floof.org
@woelfisch Glad to hear that it was bearable and enjoyable!
I look forward to the relative quiet of Eurofurence in a couple months
If you want to buy me a coffeehttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/apteraocReserve your Aptera for $30 off ($70 refundable deposit instead of the usual $100) by usin...YouTube
Looks like the left coalition held together and #France dodged a fascist bullet. Some rare good news, although the trend remains troubling.
Hotel global weather forecast is on. SUNNY AND WARM EVERYWHERE EXCEPT WALES.
Normal then.
Many years ago, I starting to make a Factorio Let's Play series. I remembered it being really dumb and awful, but I just rewatched the first three episodes and it's actually not so bad. The volume is very low on episode 1 and I do spend a stupid amount of time explaining things far too slowly and repetitively at first, but actually it's otherwise okay once I got going.
I only did 5 episodes as no one was really watching (I think one of them was still on zero views a few days after upload, which was disheartening - it looks like there have been a few views over the years, but it's still in single digits) and I was running out of steam.
Could I have made it as a youtuber? Eh, probably not. It was an interesting thing to try though.
Let's play some Factorio! In this game, I'm not allowing myself to use (or even research) landfill. Our shipwrecked engineer is stuck on an island with rela...YouTube
oh, thats some cool software
oh, its open source
oh, its made by a trans woman
oh, she has a fedi account
oh, i already follow her
thank you mysterious fedi trans women for making software that i cannot
The other day, I had a customer (an older guy) at my work point at my pride tattoo and ask me "Does that mean you're gay or something?" And I was like, "Uhh, yeah, basically." He nodded and said "Word." Then left. He's become kind of a regular buying supplements about every other week or so.
I keep thinking about this interaction because 1) it was really funny and 2) When he first asked I half expected him to be homophobic.
I just hope wherever dude is, he's having a good day.
Mom look, mom. Mom! Look! I can do both! π
@writers @writingcommunity @writing @humour
#WritingMemes
#Author #Authors #IndieAuthor #IndieBooks #AmWriting #Writerdons #Writers #Writer #Writing #WritingCommunity #Writinglife #WritersOfMastodon
#BoostingIsSharing
i think being nonhuman is punk
i mean think about it youre literally going against the system but like on a whole new other level of abstraction, you not only want to disrespect the rules and cause disruption of the status quo, but also break the boundaries of what makes someone a member of society
this makes being nonhuman Decidedly cooler and more people should do it
As it becomes ever clearer (and documented) that artificial intelligence is highly dependent on exploiting human labour - from creatives whose content is stolen, to the low-paid staff who help sort & train AI programmes - once again we can see that a 'new economy' promised by the Tee-shirted 'revolutionaries' of Silicon Valley is nothing other than a reboot of C19th exploitative economic practice....
So, one important Q. for modern society is how to bring these new robber barons to heel!
#AI
πππ. I think "robber barons" is exactly the term for today's late stage capitalists.
The most depressing thing about AI is that all this destruction isn't to create more accurate output that lifts society. But rather to produce quicker, plausible sounding output to benefit corporate margins.
Just in time to switch back to the loratadine!
"Interestingly, several antihistamine drugs [...] which have been approved for treating allergy symptoms without side effects for decades, have been found to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection or replication via protein-protein interaction analysis or drug library profiling (30β35)."
Thank you for the beautiful twist! I deeply appreciate the way you speak and portray love in these comics.
I resonate with voicing of the sadness that comes with disappointment as a way forward in relationships to nurture a gentle, safe and vulnerable path towards healing with each other. That sadness often hides behind the anger. But one cannot change people with anger and respect their autonomy! This comic speaks for me about how to hold and lift eachother up! π
Content warning: re: UK, Politics, Press
Technology is political.
If your project or organisation has a βno politicsβ clause, youβre saying youβre happy to exclude people whose very existence is political in our societies.
Itβs only defensible if youβre coming from a place of privilege where the dominant politics are to your advantage so you can take them as given.
There is no such thing as βno politicsβ; there is only βno politics other than the politics of the status quo that I benefit from, which Iβve internalised as normal.β
Female hair is either long or political. Sexual orientation is either heterosexual or political. Gender identity is either cis or political. Clothing is either gender stereotyped and boring or political. City infrastructure is either car-focused or political. Energy is either fossil fuels or political. Education is either white christian propaganda or political.
Everything follows the same pattern, tech included.
A piece of "motivational CSS" that I sometimes include in web pages I haven't finished writing yet:
.FIXME {
background: rgb(160,0,0);
color: rgb(0,255,0);
font-weight: bold;
font-family: "Comic Sans MS";
}
That way, when I write something like
<span class="FIXME">come back and add a link to xyz</span>
in the body text, I'm _really_ motivated to make that horrible thing go away.
