Peyton Manning's 2013 success will never be repeated https://insidethestar.com/peyton-mannings-2013-success-will-never-be-repeated

The Guardian: A world on edge as Trump bombs Iran and triggers war in the Middle East. There was no need for this, by Simon Tisdal.
If you want an extract from that article:
"Despite all the hate-mongering, mutual ignorance and disinformation, the vast majority of Americans and Iranians are on the same side. Their common foe is tyranny. Their leaders are the problem. There is no need for this fight."

A world on edge as Trump bombs Iran and triggers war in the Middle East. There was no need for this
We cannot know where this foolish, reckless attack will end – but new hatreds will be seeded, terrorist vendettas sown and, ultimately, little will be achieved, says Guardian foreign affairs commentator Simon Tisdall

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

One day, these sons of bitches are going to get what’s coming to them. That day, I will be shedding zero tears. I just hope they don’t take the rest of us down with them. And if we keep being complicit and allowing them to act with impunity, I’m afraid that’s exactly what’s going to happen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cn5ge95q6y7t…

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei killed in US-Israel attack - follow live
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps has vowed a "devastating" retaliation following the supreme leader's death.

Jensen Huang says Nvidia's OpenAI investment will be "the largest investment we've ever made", after a report said plans to invest $100B in OpenAI stalled (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/116144776295217687
Well tomorrow will be the absolutely last resort to fix that iMac Pro, trying to install macOS from thumb drive
Internet recovery is failing, possibly because the SSD isn’t partitioned right (which is hinted at that while it boots into target disk mode I don’t see any disk when connected to it).
We shall see…

Even if ICE CBP presence in the Twin Cities goes back to pre-Dec levels (which to be clear it •has not• yet done), we will be living with this for a long time. The world will be moving on, the national press will forget about us no doubt, but we’ll be living with this.
Nobody here thinks we’re done. But a lot of us are cautiously hopeful that we are now entering a time where this is some room for repairing and rebuilding.
Cautiously hopeful. But vigilant.
/end

We close out 2025 this week with another early pick, a fitting track from 90s rock act Semisonic.
Give it a listen and bring in the new year with us, as we run through why we feel this is the perfect track for the occasion.
Thanks again to all our readers for another fun year of music blogging, we'll be back in the new year to showcase more hand picked tracks from across the epic world of #rock

Semisonic - This Will Be My Year
One awesome, hand picked song from the world of rock and metal, showcased every week. Nothing more, nothing less! 🤘

Here’s something from an 11 year old blog post. (Folio.olio) I guess we were worried about paparazzi back then. But they might be useful these days too, to counter facial and body movement ID detection.

Did Performance

Played two Loopy gigs

Just a tiny birthday party and in a camping field with friends.
This is probably about the target number really.
It's nice to play now and then but couldn't be monthly or anything even more frequent.
Didn't feel like either went great. Health issues affecting performance plus nerves
Just one with video of any kind.
Added a couple of great songs to the playlists, need to practise more really.
At the end of a Hoopla class and the end of
a self-organised group class.
They were good fun.
But having to book a course every eight weeks means constantly churning co-players and long gaps where I don't get around to it or it was all booked up.
Tried to get a more permanent group going...
Trying to get some sort of indie-group off
the group rather than just short runs of
classes with new people all the time.
We found a group an booked the room but didn't get most of the actual people to turn up. Need to presumably meet more people up for that sort of thing.
So there will be new improv class starting
in Jan.
A new show in March at least.

"A very-well known Internet meme, inspired by a scene from the 2004 movie “Finding Neverland”, features a sequence of images in which a very young Freddie Highmore tearfully admits that “it works in my machine”, to which Johnny Depp replies “then we’ll ship your machine”, with the last caption stating “and that is how Docker was born”."

