@Techmeme@techhub.socialDocs: OpenAI burned through $3.7B in Q1, on revenue of $5.7B, and ended the quarter with $73B in cash and marketable securities vs. $40B at the end of December (Erin Woo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-burned-3-7-bill…
@cdarwin@c.imAround a Third of Santa Rosa Island Has Burned
The fire on Santa Rosa Island has “burned 17,554 acres and was 44% contained as of Wednesday night.
https://www.noozhawk.com/crews-increase-containment-santa-rosa-island-fire/
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSpaceX S-1: xAI had a $6.4B operating loss on $3.2B in revenue in 2025; Grok and X had 550M MAUs combined as of March 2026, and 117M used Grok's AI features (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/xai-
@cdarwin@c.imThe GPS system on a small medical plane that crashed into a mountainside last month in New Mexico
malfunctioned because the military was jamming that signal throughout the area at the time
although pilots had been warned to expect that, according to federal investigators.
Four people died in the pre-dawn crash on May 14 that sparked a wildfire that burned for weeks in the rugged Capitan Mountains around Ruidoso where the plane was trying to land that night.
The Nationa…
@rasterweb@mastodon.socialThis weekend has been mostly crap. Lots of pain, spent too much time horizontal. Burned my hand. Partner had a really rough day yesterday. I did manage to bake a bunch, and minus the burn everything turned out well. Cleared a few things out of the basement. Napped too much due to pain though, did not get enough work done. Oh well.
@Sustainable2050@mastodon.energy'Never before have 11,000 hectares burned this early in the summer in southern France in at least the past 20 years'
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/arti
@hex@kolektiva.socialOh, here it is (July 2018). It's nice that this report back didn't include any names or initials so I didn't need to sanitize it:
Meeting Notes:
Table-top exercise scenario topic was state and far-right repression.
Responses:
Strong networks require redundancy, so no one person is a social connection, skills, or resource gatekeeper. These people are often targeted by the state, and if they get burned out and leave, it also weakens and jeoprodizes groups.
Ways to strengthen our networks:
Mentoring/sharing responsibility. Creating a culture of mentorship and support so new people learn skills, take on responsibilities, and are introduced to other folks. Reducing burden on a few key people too.
Chaos Monkey exercise: ask central people to step back from communications/organizing to see what happens.
Regular check-ins! & Delegates check-in with new members they sign up
Ask well connected folks to introduce people to build social redundancy.
Gaming (D&D, board games, etc) committee could support a more fun, and socially robust network.
Practical safety tool:
Burner phone. Not everyone needs one, but good to have access to.
TO DO LIST:
Make regular announcements at each meeting for people to check-in with folks they know (especially those they haven’t heard from in awhile!)
Start google doc for disaster preparedness zine
Why you should prepare (ideological argument)
What people should have (the basics)
How to prepare
Frame as questions, so people can find the answer that best suits themselves.
Such as “what are you preparing for?”
Where do you spend most of your time? (home? Office? car?)
Make it as easy as possible for folks to get the basics (list locations for supplies, etc.)
@crell@phpc.social
@marjolica@social.linux.pizzaPerhaps they should have signed it in Compiègne? Unfortunately Foch's railway carriage was later burned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_of_22_June_1940
@kurtsh@mastodon.socialSpencer Pratt is a continual f-ck up who's never run anything & literally burned out his last hustle.
So his next hustle is you, Los Angeles. Take it from Brad Wollack.
#LosAngeles #Mayor
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.ioMonsoon season is starting!
Kodak DC290 (2MP, 1999)
Yes, I forgot to turn off the burned-in date and time (which I also didn't set).
Anyway, get yourself a camera that defaults to the previous millennium as default year.
#ShittyCameraChallenge
@primonatura@mstdn.social"Wildfires devastating richer areas but fewer hectares burned globally – study"
#Wildfires #Environment
@mlawton@mstdn.socialIt started out as an exploratory bike ride in neighboring Botetourt County (locals pronounce it “bot-uh-tot”). The ride itself was a disaster of constantly getting lost in trying to connect from the Cherry Blossom Trail onto the Greenfield Trail. You have to take a few horse trails. They’re marked, but only so far as to tell you that you’re on a horse trail. Intersection? “Horse Trail” 😐
Finding a bee sanctuary right off the trailhead was cool. The raggedy looking cabin in the backgrou…
@Dragofix@veganism.socialRecord wildfire losses rocked 2025 even as global burned area neared all-time lows #environment
@rasterweb@mastodon.socialFun story about a 100 mile (well, almost) bike ride. Milwaukee Record is the best!
