Tootfinder

Well, this is just lovely /s
... HUGE icons that can't be removed from the top of the Safari Bookmarks Sidebar.
Bonus almost unreadable "Reading List" text overlaying each enormous icon.
#OS26 #Apple #Ugh

So #iOS26 and #macOS26 show that Apple isn't straight--all the corners are rounded. This bisexual approves.
#apple #mac

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/

Agora Digitale Transformation fordert: mehr Geld & Strategie für offene Plattformen – von Fediverse bis Bluesky (??). Europas digitale Öffentlichkeit darf nicht länger an BigTech hängen. Souveränität heißt: offene Infrastruktur statt Abhängigkeit. 1-Prinzip jetzt konsequent umsetzen!
#DigitaleSouveränität

Digitale Souveränität: Think Tank empfiehlt mehr Investitionen in Big-Tech-Alternativen
Vor dem Gipfel zur europäischen digitalen Souveränität werden die Appelle an die Bundesregierung lauter, gemeinwohlorientierte Alternativen zu Facebook und Co. zu stärken. Offene Netzwerke wie das Fediverse sollen mit konkreten Maßnahmen aus der Nische geführt werden.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #FridayNightIsMusicNight
Rodgers and Hammerstein, BBC Concert Orchestra & David Charles Abell:
🎵 State Fair: Isn't it Kinda Fun and It Might as Well Be Spring
#RodgersandHammerstein #BBCConcertOrchestra #DavidCharlesAbell

Technically the road is closed but the bridge isn't out... at least not by bike. Construction crews were not around today so I was able to get across the bridge. It'll take some time to get it paved for cars though.

Isn't Donald Trump far too overweight to be able to fly a jet?
#donaldtrump

“Apple is now treating federal agents—who are public employees exercising government power—as if they’re a vulnerable minority group in need of protection from ‘discrimination.’ This isn’t just a misapplication of content policies; it’s a fundamental inversion of what those policies were designed to do.”

Apple Decides ICE Agents Are A Protected Class, Because Apparently Government Accountability Is Now “Hate Speech”
Just when you think corporate content moderation can’t get any more absurd, Apple has managed to redefine “protected class” in a way that would make Orwell proud. According to int…

The fracturing of the Dutch far-right, after Wilder's reminded everyone that bigots are bad at compromise, is definitely a relief. Dutch folks I've talked to definitely see D66 as progressive, <strike>so there's no question this is a hard turn to the left (even if it's not a total flip to the far-left)</strike> a lot of folks don't agree. I'm going to let the comments speak rather than editorialize myself..
While this is a useful example of how a democracy can be far more resilient to fascism than the US, that is, perhaps, not the most interesting thing about Dutch politics. The most interesting thing is something Dutch folks take for granted and never think of as such: there are two "governments."
The election was for the Tweede Kamer. This is a house of representatives. The Dutch use proportional representation, so people can (more or less) vote for the parties they actually want. Parties <strike>rarely</strike> never actually get a ruling majority, so they have to form coalition governments. This forces compromise, which is something Wilders was extremely bad at. He was actually responsible for collapsing the coalition his party put together, which triggered this election... and a massive loss of seats for his party.
Dutch folks do still vote strategically, since a larger party has an easier time building the governing coalition and the PM tends to come from the largest party. This will likely be D66, which is really good for the EU. D66 has a pretty radical plan to solve the housing crisis, and it will be really interesting to see if they can pull it off. But that's not the government I want to talk about right now.
In the Netherlands, failure to control water can destroy entire towns. A good chunk of the country is below sea level. Both floods and land reclamation have been critical parts of Dutch history. So in the 1200's or so, the Dutch realized that some things are too important to mix with normal politics.
You see, if there's an incompetent government that isn't able to actually *do* anything (see Dick Schoof and the PVV/VVD/NSC/BBB coalition) you don't want your dikes to collapse and poulders to flood. So the Dutch created a parallel "government" that exists only to manage water: waterschap or heemraadschap (roughly "Water Board" in English). These are regional bureaucracies that exist only to manage water. They exist completely outside the thing we usually talk about as a "government" but they have some of the same properties as a government. They can, for example, levy taxes. The central government contributes funds to them, but lacks authority over them. Water boards are democratically elected and can operate more-or-less independent of the central government.
Controlling water is a common problem, so water boards were created to fulfill the role of commons management. Meanwhile, so many other things in politics run into the very same "Tragedy of the Commons" problems. The right wing solution to commons management is to let corporations ruin everything. The left-state solution is to move everything into the government so it can be undermined and destroyed by the right. The Dutch solution to this specific problem has been to move commons management out of the domain of the central government into something else.
And when I say "government" here, I'm speaking more to the liberal definition of the term than to an anarchist definition. A democratically controlled authority that facilitates resource management lacks the capacity for coercive violence that anarchists define as "government." (Though I assume they might leverage police or something if folks refuse to pay their taxes, but I can't imagine anyone choosing not to.)
As the US federal government destroys the social fabric of the US, as Trump guts programs critical to people's survival, it might be worth thinking about this model. These authorities weren't created by any central authority, they evolved from the people. Nothing stops Americans from building similar institutions that are both democratic and outside of the authority of a government that could choose to defund and abolish them... nothing but the realization that yes, you actually can.
#USPol #NLPol

⭐ The Great #Software #Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe