"The study of programming history might not be the solution to all the problems in our industry, for sure. It is also worth pointing out that most university curricula simply do not include any mention whatsoever of such subjects. Maybe it is time to start providing such information to students."
https://dep…

#Sky's scaremongering is not going to work.
They simply need to drop the pricing (€52 a month on their 'Sky Signature' aka. Entertainment package €40 a month on Sky Sports)
And abolish the Saturday 3PM bollocks (in Ireland anyway) for Premier League games, and maybe people will pay for it then.
The wording on this is just laughable.
'Dodgy boxes' are not i…

Incredible. I love the idea of taking checkpoints and the "papers please" mentality, and turning it around on the nazis.
#FuckICE #Minnesota (and yes, this is very much also #TacticalUrbanism

Media stuff

Rewatched all of Buffy

Broken wrist meant I had to sit on the sofa for a month doing nothing really. I re-watched all 200 or so episodes of Buffy for the first time this decade.
What an achievement in TV production. Amazing show.
I'll watch it again next decade maybe.
Not that I read a huge amount. Hopefully more next year.
"Outland" by Dennis E Taylor, and actually also his "Not Till We Are Lost"
"Broken Money" by Lyn Alden.
Think "Severance" was the most remarkable show I watched this year, with "Trek, Strange New Worlds" also being great again.
"Pantheon" was a pretty great cartoon, haven't seen the second season yet.

Disable my ad blocker to see your article? Nope. How about generic ads? ALSO HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW I AM RUNNING AN AD BLOCKER? Maybe because you are running a F*****g invasive script?
Guess what, I don't go to your site. There are sites with ads that don't ask me that and guess what? I go to their sites. Sometimes I even click on the ad as I find it interesting.
Also, for a couple of true journalists I also pay a bit so that they can keep on writing.

Real conspiracies tend to come out, but some of them take a while. Information on the Iran/Contra scandal broke out about 5 years after the conspiracy started. That would have taken several hundred people to carry out, so it was somewhat hard to hide. Even so, they largely got away with it.
The moon landing conspiracy theory would have taken thousands of people, so it would have come out more quickly. Since we have an example of a real secret program of a similar scale as what would be required to fake a moon landing (that is, the Manhattan project), we know that the fake moon landing conspiracy theory is not true. (There's also the literally tons of evidence in the form of rocks and other samples, and all kinds of other ways to debunk the claim.)
Could Kash Patel's FBI have been trying really hard to entrap people into carrying out terrorist attacks in order to justify #Trump's occupation of DC? Could they have helped a guy plan an attack then just failed to arrest him? There are reasonable scenarios that fall in between malice and incompetence while still indicating some level of false flag.
Could someone have just snapped and ambushed some guardsmen without any involvement from the FBI? Yeah, totally. The US is a country full of guns with a completely non-functional mental health system. Someone coming from a country that the US destroyed, twice, could have a lot of untreated trauma. Might they see the national guard as a threat (even if that wasn't totally true)? Yeah, they were deployed to threaten people (even when they were just picking up trash). The point was to incite this kind of response. It's completely reasonable to believe that the FBI would not need to be involved at all, that this would just be the stochastic response they were looking for.
So the point here is that everything is on the table, nothing is really known, nothing should be surprising, and no matter what it's Trump's fault. This is exactly the escalation he was looking for. If he didn't get it naturally, he would also have had ways of making it happen.
He will use this in exactly the same way as the Reichstag fire, to drive a wedge between liberals and radicals. Don't fall for it.
Edit:
There are plausible reasons to not believe the official narrative at all right now, or maybe ever. The official narrative is also plausible, but there are plausible reasons to disagree with the response even if the official story is true. It is unnecessary to resort to conspiracy thinking in order to account for what happened and to disagree with the response. But it is also understandable why someone might jump immediately to a conspiracy given the circumstances.

