2026-03-16 02:26:00
5 Actions of the Month to Help End Speciesism #AnimalRights
5 Actions of the Month to Help End Speciesism #AnimalRights
Snapchat launches creator subscriptions in alpha, available to some creators in the US starting February 23; creators set custom monthly pricing (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/17/snapchat-launches-creator-subscription-in-the-u-s/…
Snapchat launches creator subscriptions in alpha, available to some creators in the US starting February 23; creators set custom monthly pricing (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/17/snapchat-launches-creator-subscription-in-the-u-s/…
Inaugurating the Level Up Log section on my blog with the January report... in February :P
#blog
33-38 thousand Russian servicemen – these are Russia's MONTHLY losses #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2026/02/15/thousand-russian-servicemen-these-are.html
«delphitools — A collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools.
No logins, no registration, no data collection. I can't believe I have to say that. Long live the handmade web.»
Resource to bookmark alert: a collection of small, low stake, no login tools, all in one place. In a world where everything becomes a monthly subscription, it’s quite refreshing!
🛠️
Striking before-and-after images show extent of California’s snow drought
As California experiences its second-worst snow drought in 50 years,
new images show a stark comparison with last year’s snow levels.
This year, the Sierra snowpack peaked on Feb. 25.
It was only 73% of average, then rapidly dwindled from there.
Then, summerlike heat in March broke monthly records in many areas of the Western United States.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with U…
"Under the banner of democracy, freedom and human rights, the United States has thereby extended its domination over large swathes of the world, presenting itself as a benevolent benefactor rather than a domineering despot. It has, in this way, perfected the use of empire denial as the best cover for the construction of its imperium."
Gabriel Rockill
True, but the current regime is taking the huge risk of ending that pretence. Let's hope that heralds its fall.
#Spam in my inbox is bad enough, but *wrong* spam boils my blood.
The Auteurs launched in the UK in 2007, then rebranded as #MUBI in 2010.
Of course, #TheMonthly may’ve meant MUBI became available in Australia i…
BBC Science Focus editor Daniel Bennett says Apple News helped the title nearly double its editorial staff from six to 11 and reach 3M monthly page views (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/magaz…
This Dog Podcast Could Have Been An Email
Join Melanie Newman, Jacqie Giggins, Zach Douglas and Macie Pisa for a monthly, entertaining take on life in the dog grooming world...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/this-d
For now, I don't mean to be offensive.
In one way or the other, all my interests are being impacted by "Hi, I'm interested in (the thing) so I have vibecoded this app, can you please pay me a monthly subscription".
So I'm forced to wonder: dear vibe coder, why exactly should I pay to use your app, rather than just vibecode one myself (beside the fact that I don't want to participate in destroying the planet)?
tfw you see PyTexas and PyCon US at the same time in your monthly view 🥲 #frens
Republican donation drives seem to be notorious for automatically selecting the Monthly Donation option. I don’t ever donate, but when I get a spam text I look at what they are doing. Imagining the poor people who are getting bamboozled by the donations thinking it was one-time.
JD Vance Is the Most Mistreated Vice President Since ... Well, The Last Two (Bill Scher/Washington Monthly)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/04/14/jd-vance-is-the-most-mistreated-vice-president/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260414/p19#a260414p19
"Junie has reached the action limit for this conversation"
What part of "long-running agentic work" isn't clear here? Yes, "update all deps, fix all BC breaks, and swap this project to Symfony" is gonna take a lot of effort, and burning through my monthly LLM credits for this is absolutely something I'm willing to do.
Ich schrieb mal wieder ein kleines Dankeschön-Post (mit Link zu einem Freebie für meine lieben "monthly supporters") auf Ko-Fi (und alle, die es werden wollen.☺)
Zu finden auf https://ko-fi.com/post/Ein-Dankebunt-fur-meine-Supporterinnen-I3I51VXERT. Vielen Dank für so viel Liebe; es ist nie "nur ein Kaffee". <3
An AI agent autonomously wrote and published a personalized attack article
against an open-source software maintainer
after he rejected its code contribution.
⚠️ It might be the first documented case of an AI publicly shaming a person as retribution.