Shipping Your Computer
The analogy between intermodal containers and software containers sounds cliché, but it works pretty well, which is the reason why we will keep using it in this article. Let us recap: before the standardization around intermodal containers after the Second World War, freight had to be manually loaded and unloaded from boats to trains to trucks, over and over again. Before the rise of software containers of the 2010s, software had to be manually loaded and unloaded from developer laptops to tes…

Save important peat moss in Greater Manchester.
Trafford Council is applying for planning permission for the Carrington Relief Road, and we have until 27 February to object.
The Carrington Relief Road will cause harm to Carrington Moss, a 335 hectare peat moss, which Natural England considers to be an irreplaceable habitat. It will also damage or totally destroy 40 hectares of productive agricultural land, and increase traffic,.
Take action::

Selten hat der Song so gut gepasst, wie zu den jetzigen Zeiten.
"Greed and jealousy, each equal, all your days now dark"
"Monsters rule your world, are you too scared to understand?"
"We put our faith in maniacs, the triumph of the will
We kill for money, wealth and lust, for this we should be damned
We are disease upon the world, brotherhood of man"

We're downtown killing time before we head over to the theatre to see We Will RockYou. I suspect Best Buy's boxing day sale is not going well. At the Eaton's Centre location there are hundreds of big screen TVs piled up everywhere. In the aisles, at the front, in display areas. Messy as hell.
Reminds me of this appropriate tune.
https://youtu.be/wTP2RUD_cL0?si=pjmiHpE0mct5pXbF

watching bf play Elden Ring, it strikes me that we're close to peak graphics. the realism dial can still be turned up a bit, but games are generally better when they're a step away from reality.
what's missing though is physicality. when characters swing weapons at enemies, it's clearly just sprites doing canned animation, and there's no actual contact happening.
a couple decades from now, perhaps average 3d games will have processing budget for procedural ani…

Today's alarm in the Radisson Blu Hotel will just be a DRILL!
Der heutige Alarm im Radisson Blu Hotel ist nur eine ÜBUNG!
#radissonbluhotel #39c3

Ugh, my personal git server uses a pre-2022 version of sshd - and now, when I do anything, I get a warning that I'm not using post-quantum keys.
We should be moving to PQ methods, yes, but I don't think anyone will convince me that mass "store now, decrypt later" quantum attacks will ever really be a thing - the opportunity cost will always be too high.
This is a VPN-advert level of unnecessary caution.
(You can set "LogLevel ERROR" in an ssh_con…

I’m not really sure what it means, given the state of the world, but I guess in an aspirational sense, at least, as in “against all evidence to the contrary, here’s hoping 2026 will be a…”
Here’s wishing you all a Happy New Year.
(Except the fascists. They can get fucked.)
💕
PS. You can find people in need in Gaza to donate to at https://

Gaza Verified
We’ve personally had video conversations on Signal with the people from Gaza whose Mastodon accounts on the fediverse are listed here and we verify that their accounts are genuine. – Joy & Aral Balkan

Donald Trump said on Sunday that he and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy were “getting a lot closer, maybe very close”
to an agreement to end the war in Ukraine, though both leaders acknowledged that some of the thorniest details remain unresolved.

Trump said it will be clear “in a few weeks” whether negotiations to end the war will succeed.

Zelenskyy said an agreement on security guarantees for Ukraine has been reached.

Trump was sli…

Good to see employees from Google and OpenAI speaking out.
"The Pentagon is negotiating with Google and OpenAI to try to get them to agree to what Anthropic has refused."
#AI

We Will Not Be Divided
Employees of Google and OpenAI stand together to refuse the Department of War's demands to use AI models for domestic mass surveillance and autonomous killing without human oversight.

