@ErikUden@mastodon.deWe watched the Joker ironically and then went on YouTube to watch whatever people made about the movie there back in the day, landed in the worst slop bubble, and dug so deep until we hit “JOKER QUOTES ABOUT WOMEN” and these videos could be classified as performance art, they're pure gold
@pre@boing.worldDespite much opinion to the contrary, the government money we use is crappy.
I'm at bitfest in Manchester to find out if Bitcoin could be a better money.
It could hardly be worse.
The mood is still good, people are joking about recent devaluation rather than crying. Those who aren't all in are trying to buy more at the discount.
After an introduction by Mad Bitcoins, Joe Bryan explains the problem with government money.
He imagines an island on which two types of money are tried, with a dividing wall between them.
When economic problems hit, government can just print more money on the fiat side. Everyone now using money which is worth less. Distorting prices, inflating asset prices, making the rich (who hold assets) richer and the poor (who have to pay inflated prices) poorer. Driving wealth inequality.
On the hard money side, government must tax properly. Take in more from the rich rather than inflating to take it from the poor. Reducing wealth inequality.
On the government money side, the wealthy monitize houses, stocks, resources. Saving in money is impossible, its inflated away. So they save in assets and hording resources. Capital is misallocated. The youth can't afford houses. Poverty traps are caused. The only way out is printing more for benefits. Making it all worse. More economic crises, more printing. More government debt.
Eventually, the wall is broken. Government money people can save in the hard money instead. It reduces the value of government money further. More printing. More inflation.
Eventually, war. Funded by printed money.
The dollar is the best of a bad bunch all other government money is falling in value even faster.
I wonder, is bitcoin really this better money though? It's limited, hard, and can't be printed without energy investment.
I'm still unsure that fixing money fixes the world.
--
Note: "crypto" is mostly more like government money than bitcoin. It can be printed indefinitely by it's makers, does not cost it's makers to print. Crypto is usually just a scam people to get more bitcoin. Bitcoin is not crypto.
#bitfest #bitcoin
@mpsgoettingen@academiccloud.socialHere comes the Sun! ☀️
After a 6-month guest appearance in the exhibition “What the Quantum?!” in the Göttingen science museum @… , our model of the Sun is back home. Thanks for safely transporting the Sun through Göttingen.
And many thanks for the opportunity to shine as part of the exhibition!
@johnleonard@mastodon.socialWeird. "the mysterious mushrooms are found in different parts of the world, but they give people the same exact visions."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260121-the-mysterious-mushroom-that-makes-you-see-tiny-people…
@cdarwin@c.imThe Colorado River is on the verge of crisis.
No one has a solution.
Once again, the Colorado River is heading toward a crisis. This time, the way out appears murkier than ever.
For months, the seven states of the Colorado River basin have failed to reach an agreement on new rules to share the river’s dwindling supply of water.
The current rules that divvy up water among 40 million people in the West, including Los Angeles, Phoenix and farming regions that provide most o…
@scott@carfree.cityThe Lurie/Mandelman RV ban is still set to go into effect and tow people's homes on Nov. 1, the same day SNAP expires and at the same time federal agents are in the Bay to terrorize immigrants.
Send a letter to the mayor and BOS asking them to extend the towing deadline:
https://
@leftsidestory@mstdn.socialMoody Urbanity - Everyone 👹
情绪化城市 - 每个人 👹
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Orwo Wolfen P400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
@hex@kolektiva.socialSo 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.
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.ioSaw a Reddit thread where someone asked what would happen if a personal wealth cap of $100M was introduced.
The comments were entirely full of people gleefully calling the poster dumb and going to great lengths to argue how nothing can ever be changed about wealthy people being wealthy actually, because their wealth makes the economy run and that messing with the stock market will break the world.
So many excuses all over for complacency with an economic system that is very much the result of specific policy decisions and doesn’t even do the things it’s supposed to.
Why do people keep hiding behind the economy as if it’s a weird deity?
@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.netSeries C, Episode 06 - City at the Edge of the World
AVON: Seems we're not the only strangers on this planet.
CALLY: That could explain a lot.
AVON: The woman is still with us. Is she trying to bluff her way out?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/306/284 B7B3
@AimeeMaroux@mastodon.socialIt's the #DayOfZeus / Jupiter's Day / Thorsday! ⚡
"They used to say, my friend, that the words of the oak in the holy place of Zeus at Dodona were the first prophetic utterances. The people of that time, not being so wise as you young folks, were content in their simplicity to hear an oak or a rock, provided only it spoke the truth."
Plato, Phaedrus 275b
🏛️
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ng#WinterWonderland arrived early this year...