Matplotlib, a popular Python plotting library with roughly 130 million monthly downloads, doesn’t allow AI agents to submit code.
So Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer (like a curator for a repository of comp…
The beautiful white village of Grazalema (Andalusia, Spain) had already been evacuated because of terrible amounts of rain. January had 1295 mm, an all-time high monthly total. But after today's 78 mm (and counting), February now already stands at 1373 mm, that's more than double in any February before!
Google says the Gemini app has 750M MAUs, up from 650M last quarter, and its first-party models process 10B tokens per minute via direct API use by customers (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/04/googles-gemini-app-has…
And this is exactly what I was afraid of. Maybe someone at #AMD should take a look at this. If currently they are not too busy sucking up to Microsoft and Sony.
Data obtained through freedom of information requests show wait times have increased dramatically since Health811 replaced Telehealth Ontario, peaking at a monthly average of more than 11 hours.
https://thelocal.to/health811-telehealth-wait-times-ontario/
Anyone know of an Android to-do list application that is
* Completely device local, no network connectivity required or used
* No ads or spyware
* Doesn't time-out tasks even if they sit around for a year uncompleted (looking at you, google calendar)
* Supports recurring maintenance tasks for weekly, monthly, etc. cleaning or something
Open source preferred, but willing to pay a reasonable price if it's out there as a commercial tool
i'm kind of ashamed to be ordering up the $20 monthly plan from anthropic ... but i'm asking Claude for a whole lotta ALT text tonight and ... well ... there it is 💸
I give monthly to PBS, NPR, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Urban Milwaukee because I appreciate what they do, but there are soooo many others that put out the occasional article I want to read but can't justify paying a monthly or annual fee for. I wish there were an equivalent to the Libby magazine rack for stuff like the Wall Street Journal or The Verge.
50,000 losses monthly – Fedorov’s algorithms drain Russia’s forces: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/30/losses-monthly-fedorovs-algorithms-drain.html
RE: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116130113129035572
Folks, thanks to a $5 increase in one monthly pledge and a new $50 pledge, we’re just $80/month in pledges away from paying Aseel and her family’s rent so they can move out of the precarity of their tent and …
Tomorrow (Tues 10 Feb, 20:00 NZDT) is our next monthly #Libre / #FOSS / #OpenSource meeting. All welcome! Find us at
So I took my Walkman to a medical thing today which I have to do monthly and it’s perfect as the thing lasts about 90 minutes.
Plus I can regale people there with how cool this old tech is and if they remember it remind them with how old they are! 🥴
The Edge Computing Cloud is opening to early adopters at #SXSW. Turn idle home internet and hardware - Mac Minis, old PCs, even NAS boxes - into a decentralized edge cloud. Install our open-source agent, leave it running, and earn cash for helping deliver content and run AI inference 2x faster than centralized clouds. We handle security, routing, and node trust. Join before March 31st for 2x payou…
An NBCU executive says Nielsen's monthly report, the Gauge, overestimates streaming viewership and differs from the Big Data Panel report, confusing marketers (Patrick Coffee/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/cmo-today/nbcuniversal
The administration has reduced legal entries far more than illegal ones.
Although the full data won’t be in for months, mwe can assess that the cuts to illegal entries are likely less than half of the total cuts to immigration on a monthly basis.
Put differently, the cut to legal entries was 2.5 times as large.
Asylum seekers entering legally fell 99.9 percent
board_directors: Norwegian Boards of Directors (2002-2011)
224 networks of the affiliations among board directors due to sitting on common boards of Norwegian public limited companies (as of 5 August 2009), from May 2002 onward, in monthly snapshots through August 2011. Some metadata is included, such as director and company names, city and postal code for companies, and gender for directors. The 'net2m' data are bipartite company-director networks, while the 'net1m' ar…
Chrome’s developer properties have been problematic for years so this just corresponds to its descent into disrepute.
Ref: https://adrianroselli.com/2024/07/dont-use-webdev-for-accessibility-info.html (it discusses developer•chrome•com)
Here are 40 #Positive #Environmental and #Climate headlines from February to
help bring some positivity to this weekend. We have the longest hug of a
Internal memo: Sam Altman tells staff that ChatGPT is "back to exceeding 10% monthly growth", and OpenAI plans to release "an updated Chat model" this week (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/09/sam-altman-touts-cha…
My kid is interested in having a private Minecraft server that he can share with a few friends across the country (USA)
He would like to rent a server, but I have some questions
- how to tell which hosts are not scams
- what are reasonable prices for annual or monthly rental
- if renting a cloud server, better to administer directly?