The medical facility I go to for PT has a bike rack but it looks like garbage. It is bolted down but just does not look secure.
It's in the parking structure, so it's not exactly out in public... maybe that's a good thing?
But also, I can't ride my bike in the parking structure.
#bikeTooter

Maybe this will positively impact salaries in Europe (also why can't I quotepost Slashdot? It's a news aggregator, ffs!)
https://m.slashdot.org/story/450791

Random thought: humans view trees as vulnerable because they can't move out of the way of danger. But consider:
1. A single tree can produce tens of thousands of offspring.
2. Many of those seeds can remain dormant and viable for millennia.
3. Some living trees survive fit millennia themselves.
4. Trees vastly outnumber humans, maybe up to 100:1.
5. Many seeds die, but those that don't have found a niche that supplies them everything they need without having to move.
In contrast, humans:
1. Only produce a few dozen offspring at most. Barely replace their own population.
2. Cannot remain dormant once birthed.
3. Only survive for a century tops. Can only reproduce for maybe half that time.
4. So few of us. Individual humans live hundreds of feet apart, or at least dozens even in the densest cities.
5. Need to constantly burn energy moving around for their next meal. Could starve and die at any time in just a few days if they can't find water.
At a species level, the survival of humans begins to look much more perilous than the survival of many tree species.
Also I forgot to add:
6. Humans kill *each other* all the time. What the fuck humans?!? We have made ourselves our own biggest threat.
Trees do compete locally for water and sunlight and thus do kill each other, but only via circumstance, not intentionally.

@… there's no such fight.
Also, for everyone: I highly recommend spending maybe thirty minutes listening to Benno Rice's presentation at BSDCan 2018 …
<https://redd.it/96pm7w…

With growing interest in social housing in SF, maybe it’s a good time to re-up this Q&A I hosted last month. In addition to lessons from Seattle, @… goes over SF efforts so far, so it’s a great way to get up to speed!

I'm trying to play through the implications of some software I've been thinking about maybe designing.
It's legal to make a digital copy of the media that you own (videos, audio) physical copies of. It's legal to give a physical copy of your media to someone else or loan it out, which transfers your viewing license while they have It. Then it should also be legal to let someone else use a digital copy of your media given that you don't also use it at the same time. So as long as you keep track of your license, you should be able to let exactly one person stream some media you own.
If someone else then "steals" that content and views it without a license then that has to be legally on them, otherwise streaming platforms would be liable whenever someone cracks some DRM.
So then, it should be completely legal to set up a local community media library streaming service where you can share content you own licenses to as long as you track your license count and don't let more people stream at any given time than there are licenses available.
Is there something obvious I'm missing (aside from the MPAA and RIAA don't care about the law and will just sue anyone they can just to make an example)?

Many people are cheering for the popping of the "AI" bubble. Maybe it's not that simple though
https://tante.cc/2025/11/23/desire-to-pop/

amongst the various start-of-semester things to do today, I started a new backup 800gb of a Time Machine backup onto a HFS formatted disk image.
and also planted my "vegehome" with a fresh batch of little plant plugs. Look at their little plastic domes. 🥰
Once these lettuces and stuff run their course, I want to try something a little bigger... like maybe starting a little fruit tree.
#office #worklife #viu #garden #growing #backup #tech

I think if you’re worth more than say $5 million you should get some sort of “congrats, you won” badge and then you should be banned from owning businesses or having political office for the rest of your life.
Maybe also ban from social media for good measure.

What instant communication, thread-based platform do you use at least once a month?
Just trying to get an idea of the popularity of different options - multiple choices possible, please boost around!
If you think we should add some choices, please cite them in comment and I'll do a 2nd poll. They would have to be similarly thread / themes / channel - based, with a phone app but also available in the browser (e.g. maybe Matrix? But website-only platforms like Discourse would not work…

while you are at Dublin mayors, maybe you could ask car drivers to turn on their lights as required by law in Ireland :-) ?!?! During my super brief time in Dublin in 2024 I saw a lot of cars with their lights off during a dark rainy afternoon.
https://mastodon.ie/@irishcycle/115583918846…

Completely crazy, no sense of history, maybe also remove their gold teeth?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/17/refugees-jewellery-asylum-home-office

@… I wonder if it would be valuable to have a more structured way to evaluate additions to the addon manager? Maybe use GitHub issues? Or did things change and I also missed it?
Question:
Looks nice one to have, I will try when I am on pc.
Why not in addon manager?
Answer:

@…

This is also true of code, maybe even more true?

@…

This is also true of code, maybe even more true?