(From our #EveningWalk in the Ammergau Alps last night... 25-30cm fresh powder everywhere, -7℃, no people, but lots of animal tracks)
#SilentSunday
@tante@tldr.nettime.orgMany 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/
@wraithe@mastodon.socialYea I can’t imagine why anyone thought this dipshit was defending rape…I mean aside from the over half a dozen posts where he defended rape as “not immoral”, literally said “No. In fact, the word "rape"…didn't even exist until the 1800s.” and arguing that being “owned”* wasn’t “horrific”
Complete mystery why people went after him, must be some weird BlueSky thing. 😂
JFC
@PaulWermer@sfba.socialGee, how nice - #PGE Resource center is open from 5 - 10 pm, and then people without power can go back to their electricity-free homes in the dark at 10 pm. Such service to people left in the dark. When will #SFPUC be allowed to take over the local grid from the mismanagement of PG&E? We need public power s…
@paulwermer@sfba.socialGee, how nice - #PGE Resource center is open from 5 - 10 pm, and then people without power can go back to their electricity-free homes in the dark at 10 pm. Such service to people left in the dark. When will #SFPUC be allowed to take over the local grid from the mismanagement of PG&E? We need public power s…
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioIn the 1950s, the Air Force realized that planes were crashing because cockpits didn’t actually fit the pilots’ bodies. Wrong size = danger!! They commissioned a researcher to develop a new, more correct set of standard dimensions for the seat, yoke, etc.
That researcher, Gilbert S. Daniels, came up with 10 body measurements that matter to cockpit size. He gathered measurements of several thousand pilots. And the number of people who were at the average for all ten measurements? Zero. Not a single one.
“Average” proved to be a statistical construct, not a thing that actually exists as a person.
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
3/
@annsev@troet.cafe
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSources: Adobe held talks to acquire Synthesia, which makes AI tools that generate video avatars of people, for ~$3B; the startup was valued at $2.1B in January (Katie Roof/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/adobe…
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scotFull disclosure: I have experience in living under just a tarpaulin. I have experience of surviving storms under just a tarpaulin. Few people in the west have. So I can imagine and understand the present experience of people in #Gaza in a way few in the west can.
#GazaGenocide
@pre@boing.worldThe conference is over now. I likely wouldn't have come for just a bitcoin thing, but I am very interested in redecentralizing the web, so it's attachment to the nostr day pulled me in.
Everyone I met was friendly and interesting and seems much more interested in making a better money system than in making money for themselves.
Our government and bank money systems are dysfunctional in all kinds of ways which are often less visible than they should be too people using them, especially to those in Europe and America who benefit from the way those systems exploit the global south.
I'm not convinced that fixing that would end wars and fix broken government as some seem to think, but I am sure our money is the source of many problems.
There are many bright, well meaning, and intelligent people building to improve bitcoin in fascinating ways with the hope of having a parallel system to transition to. With lots of work still to be done.
Can it work?
I'm sure I don't know, and I'm sure even if it's a better system it'll come with it's own unfairness and cruelty. Money will continue to be a source of suck and worry.
I'm told that the bigger conferences are often full of shitcoin scammers and suit wearing banksters who are in fact all in it too get rich and rip people off, but I found none of that here.
Here there is a real community of people trying to make the world a better place and improve the lives of their neighbours and governance of their countries.
And in the end building community is the most radical and effective way to change the world regardless of the problems of it's money system.
I had a great time. Thanks to those organising it.
#bitfest #bitcoin
@padraig@mastodon.ieA good weekend for Mercedes between the #F1Academy and #F1 drivers:
* Kimi Antonelli - P3 (originally P4)
* Doriane Pin - Who won the F1 Academy Drivers Championship.
* George Russel - P2 (originally P3)
@Sustainable2050@mastodon.energyIran's president says moving the capital Tehran is now a necessity as the water crisis deepens. That'll be moving 16 million people (metro area) then, almost equal to the entire population of the Netherlands.
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202511209098
@karlauerbach@sfba.socialOne might think that the maga-klan actually wants these people to destabilize the US....
"Neo-Nazi terror group steps up US operations as FBI pulls back"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/22/neo-nazi-terror-the-base
@UP8@mastodon.social😿 Myanmar’s election is derided as fake, but the nation’s suffering is all too real
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/12/28/asia-pacific/myanmar-election-people-suffering/
@jensilber@mastodon.socialIn the 1980s there were a lot of television ads that showed how people might use technology in the future.
I remember one that showed a woman waking up in bed and (I think) speaking to the computer across the room to ask for the news and weather. The part that struck me odd then wasn't the use of voice command, it was the idea of wanting to interact with a computer right away in one's bedroom, before even having coffee or seeing sunlight. And now here we are.
@davidaugust@mastodon.onlineICE is hostage taking, taking young 4 or 5 year old kids to compel parents to do things.
In russia from late 1918 thru 1922, the Bolshevik secret police waged the Red Terror, modeled on the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, and designed to repress dissent.
Their methods included confiscations, fines, executions, and hostage-taking.