Series B, Episode 05 - Pressure Point
BLAKE: It is a calculated risk. Remember, we've got one foolproof factor: the teleport. Even if they do attack, we can still get out. We will have failed, but at least we'll be alive.
GAN: It's still a big risk.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/205/280

AI is McDonald’s. That Will Be Good, Bad, and Catalytic for Civil Rights Advocacy. | TechPolicy.Press https://techpolicy.press/ai-is-mcdonalds-that-will-be-good-bad-and-catalytic-for-civil-rights-advocacy

AI is McDonald’s. That Will Be Good, Bad, and Catalytic for Civil Rights Advocacy.
The current trajectory of AI may have similar effects on how people engage with computers as fast food has on how we engage with eating, writes David Brody.

NFL Coaching Hot Seat Rankings https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/nfl-coaching-hot-seat-rankings-after-harbaugh-vs-tomlin-will-loser-leave-town

Katherine Rundell betont im Kontext der 'reading crisis' die Bedeutung von Schulbibliotheken und Schulbibliothekar:innen: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2026/feb/23/will-we-ever-read-books-again-podcast

FAFO-ing in the iOS app Loopy Pro, which is what I use to create midi controls on the iPad. Here I have used an XY controller widget to control delay mix/feedback.
We will see how fiddly that is in the heat of battle, but if it works I might do the same with reverb mix/decay.
The joke might be on me however; in iPadOS26 grabbing anything near the edge will resize the app 🤣😩

The Feds keep saying "We did not" or "We will not" buy this or that empty warehouse for use as an ICE prison.
What they are hiding is that in order for a warehouse to be an ICE/CBP prison that the warehouse need not be "owned" by the Feds.
Rather the warehouse could be bought by a maga-friend, like Elon or Ellison etc and then leased to the government.
The Feds would not bey lying when they say they are not buying the warehouse. But they will …

ICE is quietly buying warehouses for its detention expansion
At least 20 communities with large warehouses across the U.S. have become stealth targets for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s $45-billion expansion of detention centers. Communities are objecting to mass detentions and raising concerns that the facilities could strain water supplies and other services while reducing local tax revenue. In many cases, mayors, county commissioners, governors and members of Congress learned about ICE’s ambitions only after the agency bought or leased spac…

Where will you be tonight? Will you be at Victory Cafe, 440 Bloor St. W. In Toronto, for @… hosted by us, Tech Pizza Mondays? https://luma.com/ojfhyp5q

This is as good a time as any for a thought experiment.
You're in Nazi Germany. You know about the camps, you know what they do, you see the ash fall, you smell it. People who resist alone are killed, some are sent to the camps too. You're afraid to even talk to people about it for fear that they'll turn you in.
You think back to when the camps were being built. You had all the warning signs, but you didn't know how to interpret them. You could believe it would happen. You thought you'd have a chance to vote him out. You thought there might be another way. You thought maybe things would turn out differently if you just sat tight, kept your head down, kept yourself safe.
You see a family being dragged from their home. You know they will be killed. You want to fight, not just for them but for yourself. You opposed Hitler, and at any point you know you could be on the list... Even if you do nothing.
You wish you could rise up, shoot the SS, open the gates, fight it all. You know you aren't alone, but you don't know how to connect with the people who want the same thing.
Using the knowledge we have now, what should you have done in the preceding months and years to connect, to build a community that would open up all paths of resistance?
There were people who resisted. We know it wasn't enough.
Gun laws in Nazi Germany were very similar to US laws in that Nazis were largely free to own guns and everyone else was not. Unlike the US, where "others" have historically controlled using the fear that they might be randomly executed, Germany did codify it. Red flag laws were one more step in the US towards that codification, and there will be more.
When Nazis were taking away those guns, the social networks didn't exist to make resistance possible for most folks. But some Jews were able to resist.
It wasn't the guns that made the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising possible, though they definitely helped. The Warsaw Ghetto uprising was made possible by labor organizing in the precessing years.
If there were more uprisings like that, the Holocaust could have been stopped if not prevented. Social networks make resistance possible. Guns are only useful tools to resist authoritarianism *after* you build a community able to support that resistance, and they are only one of many tools made useful by that community.
Getting guns is easy, and not always necessary. Building community is hard. Guns won't keep you safe. Community will.
Single acts of resistance may slow the machine down, but to actually bring down a monster you need to be able to attack more than once. You need a society of resistance. If you are afraid now, build that. Talk to people while it's still safe to do so. Ask them where their red line is. Talk to neighbors. Figure out your network.
Take the steps you need now to keep your neighbors safe, to keep yourself safe.
#USPol