Many years ago, my boss called me up, which he never did - and asked me about a comment in my code:
// monkey
It was my current-work pointer. I'd set it when I'd stop work, so I could pick up where I left by grepping for monkey.
When I think about the security of a computer system, I have a specific scale I rate it on:
1. The US government can crack it *OR* the government of China can crack it (equivalent)
2. The government of Israel can crack it
3. My friend Kristin could crack it
4. The government of Russia can crack it
5. A nation-state not listed above can crack it
6. A well-qualified single infosec professional could crack it
7. I could crack it
The strong increase in support for the Lib Dems and the Green party, both of which have much stronger environmental policies than Labour, should give Keir Starmer a warning.
βHe should take note of the Green surge and the new βOrange Wallβ in the south. He may have achieved a historic victory but there is a lot of appetite for much bolder climate action, fairer taxes for the wealthy elite and the kind of investment needed to deliver the real change he is promising,β
Georgia Whitaker, Greenpeace
One can hope we are moving into an era where the political narrative isnβt written from Tufton Street and greater credence is given to organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth who have long been aware of the shift in the political tectonic platesβ¦will the producers of Politics Live and Question Time make new entries in their contacts book though?
Polling shows voters in south of England switched because of Conservative inaction on polluted rivers and beachesFiona Harvey (The Guardian)
"Off the charts:" Solar is about to leave nuclear and everything else in the shade | RenewEconomy
https://reneweconomy.com.au/off-the-charts-solar-is-about-to-leave-nuclear-and-everything-else-in-the-shade/
Solar is on track to become the biggest source of electricity on the planet by the mid-2030s. The Economist says to bet against that is to bet against capitalism.Peter Martin (RenewEconomy)
The Rwanda deportation scam had a fixed cost of Β£370M, plus an extra Β£20,000 per person, plus Β£12K in air fares, plus an extra Β£120M after 300 people were deported.
So it would cost well over Β£1M/refugee deported to Rwanda. Absolute madness (and clearly corrupt deals for cronies).
As it is, only 5 people were (illegally!) deported, at a cost of tens of millions per person.
Really, it'd have been beyond astonishing if Starmer *hadn't* cancelled the scheme.
https://mastodon.online/@RufflySpawned/112740716768631630
Yay!! Common sense starts to prevail. Al Jazeera English: Keir Starmer says scrapping UKβs Rwanda migrant deportation plan https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/6/keir-starmer-says-scrapping-uks-rwanda-migrant-deportation-planMastodon
A new βcontinuous sidewalkβ in #Kitchener. The design differs from regular sidewalks in that it doesnβt dip down to road level at intersections. It continues at an uninterrupted height. This slows cars turning onto the street + reinforces pedestrian priority through the intersections. Same at the driveways, so you donβt get the up-down βroller coaster effectβ when youβre #walking, #cycling or using a wheelchair.
#safestreets #urbanism #accessibility
Numeronyms are fun, but they have one major problem: namespace collision.
What is a11y? Is it accessibility? Associatively? Axiomatically? Autobiography?
This is obviously a problem that needs solving.
My solution? SHAsum hashing.
We can avoid the ambiguity of "a11y" with this unique, cryptographically sound alternative:
Accessibility? a884a5f3609f2cca635fed56d4ec5795da56fb970y
Axiomatically? a20c4bcee8f977a3f5a3b6b499d52d7dd32584771y
Simple, easy to visually distinguish, everyone wins.
I was actually racking my brain for 'starts with a, ends in y, same length' words to make this dumb joke but then I remembered that /usr/share/dict has _huge_ flat-file lists of words of many languages in it, so I could just get them from that?
Ninety seconds of grep, awk and sort later, there it is. For future reference there's 223 of them, alphabetically going from abdominoscopy to axiomatically.
Y'all these computers have so much in them already. _So much_. But nobody knows.
I joke but a note about language usage and open source _cultural_ accessibility: Numeronyms are bad.
There's no meaningful distinction between "a884a5f3609f2cca635fed56d4ec5795da56fb970y" and "a11y".
Neither is recognizable as "accessibility" to anyone new to the field - great work nerds, we've managed to give the word "accessibility" its very own accessibility problem - and I gotta tell you, "not typing out long words because they're long words" seems childish as hell to most people.
This related joke I made while doing my tax return might tickle you:
https://meow.social/@tuftyindigo/112610851931403402
All those people who moan and complain about vaccines... I just had my latest flu one, and am SO HAPPY I live in a future where they're available.
Medical science is fucking awesome.
i built a tiny fedi server entirely in bash!
https://kiki.velzie.rip
somehow it works and you can federate with it
https://github.com/velzie/kiki if you want to install it for some reason
@colonthree@kiki.velzie.rip @mastodon@kiki.velzie.rip
a super-tiny activitypub semi compliant microblogging platform, written entirely in bash - velzie/kikiGitHub
