Underground)

The ACM obituary for PGN, by @spaf and Simson Garfinkel, is wonderful: https://cacm.acm.org/news/in-memoriam-peter-g-neumann-1932-2026/

Not nearly enough reporting about what's happening in Cuba, which the administration is attempting to squeeze, punish, and coerce into submission and violent self destruction. This is so much worse than the embargo. It's hideous. Haiti, Cuba, ongoing boat strike murders: anti-Black foreign policy

"Trump fires all 24 members of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s governing body." https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-fires-nsf-s-oversight-board "U.S. President Donald Trump yesterday fired all 24 members of the National Science Board (#nsb), the body that oversees the National […]

this is a high point, but still ... Latest (2026-04-25) Scripps Mauna Loa Observatory co2 value: 431.64 ppm Latest (2026-04-25) NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory co2 value: 432.20 ppm

@FediTips you can ignore my Q from earlier re hashtags and profiles. And thanks again for providing the tips service.

@FediTips a simple Q (i think) i saw a post saying that by adding a "#noai" hashtag to my profile I could avoid having my posts included in some ingestion service. What I do not know is where in my profile would I put such a hashtag? (this link is provided as a reference, but I still do not know […]

Anyone can still edit Wikipedia. Without even signing in! Anyone can still "join" the IETF: "There is no membership in the IETF. Anyone can participate by signing up to a working group mailing list (more on that below), or registering for an IETF meeting. All IETF participants are considered […]

Today, we're introducing three things. The first one is a forum. A real forum - with categories, threads, and actual conversations that don't disappear in a timeline after six minutes. The second is a Fediverse platform. Fully federated, ActivityPub-native. Your posts go out, the world's posts […]

"I warn my students: - Yes, AI can generate the code for this assignment. Don’t let it. You have to write the code. I explain that, if they don’t write the code, they will not be able to effectively read the code. The ability to read code is certainly going to be valuable, maybe more valuable […]

Thu Mar 26 12:37:00 UTC 2026 Latest (2026-03-24) Scripps Mauna Loa Observatory co2 value: 431.59 ppm Latest (2026-03-25) NOAA Mauna Loa Observatory co2 value: 431.50 ppm

a bit of raw thought: In the political realm I am examining my own views on socialism, liberal democracy, and trying to understand my own assumptions, that sometimes feel built-in and hard to examine. My take-away, so far, from “Hospicing Modernity” is that there is no repair or modification to […]

I'm so tired of cautionary films/books that bring together a lot of evidence to show us a challenge humanity is wrestling with, its urgency, explain how people benefiting from the problem are making it worse, maybe go into how it's also tied up in systems we're really all responsible for […]

Update. It turns out that the National Academies of Science (#nas) did 𝗻𝗼𝘁 acquiesce in this #censorship of #climate science. In a short statement (March 11) it said “The manual, including the chapter on #Climate science, will continue to be available on the Academy’s website.” […]

today's poetry gem (Richard Wehrman):

quote for the day: “I have acquired a mood. It is not the same as hope, but it is not nothing … I bought a frying pan as well. I have exchanged my hope for a mood and a frying pan." ~ Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume Fiona Tribe @fionatribe.bsky.social < […]

There are over 600 comments submitted on Reflect Orbital's filing at the FCC!! That's amazing, especially given how hard the FCC has made the submission process. If you want to submit your own comment (on this or SpaceX's million sat filing), there's still a few more days to do that, and […]

“Dorothea Salo the awesome [@dsalo here en la fedi ] a cybersecurity expert and UW-Madison professor, says Dane County’s data sharing agreements add another layer of concern” » “They can’t promise that [data won’t be used for immigration enforcement] if […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

I have the feeling when conversing with someone that even when using the same English words we are not saying the same thing. And even when reading, sometimes the dictionary is not helping.

Rolling out a new project this weekend. It's a "cheat sheet" with major and minor scales for my music theory class. Code published here: https://codeberg.org/crosenthal/music-theory-refs Doc published here: https://pub.crosenthal.com/music-theory-refs/ #musictheory

I wanted the blue checkmark on LinkedIn. The one that says “this person is real.” In a sea of fake recruiters, bot accounts, and AI-generated headshots, it seemed like a smart thing to do. So I tapped “verify.” I scanned my passport. I took a selfie. Three minutes later — done. Badge acquired […]

@atproto_rocks seems that blacksky.community is not loading posts now: Mon Jan 26 14:22:19 UTC 2026

1/ I'm seeking expressions of interest from nonprofit organizations to take over the Open Access Tracking Project (#OATP, @oatp#OATP and the open-source software (#TagTeam) on which it runs. Details in this Google doc: https://bit.ly/TransferOATP Contact me <[email protected]> if you have any […]

*Maybe AI is a really strong conservative force that only goes where the convenient Big Data already is https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09922-y

2026-01-14 (not great news):

I think the appearance of free software really broke the oligarch's brains. People are just giving away stuff that should be Shareholder Value? And we *can't* buy it off them and own it? People are just running a compiler whenever they like to make whatever they want without paying anyone? The […]

How Much? BY CARL SANDBURG How much do you love me, a million bushels? Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more. And tomorrow maybe only half a bushel? Tomorrow maybe not even a half a bushel. And is this your heart arithmetic? This is the way the wind measures the weather. < […]

Maybe we want to bare our teeth. s.e. smith - 06 Jan 2026 This is an era where people do not do the reading, so we have the same superficial conversations over and over again. ,,, We should call things what they are. Sometimes that means they are ugly and messy, that the people we look up to are […]

"antifa" -- is it a string or a thing or an Ontological Commitment Error?

Hmm ... homebrew-emacsmacport just stopped working from a tree-sitter update for macOS Tahoe. reinstall did not help, so i homebrew installed the GNU emacs (30.2) (that works). this is the first time in many years I have had an emacsmacport breakdown. am i the only one?

Today's #fediverse observation: Posted today on "blacksky.community" and it showed up right away on my Mastodon Home feed. And an early morning post on my Masto instance shows up on my "blacksky.community" "federated" tab. So, yes Bridgy Fed is working.

Fame is a bee. (1788) BY EMILY DICKINSON Fame is a bee. It has a song It has a sting Ah, too, it has a wing. <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52139/fame-is-a-bee-1788>

2025-12-06-01: a test post with a link to verify documentation on 'mastodon_comments` package. the link: https://socialpraxis.netlify.app/activitypub_and_atprotocol_observations_and_notes

to the connected us: i am looking for references about anonymization of collected license plate footage (i know there was some papers on the general anonymization of personal info problem 15+ years ago)

@courtney notifybot is working well for me; of course now i need to figure out what to do with even more posts to read, nonetheless "nice work!"