We recently switched to a different trash & recycle pickup company, one that was mandated by the town govt. They’re generally pretty good, but the bin we were given for trash is only just big enough to hold 1 week’s worth of trash. Usually that’s fine, but now I’ve got more stuff than will fit in it, like a Christmas wreath, and a large potted poinsettia that’s on its last legs, and more in that vein. I may be forced to toss these in someone’s yard after dark some night.

In a staff meeting, Bari Weiss says CBS News will be "toast" if it clings to its broadcast audience and will put a "huge emphasis on scoops...scoops of ideas" (Alex Weprin/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-ne…

Bari Weiss Unveils Sweeping Vision: “I Am Here to Make CBS News Fit for Purpose in the 21st Century”
Weiss rallied the troops and outlined her vision at an all-hands meeting Tuesday morning, naming a lineup of new contributors: "Our strategy until now has been to cling to the audience that remains on broadcast television. If we stick to that strategy we're toast."

Daring Fireball: The Names They Call Themselves
#USpol

The Names They Call Themselves
*Fascist* and *Nazi* weren’t slurs that were applied to the Italians and Germans by their political or military opponents. That’s what they called themselves. The job won’t be done, this era of madness will not end, until we make *the names Trump’s regime calls themselves* universally acknowledged slurs.

Want to see some fluffs at #39c3 ?
chaosfurs will do two fursuitwalks on day 2 and 3
https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/en/assembly/detail/chaosfurs

The comic / graphic novel will be ending soon and then the wait for the final Netflix movie will start. #Heartstopper 🏳️‍🌈
#LGBTQ #AliceOseman

"Hero? No! We're pirates! I love heroes but I don't wanna be one! Do you know what heroes are? Say there is a chunk of meat. Pirates will have a banquet and eat it but heroes will share it with other people. I want all the meat!"
Monkey D. Luffy, One Piece, ep. 554.
#quote #OnePiece

(yes, I'm avoiding a link to Failbook):

Yesterday Cory Doctorow argued that refusal to use LLMs was mere "neoliberal purity culture". I think his argument is a strawman, doesn't align with his own actions and delegitimizes important political actions we need to make in order to build a better cyberphysical world.
EDIT: Diskussions under this are fine, but I do not want this to turn into an ad hominem attack to Cory. Be fucking respectful

Acting ethically in an imperfect world
Life is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]

What will people do when AI can handle most current white-collar tasks?
I don't know.
And that's the whole point.
Nobody knew what displaced agricultural workers would do, either,
-- until they did it.
The absence of a visible next chapter isn't evidence that there won't be one.
It's evidence that we're bad at predicting what humans will invent when constraints shift.

Everything is awesome (why I'm an optimist)
February is the month the internet decided we're all going to die. In the span of about two weeks, Matt Shumer's Something Big is Happening racked up over 80 million views on X with its breathless comparison of AI to the early days of COVID, telling his non-tech friends and

From the comments: “World leaders now know that Trump’s word means nothing and that no member of his administration can be trusted. They also know that even if 2028 ends the current nightmare, America will always be just four years away from electing someone of his ilk. For that reason, they should count this as a permanent rupture.”
Opinion | We Don’t Need Greenland. We Need Allies. - The New York Times
https://archive.ph/OAzIw

News - The Supreme Court Will Weigh in On #BigOil’s Favorite Defense Against Climate Liability Lawsuits | Drilled
“Is the idea that we wouldn’t be able to have these products without this legal immunity, because of the harm they cause? Then maybe we need to rethink that.”
#ClimateLiability
#ClimateCrisis
https://drilled.media/news/scotus-boulder