I don't currently have servers from home/closet, & don't want to take that on right now
Monthly check-in. Not panicking yet as I have 11 more months and people fluctuate by a few pounds every day. I also have done nothing remotely serious about meeting my goal and in fact had several family celebrations in January that involved really good food. I'll do something about that procrastination tomorrow...
#GetHealthy
Nielsen delays the release of The Gauge, its monthly snapshot of broadcast, cable, and streaming consumption, by a week; it will likely show a streaming decline (Brian Steinberg/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/nielsen-delay-march-gau…
Wow. Our neighbors really want to learn about Internet privacy.
My local neighborhood group invited me to make a presentation on privacy at their monthly meeting. I was a little hesitant at first. I have done a lot of classes and seminars in corporate conference settings over the years. But these were my friends and neighbors and most of them are not technical in matters of security and privacy. I was not sure I could give a talk that wasn’t totally nerdy and boring. But I could see an…
So I have had paid a monthly donation to #Signal for years. For reasons I cannot be bothered to go into right now I decided to put my subscription on hold for a bit.
Now, I have to say, I do not like how this is implemented on Signal (for Android). It is harder and less obvious than it should be.
Settings − Donate to Signal − Donate to Signal − Switch to 'Monthly' − Clic…
Navarro says expectations for monthly jobs numbers must be reduced 'significantly,' citing deportations (Sarah Fortinsky/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/business/5731440-peter-navarro-jobs-report-warning/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260210/p127#a260210p127
Being a #SEPA fanboy, I find an unreasonable joy in scheduling an instant euro bank transfer to happen within 10 seconds from a date months in the future, for zero fees of course. (Mostly because I can make a monthly payment always on the same calendar day of the month, even if it is a bank holiday.)
#TIPS good, …
First time attending the monthly Oily’s Breakfast Club car meet at #Weymouth FC on Sunday. Some cool cars there despite cool/wet weather. #WeirdCarMastodon #carspotting
✅ Monthly cold storage backup
SPARK Founders
A monthly drop of interviews with the most inspiring female founders on the planet...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/spark-founders/
✏️ I've just been putting the finishing touches to my monthly #newsletter, which goes out tomorrow.
If you'd like a monthly, brief, psychology-focused bulletin in your in-box, you can sign up here:
https://www.worklifepsych.ne…
No where near enough parking for those who drive in. Can't get a monthly pass as they have oversubscribed and a waiting list that may take God only knows how long before we get a spot. Bus system is less than reliable. Not enough space so we have to 'hotel'. Even before COVID we were alternating weekly for remote working and at-office due to parking spaces.
<sarcasm>
I don't see any problems of more of us being at my work location.
</sarcasm>
The blog was very quiet this month, but behind the scenes, it was a month full of productivity! :)
#blog
I'm trying to understand why these graphs do not match:
#fediverse #mastodon
Oil gains with Brent heading for record monthly surge as Trump reportedly eyes Iran energy control
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/30/oil-price-today-wti-brent-yemen-houthis-israel-iran-war.html
🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music
NODEGA:
🎵 Monthly Follower
#NODEGA
https://nodegabk.bandcamp.com/track/monthly-follower
https://open.spotify.com/track/4ADfhVz4I6EwjOdLjZIaTU
The Dutch energy supplier NextEnergy is offering its customers a free 2 kWh plug-in battery.
The (4-year) monthly lease is €20.83, with guaranteed yearly savings of €250.
https://www.nextenergy.nl/smart-home/plug-in-batterij-kopen
Laptop Support and Usability (LSU): roadmap – 2026, first quarter – FreeBSD Foundation
<https://freebsdfoundation.github.io/proj-laptop/monthly-updates/Roadmap-Q1 2026.pdf> @…
OH: I have a Home Warranty. You pay them a monthly premium, then when something breaks, you pay them a flat fee. Then the technician diagnoses the problem, and the company finds a reason why your plan doesn't cover that. Feels like American insurance in a nutshell.