Ice helps themselves to groceries, devices and more from captives, charges fines, kills people in the street and now: takes hostages.…
@seeingwithsound@mas.toContrary to Neuralink Blindsight's lack of evidence concerning applicability to people born blind, there is the 2012 paper titled "'Visual' acuity of the congenitally blind using visual-to-auditory sensory substitution" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/arti
@kexpmusicbot@mastodonapp.uk🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
The Stylistics:
🎵 People Make the World Go Round
#TheStylistics
https://astralblak.bandcamp.com/track/the-stylistics-people-make-the-world-go-round-ft-troy-williams
https://open.spotify.com/track/6u5DJLTMuHgKqxdtjAWnWP
@YaleDivinitySchool@mstdn.social"What will be the condition of the world our children inherit? What will we feed them if we destroy the ecosystems on which agriculture depends? In short, we can’t nurture healthy people on a sick planet."
—Mary Evelyn Tucker, Co-Director of Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, in her piece in the new issue of the YDS journal Reflections
@hikingdude@mastodon.socialSome photos from today's hike in the mountains. To escape the fog.
It was very very icy at the bottom. And I was super happy to have my micro spikes.
The way up was pretty calm. Right the #silentsunday I had desired. At the summit there were a bit too many people and I didn't see proper motives. So I just enjoyed the view and the really warm temperature.
On the wa…
@Defiance@sfba.socialParty time! (while the soldiers starve)
Party time! (while the people pay)
Party time! (while the East Wing falls)
Party time! (bribes build the hall)
Woh woh woh, woh oh, oh
Woh woh woh, woh oh, oh
Woh woh woh, woh oh, oh
Woh woh woh — it’s the Billionaire’s Ballroom!
@salrandolph@zirk.usFree Words was an art project I started in 2001. It was a hot pink artists book I described as “a book that belonged to anyone who found it.” I placed it onto the shelves of bookstores and libraries to be discovered, and people who found it had to make an uncomfortable decision about whether they were truly free to carry it away.
Here’s the story.
@theodric@social.linux.pizzaDisappointing to see that even Electric Sheep has a slop angle now https://electricsheep.org/
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.debudapest_connectome: Budapest Reference Connectome 3.0
A parameterizable consensus brain graph, derived from connectomes of 477 people, each computed from MRI datasets of the Human Connectome Project. Nodes are brain regions, and edges are weighted by the number of "tracks" that run between two nodes, as well as fiber length, fractional anisotropy and the number of occurrences in each of the 477 individuals.
This network has 1015 nodes and 121755 edges.
Tags: Biol…
@markhburton@mstdn.socialPortugal’s far-right Chega party ordered to take down posters targeting Roma people | Portugal | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/22/portugals-far-right-chega-party-ordered-to-take-down-pos…
@grumpybozo@toad.socialIt’s been a norm for my whole time in tech.
How is it NOT just another day at the job? @… https://toot.cafe/@baldur/115762982979476704
@catsalad@infosec.exchangeEvery so often the people question whether @… and @… are the same.
The CatSalad network can neither confirm nor deny these allegations.
@leftsidestory@mstdn.socialRED （Ocassionally） II 🔴
红 （有时） II 🔴
📷 Zeiss IKON Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Harman Red 125 (6x6)
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
@aral@mastodon.ar.al💬Readers added context they thought people might want to know…
“Europe is hurtling toward digital vassalage. Under Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, EU laws to tackle tech giants have been either not applied or delayed, for fear of offending Donald Trump. Now leaked documents reveal that the European Commission plans to gut a central part of Europe’s digital rulebook. This will hurt Europe’s innovators and hand the future of Europe’s tech sovereignty to US firms.…
@radioeinsmusicbot@mastodonapp.uk🇺🇦 Auf #radioeins läuft...
Empire Of The Sun:
🎵 We Are The People
#NowPlaying #EmpireOfTheSun
https://avispado.bandcamp.com/track/empire-of-the-sun-we-are-the-people
https://open.spotify.com/track/5NzeaGdmieI4pRlNLv5p7L
@mlawton@mstdn.social👀 Defensive regression. If you review most of the goals this season, it usually isn’t that LFC don’t have enough people behind the ball. It’s that depth & injuries have been more undermining than expected. Little choice but to play those out of form or out of position.
Missing out on Guehi was massive, as was the injury to Leoni, and the decision to sell Quansah now looks bad. I think Trent, when he wanted to, was a better defender than his reputation, but defensively, he’s not mis…
@memeorandum@universeodon.com'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans (Rachel Nuwer/BBC)
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260121-the-mysterious-mushroom-that-makes-you-see-tiny-people
http://www.memeorandum.com/260123/p2#a260123p2
@jake4480@c.imMany people know of the SNES version of SimCity, but there was actually a version made for the NES that was unreleased, and The Video Game History Foundation published a few minutes of gameplay of the prototype for it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0q93b_allY.
It looks similar to othe…
@hex@kolektiva.socialAfter #Trump finally crashes and burns (I'm still saying I don't think he makes it to the mid terms, and I think it's more than possible he won't make it to the end of the year) we'll hear a lot of people say, "the system worked!" Today people are already talking about "saving democracy" by fighting back. This will become a big rally cry to vote (for Democrats, specifically), and the complete failure of the system will be held up as the best evidence for even greater investment in it.
