What a fantastic way to describe gas vs #solar electric for transportation.

“If you grow an acre of corn, it will produce 900 gallons of ethanol, which will get you about 25,000 miles for a Ford F-150 pickup,” says Carson. “Which is, not bad I guess. But let’s say we put solar on that same acre. It will produce enough electricity every year to drive my Lightning 550,000 miles.”

The entire article is here https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/forty-acres-and-a-sense-of-hope

Forty Acres and a Sense of Hope

Sunshine on a Cloudy Week

^{Bill McKibben (The Crucial Years)}

You cannot buy your way to happiness

“the key to a longer, healthier life is no mystery”. Research has long shown that it comes down to five fundamental lifestyle behaviours: exercising regularly, eating sensibly, limiting alcohol, skipping cigarettes and “nurturing meaningful relationships”. This stuff is simple, “somewhat boring” and, crucially, harder to make money from than “trendy supplements, complex-sounding theories and new gadgets”.

Content warning: Latex meow meow Reveal/hide

Squeakmao conducts mandatory bed inspection. :3c
🖤💚🖤

personally I think the MONA thing is hilarious, especially in the context of the Discourse.

for non-Australians, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania had an area called the Ladies Lounge, where men were not allowed. They hung several fake Picassos, an antique mink rug that was actually polyester, and a bunch of fake tribal spears. The idea was that it was a criticism of the general idea of the patriarchy where men typically have a lot more opportunities for... pick a thing. Even when women were allowed in, what was actually inside were cheap replicas devoid of any amount of authenticity. It's ripping on token inclusion.

In an eye-watering display of self-awareness deficiency, a man then sued MONA for not being allowed in, claiming discrimination due to being a man. He claimed that as he had paid admission to the whole of MONA but was not permitted to this specific exhibit due to his gender, he was being discriminated against.

The Tasmanian Civil Tribunal agreed, and MONA was directed to admit men into a women's-only area. The irony is thick enough that you could cut it with a knife.

MONA, in response, dismantled the exhibit except for the fake Picassos. All the bathrooms at MONA are single-occupancy all-gender, but it turns out having a women's bathroom from which men are excluded *isn't* discriminatory, so they converted one into a women's bathroom and hung the fake Picassos in there, an exhibit of itself.

The art exhibit was basically a criticism of "turns out the only safe space for women away from men is a bathroom, and people will still claim that you're getting special rights because you get to see something nobody else can. Even if what you're seeing is a cheap replica, someone somewhere will claim that you have it good because you're getting something they don't."

Picasso's estate, however, took a rather dim view of unauthorised replicas being displayed in an art gallery in Tasmania, even though it was literally years between putting up the artwork and someone noticing. They've since been taken down with no further action.

MONA has declared that the Ladies Lounge will return as something where S26 of the Sex Discrimination Act doesn't apply, such as a church or boutique glamping experience.

They've also expressly stated that the Ladies Lounge includes ALL women, not just cis ones.

I love everything about this story. Fucking classic stuff coming out of the art world.

Wes Streeting: “This ban [on puberty blockers] brings the private sector in line with the NHS. We are committed to providing young people with the evidence-led care that they deserve”. Evidence shows that blockers are of great help.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/labour-government-may-puberty-blocker-152756755.html

#transgender #lgbt

This 2018 article from the Guardian lives rent-free in my head. I think about it often.

Michell Baker: ”if we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behavior, then we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/12/tech-humanities-misinformation-philosophy-psychology-graduates-mozilla-head-mitchell-baker?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other https://phpc.social/@ramsey/112780443425702602

Tech suffers from lack of humanities, says Mozilla head

Mitchell Baker says firms should hire philosophy and psychology graduates to tackle misinformation

^{Alex Hern (The Guardian)}

TIL that in the UK political system the two following statements are both true :

1) in order to vote for a candidate in a general election, you must provide photo ID.

2) in order to stand as a candidate in a constituency, to hopefully receive votes cast by those people mentioned in #1, you are *not* required to provide any photo ID.

The UK is insane.

It’s amazing to me how quickly OpenAI speed ran the cycle from “we’re just a bunch of nerds building cool tech to change the world” to “we’re at war with our employees who think we’re a soulless for-profit corporation”.

It took Google decades to run through what’s taken OpenAI months

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/13/openai-safety-risks-whistleblower-sec/

Every time someone says "Snowflake should have enforced better security" I like to remind them that if Snowflake wasn't trivially easy to use, you wouldn't know the name Snowflake.

Real talk: security is friction and friction doesn't attract customers.