Maybe a good opportunity to illustrate the purpose of one of the more uncommon packages in #ThingUmbrella: The https://thi.ng/hex package provides hexadecimal formatters for a variety of word sizes (4-64 bits) and also a…

I recently researched the etymology of two interesting German words:
- "nonchalant" (informal, relaxed, casual, carefree, easy-going): I found that interesting because it's obviously a negation and I never read the non-negated form "chalant". Turns out that the non-negated form goes back to latin "calēre" (warm, to be hot, to be alarmed, to be fired up)
- "verschollen" (lost, missing, nothing has been known about the whereabouts of sth. or sb. for a long time). I found it weird because I couldn't make any sense of "schollen". This might be related to "verschallen" (stop making noise) and might go back to old high German "skellan" (which is also related to German "Schelle", a small bell). So, "verschollen" can be seen as a euphemistic expression because stop making noise is used to refer to being lost (and maybe dead).
#etymology #linguistics #German

Can I complain about required, subject-agnostic university writing courses? Part of the crisis in the humanities is that our institutions appear to have decided that we don't teach writing. But we do. Or maybe their problem is that we also teach troublesome substance? I haven't seen any evidence that the writing courses on my campus pay any attention to ideas, it seems to be all form all the time.

The state has become an existential threat to humanity in multiple ways. Not only are we *all* at risk of being killed at any time by the monsterous incompetence and malice of these systems (yeah, listen to this: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-the-men-who-might-310407494/), but we are also slowly being killed by systems enforced and protected by these same entities.
States won't fix climate change. Ecocide is enabled by the existence of states.
Maybe... just maybe... it's time to think of other ways to organize ourselves.

For a deep dive with some very excellent analysis of *that* white house security strategy, @… 's latest is a must view, and deeply discomfiting.
Anders ends with a suggestion to move off Meta X for blue sky. Which while I appreciate that a rivalry between masto BSky is probably unhelpful should maybe also come with the caveat that Blue sky *really* needs some other servers that federates with the US patent...
https://youtu.be/YAh-xEteBz4?si=yjXMUHc9qm_mxge2

Maybe, just maybe, Governor#GavinNewsom needs to hear that this is a really bad idea.
And DPR's assertion that their regulatory controls are sufficient is risible. After all, see how well laws about stop signs and traffic lights are followed.
California pesticide agency could loosen restrictions on most toxic rat poisons

Maybe, just maybe, Governor#GavinNewsom needs to hear that this is a really bad idea.
And DPR's assertion that their regulatory controls are sufficient is risible. After all, see how well laws about stop signs and traffic lights are followed.
California pesticide agency could loosen restrictions on most toxic rat poisons

@… Do you maybe have this text as a blog post somewhere? I would love to be able to share it with more people. It’s painful in a recognizable way, which also makes it comforting. I see in words what I feel.

@… First of all, yes. Maybe also have a subset of HTML that has stricter XML-like parsing rules — not sure what we would call it…

Fucking yes… finally! Thank you, Ireland, Spain, and Netherlands!
“Ireland will not participate in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, and it will not be broadcast on RTÉ, after organiser the European Broadcasting Union confirmed today that Israel will be allowed to take part … Spain’s national broadcaster RTVE and the Netherlands’ AvroTros also announced that they would boycott the contest.”
Maybe we should rename it to the Genocidevision Song Contest?
Now… any more Euro…

So yeah maybe don’t try using SaveMii on Wii Fit U to migrate your nnid account save to your pnid one. It not only doesn’t work, but also (seems to) cause at least one weird bug that I only noticed after more than one (almost two by now I think?) year playing
#WiiU

Welp, from my PoV, all sides are wrong.
There is a difference between bug reports generated by AI to spam curl devs and AI generated bug reports sent by Google to FFmpeg devs that are accurate. Calling them slop is hardly true.
"We would rather not know there is a vulnerability in our software" is a terrible take.
Also, I would like to say that maybe it is unreasonable for a software with so little funding to want to support all codecs that were ever invented becaus…

The Post-Gazette closes in five months, leaving time for Pittsburgh institutions to react, maybe by growing a replacement or helping its owner start a nonprofit (Joshua Benton/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/will-pittsb…

Evidently Weird Al Yankovic played this song ("Killing in the Name" by Rage Against the Machine), but it wasn't a parody of the actual song.
He played it straight, as in he meant it- or maybe also as in the USA has become a parody of what it once was...
I fucking love that guy!
https://youtu.be…

Not surprised. I found stuff that looked great. I am fairly experienced at baking and part of them didn't turn out. Going over them afterwards I should have clued in on the temperatures for the candies. I have made fudges and candies for decades and thought maybe they knew something that I didn't. They turned out to be almost as runny as cold syrup and will be used as a topping for fruit cake with ice cream.

