Texas A&M has decided that Plato is woke & thus has forbidden a philosophy professor from teaching Plato's works. Not a joke. Not satire. This is the world the anti-woke "free speech warriors" have bequeathed us. dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

@tarheel "The Trump administration is closing NASA’s largest research library on Friday, a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else. Jacob Richmond, a NASA spokesman, said the agency would review the library […]

A letter to the Grauniad on why we don't trust Starmer. This.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/115826000254101154 Speaking as a cynic, the difference between buying a car that sells my location to data brokers in real time, Windows 11 that spies on everything I do for "AI," and a TV that has a botnet installed is getting harder and harder to justify.

Do you also know somebody who answer to the question if they play an instrument: “Yes, the triangle 😜” 13 years ago I was so annoyed by people underestimating this instrument, that cuts through every mix, that I planned to make a website about it. Today it goes live […]

Privacy settings are important.

Es hat keine Hemmungen mehr. #trumpisacriminal https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/donald-trump-us-praesident-fordert-cbs-in-post-auf-moderator-stephen-colbert-einzuschlaefern-a-84dddb8f-7b0f-4618-9aee-8a9a1d0ed6f3#ref=rss

Delighted to hear that The Invisible Doctrine, the film by @peterhutchison.bsky.social and @lucas-sabean.bsky.social, is being offered free to view on YouTube for the holiday season. It's all yours! youtu.be/gR4eSEetKP0

started / going

Suddenly reminded of an e-waste story: about 13 years ago I spotted a high end gaming PC at the tip. Less than two years old, pretty expensive component choices for the era. Took home, powered up. The CPU fan immediately ran 100%, and it froze mid-boot. OK, we know why it was treated as e-waste […]

"Would you ever put a prediction market in Roblocks? Let kids bet with their robucks?" Insane combinations of words that should never occur. Anyone even discussing such questions ought to be put into prison. However... Moments like this make me more determined to help kids build an internet […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115737483111161917 I'll elaborate. I believe we're in an AI bubble. AI companies are pushing the overton window on AI discourse. They want the most extreme anti-AI sentiment to be "Sure, it's an overhyped technology right now but there will be reasonable […]

Dan Hicks & his Hot Licks 1972 https://youtube.com/watch?v=hBGeQ0zSifc&si=dXo7knTEz6DFSM-H

#writerscoffeeclub 17 Dec Give a shout-out to a resource or site you think more writers should know. @diabolicalplots 's Submission Grinder https://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com/ Without that I'd have sold and placed less than half as many short stories, not having any similar way to find […]

Comparing the early internet with the Sloponet that we are sliding into currently is mind boggling to me. The early internet gave more people more tools to easier publish and learn and collaborate. The slopfest centralizes knowledge so that you can only exist when you’re in a symbiotic […]

Reposting for those not bridged to BlueSky, and to add alt-text, because this is important! Jonathan McDowell @planet4589.bsky.social posted this morning: "The number of active satellites in orbit has now passed the 14000 mark according to my estimates"

The Danish government is using the upcoming Christmas break to slip through a public consultation for a draft law that would make it an OFFENCE to use a #VPN to access content that would otherwise not be available in Denmark, or to circumvent the blocking of […] [Original post on eupolicy.social]

Today in insanity: "Travelers visiting the United States from countries like Britain, France, Germany and South Korea could soon have to undergo a review of up to five years of their social media history, according to a proposal filed on Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection." […]

Your occasional reminder that acting to curb #climatechange SAVES money. https://www.commondreams.org/news/un-climate-action-report

Really excited to see AI getting built into Calibre, the ebook manager. ... because this will supercharge development on forks and replacements.

Still really genuinely angry at how much the passkey rollout has fucked up the flows for anyone using a security key. Fuck forcing people to set pins on hardware tokens. Fuck defaulting to allowing a hardware token to log in without the password. Fuck making every mobile device you own a first […]

We're half a decade into studies finding that improving airflow in classrooms will reduce disease transmission enormously, and that bleaching surfaces etc. does very little. And yet nothing changes. Waves of flu and colds wash over schools, and the schools pretend it's an act of God.

I've been pondering #solarpunk and #hopepunk ideas. One of the most impressive resources I have come across is the #appropriatetechnologylibrary - a giant collection of books that is everything you'd need to make a village or community go with minimal effort and access to basic tools and […]

1. Some good news at last. This week’s column is about the amazing thing a couple of us stumbled into three years ago, which we’ve now developed into a global research programme. It doesn’t change everything, of course, but it could help change quite a lot. + 🧵 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I will ask chat GPT I will boil the last of our drinking water Salt the soil of the scrub-lands Tear the pages from books and feed them to my fire I will ask copilot I will scramble your library maim the faces of your favorite paintings I will bury you in poor copies of your dreams I will ask […]

@sue As a coder, I think a higher priority should be critical thinking skills. Generating media with fallacious arguments that caters to your cognitive biases is how people (with or without genAI) manipulate you. genAI is the bullet train to replace the horse that used to be the source of a […]

I sometimes see people describing resistance to LLM assisted coding as gatekeeping and I get that, software engineering culture is absolutely rife with gatekeeping, I quite literally dedicated dedicated my career to developer education because I want more people to have access to these […]

@sue These people need an education in programming just so they internalise that "I don't know how this works" is exactly equivalent to "I don't know if this works" or even "I don't know what this does".