https://milwaukeerecord.com/food-drink/sunday-sauce-a-98-3-mile-bike-ride-to-chicago-fueled-by-meatballs-pizza-and-italian-beef/…
@servelan@newsie.socialGrifters gonna grift:
Gulf states that bankrolled Trump's son-in-law are now furious they got burned: report - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/jared-kushner-2676896338/
@kazys@mastodon.socialOver 25 Billion Tokens of Fable and Sol 65.6 burned to create a web interface to 143 GB, 12,613 files, and 92,000 pages of PDFs. http://CCRU.is-lost.org now live on my basement server. Some things are behind login. PM me for access.
@raiders@darktundra.xyzThe Bay Area bridge remains burned as Maxx Crosby, 49ers rumors rage on https://raiderramble.com/2026/07/03/the-bay-area-bridge-remains-burned-as-maxx-crosby-49ers-rumors-rage-on/
@cdarwin@c.imThe Chinese Massacre: One of Los Angeles' Worst Atrocities
In Santa Ana stands the site of a former Chinatown that was burned down
in one of the most brazen acts of officially sanctioned anti-Asian violence in Southern California
until the World War II-era incarceration of Japanese Americans.
This Chinatown once included lodging, drugstores, curio shops, two Chinese wash houses and a vegetable garden and barn.
Chinese workers built most of the irrigation c…
@chris@mstdn.chrisalemany.caMother nature’s version of a double tap is a second wildfire at a town that was essentially burned off the map in 2021.
About the only good thing here is there are very few people impacted as most of the town has not been rebuilt yet despite all the initial hand ringing and nice words from BC politicians.
#climateEmeregency #bcwildfire #bcpoli
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/lytton-saw-creek-wildfire-evacuations-9.7243091
@azonenberg@ioc.exchangeBeautiful sunny day and another solar generation record, 82 kWh produced (21.4 exported).
It's not midnight yet so I don't have daily consumption yet but I've burned 121.5 so far; assuming the same rate of consumption I'll end up around 139.
Which would put me at 59% of the day's energy consumption being locally sourced. Not bad.
@memeorandum@universeodon.comKaren Bass' Brother Sues City After Home Burned in Palisades Fire (Matt Hamilton/L.A. Material)
https://lamaterial.com/p/karen-bass-brother-sues-city-palisades-fire
http://www.memeorandum.com/260610/p89#a260610p89
@rasterweb@mastodon.socialToday’s bake… a lot went wrong, I was clumsy, I was in a lot of pain, and I burned my hand.
I did have one for lunch and it was good, despite not looking as good as the first batch.
I made these 120g each which is probably too large. I’ll try 100g next time. I also tried an overnight cold ferment, but probably used too much yeast.
#baking
@kornel@mastodon.socialRE: https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/116715504765532744
The air got so much cleaner after Notre Dame burned down.
@Dragofix@veganism.socialWorld burned less coal in 2025, but built more plants over energy uncertainty https://news.mongabay.com/2026/05/world-burned-less-coal-in-2025-but-built-more-plants-over-energy-uncertainty/
@cdarwin@c.imSaying "oh the suffragettes did it the right way, not like these people" may have set a new bar for oblivious idiocy.
The suffragettes had squads of undercover women trained in Judo and packing truncheons in their petticoats that fought against cops in the streets.
They burned down a cricket stadium because it didn't let women in except for cigarette girls.
MAGA DoJ would indict them as Terrorists
@ErikJonker@mastodon.socialGreat article, "America’s Throwaway Spies
How the CIA failed Iranian informants in its secret war with Tehran"
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spies-iran/
@primonatura@mstdn.social"A lot of 'recycled' plastic is being burned overseas—and causing widespread pollution linked to health problems"
#Plastic #Plastics #Recycling
@sean@scoat.es
@chiraag@mastodon.onlinePlatner really crashed and burned, huh. Like, literally *right* after winning the primary.
And like, in interviews, he said stuff like "Nothing worse will come out about me, everything's out there now." And things still kept coming out.
He should step down because we should not tolerate rapists and abusers in our society and government. This should not be controversial.
@ellie@ellieayla.netRemember back when building computers we burned a cd/dvd from a working machine and kept giant binders of install media? And then things changed and we could make a bootable USB device from whatever promotional 4GB stick people were handing out at tradeshows, but often it couldn't boot?