Guardian repeats story that Venezuela's oil production low due to corruption and lack of investment.
Actually, the Maracaibo basin is beyond peak extraction so costs rising. And Orinoco oil is heavy, tarry, and hard to get (deep under the rainforest).
Of course the blockade is also part of the reason, and maybe flight of technical staff.
Oil prices fall after Trump says Venezuela will send up to 50m barrels to US | Oil | The Guardian

So in another dream I just woke up from, I was talking to someone about "the idea problem" (that it's becoming harder to monitize ideas, from a vox article written by an AI cooked reporter).
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/executive-disorder-white-house-weekly-46-313675864/
Basically, I was arguing that the majority of inventions target men because patriarchy puts economic control in men's hands. As men have started to help more with childcare, there have been more inventions related to childcare. (I don't have any idea if this is true. Seems legit, but I'm just relating my dream. I think I was also oversimplifying a bit to "men" and "women" because of my audience, but anyway it was a dream.) There's actually more low-hanging fruit, I pointed out, related to making care work easier.
So I argued that the real problem was a failure to invest in research into solving that problem. Today there are all these boondoggles built around killing people. What if, instead of all this government research into killing people, we dumped a ton of money into making it easier to support a household? That would be great for the economy. (Being asleep, I seem to have forgotten that working people need money.)
In the blur of being just awake I started thinking about how you could kickstart the US economy by taking the money from the AI boondoggle and other autonomous murder bots and create something like a program to build robots for housekeepers. You'd still be funding tech with government money, so the same horrible people get paid, but you're now actually solving real problems. It wouldn't even matter if it was a boondoggle, honestly. Just dumping money into something other than murdering people is good enough.
I imagined first if there was a program to fund a robot housecleaner, like robot dog with AI some laundry pickup, that would be provided, free of charge, to help people with children. It would work the same as the military boondoggle where a private company makes the government buy a piece of hardware from them and then also pay them to service it for some number of years. But instead of that hardware sitting around waiting to kill someone, it would be getting brought to people's houses to help them.
Then I thought, hey, you could even boost the economy more if you just had government funding for doulas and housecleaners and paid them a living wage. Hey, you could really kickstart the economy by nationalizing healthcare and including doula support as part of all births. Oh, and you could also just include the optional household help for families with children until the kids turn 18.
None of this is perfect (I don't actually think most of this is possible from any state), but the point is that it's actually wildly easy to figure out all kinds of ways to invest in the economy and monitize ideas as long as you aren't entirely focused on the same old "make money from spying on people and killing them." Funny that. Like they said in the podcast, maybe "finding ideas" isn't the problem.
Hope you enjoyed the weird semi-awake brain dump/rant.

A good friend of mine has the Muppet character "Beaker" as his avatar. For reasons.
He offers me advice. I offer him advice. We chat. These are #ChatsWithBeaker
The link in the discussion thread:
https:/…

@… Maybe start by updating it to Python3 at all? 😅
After all these years, that bare print finally looks weird to me.
Edit: Oh, I only saw on the second pass you also called out the print 🙃

Critics have compared the offensive to the Iraq war, citing a familiar mix of regime-change rhetoric, security pretexts and oil interests. This month, the Trump administration labeled fentanyl – which it says flows from Venezuela – a “weapon of mass destruction”.
On Monday, Trump suggested oil seized from Venezuela could be treated as a US asset. “Maybe we will sell it, maybe we will keep it... Maybe we’ll use it in the strategic reserves. We’re keeping the ships also.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/24/trump-venezuela-oil-resource-imperialism?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Australia should ban *everyone* from social media next, and maybe also make it difficult to leave the country without a Good Reason (beyond the extent to which it already is). Maybe the UK could follow suit. Then, Ireland would fall in line, because they're not creative enough to come up with their own ideas for laws. Just imagine the harmony in the Anglosphere thereafter. It would be lovely.