Over on bluesky where the conversation is *a lot more heated* I've seen folk telling engineering leads they're being unfair in expecting contributors to understand the code in a commit before it can be merged.. That is a recipe for harm without accountability.

Noticing a wave of ppl moving out of Spotify. Congrats. And thanks for sharing your success stories. For those who wonder where else ? Here u go https://zoemcpherson.xyz/MOVING / Keep it up

Uruguay did what most nations still call impossible: it built a power grid that runs almost entirely on renewables —at half the cost of fossil fuels. The physicist who led that transformation says the same playbook could work anywhere —if governments have the courage to change the rules. For […]

This ‘shadow’ Autumn Statement from the Chancellor feels like it’s been going on forever. I’m pining for the days when the UK had one budget statement, delivered first and foremost to Parliament, and the slightest leak beforehand was likely to lead to the compelled resignation of the Chancellor […]

What could possibly go wrong? "Three local Parramatta libraries have become the first in Australia to adopt new forms of artificial intelligence (AI), hosting AI Tutor Robots to teach kids. "The ABii Smart Tutor Robot is designed to help children aged 3-11 with STEM, reading and writing skills […]

Well said. "Imagine a family stuck in a house that constantly floods. The carpets are soaked, the walls damp. It’s always cold, no matter how much they turn up the heating. "The family try everything. They promise to replace the sodden carpets and find new, innovative ways to warm the house […]

If all the people who work at airports told you, "don't fly that airline," I hope you would listen. When all the musicians who have the freedom to be honest tell you, "don't use Spotify," you might consider other options for listening to music.

I'm running a German-speaking Mastodon instance with half-open registration. So when I receive an account application in English, it's almost always from a bot or click-worker/slave trying to create sleeper accounts for use in spam campaigns. Here is a rather disingenious, very generic […]

I had a great conversation with the wonderful @zackpolanski.bsky.social on his podcast. Do please listen in. I don't think you'll have heard anything quite like it. And there's a LOT more here than the title suggests. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/h...

The more “AI” stuff is pushed the less I want to work in tech at all. Everything is “this is shit, but it is not shit enough to change anything”, and that just doesn’t work with my desire to do good quality, sustainable work that works for everyone – and especially for disabled people. I’m […]

What's horrifying about this graph is that we're emitting CO2 from fossil hydrocarbons NOW at four times the rate we were when I was a child, and twice the rate we were in 1972, when we already knew that #ClimateChange was an existential problem. Source […] [Original post on mastodon.scot]

Cloverdale, a tiny town in Sonoma County, California, is being invaded by secretive investors who want to build a new "town." Of course, the backers of "Esmeralda" have very deep ties to the Network State cult and Peter Thiel. My notes: www.thenerdreich.com/esmeralda-ne...

Only 2.6C *by 2100*. That's all good then. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/13/world-still-on-track-for-catastrophic-26c-temperature-rise-report-finds "By 2100". What happens in 2101? Reminder. 2100 is now closer than WWII. Its only 75 years. There are people alive today who […]

Quand on me dit "Voulez-vous profiter des fonctionnalités de Copilot pour Office 365 ?" #memecredi

CI/CD means "crashes immediately, can't debug"

Bonfire Social looks like everything a fediverse platform should be. The values, the features, the plan. Somehow I'm just the 82nd backer of their very modest funding campaign, and that should change. @bonfire https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/bonfire/community

The Irony of the right complaining about the left wing bias of the BBC and getting the senior management fired. Who were put in by the right and were directly responsible for the right wing bias of the BBC. With an unhealthy dose of Zionism in the mix. Complaining about the Antisemitic […]

*Holy cow, a giant mechanized Incan Quipu mainframe for barter and tax collection https://www.newscientist.com/article/2503499-mysterious-holes-in-andean-mountain-may-be-an-inca-spreadsheet/

"Climate tipping point risks are interconnected. Most of the interactions between them are destabilising. This means that tipping one system over into disaster makes tipping another more likely. The negative impacts would cascade through the ecological and social systems we depend upon, creating […]

Australia's rooftop solar generation is so successful that curtailment, the process of throttling or spilling energy production in excess of demand, is a regular occurrence, apart from offering free electricity at peak hours. A large part of why: "coal-fired […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

The government has STILL not cleared out the highly partisan decision-makers imposed on the BBC by the Tories. Starmer and co are so amazingly spineless and feeble. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...