@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-11-18 17:12:23
Sphere, which raised a $4.3M seed as an edtech marketplace, pivots and raised a $21M Series A led by a16z to develop an AI tax compliance software service (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/18/a16z-leads-21m-series-…
@arXiv_grqc_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-08-20 10:07:00
Discriminating scalar ultralight dark matter from quasi-monochromatic gravitational waves in LISA
Jordan Gu\'e, Peter Wolf, Aur\'elien Hees
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13847
@AimeeMaroux@mastodon.social2025-09-18 06:49:04
It's the #DayOfZeus / Jupiter's Day / Thorsday! ⚡
"Zeus breathes deeply with delight, like men who have undergone a great contest for a great prize, and he looks searchingly for his daughter, feeling pride in his offspring; nor yet is there even on Hera's face any trace of indignation; nay, she rejoices, as though Athena were her daughter also."
Philostratus th…
@cowboys@darktundra.xyz2025-10-15 21:02:44
Brian Schottenheimer shares feelings on dealing with infamous sun glare in Week 7 https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/brian-schottenheimer-shares-feelings-dealing-infamous-sun-glare-nfl-week-7
@arXiv_astrophCO_bot@mastoxiv.page2025-09-19 09:10:31
Constraining Cosmology with Double-Source-Plane Strong Gravitational Lenses From the AGEL Survey
Duncan J. Bowden, Nandini Sahu, Anowar J. Shajib, Kim-Vy Tran, Tania M. Barone, Keerthi Vasan G. C., Daniel J. Ballard, Thomas E. Collett, Faith Dalessandro, Giovanni Ferrami, Karl Glazebrook, William J. Gottemoller, Leena Iwamoto, Tucker Jones, Glenn G. Kacprzak, Geraint F. Lewis, Haven McIntosh-Lombardo, Hannah Skobe, Sherry H. Suyu, Sarah M. Sweet
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-10-20 08:05:15
Some leftists have criticized #NoKingsDay2 as useless. Though it was the largest protest in US history, it didn't change anything. I would go further to say that protests like these generally won't change anything. Dictators aren't forced to step down by 2% of the population coming out for one day. If they're forced to step down by protests, those protests are sustained. They are every single day. They are accompanied by general strikes.
We've been watching that happen all over the world. Portland in 2020 gave us a taste of that in the US. The George Floyd Rebellion was the type of resistance that actually brings down dictators like Trump. Occasional protests, no matter how large, can simply be ignored. That is precisely the reason the US developed a militarized police force in the first place. You need more, more than the largest protests in US history, more than Occupy, more than the resistance of the 60's and 70's, more than, and different from, anything we've seen in our lives.
And yet... Each protest has grown, and grown bolder. Some have grown more persistent. If you think of protest as the path to achieve change, you will lose. It is not. But it is a path to escalate. Some people, some otherwise comfortable white folks, came out for their first time. Some people got pepper sprayed for the first time. Some people questioned authority, stood up for the first time, and have had an experience that will radicalize them for the rest of their lives.
Protest is not useful in and of itself. It is training. It's making connections. Authoritarian regimes rely on the illusion of compliance, so visual resistance does actually undermine their power.
Liberals like to teach that non-violence is all about staying peaceful no matter what, that there's some way that morality simply overwhelms an enemy. I remember reading Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred in high school. I said it was a threat. My teacher said, "you're wrong, he was a pacifist." Pacifism is a threat. If you can spit at me, beat me, shoot me, and I will not move, if I have the strength to absorb violence without flinching, without even rising to violence, what will happen when you push me too far?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For peaceful resistance to work, there must be ambiguity. It must not be clear if or when the resistance will stop being peaceful. Peaceful resistance with no possibility of escalation is just cowardice.
My critique then is not so harsh as some other anarchists. If you think that protest alone will work, you're probably going to lose. If you are prepared to escalate, if you are prepared to absorb violence without flinching, then it could be possible for protest alone to topple the dictator. The cracks are already beginning to show.