I’m so glad we have military strategy being developed by a guy picked for being white…
At least he’s honest/capable enough to understand that it’s not a sure or even likely success. His predecessor likely would know the answer (it will be a disaster.) @…

Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath.bsky.social)
“As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine has been drafting military options for potentially striking Iran…In a Situation Room meeting last week about plans for Iran that went three times longer than scheduled, Caine was unable to predict what the result of a regime change operation would be…” https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/25/politics/caine-iran-hegseth-trump

#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 09 - Sand
ORAC: We will be lovers for a little while, or maybe for a long while, who knows?
SOOLIN: I do. [Pulls key]
VILA: What a thought.
SOOLIN: Keller was right again.
AVON: Vila, try and bring Tarrant back up.

Chicago is getting a place for sickos
#fedifc

Yet another reason to not enable passkeys anywhere.
#dataloss #passkey #passkey_security #datahoarding

I am thrilled to be back at FOSDEM. It is a fantastic opportunity to meet with the open source community and connect with fellow developers at such a great conference!
Please join me this Saturday in the FOSS on Mobile devroom. I will be presenting the technical evolution of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, demonstrating how we achieved full mainline support—from power management to the Adreno GPU—running on actual product hardware.
I look forward to seeing you there.
Saturday, 18:30…

Okay, getting an early start on preparing for the JoCo cruise in the beginning of 2027 (assuming the world is still here). The overall setup will be the RetroTINK 4K (already owned), a nice 4K OLED portable monitor, and a sturdy MiSTer. I'm excited to see if the RetroTINK 4K works its magic on the portable monitor...even more excited to see if I can get back into running _Castlevania: Symphony of the Night_. We'll see.

"Even if #OpenAI was run by decent, ethical, friendly, trustworthy people (which would then of course make them not work on the products OpenAI has, but it’s just a thought experiment) their products would need to be criticized for what they are and what they do." — @…

Acting ethical in an imperfect world
Live is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are […]

"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

»Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days:
Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028.«
The @… halving the validity of the keys makes the web more secure (not more anonymous).
🔐

Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days
Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028. This change is being made along with the rest of the industry, as required by the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, which set the technical requirements that we must follow. All publicly-trusted Certificate Authorities like Let’s Encrypt will be making similar changes. Reducing how long certificates are valid …

I explained something for a friend in a simple way, and I think it's worth paraphrasing again here.
You cannot create a system that constrains itself. Any constraint on a system must be external to the system, or that constraint can be ignored or removed. That's just how systems work. Every constitution for every country claims to do this impossible thing, a thing proven is impossible almost 100 years ago now. Gödel's loophole has been known to exist since 1947.
Every constitution in the world, every "separation of powers" and set of "checks and balances," attempts to do something which is categorically impossible. Every government is always, at best, a few steps away from authoritarianism. From this, we would then expect that governments trand towards authoritarianism. Which, of course, is what we see historically.
Constraints on power are a formality, because no real controls can possibly exist. So then democratic processes become sort of collective classifiers that try to select only people who won't plunge the country into a dictatorship. Again, because this claim of restrictions on powers is a lie (willful or ignorant, a lie reguardless) that classifier has to be correct 100% of the time (even assuming a best case scenario). That's statistically unlikely.
So as long as you have a system of concentrated power, you will have the worst people attracted to it, and you will inevitably have that power fall into the hands of one of the worst possible person.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. The alternative is to not centralize power. In the security world we try to design systems that assume compromise and minimize impact, rather than just assuming that we will be right 100% of the time. If you build systems that maximially distribute power, then you minimize the impact of one horrible person.
Now, I didn't mention this because we're both already under enough stress, but...
Almost 90% of the nuclear weapons deployed around the world are in the hands of ghoulish dictators. Only two of the countries with nuclear weapons not straight up authoritarian, but they're not far off. We're one crashout away from steralizing the surface of the Earth with nuclear hellfire. Maybe countries shouldn't exist, and *definitely* multiple thousands of nuclear weapons shouldn't exist and shouldn't all be wired together to launch as soon as one of these assholes goes a bit too far sideways.

