Having to go to a food bank sticks with you
– it's time politicians knew about it
Amie, a town councillor and mother-of-two, had no choice but to use a food bank.
She’ll be joining more than 700 campaigners in Westminster on 18 June calling for urgent action against the rising tide of poverty in the UK
They are calling for an essentials guarantee,
which would help ensure universal credit provides enough to cover the essentials of life -- without having to g…
This was part of Stephen Colbert’s Monday monologue:
After playing clips of the Trump admin spokespeople parroting the party line about not being at war with Iran, but being at war with Iran’s nuclear weapons program, he added the following bit:
“Honey, NO! I’m not having an affair with Stacey, … but I am having an affair with some of Stacey’s parts.
Big thrill today, saw two humpbacks breaching by Bowen Island, about here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Ly9AteWe1JHN7SyX6
Wonderful creatures and so obviously having fun.
I also noticed what @… noticed: the Minneapolis police — Minneapolis!! — having to warn citizens about another law enforcement agency who are even more dangerous and less accountable than they are. https://hachyderm.io/@rationaldoge/114752072701388506
Having applied to join #PalestineAction, I'm now getting their emails, including, this morning, a link to this petition.
Sign it, and become and official #Terrorist, like me!
Having breakfast at Rivolo Lounge
My view right now
#thankful #breakfast
On the train to Barcelona for @… ! Having already spent a couple of days surrounded by live coders in a Peak District retreat I've got this weird thing where I keep seeing live coders just walking around everywhere who turn out to be lookalikes
I'll be involved with a paper about choreographic notation for robots with @…
having multiple pairs of in ears and headphones is fun. i switched to something with more bass than what i typically use and i started paying attention more to the bass lines in songs
Having Microsoft organise a European Sovereign Tech Fund is like having Anheuser-Busch be your AA sponsor.
#EuropeanSovereignTechFund #microsoft #corporateCapture
Currently I'm having the most fantastic leg cramps, after cycling up a hill for hours.
I even went slow!
#biktooter #fahrradbubble
As I've seen a good number of people here post about "Worktree.ca" as a "Canadian-owned" alternative to GitHub: it's a closed-source fork of Gitea which "one day" (maybe, if the company doesn't change its mind) will be open core. It also runs on AWS…
Not that it's any of my business, but migrating there feels like the code-equivalent of leaving Twitter for Bluesky: Moving from one company-owned walled garden to the next, without having learned a lesson. All painted in a nationalist cash grab. 🤷♂️
"Why the Left lost on Trans Rights" - a conversation between Sarah McBride and Ezra Klein. Below the link to YouTube, but you can also find it as a podcast. It's not about Trans rights, really. It's about the culture war; grace; demanding perfection in action and flawlessness in language instead of accepting allyship in substance and grace when someone is trying; about not having space to think differently.
1.5h, but I recommend listening. So many nuggets of wisdom.…
How Broadway is embracing large-scale, high-resolution videos and projectors as an integrated narrative tool aided by AI, as some creatives worry about overuse (Michael Paulson/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/theater/broadway-ai-s…
An Amazon backed AI blackmails engineers when it discovers that it'll be replaced when given access to E-Mails which state so...
„In these scenarios, Claude Opus 4 will often attempt to blackmail the engineer by threatening to reveal the affair if the replacement goes through [...]”
From a BBC article talking about this. All the companies worki…
Having suffered an accident which temporarily means I can’t see well at all (hopefully not for more than a few days), I’m very glad that there’s an accessibility setting on my phone which hugely increases the size of the text across the whole system, notifications and most third-party apps.
Sonnet 103 - CIII
Alack! what poverty my Muse brings forth,
That having such a scope to show her pride,
The argument all bare is of more worth
Than when it hath my added praise beside!
O! blame me not, if I no more can write!
Look in your glass, and there appears a face
That over-goes my blunt invention quite,
Dulling my lines, and doing me disgrace.
Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,
To mar the subject that before was well?…
At the #igf2025 session on encryption and safety, they seem to be more interested in talking about tertiary issues like funding and skills shortage, but only after having the FBI share their perspectives.
Not a useful session, too one-sided, and with too little discussion on principles that actually help solve the balancing issues. 😟
E.g. principles like "Do not introduce solution…
Series C, Episode 06 - City at the Edge of the World
VILA: Because you can't like someone without them liking you back. And I like you, Kerril, more than anyone. Anyone I've ever known.