A #degooglification lesson, AKA "centralization is bad" even when the Good Guys™ do it because it makes you less resilient:

One of the key piece of many (but not all) degooglified Android systems is a tool called "microG". It basically "pretends" to apps that you have Google Services installed, emulating the many system APIs basically all apps depend on.

One of these APIs are Location. In fact, you used to be able to install "add-ons", download a CSV of cell-towers and run mobile cell tower-based approximate geolocation fully locally. Well…

https://github.com/Helium314/Local-NLP-Backend?tab=readme-ov-file

> Note that microG has stopped supporting UnifiedNlp backends with 0.2.28.

https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/releases/tag/v0.2.28.231657

> The new location stack does not support UnifiedNlp modules anymore. This was a step necessary to take to get locations properly working on latest Android versions. […] For now, the new locations stack is relying exclusively on Mozilla Location Service for network based location.

You know what comes next?

GitHub - Helium314/Local-NLP-Backend: Yet another network location backend for the UnifiedNLP/microG project

Yet another network location backend for the UnifiedNLP/microG project - Helium314/Local-NLP-Backend

^GitHub

“One mile on a bike is a $.42 economic gain to society, one mile driving is a $.20 loss.”

“Which means that Copenhagen, a city of 1.2 million people, saves $357 million a year on health costs because something like 80% of its population commutes by bicycle, even in winter.”
https://grist.org/biking/one-mile-on-a-bike-is-a-42-economic-gain-to-society-one-mile-driving-is-a-20-loss/

Content warning: ukpol, transphobic policy Reveal/hide

It turns out Google Chrome ships a default, hidden extension that allows code on `*.google.com` access to private APIs, including your current CPU usage

You can test it out by pasting the following into your Chrome DevTools console on any Google page:

chrome.runtime.sendMessage(
"nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome",
{ method: "cpu.getInfo" },
(response) => {
console.log(JSON.stringify(response, null, 2));
},
);

More notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/9/hangout_servicesthunkjs/

Today I had “the talk” with my partner.

No, not that one, the one about how cloud infrastructure is operated by furries.

So I turned off the new Firefox advertiser-friendly stuff.

But somehow I feel this isn't enough. I want to do more than just turn the feature off, I would prefer to submit poisoned and false data to it continually.

Anyone know a plugin that will flood this bullshit system with fake AI lies or anything like that?

In the page explaining why they silently forced this bullshit on me they say "Attribution is very important to advertisers"

Fuck advertisers. Fuck them. You get that Firefox? It is not your job to be kind to advertisers, it is your job to fuck them on my behalf.

#firefox #adverts #tracking

Arrived back safely from #Anthrocon2024 as of yesterday. Back in the cool Winter weather of Sydney 🇦🇺. Happy #FursuitFriday and have a great weekend!

✂️ @lupesuits
📷 AscariFennec

#furry #fursuit #LupeSuits #FoxFursuit #anthrocon #FursuitPhoto #FoxFurry #AustralianFurry #CuteFursuit #FurryConvention #FurCon

Dragons looking good at the recent #AC2024!
#FursuitFriday #Fursuit #Fursuiting

🐲 Dracore
🧵 Komickrazi
📷: Monzathekobold

Today is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans. #AC2024 #FursuitFriday

📷@ravenpaws

Yup, it's true. Firefox 128 includes new adtech features that are turned on by default and announced with very little fanfare, so most people might not even know they're there.

Well, this is me telling you they're there. You might want to go ahead and take a minute to opt out.

Here's the little helpful explainer from Mozilla about how it all works:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

My read seems to be: Mozilla says website surveillance is generally bad and should be defended against. Cool. No notes. Firefox actually has a lot of nice anti-tracking and privacy features there and that's the main reason why I like Firefox.

But, and I swear I'm not even joking a little bit here, Mozilla goes on to say that advertisers might be happier if Firefox itself just tracked you directly and sent activity reports back to them.

Doesn't that sound great?

Now, to Mozilla's credit, they claim to anonymize the activity reports. And you can still meaningfully opt out of the whole system.

But WTF, mate?! I use Firefox *because* it fights against adtech. Or at least it used to. Now, Mozilla just lets adtech right in the front door and hopes you won't notice?

Well, we noticed. Mozilla is damage and we need to route around it.

UPDATE: The about:config setting for this is `dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled`. It's a bool. Set it to false to turn it off.

Hello privacy-forward friends. You might want to uncheck this checkbox that comes pre-checked in the latest iteration of Firefox (if you are still using it. I realize you may not be, yes I still am). The vibe I get is that it's like "cookie trackers lite" and still not cool.

What Firefox says: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

Hat tip and read more from @mcc https://mastodon.social/@mcc/112775362045378963

still that #flamedramon #cosplay

Happeh #FursuitFriday ! 🔥❤️