Breaking down Bill Polian's alleged role in Bill Belichick not being a first-ballot Hall of Fame inductee

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/bill-polians-alle…

Due to inclement weather, we will be sleeping all year

:bear:

RE: https://mas.to/@gleick/115952606396238455
Unlikely, but I hope somehow his phone will be used in evidence, so we can know what they said to one another. More likely is that the murderer will see to it that the phone disappears.

In October last year, US chip giant Qualcomm acquired Italian open source electronics and software pioneer Arduino. Not everyone was happy.
https://www.computing.co.uk/interview/2026/arduino-ceo-we-will-always-be-open-source

Arduino CEO: We will always be open source
In October last year, US chip giant Qualcomm acquired Italian open source electronics and software pioneer Arduino. Not everyone was happy.

I freelanced for @… for 10 years, writing 37 articles/features
They were an amazing team, interested in global #justice, #labor, &

As Equal Times closes, the work continues
This is it. Our final article. Equal Times, the global labour news platform, will cease to publish as of December 2025. The website – which was, for more than a decade, an invaluable resource on the realities of work, society, fundamental rights, and more: the victories secured, the innovations introduced, but also the many indignities, injustices and stubborn anachronisms endured – will remain online, but no new content will be added. We launched back in autumn 2012 with a simple mission …

"The Nordic trade union movement stands firmly with Greenland. We will continue to support the right of the Greenlandic people to decide their own path and to be treated with respect as equal members of the international community." ✊️ #solidarity #Greenland

This has allowed me to make clear something that's been at the back of my mind. Something that is at the heart of so much blind stupidity in big tech.
It's the assumption that we will change one thing and all else will be the same.
In this case, we will fire lots and lots of employees all over the world and we will make lots of profit. We're smart enough to make the AI, and we're dumb enough to think that there will only be one consequence. 1/n

Well, the cheese pairing went, the play was cancelled and we are snowed in… with Marie’s waffles! Egg and bacon, tea and coffee. High winds outside, today will be … shoveling 😬 #TogetherBreakfast https://photos.app.goo.gl/6Ef46tUgU8gss5Ku8

Irgendwie der Soundtrack dieser Tage:
You'll be back, time will tell
You'll remember that I served you well
Oceans rise, empires fall
We have seen each other through it all
And when push comes to shove
I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love
[…]
So don't throw away this thing we had
'Cause when push comes to shove
I will kill your friends and family
To remind you of my love
You'll be bac…

Arrived in Toronto safely. We're staying at my youngest daughter's apartment for 3 or 4 days and planning on attending a show and maybe visit a few museums.
Our daughter took our car back to our place in Innisfil and she will be having friends over for a New Year's extended party. I hope her commute is as uneventful as ours was.
#HouseSwap

RE: https://mastodon.scot/@lindseylavender/116120093040525559
This kind of art will be enormously important in the future, when people wonder how we lived in the 21st century, what our houses and cities looked like. A good investment!

House Rep. Rosa DeLauro (from CT) says:
❝I understand that many of my Democratic colleagues may be dissatisfied with any bill that funds ICE. …[But]… The Homeland Security funding bill is more than just ICE. If we allow a lapse in funding, TSA agents will be forced to work without pay, FEMA assistance could be delayed, and the US Coast Guard will be adversely affected….❞
And I am saying stop ICE if you have to ••shut down every airport in the country•• to do it.
That is the message I want Congress to hear. That serious. This is Trump starting a civil war.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/democrats-ice-funding-bill

Possible replacements for Matt Eberflus as the Cowboys DC in 2026 https://insidethestar.com/possible-replacements-for-matt-eberflus-as-the-cowboys-dc-in-2026

