Useful answers to common (and generally not unreasonable) questions about #vaccinations, from #yle: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/routine-vaccinations-sanitation-and Worth reading and having in your back pocket, for when you're talking to someone who is unsure about *why* […]

Oh, neat -- #Kagi News has launched: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-news I've been using the early releases of this for most of the past year, as it's been evolving, and I find it a concise (and less panic-inducing) way to efficiently keep track of what's happening in the world. It's nicely […]

I'd say we're at 14 of 14.

If your book(s) were, or are pirated on LibGen and subsequently used by Anthropic to train its AI models, the courts have ordered them to pay a minimum of $1.5B. Authors might/could/perhaps get an estimated payment of $3,000 per work (based on current estimates of the # of pirated works trained […]

The administration celebrating Wounded Knee is congruent with the administration asking for dismissals or one-day sentences for cops convicted of civil rights violations. It’s part of a coordinated message. /1 apnews.com/article/woun...

Wow, #disney is working *really* hard to get me to cancel my service. First, there was the abortive kow-towing to the fascists; now, they're raising the price of Disney+ to absolutely absurd levels. (And adding ads, to boot.) I use Disney+ quite a bit, and we're by no means poor, but they're […]

Starting a new series of articles, trying to really drill into how to build a modern "Web of Trust", which seems to be desperately needed at this point: https://jducoeur.dreamwidth.org/1668137.html Looks like it'll run half a dozen or so articles over the next couple of months; I'll toot here […]

The #boston #scala #meetup is returning! Our first talk will be on November 17 -- Li Haoyi will be providing an introduction to Mill and build tooling in "Designing Simpler Scala Build Tools with Object-Oriented Programming". For more details, see […]

Useful reality-check from @siderea on #covid #vaccines: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1882720.html tl;dr -- all that publicity that the vaccines are not authorized "with some exceptions"? *Most* people qualify as those "exceptions". Moreover, even if you don't, you can probably get vaxxed […]

Wow, the Somerville Community Path Mayoral campaign has become big news: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/sep/05/the-cat-mayoral-race-meet-11-runners-and-riders-in-the-uss-most-furious-and-furriest-election For those who would like to see at least most of the campaign signs (I […]

Today was a reminder: Success in #programming does not come from already having all the answers. Success, all too often, comes from stubbornly refusing to give up, trying experiment after experiment, until *something* finally works right. (Okay, this is more true of debugging and IT tasks […]

For those who haven't yet seen it, a strongly-worded corrective from @siderea, for anyone who thinks that Trump perishing (for whatever reason) would bring a return to sanity: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1882100.html I'm *slightly* more optimistic than Siderea about the implications of […]

Helpful guide for seasonal #vaccination (mainly focused on the US), from #yle: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-fall-2025-vaccines As she mentions there, things are a mess when it comes to #covid vaccines specifically, so keep on eye on the situation in your state. For […]

For those in the intersection of #boston and #scala: there's some discussion of possibly starting a meetup again. Check it out at https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/1n6t2e6/boston_area_scala_meetup_interest/

#sca folks and others who care about actual #history should take note of the latest aspect of The Ensloppification, as described by @404mediaco: https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-boring-history-videos-are-flooding-youtube-and-drowning-out-real-history/ tl;dr -- YouTube is increasingly […]

In case anyone here is using the Tea app, I *strongly* recommend reading this article from @404mediaco : https://www.404media.co/how-teas-founder-convinced-millions-of-women-to-spill-their-secrets-then-exposed-them-to-the-world/ tl;dr -- not only did the app have a massive recent security […]

Oh, good on Bandcamp: https://bandcamp.com/about_clubs They're introducing "clubs": an album a month, each club focused on a different genre/style. Explicitly non-AI, each one curated by a human being. Very much an idea for our times: the rise of #ai #slop is making human recommendations […]

So -- Android 16 happened. And I have no idea what they did, but they comprehensively fucked up my Gmail notifications, such that each email would cause a slew of alerts to hit my (Versa 3) watch, re-alerting for all the previously-notified emails. Which managed to efficiently *kill* my Versa […]

I wish I could be the slightest bit surprised by this one, but I'm not: https://electrek.co/2025/08/25/scientist-exposes-anti-wind-groups-as-oil-funded-now-they-want-to-silence-him/ tl;dr -- a collection of right-wing lawyers and front organizations are trying to silence the researcher who has […]

Very much a #kickstarter for our times -- @pluralistic has assembled his thoughts on the concept of #enshittification into a book: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook The audiobook is self-published as usual (to work around The Audible Problem) […]

Not-so-metaphorical take on #ozma as #trans, from Lifeline #comics: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/comicuno/ozma Their work is consistently fun and well-made; looking forward to this #kickstarter!

#comics fans take note: Fantagraphics is holding a 30% off "We've Been Robbed" sale for the next couple of days: https://www.fantagraphics.com And for the context of *who* has robbed them, if you haven't yet been following the saga of the Diamond Distributors bankruptcy and all the […]

Today in Evil #ai Bubble Bullshit, it looks like, if you do any business with Spreadshirt, it's time to get the hell away from there: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/19/spreadshirt-to-artists-were-taking-your-designs-for-ai/ Seriously -- even if you're just a customer, I suggest you boycott […]

Not new, but @andrewducker just pointed me at this nice bit of analysis, how Denethor prefigures the Doomer attitude: https://www.polygon.com/lord-of-the-rings/22353128/denethor-lotr-movies-story-doomscrolling/ It well-illustrates why my response to predictions of Doom, whether in politics or […]

A few days old, but I just came across this magnificent metaphorical satire of the #ai bubble; if you haven't yet read it, it's well worth bookmarking […]