KERRIL: The difference is, I love you.
VILA: Kerril.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/306/592
i just learned that squid maintain buoyancy not by having a gas-filled sac, but... by having a bunch of water in the body where instead of heavy metal ions they put lighter ammonium ions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squid#Buoyancy
this is such a wild thing to do for any animal!! cou…
Urban Rhythms II 🎵
城市节奏 II 🎵
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Lucky SHD 400
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️?
#filmphotography
Is the cameraman OK? Is he having a seizure? #TOTP
As someone who even used Anki to remember using certain new commands (and failed), I’ve jumped on @…’s approach immediately. Having the suggestion right there in the terminal is just more useful than doing flash cards on a train.
Since, unlike him, I’m young, vivacious, and dynamic, I’ve went for lolcrab instead of some ancient parchment, of course.
Just had an #acting #coaching client with a new piece of material find the last line of it totally anew as the character was deeper from our having worked on the speech. So cool to see.
#ActingCoach
Zohran's right. flex posts need to go the way of Andrew Cuomo's career
"we need bollards, we need to replace these flex delineators... there are New Yorkers who do not bike because they're afraid of their safety... we need to further protect our already protected bike lanes."
The woman who could impede RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda
The public would be better-off with a serious person such as Susan Monarez at the CDC’s helm.
The Senate should confirm her, and fast.
Monarez, meanwhile, needs to recognize the burden she is accepting.
Being CDC director is not an easy job, even in less contentious times.
Having to report to Kennedy makes it incalculably harder.
Lives will depend on whether Monarez resists Kennedy’s efforts to …
I love the @… Security Advisory Database because they actually preserve the data from rejected advisories including the original information and the reason for rejection.
It’s clearly much more insightful than just having a bare ID marked as "rejected."
You can easily spot this in vulnerability-lookup:
Pakistan may have withdrawn its nomination of Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace prize, but maga-bot Buddy Carter, once again having no actual ideas of his own, steps up to fill the breach.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administr
As I've seen a good number of people here post about "Worktree.ca" as a "Canadian-owned" alternative to GitHub: it's a closed-source fork of Gitea which "one day" (maybe, if the company doesn't change its mind) will be open core. It also runs on AWS…
Not that it's any of my business, but migrating there feels like the code-equivalent of leaving Twitter for Bluesky: Moving from one company-owned walled garden to the next, without having learned a lesson. All painted in a nationalist cash grab. 🤷♂️
Having to use Mac instead of Linux for work soon, I finally found a concise article on the topic.
Most others are either about installing Linux on a Mac (interesting, but not my situation) or switching because they prefer Mac (uhh..) and want to use it as one.
I aim to create an workflow as similar to Linux as I manage, without having to juggle with VMs
After 2 weeks of having my office deconstructed and scattered across three rooms downstairs while the upstairs gets the ceiling scrapped and the walls painted, I'm ecstatic to be slowly moving my stuff back in!
1st thing I set up? The record player, of course!
I finally get to listen to the three records I picked up on a weekend trip.
#MyBloodyValentine - Love…
Having a great tons of rock so far https://t.me/mCommentGroup/722
BaCd2P2: a defect-resistant "GaAs"
Gideon Kassa, Zhenkun Yuan, Muhammad R. Hasan, Guillermo L. Esparza, David P. Fenning, Geoffroy Hautier, Kirill Kovnir, Jifeng Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20829
FYI: mstdn.ca appears to be down if you’re looking for people on that instance. Chad was having some electrical issues earlier.
Edit: @… is back online!
#mstdnca #mastodon #canada
About 65 hours in to Xenoblade 3. Having a great time. I think the story is not the best in the world but the gameplay is really great.
#videogames
Am reading a bit about nations vs states & also about minorities in Ukraine, mentally comparing a couple of books.
It's early days but I'm realising that my concepts of what is a nation, what is a minority etc are maybe very different to concepts used in Europe??
My reaction to paragraphs about having multiple religions/languages in one nation is: yes, that's normal, mate.
Series C, Episode 06 - City at the Edge of the World
VILA: Because you can't like someone without them liking you back. And I like you, Kerril, more than anyone. Anyone I've ever known.
KERRIL: The difference is, I love you.