I just want to point out that American democracy gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile, who, before being elected was already a well known sexual predator, and who made the campaign promise to commit genocide. He then preceded to commit genocide. And like, I don't care that he's "only" kidnaped and disappeared a few thousand brown people. That's still genocide. Even if you don't kill every member of a targeted group, any attempt to do so is still "committing genocide." Trump said he would commit genocide, then he hired all the "let's go do a race war" guys he could find and *paid* them to go do a race war. And, even now as this deranged monster is crashing out, he is still authorized to use the world's largest nuclear arsenal.
He committed genocide during his first term when his administration separated migrant parents and children, then adopted those children out to other parents. That's technically genocide. The point was to destroy the very people been sending right wing terror squads after.
There was a peaceful hand over of power to a known Russian asset *twice*, and the second time he'd already committed *at least one* act of genocide *and* destroyed cultural heritage sites (oh yeah, he also destroyed indigenous grave sites, in case you forgot, during his first term).
All of this was allowed because the system is set up to protect exactly these types of people, because *exactly* these types of people are *the entire power structure*.
Going back to that system means going back to exactly the system that gave nuclear weapons to a pedophile *TWICE*.
I'm already seeing the attempts to pull people back, the congratulations as we enter the final phase, the belief that getting Trump out will let us all get back to normal. Normal. The normal that lead here in the first place. I can already see the brunch reservations being made. When Trump is over, we will be told we won. We will be told that it's time to go back to sleep.
When they tell you everything worked, everything is better, that we can stop because we won, tell them "fuck you! Never again means never again." Destroy every system that ever gave these people power, that ever protected them from consequences, that ever let them hide what they were doing.
These democrats funded a genocide abroad and laid the groundwork for genocide at home. They protected these predators, for years. The whole power structure is guilty. As these files implicate so many powerful people, they're trying to shove everything back in the box. After all the suffering, after we've finally made it clear that we are the once with the power, only now they're willing to sacrifice Trump to calm us all down.
No, that's a good start but it can't be the end.
Winning can't be enough to quench that rage. Keep it burning. When this is over, let victory fan that anger until every institution that made this possible lies in ashes. Burn it all down and salt the earth. Taking down Trump is a great start, but it's not time to give up until this isn't possible again.
#USPol
@detondev@social.linux.pizzaTheir father, who they thought was human, revealed himself to be a man of the soil once drunk. Crackling browns darkened by wine dribbling down his chin, writhing with small insects and budding flora. They couldn't bear laying eyes on his breath any longer, the flood was all of God's open might they could handle.
![18 The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) 19 These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth.
20 Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded[a] to plant a vineyard. 21 When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. 22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it …](https://cdn.social.linux.pizza/system/media_attachments/files/115/759/201/009/188/415/original/426923bf81395169.jpg)
@azonenberg@ioc.exchangeHuh, that's weird.
Watching a documentary set in a hospital ER and they're blurring some obvious things - patient names, computer screens not relevant to what's going on, faces of people without a media release, more graphic injuries, etc.
But they also blurred a *clock* in the background of one scene. I have to wonder what the story there is. Just a big 7-segment LED clock on the wall of one of the trauma bays.
@cdarwin@c.imAs the Trump administration ramps up its targeting of left-leaning people and groups, the prosecution and harsh sentencing of Casey Goonan may provide a glimpse of things to come.
h…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialIn case anyone was wondering about the relevance of #LandBack in the current moment, via CrimeThinc an article on the Minneapolis resistance states:
"""
The Whipple, a federal building in Fort Snelling on the outskirts of the Minneapolis and St. Paul, has long been a regional headquarters for ICE, having previously housed other federal agencies. The complex is located across the street from a National Guard base, down the road from a military base, and next to the preserved fort itself. The fort sits on the sacred site of the convergence of two rivers. It was one of the earliest sites of colonization in the area; at one time, it was a concentration camp holding native Dakota people.
"""
If at any point in the past you ever felt that maybe Native soverignty was a niche issue, or so far from being realized that other causes were more important or relevant, things like this are a good reminder that that cause: overturning the colonial order, is the *same* cause as any meaningful change from the fascist status quo. Things like a "return to democracy" aren't necessarily bad, but the rot runs to the root of this nation, and any intervention that doesn't go that deep is going to leave us right back in this situation again later on.
The fact that ICE is detaining Native Americans is not at all a mistake given their white supremacist aims.
Article link: #ICE #LandBack
@metacurity@infosec.exchangeThe Trump administration pushed out two officials focused on neutralizing technological threats from China, people familiar with the matter said, in the latest dismissals of key personnel working on national-security issues tied to Beijing.
https://ww…
@oligneisti@social.linux.pizzaThe talk section on the Wikipedia article about the acronym "MILF" is quite interesting. There have been heated discussions about age range and if having a child is actually a prerequisite.
Of course the article itself has a disambiguation that helps people who were actually looking for information about Moro Islamic Liberation Front. That article in turn has this line:
> MILF announced that it would disarm its 30,000 fighters.