The working machines are now laptops which no longer have optical drives at all. Or USB A.
I found an old external dvd burner and have it running through a Thunderbolt3 hub that still has USB A ports.
@hex@kolektiva.socialThe "AI Industry" (to the degree that it exists) has burned billions of dollars with no real hope of recuperating that. Models offered by services, charging huge amounts for inference, don't really offer much, if anything, above open source models run locally. Many of the claims made by these companies, and their supporters, have turned out to be lies. It seems as though the whole thing is a huge grift.
Investments will likely never be recovered. We've already seen a bail out in the form of military contracts. We will see much more public money dumped in to these technologies. In fact, threatening workers and suppressing labor strength is so strategically valuable that I expect LLMs to just be publicly funded (by being folded into the military industrial complex).
On these grounds, it can be easy to reject the technology outright. After all, how can anything useful not be profitable?
Even for radicals, capitalism can cloud our lens. The fact is, the dominant technologies of our age tend to not be profitable. Or rather, they are "publicly funded, privately profitable" (/hums in propagandhi/). Just like oil.
Outside of Saudi Arabia, oil is mostly not profitable to get out of the ground. Even there, it had only historically been profitable because of massive global military investments. The oil-centric world we have today is largely built on, and kept in place by, massive government subsidies. Roads, street parking, and direct subsidies to oil companies are all massive investments that tie populations to the resource at the heart of the military industrial complex: oil.
Oil was strategically important, because you can't run a modern military without it. The fossil fuel economy doesn't exist because fossil fuels are so cheap, but because modern militaries are only really possible by militarizing the population.
Unprofitable things *are made profitable* to serve the strategic interests of authoritarian systems. Though we have better alternatives to most oil-based products, it would be hard to argue that oil is not a useful resource. We can acknowledge it's strategic importance while also recognizing that the elimination of oil is essential to the survival of humanity.
Returning to "AI," we're seeing the same type of thing but it's more obvious. After the crypto grift, this seems to just be another way to transfer money into the pockets of the rich.
But crypto wasn't exactly a grift. It had a strategic function to power. It wasn't what we were told it was. It didn't free us from central banks. It wasn't a new way to invest. It wasn't anonymous. But it did create a new way to bribe politicians. It did make it easier to funnel public money into the pockets of the far right.
"AI" can similarly be mostly a grift. It can fail to do most, or all, of the things it claims, and it can still fulfill strategic functions. If we dismiss it as "just another grift," I think we miss a lot. "Just a grift" isn't something sustainable. It is something that will die out. It's something we don't need to resist because it is self limiting. But a strategy is something different. A strategy is more complex. A strategy will be sustained, at any cost. A strategy must be actively resisted.
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scot@… @… We currently burn at least 10 calories of diesel for every calorie of food produced¹ by industrial agriculture.. Quite a lot of that diesel is burned in moving food from farm to warehouse and from warehouse to supermarket. of …
@markrsmith@smithtodon.orgMy wife just told me that she had the “privilege” to see pictures of machines she designed that were destroyed in Saudi Arabia. A refinery was hit and the flames were 30 feet above the highest stack in the plant. It burned for 3 weeks.
She designed them at least 20 years ago as a young engineer.
#iran #SaudiArabia
@KazuShuSora@social.tchncs.deI wish the system burned down and the people would be free to live in a way so they can fully express themselves 💭
@kazys@mastodon.socialWhen OpenAI killed the ChatGPT app, I burned some Fable Sol 5.6 tokens to create an Electron wrapper for their website (mac only, tested on OS 26 only). The moment I was done, they dropped ChatGPT Classic. But you might prefer it, though, so here it is. CatGPT
https://github.com/abandoned-industrie…
@primonatura@mstdn.social"World burned less coal in 2025, but built more plants over energy uncertainty"
#FossilFuels #Energy #Climate
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.ittired: #SelfHosting w/ a commercial NAS device
wired: Buying a case and building your own NAS
inspired: Murray's Cheese charcuterie board -> NAS
@soundclamp@mastodon.xyzMarc Masters (author of “High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape”) has started up a newsletter called “Good Experimental Music” to continue writing his recently cancelled monthly Bandcamp column (I know, that’s a mouthful). There’s even a free version if you’re burned out on subscriptions. https://www.goodexperimentalmusic.com/
@aardrian@toot.cafeRE: https://dragonscave.space/@jscholes/116618433908614884
Until you’ve burned all your tokens and need to buy more. Repeat.
