@heiseonline@social.heise.de2025-11-28 06:28:00
Partei ergriffen für 1&1? Vodafone geht gegen Kartellamt vor
Vodafone legt sich mit dem Bundeskartellamt an. Der Wettbewerbshüter soll Partei für den Vodafone-Konkurrenten 1&1 ergriffen haben.
https://w…
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-10-28 00:10:46
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-10-28 00:55:42
Grokipedia, a Grok-powered online encyclopedia, launches with over 885K articles; Elon Musk has touted it as a less biased alternative to Wikipedia (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/27/grokipedia-wikipedia-musk-/
@memeorandum@universeodon.com2025-10-27 21:40:42
Republicans work to make Zohran Mamdani the face of the Democratic Party (Scott Wong/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/republicans-work-make-zohran-mamdani-face-democratic-party-rcna240069
http://www.memeorandum.com/251027/p110#a251027p110
@outer@mas.to2025-12-27 16:26:45
This basic science advance was made with a rocket sled. (And math.) But rocket sleds are FUN!
#Science #PlanetaryScience #RocketSled
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-10-27 03:00:46
Day 30: Elizabeth Moon
This last spot (somehow 32 days after my last post, but oh well) was a tough decision, but Moon brings us full circle back to fantasy/sci-fi, and also back to books I enjoyed as a teenager. Her politics don't really match up to Le Guin or Jemisin, but her military experience make for books that are much more interesting than standard fantasy fare in terms of their battles & outcomes (something "A Song of Ice and Fire" achieved by cribbing from history but couldn't extrapolate nearly as well). I liked (and still mostly like) her (unironically) strong female protagonists, even if her (especially more recent) forays into "good king" territory leave something to be desired. Still, in Paksenarion the way we get to see the world from a foot-soldier's perspective before transitioning into something more is pretty special and very rare in fantasy (I love the elven ruins scene as Paks travels over the mountains as an inflection point). Battles are won or lost on tactics, shifting politics, and logistics moreso than some epic magical gimmick, which is a wonderful departure from the fantasy norm.
Her work does come with a content warning for rape, although she addresses it with more nuance and respect than any male SF/F author of her generation. Ex-evangelicals might also find her stuff hard to read, as while she's against conservative Christianity, she's very much still a Christian and that makes its way into her writing. Even if her (not bad but not radical enough) politics lead her writing into less-satisfying places at times, part of my respect for her comes from following her on Twitter for a while, where she was a pretty decent human being...
Overall, Paksenarrion is my favorite of her works, although I've enjoyed some of her sci-fi too and read the follow-up series. While it inherits some of Tolkien's baggage, Moon's ability to deeply humanize her hero and depict a believable balance between magic being real but not the answer to all problems is great.
I've reached 30 at this point, and while I've got more authors on my shortlist, I think I'll end things out tomorrow with a dump of also-rans rather than continuing to write up one per day. I may even include a man or two in that group (probably with at least non-{white cishet} perspective). Honestly, doing this challenge I first thought that sexism might have made it difficult, but here at the end I'm realizing that ironically, the misogyny that holds non-man authors to a higher standard means that (given plenty have still made it through) it's hard to think of male authors who compare with this group.
Looking back on the mostly-male authors of SF/F in my teenage years, for example, I'm now struggling to think of a single one whose work I'd recommend to my kids (having cheated and checked one of my old lists, Pratchett, Jaques, and Asimov qualify but they're outnumbered by those I'm now actively ashamed to admit I enjoyed). If I were given a choice between reading only non-men or non-woman authors for the rest of my life (yes I'm giving myself enby authors as a freebie; they're generally great) I'd very easily choose non-men. I think the only place where (to my knowledge) not enough non-men authors have been allowed through to outshine the fields of male mediocrity yet is in videogames sadly. I have a very long list of beloved games and did include some game designers here, but I'm hard-pressed to think of many other non-man game designers I'd include in the genuinely respect column (I'll include at least two tomorrow but might cheat a bit).
TL;DR: this was fun and you should do it too.
#30AuthorsNoMen
@StephenRees@mas.to2025-11-27 18:16:15
BC all-party committee on Electoral Reform recommends a Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform! New polling shows BC voters support proportional representation.
Additionally, the Committee recommends that the provincial government consult local governments to determine the level of interest in alternative electoral systems for their communities."
@hex@kolektiva.social2025-11-27 22:32:54
I was just thinking about how the fact that #Musk named his AI "Grok" is evidence that he "reads sci-fi" in the same way he "plays video games." Like, he claims to do it but when it comes time to show the evidence it's clear he does not actually "grok" it.
Like... To grok something is to have a layer deeper than simply knowledge, but mathematically encoding statistical relationships between words is pretty obviously not even understanding much less qualifying as "groking" it. In the book, the ability to grok something is also the ability to annihilate that thing with a thought. Just pretending that an LLM actually *was* something that could become AGI (which it's not), this name would imply the AI would have the power to annihilate reality. That's bad. That's a bad name for an AI.
And why would a greedy fascist name something of his after something an anarchist communist space Jesus taught to the hippie cult he started? There are so many layers of facepalm to this. It's some kind of php-esque fractal of incompetence.
Like, there's no reason to talk about this but my brain does this to me sometimes and now it's your problem.
@Mediagazer@mstdn.social2025-11-29 01:56:06
NBC says the 2025 Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade drew a record 34.3M viewers across NBC and Peacock, up 8% YoY; NBC's live broadcast averaged 25.4M viewers (Kimberly Nordyke/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-ne
@memeorandum@universeodon.com2025-11-27 15:25:59
Trump to review Afghan migrants after shooting; Macy's prepares for parade (Straight Arrow News)
https://san.com/cc/trump-to-review-afghan-migrants-after-shooting-macys-prepares-for-parade/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251127/p22#a251127p22