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialSource: Suno hit ~$150M in ARR from subscriptions to its app, up nearly 4x YoY; it has $10 and $30 per month subscription tiers, implying 5M subscribers (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mu
@trezzer@social.linux.pizzaChronic pain is stressful. Not just due to what you might expect; the body reacts to pain and it doesn’t like it. It’s also the many things you would like to do or need to do — where if you do them, you will be in pain and potentially even worse pain afterwards that leaves you unable to do even more of the things you need to do. Sometimes at the cost of being with people you want to spend your time with. The chronic pain/guilt-combo is crushing over time, and you usually end up not doing thi…
@pre@boing.worldA panel of people from a few different countries.
The UK, where the event is, and the US currently have money which perhaps is good enough that the people there don't see much need to replace the money. Running global reserve currency helps exploit other poorer countries. The problems are fairly invisible.
But in other countries, poorer countries with even worse money, countries more exploited by debasement of the global reserve currencies, the problems with government money are more evident. They see the need for an alternative more strongly.
Adoption is important though. Money is only money if it's widely accepted. So given the choice of more users or higher price, the panel would all pick more users.
#bitfest #bitcoin
@simon_brooke@mastodon.scotReading Tim O'Reilly's essay on the economic future of #AI, one sentence stands out:
"By product-market fit we don’t just mean that users love the product or that one company has dominant market share but that a company has found a viable economic model, where what people are willing to pay for AI-based services is greater than the cost of delivering them"
/Continued
@cdarwin@c.imMicrosoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday.
Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called #BitLocker, which is enabled by default.
This type of technology should prevent anyone except the device owner from accessing the data if the computer is …
@inthehands@hachyderm.io(This is not some kind of false modesty. Most of what you’re hearing from me here is just me passing along information from community channels. My personal contribution has mostly been helping communication, helping people with tech issues, doing some volunteering, keeping watch, protesting, doing neighborhood support work — that kind of stuff. I don’t want to downplay the importance of any of that. It matters a •lot• that there are so many people doing all of those things! It matters that I’m one of them! Just…you know, I’m one among many, a small player who somehow ended up holding one of the mics on Mastodon, and that’s it. The courage you see is the courage of many.)
@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.netSeries B, Episode 03 - Weapon
RASHEL: Perhaps that creature drove the people away.
COSER: I doubt it. Raw materials ran out more like.
RASHEL: Perhaps that was the only one.
COSER: Perhaps, perhaps! Just get on with it, will you?!
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/203/397 B7B3<…
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSource: SoftBank held talks about acquiring Agility Robotics for $900M before participating in Agility's funding round valuing the startup at $1.75B pre-money (Rocket Drew/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/softbank-hunts-humanoid-rob…
@UP8@mastodon.social🫥 Mexico’s missing people crisis casts a shadow over World Cup venue
https://english.elpais.com/international/2025-12-20/mexicos-missing-people-crisis-casts-a-shadow-over-world-cup-venue.html
@karlauerbach@sfba.socialI am wondering why people still pay their Federal taxes?
(I sent my quarterly payment to the IRS about a week ago. And I cringed at the thought of what ill uses it might be used for.)
'How “Bitcoin Jesus” Avoided Prison, Thanks to One of the “Friends of Trump”'
https://www.
@aral@mastodon.ar.al“The US has unveiled its plans for a ‘New Gaza’ that would see the devastated Palestinian territory rebuilt from scratch.
‘We’re going to be very successful in Gaza. It's going to be a great thing to watch,’ Trump declared.
‘I’m a real estate person at heart and it's all about location. And I said: “Look at this location on the sea. Look at this beautiful piece of property. What it could be for so many people.”’
…
Last February, Trump sparked outrage around the …
@Sustainable2050@mastodon.energyThe Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs sees no specific security problems in traveling to the US. By now, I think they should at least make it orange for people of color traveling there.
@pre@boing.worldBritain is broken, in various ways. Could adopting bitcoin help it bounce back?
Renegade Investor thinks so.
Central banks printing money causes government debt and artificially low interest rates. Their monetary policy is political and done for bankers not for people.
Bitcoin monitory policy is fixed.
Lockdown during pandemic was funded by money printing, and caused a big inflation pump and government debt increase. It caused the current cost of living crisis.
Lockdown could have been impossible under a bitcoin standard.
In pounds the cost of living has gone up lots over the last decade. But in bitcoin it's gone down massively.
He thinks wealth redistribution is taking money from productive people and giving it to those who aren't increasing the country wealth. Here I disagree entirely. Wealth is reality being taken from the workers and given to the capital owners. We are redistributing wealth towards the rich currently. Taking the wealth created by workers to give to idle owners.
I also wonder, would limited government power be good? Did the lockdown save lives? Would it do do under a worse pandemic? Limited government power may be double edged.
Not sure why he thinks immigration is funded by government, rather than immigrants increasing the country wealth. Seems to think bitcoin could reduce immigration, which I find unbelievable and undesirable.
This talk I disagree with quite a lot.
#bitcoin #bitfest #britain
@netzschleuder@social.skewed.dedbpedia_country: Person-Country Affiliations (DBpedia, 2016)
A bipartite network of the affiliations between notable people and countries of the world, as extracted from Wikipedia via the DBpedia project. Countries include former countries, empires, kingdoms, and some country-like entities.