The more news I see, the more I feel like it needs to be said: ICE is state-sponsored terrorism. Wikipedia says (I think fairly), "Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims." And that's clearly the case here. The […]

[Gun violence] Jesus fucking Christ -- CDC attacked by some lunatic with a gun: https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/bullets-in-the-windows It's the logical confluence of a political leadership that worships guns and has mass-marketed the idea that science is somehow a sinister […]

Fascinating, and (if true) pretty ghastly: https://data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-mothership-vortex-an-investigation I've long assumed that the hyperbolic spams that I am *constantly* deluged with from ostensibly-Democratic causes were simply fraud. This article argues that they are "real" […]

Pardon a quick #games plug (my brother-in-law is a co-founder of the company): https://boostedreality.games/products/rift-zone-contact Rift Zone: Contact is a tabletop battle game with an associated AR app to deal with the crunchy-numbers part. Currently in beta, and I gather they're showing it […]

Clever new #scala testing mechanism from Haoyi: http://www.lihaoyi.com/post/GoldenLiteralTestinginuTest090.html tl;dr -- "Golden Literals" in tests will check whether the actual result matches the expected *and* propose a code change to the test iff the answer is "yes this changed, and the new […]

Funny and incisive takedown of the periodic breathless claims of being able to factorize large numbers via quantum computers: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237 tl;dr -- the claims tend to be sleight-of-hand nonsense, and this sardonic article suggests easier ways to apply the same techniques […]

For #sca Cooks, a relevant thread on the anatomy of sheep: https://www.tumblr.com/andrewducker/790117333600518144/arsanatomica-arsanatomica-dreamingdeeper ("Tail of fat lamb" is a common ingredient in some period cookbooks -- this presumably explains what that's talking about.)

Just found out about this lovely ancient Easter Egg perpetrated by the late, great Tom Lehrer: https://skywriter.blue/pages/did:plc:wn5sx5neaortppmdqj5gnksn/post/3luxxx27nos23

A reminder that the Congressional horrors didn't stop with The Bloated Ugly Bill: https://transnews.network/p/the-sweeping-anti-trans-bills-moving-through-congress-no-one-s-talking-about #uspol

As I go to report yet another "Your account is unverified" spam (this one trying even harder to look officially from "Mastodon"), I notice that it doesn't *technically* violate the code of conduct for social.coop -- or, indeed, most sites AFAICT. We've gotten pretty good about saying "no abuse" […]

Grr -- my inbox is getting slammed with an increasingly large number of fake Kickstarter mailing lists: emails that try to *look* a lot like Kickstarter, but aren't. I've had several of these spam-binned for a long time, but they're now coming out with lots of variants with different names, to […]

Fun, scary, epic rant about the #ai bubble: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/ It doesn't even bother touching on all the ethical or environmental issues. Instead, it just runs the numbers and shows that *economically* the whole thing is more or less a slightly-recursive pyramid scheme […]

#google has been forcing lots of entirely-undesired #ai features into my company's Google Workspace plan. This is, obviously, because they want to charge me more for it. As a result, I'm finally starting to figure out how to cancel and shut down my 15-year-old Google Workspace, and switch to […]

“Debates about family structure rarely address the possibility of families like these. Instead, they tend to compare one-parent households to two-parent households, holding up the latter as the ideal. […] But by that reasoning, three or four parents should be even better. In a case in which […]

The thing that stands out here is so many Dems run campaigns terrified of (and thus buying into) the Fox News framing. Mamdani is rightly mocking that framing as ridiculous and it resonates. He's not running scared. He's running proud of who he is and what he stands for.

PHISHING ALERT: I just got a DM from something calling itself the "Mastodon Support Team", saying that "verification is now required for all members", with a link to click on to do so. It's screamingly obvious phishing (probably attempted identity theft), but if you see it, report and block it! […]

Fascinating article about how belief systems are structured, and some lessons one can draw from that about practical memetic warfare: https://vasily.cc/blog/facts-dont-change-minds/ Well worth reading, both to help understand how to loosen pernicious worldviews and to understand how others are […]

David and I are both adoptive fathers and his experience speaks to me. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/o...

This fascinating, and damning, deep dive into Google search results came my way via @pluralistic: https://housefresh.com/beware-of-the-google-ai-salesman/ I switched to @kagihq as my default search engine more than a year ago. I don't have to worry about hallucinations or SEO spam. The monthly […]

Oh, FFS -- I have a sneaking suspicion that Amazon decided that, since everyone is supposed to go all-in on agentic #ai, some clever person put one in charge of the PR reviews here: https://www.404media.co/hacker-plants-computer-wiping-commands-in-amazons-ai-coding-agent/ (h/t to @404mediaco […]

Radley Balko is always worth reading, but when he talks about police militarization, he’s speaking as one of the most qualified journalists we have. He’s rather apocalyptic about where we are with a huge ICE force. He’s right. open.substack.com/pub/radleyba...

Spreading the word: Friday Afternoon Tea (https://www.fridaytea.com), an excellent geekly #tea company, has been trying to dig themselves out from under the debts they took on in order to make it through the worst of the pandemic. They're running a fundraiser to try to get back on a firmer […]

Excellent editorial by Mike Masnick about why fascism is destructive to innovation: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/17/fascism-for-first-time-founders/ Everyone in tech should read this. It's a thoroughly correct look at what we *need* to learn from history. If you actually want to do cool […]

Ew: https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/21/opinion_column_age_verification/ tl;dr -- Bluesky's system for age verification (in order to comply with UK law) sounds like it may be even worse than I would have expected. I'm a bit more pissed-off at the UK government than I am at Bluesky about […]

"Financial decision" my ass: https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/cbs-cancel-late-show-stephen-colbert-financial-decision-1236464356/ Sad but unsurprising to see more of the major media caving to the Trumpists... #uspol