@servelan@newsie.socialMob Burns Congo Ebola Center Amid Rare Strain Outbreak - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/world/africa/ebola-congo-clinic-burned-protests.html
@colinpurrington@flipping.rocksIf you have an opportunity to visit a freshly-burned forest, look for pyrophilic beetles (e.g., certain species in Sericoda, Melanophila, Monochamus) and flies (Microsania). Some have specialized antennae for detecting smoke, others use infrared-sensing areas on abdomen or thorax to locate hot spots. #fire #smoke #weather #canada #beetles #coleoptera #insects #flies #trees #forests
@theodric@social.linux.pizzaSpent my evening fucking around with z/OS and MVS. I still don't get IBM mainframes, and at this point I'm probably too old/burned out/cynical to muster the required quantity bloody-minded useless drive toward a goal of learning something I will never need to know. Maybe for SCOPE/Hustler.
@kurtsh@mastodon.socialSpencer Pratt doesn't even LIVE in Los Angeles.
▫️ He didn't have home insurance when his house burned down
▫️ He spent $10M preparing for the "Mayan Apocalypse"
▫️ He thinks the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax
▫️ He current online business sells 'energy crystals' that heal people
▫️ He doesn't believe in global warming
▫️ His financial support comes from conspiracy theorists, crypto bros & of course, dozens of billionaires
…
@cdarwin@c.imThe Santa Rosa Island fire is the largest on any of the eight California Channel Islands in recorded history.
It has burned 17,554 of the Island’s 53,760 acres, or 32.7 percent
The fire threatens the sensitive habitat of the island’s endemic flora
— Santa Rosa Island Manzanita,
Santa Rosa Island Torrey Pine,
Santa Rosa Island Live-forever,
Hoffmann’s Gilia,
Munchkin Dudleya,
Island Tree Mallow;
several of which are already listed as endan…
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioInstead of •judging• people who are stuck between a rock and a hard place, we all — but especially us tech folks! — should spend some time •actually learning• what’s locking people in to a platform going bad. There are some answers in the original QP. Here are some guesses of my own:
- Is prohibitively hard to migrate their catalog / inventory?
- Are they unsure how to proceed?
- Are they burned out on platform switching?
- Do they have some larger process that really, really works and are loath to abandon it?
- Do the alternatives not provide the same functionality?
- Will they lose contact with their supporters if they switch?
- etc.
Those are all made-up guesses, but they're all examples of •perfectly good reasons• for someone to be resistant to switching.
@cdarwin@c.imWildfires raging across southern Europe have forced thousands to flee their homes
and prompted officials to ban spectators from a stage of the Tour de France,
amid warnings of “powder keg” conditions after a record-breaking early summer heatwave.
Hundreds of firefighters are tackling blazes that have burned through almost 20,000 hectares (49,500 acres)
in Portugal, Spain, France and Greece.
Strong winds are forecast to fan the flames and temperatures are expect…
@Dragofix@veganism.socialWildfire risk is now spreading to cool climates like the Scottish Highlands and Irish uplands #Scotland
@cdarwin@c.im87 homes had been destroyed as of Thursday by wildfires sweeping across parts of Georgia.
The two largest wildfires in southern Georgia have burned tens of thousands of acres combined.
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/georgi…
@BBC6MusicBot@mastodonapp.uk🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #6MusicsForeverDark
Quelza:
🎵 A Bird With Burned Wings
#Quelza
https://open.spotify.com/track/3Csj737HrprdXsf1OOxGIU
@servelan@newsie.socialI think there was an article on this in Smithsonian magazine - very cool tech being used, now aided by AI...
Scroll Burned in 79 AD Volcanic Eruption Finally Deciphered Using AI - Slashdot
https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/06/27/1825220/scroll-burned-in-79-ad-volcanic-eruption-finally-deciphered-using-ai
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioThe hunger for tinkering affordances helps explain the ubiquity of spreadsheets in the business world. [long subthread left as an exercise for the reader]
It also helps explain the traction of the “AI Agent” marketing. I can’t think of a technology that’s simultaneously done a better job of removing barriers to user-designed automation and done a worse job of helping people anticipate and deal with the consequences of automation. (Security and data integrity are two of the big places where attempts at deep tinkering affordances have crashed and burned.)
10/
@primonatura@mstdn.social"Spain’s donkey brigade has kept Doñana fire-free for nine years"
#Spain #Donkeys #Animals #Environment