This network has 592414 nodes and 637134 edges.
Tags: Social, Affiliation, Unweighted
@cdarwin@c.imA couple of months ago Bali experienced its worst floods in more than a decade.
-- They came at the peak of the dry season.
Instead of the empty wells farmers faced last year,
this time their crops were washed away;
roads turned into brown, swirling rivers;
houses collapsed in the torrents;
and 17 people were killed.
⭐️Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country, faces a paradox.
Sometimes described as a sleeping giant, it is one of the …
@memeorandum@universeodon.comWhere is the footage Jeffrey Epstein secretly recorded of people in his houses?! (Dean Obeidallah/The Dean's Report)
https://deanobeidallah.substack.com/p/where-is-the-footage-jeffrey-epstein
http://www.memeorandum.com/251221/p67#a251221p67
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialMaking this a subtoot so I don't come across as smug or condescending...
My decision to stop using github when they started providing services to ICE back in ~2016 felt awkward at times but has been feeling really good in hindsight right now.
I see a bunch of people now saying "why boycott X company over some "minor" transgression or political capitulation (or over a "neutral" stance on LLM code). The answer is: it shows what their values are, which predicts their future behavior, especially under the tilted playing field of capitalism. I'm by no means perfect at this and I don't think shouting at people to boycott is a good idea for several reasons. People should boycott what they want to, for their own reasons. But I am posting this to try to help others be aware of the upsides of taking action when confronted with "subtle" evidence of corporate unvalues.
@hex@kolektiva.socialAny sufficiently advanced disaster preparedness is indistinguishable from revolutionary dual power. This essay is a bit of a transition between the theory I've written earlier, and more concrete plans.
Even though I only touched on my life on the commune, it was hard not to write more. These are such weird spaces, with so much invisible opportunity. But they're also just so unique and special. For all the stress and uncertainty of making sure you stayed on Lorean's (the head priestess), there were also those long summer nights with the whole community (except the old lady) gathered around a fire, talking and drinking. There was almost a child-like play to the whole time.
There were so Fridays I'd come home with a couple of gallons of beer from the real world, folks would bring things from the garden, someone would grill a steak, everyone who didn't cook would clean up, and we'd just hang out and have fun. So many evenings I'd go over to Miles place with a guitar, or with his guitar, and we'd pass it around over a few beers, talking about philosophy, Star Wars, or some book or other. It's hard not to write about the strange magic of that space.
My partner and I bonded over similar experiences, mine on a weird little religious commune in California and theirs as a temporary worker at Omega Institute. Both had exploitation, people on weird power trips, frustrating dynamics, but also a strange magic and freedom. Both were sort of fantasy worlds, but places that let us see through this one, let us imagine something that something else is possible behind the veil.
There are many such veils.
Perhaps it's fitting that this is more meandering, as a good wander can help the transition between lots of hard thinking and lots of hard working.
https://anarchoccultism.org/building-zion/evaluating-options
Editing feedback (especially typos, spelling, grammar) is always welcome, as are questions and even wider structural advice. I've been adding the handles of folks who provide feedback to the intro in a "thank you" section. If you do help and wouldn't like to be added, please let me know.
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSource: Suno hit ~$150M in ARR from subscriptions to its app, up nearly 4x YoY; it has $10 and $30 per month subscription tiers, implying 5M subscribers (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mu
@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.net @leftsidestory@mstdn.socialUS CHILDREN II 🧒
我們這些孩童 II 🧒
📷 Zeiss IKON Super Ikonta 533/16
🎞️ Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioA kind person just praised my courage in a DM, and…
Don’t praise my courage. I’m a drop in the bucket. My contributions are tiny compared to what others are doing.
I have never, ever seen so many people so ready to take action, putting their lives on hold, stepping into danger because their neighbors are in danger. I have never seen so many •comfortable white people• stepping up to take action — and the people who are actually in the crosshairs now, well, their courage I cannot even fathom.
@pre@boing.worldBit root is explaining why there will only be 21 million bitcoin.
Block rewards every ten minutes halving every for years is an infinite sum tending to that 21m supply. In fact a few sats less due to rounding errors.
She explains why bit shift in the code is the same as halving due to the way binary number representation works.
The code stops shifting at 64 halvings , despite the fact the reward will be zero after 32. This is since c leaves 64 bits shifted off a 64 bit number as undefined.
But could the code just be changed? No. The source code maintainers could try, but node runners would refuse the update, it being against their financial interests to do so. Even if some nodes did do, you on your own node can resist.
When people created forks with more supply, the market sent it's price to zero.
#bitfest #bitcoin
@UP8@mastodon.social🌞 Dual use of land for solar energy production and cultivation found feasible in Finland
... few people realize what a win agrivoltaics are for farmers and the environment!
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-12-dual-solar-energy-production-cultivation.ht…
@cdarwin@c.imA prominent civil rights attorney and at least two other people involved in an anti-immigration enforcement protest that disrupted a service at a Minnesota church
have been arrested, Trump administration officials said Thursday,
even as a judge rebuffed related charges against journalist Don Lemon.