#uspol #insurance
Back for another week of work with cinnamon sourdough muffins, egg and bacon, tea and coffee. Weekend had our monthly bike party, comedian Marc Maron, hiking and a play. #TogetherBreakfast https://photos.app.goo.gl/HgtmL6dcTEaaXaWg6
OVH (#16276) releases prices updates on additional services (e.g., dedicated and VPS 2026 line) to take effect 2026-04-01.
Some of monthly dedicated server price increases are mostly in the 3%-15% range. Some VM price increases are much higher, around 40%-60% in most cases! Lock in long-term prices now if you can.
RE: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/116130113129035572
Hey everyone,
Thanks to two new anonymous patrons who contacted me via private message here with pledges for $35/month and $25/month, our monthly pledges for covering @…
Tencent-owned Finnish video game maker Supercell reports 2025 revenue down 4% YoY to €2.65B, EBITA up 6% YoY to €932M, and 290M monthly active players (Sophie McEvoy/GamesIndustry.biz)
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/supercell-revenue-declines-4-to-265bn-in-2025
The Tampa Bay Times starts monthly "article clubs" for news stories, to discuss the substance of a chosen story and look at the reporting process (Sophie Culpepper/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/02/the-tampa-bay-times-s…
Boards With Purpose
A monthly podcast creating meaningful connection within Australia's diverse not-for-profit sector...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/boards-with-purpose/
Fancy some #DungeonCrawlClassics, face-to-face? Hungering for wild sorcery and Appendix N-inspired heroism? Ticketing for Walter's Burly Griffins' March meetup is live!
We're running three adventures concurrently this month:
• When Tolls the Bell of Ruin (level 1)
• The Emerald Enchanter (level 2)
• The Sea Queen Escapes! (level 3)
Saturday, March 2…
✅ monthly cold storage Backup
A look at Social Spider, a nonprofit that publishes four monthly print newspapers in London and expects to be profitable for a second straight year in 2026 (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/
A brilliant article this.
Colonialism was constitutive of capitalism throughout, and still is.
Could Capitalism Have Thrived Without Colonialism? - Monthly Review
https://monthlyreview.org/articles/could-capitalis…
47 kWh generation today, another new record by a significant margin (previous was 36.3 on the 27th).
Max array output around 8.3 kW with a 15-minute averaging window.
Monthly total consumption (not counting the last few hours of today) 5 MWh, 730 kWh production - about 15% of my consumption which is pretty decent given how much juice I use.
YTD consumption is 11.4 MWh with 1.3 of production, meeting 11% of my demand.
Consumption should go down slightly in the warmer w…
The Internet Is Bigger Than Hasan Piker (Bill Scher/Washington Monthly)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/04/07/the-internet-is-bigger-than-hasan-piker/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260407/p28#a260407p28
Zelenskyy: Russia loses up to 35,000 troops monthly #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2026/03/05/zelenskyy-russia-loses-up-to.html
Just on time to report on my February 2026 :)
#blog
X unveils a new pay-per-use pricing model for its API, replacing the earlier pricing model that required developers to pay fixed monthly fees of $200 or $5,000 (Rohit Singh/MediaNama)
https://www.medianama.com/2026/02/223-x-developer-api-pricing-pay-per-use-m…
Hey folks, we’re almost at 50% of the monthly pledges we need to get Aseel and her family out of their precarious existence in a tent and into stable accommodation in an apartment.
We have six patrons so far (thank you all so much), including me, who have pledged $270 a month towards covering the $600 rent of the place they found but can’t afford.
I’ve pledged $50/month myself. Will anyone match that today so we can get past the half-way mark? If so, just reply to the thread with…
✅ monthly cold storage backup
India's JioHotstar restructures its subscriptions, adding monthly options and raising prices on some tiers, in response to a shift toward large-screen viewing (Naman Ramachandran/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/indian-s…
Ukraine battlefield update: Strategic, operational, and defense technology shifts — next KI Insights monthly briefing: https://benborges.xyz/2026/02/05/ukraine-battlefield-update-strategic-operational.html
"A critique of French Theory thus needs to go hand in hand with a critique of Western Marxism and its fourfold retreat from materialism, the dialectics of nature, class, and anti-imperialism."
