@daniel@social.telemetrydeck.com2025-11-26 14:39:05
Sometimes my browser suddenly asks me, hey do you want to scan a QR code with your phone? It’s very safe! And then I say no.
That’s my experience with passkeys. I would love to try them, but I don’t get this UI around it.
@brichapman@mastodon.social2026-01-23 01:00:30
Your muscles grow through resistance. Your life does too.
We treat all discomfort like failure. But avoiding everything hard isn't protecting your peace. It's shrinking your life.
Some discomfort strengthens you:
• Being awkward but showing up
• Creating bad work before good
• Staying present to hard truths
• Not knowing who you're becoming
Peace isn't avoiding life. It's choosing where to put the load.
What kind of life are you…
@cdarwin@c.im2025-12-22 01:25:55
The offices at John Quackenbush’s lab at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
were once full of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and interns.
Young scientists here worked on some of the most cutting-edge computational biology research in the world,
driving new discoveries and the creation of widely used big data tools, including one the National Cancer Institute named among the most important advances of 2024.
Today, the offices are rows of empty comp…
@grumpybozo@toad.social2025-12-23 15:29:10
I love this time of year intellectually. The weeks of the Analemma Apparent.
(Mornings are getting shorter but afternoons are getting longer, faster.) @…
@pre@boing.world2025-12-19 13:02:42
So my car has been complaining I should put some exhaust emissions neutralizing fluid in it. A thing they call AdBlue I believe.
Bought a big 10l drum of the stuff ready to fill up.
But when I look at where I expect to find the hole for filling it, I just find a capped off tube and a warning sticker "See the GM Citreon Berlingo Blaze manual" for the adblue refilling hole.
Only user manual I have is the one telling me to expect it there.
The car was converted for wheelchair access at some point in its life. I think they are referring to the wheelchair-adaption manual, which the seller did not give me.
🤔
Have been looking around the car as much as I can for a couple of hours this morning to no avail. Where have they hidden this hole to fill up adblue?
Maybe it's under the engine or something now and you have to put the thing on stilts to find it?
🤷
Asked my mechanic about it and he says to bring it in on Monday. Gonna be a pain if I have to rip up the floorboards or something every year to refill that.
#mechanic #car #diesel
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-12-20 20:45:57
Google advises some employees on visas, including H-1B visas, not to travel outside the US due to processing delays, following new social media screening rules (Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-tells-visa-holders-stamp-le…
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-10-30 10:05:59
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
@nemorosa@mastodon.nu2026-01-19 10:53:46
Så mycket som måste hända nu, medan tiden står stilla.
@cheryanne@aus.social2026-01-19 10:07:18
Just watched Russell Howard Live at the London Palladium on SBS on Demand (Australian catch up).
Husband and I cried - there were some very very funny bits. Definitely recommended.
https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/russell-ho…
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io2026-01-07 13:40:18
One way to identify if something is a fad or bubble is if the hypers and the doomers are actually the same people.
Neither are actually talking about the thing.
The hypers ceaselessly tell you that you will look bad if you don’t use the thing.
The doomers spin tales on how it will end your way of life or worse.
They both work to keep the thing in your mind while never actually talking about the thing, in an endless parade of manipulating your emotions.