The developments unfolded as Vice President JD Vance arrived in the state.
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong in a post on X.
On …
@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.netSeries C, Episode 01 - Aftermath
LAUREN: There's no need. I can handle it, Dayna.
MELLANBY: All right, but don't take any chances.
LAUREN: I won't.
DAYNA: Keep your head down.
LAUREN: I always do.
[On the beach]
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/301/377 B…
@pre@boing.worldNot sure what the difference between a panel and a"fireside chat" is. There is no fire.
But here's a fireside chat on what nostr is.
Nostr is freedom for Identity. Accounts without hosts. Publishing without publidhers. Censorship resistance without platforms deciding who gets to say what.
It's not a silo in which you can be tapped as the service enshitifies, since it's a protocol with accounts you control, you can't switch clients or relays without loosing social graph or contacts.
Nostr is notes and Other Stuff, what other stuff? the panel is working on an audiobook publishing system with perhaps a required payment and affiliate revenue share. E-commerce, video publishing, zap stream for live video with zap payments.
Onboarding can be tricky with private key management needing to be understood and such a range of options of clients and what relays are. Can we make it easier?
Perhaps by abstracting away the fact it's nostr at all. Devine users don't even know they are using nostr. But this robs users of the understanding they may need to move clients or use the same account for video and notes, say.
Perhaps by making a private messagnger, the panel thinks people are used to using multiple messenger apps. Though I find they hate that, and that's why they refuse to install signal. They feel they don't need it since they already have WhatsApp with a bigger network.
In the end it's education. We have to teach literacy so people can read and write, we have to teach public keys encryption so people can do so securely.
#bitfest #nostr
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioApparently (I wasn’t part of the group, got the report when I arrived on the scene) there was a caravan of multiple vehicles following ICE. Several ICE vehicles cut dangerously into the caravan and forced the observers’ cars to stop. That’s when they smashed the person’s window and took them.
It sounds like multiple people got video. I hope you don’t see it, for the safety of those whose faces might appear in the video. But I hope you believe me anyway. This is all really happening.
@Techmeme@techhub.socialA researcher details an LLM-based AI agent that "demonstrated a near-flawless ability" to bypass bot detection methods while answering online survey questions (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/a-researcher-made-
@cdarwin@c.imThe main recourse for challenging #racial #profiling
is through the
"Federal Tort Claims Act",
which allows people to sue the federal government
for harm caused by federal employees,
said Thomas A Saenz,
the president and general counsel at
the "Mexican American L…
@leftsidestory@mstdn.socialMoody Urbanity - TWO 2️⃣
情绪化城市 - 贰 2️⃣
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Fujifilm NEOPAN SS, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite
@cdarwin@c.imWhen an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in south Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026,
what happened next looked familiar, at least on the surface.
Within hours, cellphone footage spread online and eyewitness accounts contradicted official statements,
while video analysts slowed the clip down frame by frame to answer a basic question:
Did she pose the threat federal officials claimed?
What’s changed since Minneapolis became a g…
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSources: Nvidia's DGX Cloud is merging with the engineering unit, pivoting from selling cloud services to enterprises to supporting internal AI development (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-restructures-clou…
@inthehands@hachyderm.io“Make the seats adjustable” is a thought I bring to teaching, for example: Does the context I’m creating for learning accommodate people with all different kinds of minds? What variations am I not accommodating? Can I make some things more individually adjustable to better embrace those variations? Can multiple instructors / learning environments / schools offer the flexibility that I can’t offer myself?
Total adjustability is impossible; infinite flexibility is impossible. But as an ongoing effort, as a •direction•, this work is both feasible and useful.
9/
@pre@boing.worldPrem ghinde thinks that Alan is killing bitcoin.
Alan is paid in government money, and saves in bitcoin. He's an imaginary straw man.
Alan doesn't plan to spend his bitcoin though. Just stack it until he sells it. And this doesn't build the bitcoin network.
Without transitions, when the block rewards run out, there will be no money for miners. Miners will need fees, which means transactions.
Since he's paying in bank money, he's funding bankers instead of miners. He's encouraging retail to accept bank money instead of miners and lightning liquidity providers.
Unlike Alan, Prem lives on the bitcoin standard. All in. Spending sats because he has no bank money to spend. It can be done, he insists. Today. Mostly by using gift vouchers bought with bitcoin.
He's sad that people here are buying drinks from the hotel with bank cards instead of lightning.
Stop watching the price, he says, it's only a measure of government money's collapse. Change your yardstick. Account in bitcoin. Dollars aren't even money, they are currency. If you must measure, do it against gold.
Since moving to el Salvador he had learned Spanish, until he even dreams in Spanish. Try to dream in bitcoin.
Every transaction is a vote, so stop voting for bank money.
I think the main trouble with this is that tax event in every purchase, and the fact my employer won't set a wage in bitcoin even if they would convert to bitcoin to pay me.