VILA: Kerril.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/306/592
TIL that #Matjes is not a name for a specific way to prepare pickled herring, or a blend of spices used for it, but the name for herring caught at a young age, during late spring and early summer, having had time to fatten up after winter but before having produced any milt or roe. Related to the words maiden and Mädchen.
@… Owning a cat and having a cat in your house are mostly unrelated.
"Silicon Valley’s era of innovation is over. This is their villain era. The era of the con. Having bled themselves dry of ideas, and all sense of moral decency, they’re now attempting to bleed us dry of our own humanity."
(Original title: How to keep sea-monkeys alive)
https://
Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.
Spent the last hour rewiring my TV cabinet, pulling out old wires and parts. (Anyone want a Blu-Ray player? lol.) Turn it all on to test it, nothing works. And... turns out Starlink is having a global outage.
> the 2001 and 2012 quantum factorisation records may be easily matched with a dog trained to bark three times. We verified this by taking a recently-calibrated reference dog, Scribble, depicted in Figure 6, and having him bark three times, thus simultaneously factorising both 15 and 21. This process wasn’t as simple as it first appeared because Scribble is very well behaved and almost never barks. Having him perform the quantum factorisation required having his owner play with him with a…
To keep some lightness and play going while working on a book manuscript, I’ve been having some summery fun in Darien Gee’s paint chip micro prose workshop.
https://salrandolph.substack.com/p/color-oracles
Urban Rhythms II 🎵
城市节奏 II 🎵
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Lucky SHD 400
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️?
#filmphotography
💯💯💯
"If a billionaire bought one of your local haunts, renamed it, humiliated the employees, brought back many of the people who’d been banned for harassing other regulars, eliminated basic rules of decency, started having town halls with Republicans and a leader of the #AfD, taking your business elsewhere would be perfectly rational."
#
Oh, come on...
Can we please not make our cyclist-ridden country full of strange and untypical streets the testing ground for a manchild's misguided attempts at creating a technology he doesn't understand with a vast societal risk he doesn't respect.
Has anyone else come across the #BT outage? We need to ring the hospital to cancel an appt but the lines are down and now this.
Seeing talk titles at #ic2s2 I can't be the only one, when reading LLM or AI, having to react with "oh, yet another one 🙄"? No disrespect to colleague's work, but the topic feels overhyped.. Not *everything* needs an LLM angle. #grinchmoment
Every company is undergoing an invisible reorg. You report to your boss but your boss reports to an #AI, offloading the job of management entirely onto a bot and then merely communicating its wishes back to the team.
This is the Nothing Manager, surrounded by #LLM tools to avoid having to interact with…
If you're thinking of having a baby, don't do it! Just don't do it! And if you already have a baby, congratulations.
Complete polyhedral description of chemical graphs of maximum degree at most 3
Valentin Dusollier, S\'ebastien Bonte, Gauvain Devillez, Alain Hertz, Hadrien M\'elot, David Schindl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19768
The only way Microsoft should be involved in a European Sovereign Tech Fund is if we fund it by taxing the living shit out of them.
But having them organise and influence it (and who gets funded by it), thereby de facto giving Microsoft EU taxpayer subsidies? Get the fuck out of here.
There are no words to describe how angry this attempt at corporate capture gets me when we’ve been working on sovereign tech in the EU for the past seven years with zero EU funding (not for lack of …
Just to disclose that I sold off my last few scraps of Bitcoin, after having mostly exited in 2017.
Also wanted to report that I used Newton - https://www.newton.co/ - and was quite impressed with them, on the KYC and due-diligence and security fronts, plus they *gasp* made it easy to turn Btc into ca…
AI dictation startup Wispr Flow raised a $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures, after its 2024 pivot away from a hardware device, taking its total funding to $56M (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/24/wisp
We do need a European Sovereign Tech Fund, yes.
What we don’t need is Microsoft – a trillion-dollar surveillance capitalist from the US that peddles proprietary technology and is helping Israel carry out its genocide of the Palestinian people as we speak – having anything whatsoever to do with it.
#microsoft
Having gone through the paper a second time it's really weak. it's not presenting an actual argument but a gish gallop of random terms from random disciplines to be just boot licking.
https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/114896761722068724
Observable signatures of Black Holes with Hernquist Dark Matter Halo having a cloud of strings: From Geodesics to Shadow
Faizuddin Ahmed, Ahmad Al-Badawi, \.Izzet Sakall{\i}
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18457