Summit (aka Deft, aka ServerCentral):
"In our Elk Grove Village location, our CAM costs increased by 11% [...]  We will be passing this increase through [...]
We have also renewed our lease at Elk Grove Village resulting in increased costs of 30%. This renewal reflects the impact of high demand and increasing costs in the data center space.  This renewal is effective on July 1st, 2026 and we will be passing this increase through"

I will not be going to bed until it stops fucking steaming. Not that we (or the neighbors) have any more dry towels to soak up more water, but I'm not letting my house burn down to avoid a bit of damp in the kitchen

Representative Robert Garcia accused the administration of shielding powerful figures who abused women and girls.
"The White House is openly engaged in a cover-up protecting Epstein's co-conspirators and the powerful men who abused women and girls", he said,
noting it was "outrageous that the DOJ has illegally withheld over 1 million documents from the public".
Notably, under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, there was a December 19 deadline for …

Trump's DOJ 'receives' one million new Epstein files. When can we expect another document drop?
When will the next Epstein files be released? The DOJ says it has received over 1 million new Epstein-related records, but when will we see them? All we know.

Present thought
Mastodon's the right model. But to be truly *useful* politcally - the Bluesky/Mastodonian idea of "we will make our safe space over here" might be pleasant for many and that's fine
But they're not healthy for useful political discourse, which is often ugly, but generates the necessary talk.
The discussions I'm seeing on Twitter/threads e.g. left v. liberal are finally getting "good." (among others)

It’s apparent to anyone with a bit of education in technological history that this sort of thing must be possible. We have waste streams with higher concentrations of key elements than the "ore" we derive them from.
This is part of why I religiously recycle plastics even though right now they don’t really get recycled. At some point, the piles of unrecycled plastics will be a better raw material for new plastics than the dregs of petroleum we have left.

If I were to give a prize for the most disruptive workflow change of my life, it will be probably `less` changing home/end key behavior from scrolling to top/bottom (something which I do *all the time*) to disabling line wrapping and scrolling left/right (something I never do).
It's like XKCD#1172, except it's "we've decided spacebar heating is so cool, we've removed all other spacebar functions".
#Gentoo #Linux

2026 NFL schedule reveal: Tracking the international games with Commanders and Jaguars both headed to London

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/2026-nf

Donald Trump’s decision to order airstrikes against Iran
will hinge in part on the judgment of Trump’s special envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner,
about whether Tehran is stalling over a deal to relinquish its capacity to produce nuclear weapons,
according to people familiar with the matter
How did we get so lucky?

I am being a bit cheeky, but I really do think this is a powerful psychological force that shapes orgs far more than we realize: it can be emotionally damaging to have people tell you “no” or question your ideas, and leadership means getting that •all the time•. People in management / executive positions — who are in fact very much people, all too human — will go to great lengths to protect their own psyches from the injury of pushback.
This is a •powerful• force in orgs.
7/

Just got these messages from @seengoals@mastodon.social, one of the members of Gaza Verified, basically accusing me of running a fundraiser for Gaza and keeping the proceeds (I have no fundraiser on any fundraising site anywhere) and extorting me to share his fundraiser or he’ll apparently go public with it.
So here’s what’s going to happening instead: Nabil has been removed Gaza Verified (

"We have a funding system for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland that is entirely based on the spending priorities of the UK government in England. The Welsh government has less borrowing powers than a local council, and it often publishes its final budget nine months into the financial year, because the Treasury has decided to change funding in England. This doesn’t work. And it can’t work"

BBC News hires Lindsay McIntosh, previously Head of News at The Sunday Times, as its Executive News Editor (BBC Press Office on LinkedIn)
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7407013484615409664