#bitcoin #bitfest
@cdarwin@c.imThe people who succeed in the new media environment
are the people who figure out how to work its mechanics,
which selects for skills that are only loosely correlated with genuine intellectual originality.
🔸You need to be good at social media,
🔸good at building a personal brand,
🔸good at identifying topics that will generate engagement.
These are real skills,
-- but they're not the same skills that lead to developing genuinely new ideas.
@cdarwin@c.imHalf the street corners around Minneapolis have people
— from every walk of life, including republicans
— standing guard to watch for suspicious vehicles,
which are reported to a robust and entirely decentralized network that
tracks ICE vehicles
and mobilizes responders.
I have been actively involved in protest movements for 24 years.
I have never seen anything approaching this scale.
Minneapolis is not accepting what’s happening here.
@cdarwin@c.imThe real reason people move to red states
The “U-Haul index” does not prove a point -- or at least the point the WaPo Editorial Board makes.
Yes, people are moving from more expensive to less expensive areas,
but why are those areas more expensive?
Many factors play into the calculation, but one is obvious and significant:
Real estate is more expensive where people want to live.
Tax rates by themselves don’t make real estate expensive;
ultimate…
@pre@boing.worldShort panel on merchant adoption.
Hipster burgers here in Manchester takes bitcoin. The owner says people are generally more curious than dismissive.
Gresham's law implies that people spend their worst money first. They want rid of it. When you give merchants your bank money you give them the worst money. Be kinder to merchants!
Ben from lnbits, the first merchant point of sales lightning devices, says merchants are interested because they want to have a broad portfolio. Accepting bitcoin is the easiest way to get it, without "know your customers" banking rules.
#bitfest #bitcoin
@cdarwin@c.imFive people were arrested following hundreds of investigative hours following 💥 the shooting of Judge Steven Meyer and his wife, Kimberly, in Lafayette Indiana
on Jan. 18.
Both victims were in a stable condition following the attack,
which happened around 2:17 p.m.
The judge was injured on an arm, his wife on her hip.
Raylen Ferguson, 38, from Lexington, Kentucky;
Thomas Moss, 43, from Lafayette
and Blake Smith, 32, from Lafayette,
were all ar…
@cdarwin@c.imBari Weiss gushed about the popularity of El Salvador’s president,
who describes himself as the “world’s coolest dictator,”
and how safe he’s made the Central American nation
– without noting he’s suspended basic civil liberties,
has been accused of making deals with gang leaders,
and has thrown thousands of innocent people in jail without giving them a fair trial.
Months later, on Sunday night, Weiss squashed a CBS News story on the treatment of immigran…
@cdarwin@c.imTech journalist Gil Duran outlines a disturbing theory
that a growing number of Silicon Valley elites are pursuing a vision of power
not rooted in the common good,
but in profit, feudal hierarchy, and total control of the platforms that define daily life for hundreds of millions of people.
Duran dubs this emerging ideology the “Nerd Reich”
— a slurry of right-wing ideas championed by ruthless tech overlords like
Palantir founder Peter Thiel,
Tesla an…
@cdarwin@c.imAs Donald Trump and his administration have rolled back rights, cut social safety net programs to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and ignored or failed to comply with court orders,
new demographics are being activated to join a broader coalition of people fighting for education, racial justice, gun control, science, the environment, immigration and the LGBTQ community.
From local grassroots efforts to nationwide groups, today’s organizers are breaking down barriers and creati…
@cdarwin@c.imOnce limited to policing the nation’s boundaries,
the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior
that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects.
The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found.
The …
@cdarwin@c.imNavigating 10-foot flames,
he arrived at the crashed
cyber truck.
But the bulletproof door,
opened electronically by a hidden push button,
wouldn’t budge.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/cyb…
@cdarwin@c.imFour years ago, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court decided that gun laws must be rooted in history in order to comply with the Second Amendment.
But they are not always comfortable with the reality this analysis unearths.
The Supreme Court heard oral argument on Tuesday in
"Wolford v. Lopez",
a case about whether states can ban people from carrying concealed firearms on private property without getting the owner’s consent.
Under the Hawai…
@cdarwin@c.imOn Tuesday, multiple congressional Democrats made a video reminding members of the military and intelligence community of their duty to the Constitution,
not to President Trump.
The comments—made by military and intelligence veterans Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan—set the MAGAverse off.
By Thursday, President Trump suggested they be charged with sedition and executed.
And y…
@cdarwin@c.imOn Tuesday, multiple congressional Democrats made a video reminding members of the military and intelligence community of their duty to the Constitution,
not to President Trump.
The comments—made by military and intelligence veterans Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin, and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan—set the MAGAverse off.
By Thursday, President Trump suggested they be charged with sedition and executed.
And y…
@cdarwin@c.imDemonstrators opposed to the Trump administration’s federal immigration operations
took to the streets of downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday afternoon,
disrupting traffic in the area.
The protest was part of the nationwide
“Free America” walkout
targeting Donald Trump and his allies on the one-year anniversary of Trump returning to the presidency.
The demonstration drew what appeared to be several hundred people to Los Angeles City Hall
before they move…