And then what?
The problems that lead to the George Floyd uprising were never resolved. The problems that lead to Occupy where never resolve. The DAPL was built, protesters were maimed, it leaked multiple times (exactly as predicted). Segregation never went away, it only changed forms. The fact that immigrants have different courts and different rights means that anyone can be arbitrarily kidnaped and renditioned to an arbitrary country. We never did anything about the torture black site. FFS, people can still be stripped of their voting rights and slavery is still legal in the US. The people who control both parties in the US are killing our children and grand children with oil wars and climate change.
Toppling the dictator does nothing to resolve all of the problems that existed before him.
No, #NoKingsDay was absolutely not useless. #NoKings and related protests are extremely useful but they aren't sufficient. But, I think we still need to challenge the movement on two points:
How do you escalate after you're ignored or brutalized?
What do you demand after you win?
#USPol
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.io2025-11-14 21:05:53
So I grew up next to #Chernobyl and this is, well, TERRIFYING.
A story for y’all: I’m from a city called Zhytomyr, 2 hours west of Kyiv in the North of #Ukraine. We were downwind of the Chernobyl #nuclear power plant when the 1986 disaster happened.
I wasn’t born for another 12 years, but my childhood was filled with stories and the aftermath of it all. Things like:
- My grandmother worked as a head doctor in a hospital and rehabilitation facility exclusively for children of Chernobyl victims to treat the extremely high prevalence of Tuberculosis and other severe health complications. (To specify: these were SECOND GENERATION of exposure).
- A lot of the kids in that facility were orphans, because their parents died young from health problems.
- My uncle’s wife was born in Pripyat. She was 1 year old when the disaster happened. Her parents were told to evacuate while given no information about what happened. They had to pack up their things and rush out to an unfamiliar city with their baby, never to see the rest of their belongings, apartment, or hometown again.
- When I was a kid, it became so common to see weirdly mutated animals and insects that even 2-3 year olds would make jokes about “Chernobyl mosquitos” and I wouldn’t even flinch seeing occasional giant bugs, dark frogs, weird-looking dogs.
- We’d frequently hear of nearby farms having issues with their animals being born too mutated to survive or random outbreaks from contaminated water / food. Crops would randomly fail. People would get poisoned on a regular basis. This all got less common as I grew up.
- My mother still remembers being a little girl, 10 years old, and looking outside from their balcony at the clouds blowing over from Chernobyl that day. People were told to not go outside and to shut all the windows, but not given an explanation as to why. My mother swears that the rain looked different. They weren’t able to go and buy more food for the kitchen for multiple days.
Anyway - nuclear safety isn’t a joke. I don’t understand how this level of carelessness can happen after Chernobyl and Fukushima.
https://www.404media.co/power-companies-are-using-ai-to-build-nuclear-power-plants/
@ErikUden@mastodon.de2025-11-06 19:54:28
I've read the following rhetorical question recently:
If “vote blue no matter who” doesn't apply to Zohran Mamdani, what does it actually mean?
...and despite all of us understanding the implication, let me actually try to give an answer, as the slogan emerged specifically from US politics, but this phenomenon hasn't.
This specific statement asking people to always vote for the democratic party, no matter who the candidate is, has always been thrown…
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng2025-11-14 10:30:10
Almost reached the top!
(A wonderfully wild path along the cliff edge and glorious evening light on the way to Teufelstättkopf, with a view of the Wetterstein massif and Zugspitze in the distance...)
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography
@cdarwin@c.im2025-09-03 01:34:22
The US is set to raise the number of military vessels deployed near Venezuela to eight this week,
which Maduro described as
“the greatest threat that has been seen on our continent in the last 100 years.”
Following an authorization by Trump to use military force against Latin American drug cartels,
the Associated Press and CBS News report that “the US Navy now has two Aegis guided-missile destroyers — the USS Gravelyand the USS Jason Dunham — in the Caribbean,
a…