#photography #bloomScrolling #nasturtium #morningGlory

Is anyone else’s Wii Fit U minigame ranking data getting like migrated to their old (nnid) account after rebooting or something?
I’m not sure if it’s because I renamed the old mii to like “Luana-nnid” and the new one is “Luana” or what, maybe it’s a game bug ignoring the hyphens or something and sending the ranking to the oldest account with the same name??
I thought I was getting crazy bc I never played this minigame level on the old account and the ranking was set to that, so I took a screenshot and then today the ranking I got on that day was also stolen by the old account
#WiiU

Just finished "The Word for World is Forest" by Ursula K. Le Guin. Can't believe I didn't read this one earlier, and this strengthens my resolve to finish off the rest of her stuff I have yet to read sooner. I think it benefits somewhat from having read it after "Four Ways to Forgiveness" which gives more of the Hainish context. Certainly none of the blurbs I had read about it did it any measure of justice, which is one reason I hadn't prioritized it. More than being about colonization, it's about a solution to the paradox of tolerance, and both the price and imperfections of that solution. As usual with Le Guin's science fiction, it's a rich companion to anarchist thought.
I think the typical objection to seeing it as an answer to the warlord question would be that it serendipitously positions the indigenous population with more power and a less ruthless opponent than in the imagined scenario, and it uses the League of Worlds as a sort of deus ex machina to foreclose further retribution. Ultimately that's why I think it's more about the paradox of tolerance than anything else, but I also think in regards to the warlord problem that we are too quick to underestimate just how numerous and enthusiastic the opponents of a warlord might be, and to overestimate the strength of technological weapons wielded by frail (and psychologically unarmored) humans.
In any case, Le Guin gives this book's alien humans yet another fascinatingly credible capability, and getting to see the introduction of ansible technology with all its implications is pretty cool too. Maybe not

Carpenter called away to an emergency leak elsewhere today. Trouble with having a carpenter who is also a plumber I guess. 😆
The frames for the window doors look to be mostly completed, the doors that will make the blinds are up (though probably presumably will come down again to have mirrors attached? Maybe?). Lots of holes in wood filled. Stupid natural products. MDF don't have no holes, or grain at all.
Trying to render an image big enough to fill the wall there. 2m x 1m. Keeps crashing my machine. Going to have to try and render it in bits or something.

Something broke (changed) in Inkscape where I can no longer export a DXF file at the correct size for our laser cutter software. The DXF Export also seems to mangle the file a bit.
Time to try the "export every combo of options until I find what works" thing again. (Which I last did maybe 8 years ago, so I had a good run.)
#inkscape

@… thanks, I'll think about it for the future.
All over the shop is partly dyslexia, I try to find a balance between what's in my head (sometimes, everything at once) and compartmentalising things. Chunking stuff, (a) for readers to maybe make sense; and (b) for future reference.
There's also the issue of search engine index limitatio…

This is so damning. The top of the CBC story (JP Tasker reporting)
“Smith said she got Carney to back down on most of the Trudeau-era "nine bad laws," as she calls them, that restricted oil and gas development in Alberta.
Carney, meanwhile, says he got Alberta to buy into the Pathways carbon capture project to try and decarbonize the oil pumped out of the province.”
It would be like Putin saying he got Zelenskyy to back down on Donbas and Crimea, but Zelenskyy says Putin agreed to security guarantees from Russia and the USA.
Carney = Capitulator
Also... YOU CAN'T DECARBONIZE OIL.
ffs. what a stupid statement.
Maybe Putin will De-TNT his Ballistic Missiles.
#baitandswitch #climateEmergency #ABPoli #CanPoli #CdnPoli #RussiaUkraineWar
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/livestory/alberta-ottawa-memorandum-of-understanding-energy-deal-pipeline-bc-9.6993431

Maybe I ought to learn Dvorak layout for neuroplasticity reasons and also to be even more annoyed by being unable to get a decent ANSI keyboard in Europe

If you've ever wanted to go out in the woods and have fun with some friends, but you can't figure out how to also make it about organizing, I have good news. It turns out that there are significant overlaps between a big outdoor gathering, houseless camp support, and disaster response.
Tell yourself you're practicing for the revolution, but also maybe practice some fun.
https://pnc.st/s/live-like-the-world-is-dying/9a40dfa9/organizing-outdoor-gathering-infrastructure/transcript