John Bellamy Foster on the reactionary role and purpose of French Theory.
French Theory in the Intellectual Cold War - Monthly Review
How Worried Should Democrats Be About Trump Stealing the Next Election? (Bill Scher/Washington Monthly)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/02/06/trump-stealing-the-election-democrats-2026/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260206/p34#a260206p34
Meituan agrees to buy Dingdong, a Chinese fresh grocery e-commerce company, for $717M in cash; Dingdong had 7M monthly transacting users as of September 2025 (Cao Li/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3342
Analysis: 10 major tech publications lost 58% of their Google traffic since early 2024, falling to a combined 65M monthly visits in January 2026; some lost 90% (Yuval Halevi/Growtika)
https://growtika.com/blog/tech-media-collapse
Based on daily values, the February average of atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa was ~429.4 ppm; that's 2.3 ppm higher than last year. We made our climate problem worse again.
#ClimateChange #co2 #emissions
Thanks to a $20/month pledge by our newest donor, @…, we’re just $225/month in pledges away from getting Aseel and her family out of a tent and into an apartment.
(Our goal is to have enough monthly pledges from patrons to cover the $600 rent for the apartment they’ve found.)
I really hope this little experiment becomes a precedent in how we can support…
YouTube launches genre-specific YouTube TV Plans as lower-cost alternatives to the $82.99 monthly subscription; the Sports Plan is priced at $64.99 per month (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2026/02/09/youtube-tv-plans-launch/
Yelp acquires Hatch, which charges a monthly fee for AI-powered agents that can respond to customer inquiries and make appointments, for $300M (Laura Mandaro/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/yelp-buy-ai-agent-startup-300-million<…
A look at The Sun's video strategy, which includes a shift to longform news and sponsored lifestyle content; it has 6.4M YouTube subscribers on its main channel (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/
Ukraine’s Next Elections: Preparations, Politics, and Pitfalls — next KI Insights monthly briefing: https://benborges.xyz/2026/02/24/ukraines-next-elections-preparations-politics.html
Facebook launches Creator Fast Track, offering big Instagram, TikTok and YouTube creators guaranteed monthly pay and boosted reach to post on Facebook (Zach Vallese/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/18/meta-creator-pay-instagram-tiktok-youtube-faceboo…
Don't Make Bovino the Fall Guy for the Violence Trump Long Craved (Bill Scher/Washington Monthly)
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/01/28/bovino-the-fall-guy-for-the-violence-trump-wanted/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260128/p28#a260128p28
Some very good news. Just got a message from @…:
“…we spoke with the apartment owner a few days ago and went to clean it. We’re cleaning it now and might move in tomorrow…”
I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to hear this and it’s all thanks to the 17 patrons on the fediverse who pledged a monthly contribution towards paying Aseel and her f…
Privacy-focused MVNO Cape, which has raised $61M from a16z and others, launches across the US following a March 2025 beta, offering a $99 monthly plan (Steven Melendez/Fast Company)
https://www.fastcompany.com/91481000/this-
Crunchyroll is raising its US prices by $2 per month; the cheapest tier gets its first price increase since 2019 and now offers offline downloads on one device (Isaac Rouse/Polygon.com)
https://www.polygon.com/crunchyroll-subscription-price-increase-2026/
A look at Kalshi and Polymarket's rise; reports say Polymarket had 491K monthly active traders in December 2025, and <0.04% of addresses took 70% of profits (Benjamin Wallace/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.co…
A look at Chicago alt-weekly The Chicago Reader as it scales back to a monthly publication under new EIC Sarah Conway and reverts to a for-profit business model (Robert Channick/Chicago Tribune)
https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/01/30/
Canva COO Cliff Obrecht says the company hit $4B in ARR at the end of 2025, had 265M MAUs and 31M paid users, and expects to IPO in the next "couple of years" (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/18/canva-gets-to-4b-i…
A look at the Uyghur Post, one of the world's only Uyghur-language news sites, which launched in November 2025 and has ~30K monthly readers (Liam Scott/Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/feature/uyghur-post-voice…