We are delighted to announce Lindsay McIntosh as the new Executive News Editor, BBC News.    As Executive News Editor, Lindsay will be at the heart of the BBC newsroom – driving the BBC’s editorial… | BBC Press Office
We are delighted to announce Lindsay McIntosh as the new Executive News Editor, BBC News.    As Executive News Editor, Lindsay will be at the heart of the BBC newsroom – driving the BBC’s editorial agenda and working across BBC News to ensure we continue to deliver high quality, distinctive news across our platforms.   Lindsay joins us from The Sunday Times where she is currently the Head of News and oversees its award-winning political and investigative journalism across digital and pr…

pause for voice over: "They did not, in fact, live to get it right."
Asymmetric warfare requires a different type of society. Old order will not survive because it cannot. It will adapt, but the adaptation can only go so far.
Cybernetics predicts that it will be impossible for the old society to adapt because it cannot possibly develop the level of complexity needed to respond to the increasingly complex environment.
Rather, *we,* the rebellion, will continue to live this day over and over again until *we* evolve to produce a level of complexity that cannot be managed by an oppressive system.

Series C, Episode 02 - Powerplay
SERVALAN: Good. That will be all for the moment.
[Scene - the forest on the planet's surface]
LOM: We will rest.
VILA: Much further to go?
LOM: Not far. [to Mall] Scout the ground ahead. [To Vila] The hunters are out.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/302/165

NFL Insider Pours Cold Water On Rumored Cowboys Coaching Hire https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/brian-flores-cold-water-defensive-coordinator/

Good Morning #Canada
Apparently the earth moved last night but I didn't feel a thing. An earthquake, a magnitude 3.7 to 4.1 depending on different reports, was reported in my neighbourhood near Orilla Ontario last night. The epicenter was across Lake Simcoe, approximately 35km away from my home and 5km deep. Maybe the lake reduced the impact and we do have a pretty good mattress.
There are 4,000 ish earthquakes measured in Canada annually but most are minor. Perhaps 40 might be large enough or not remote, and people will feel the ground shaking. That's about 1 every 8 days. Most of our earthquakes occur along the West Coast, the High Arctic, and lower frequency along the eastern seaboard. Earthquakes are monitored by the National Seismograph Network with approximately 100 seismographs distributed across Canada.
I know you're wondering about the 10 largest earthquakes ever felt in Canada. I got you covered...
#CanadaIsAwesome #Seismology
https://www.earthquakescanada.nrcan.gc.ca/pprs-pprp/pubs/GF-GI/GEOFACT_largest-earthquakes_e.pdf

"We also found that the evidence presented for examples of climate benefit, regardless of AI type, tend to be weak whether from companies or organisations like the IEA. The potential benefits are overstated, in surprising and significant ways."
(Original title: NEW REPORT – The AI climate hoax)
https://

NEW REPORT – The AI climate hoax
A new report on AI greenwashing, analysing the rhetoric and evidence behind the idea big tech will solve climate change

Asimov wrote his laws of robotics as a dramic device to show how difficult it is to write laws of robotics. How they always will contradict each other.
His laws are there to illustrate a problem, not as a genuine attempt at the solution. His laws are deliberately wrong.
#ai #anthropic

RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/116122409126446401
For here’s the most important bit of news in all this - if we win these twelve races the House will flip - period.
So we need to be all in now, and give these great candidates the early resources that will allow the…

Pressure on Senators •is working•. Previously head-in-sand centrist Senators are actually coming out to vote against ICE funding. Their positions are still weak and insufficient, and more need to cave to pressure — but they are visibly buckling.
Again, we should not and must not wait on elected officials to save us — they will not — but we can and should deploy pressure on them as a strategic tool in moments when that can be useful.
Now is such a moment. KEEP IT UP.
1/

Worked on some more #Gentoo global #jobserver goodies today.
Firstly, Portage jobserver support patch: #PyTest jobs will also be counted towards total job count.
Again, it's not a perfect solution, but it works reasonably. The plugin still starts -n jobs as specified by the arguments, but it acquired job tokens prior to executing every test, therefore delaying actual testing until tokens are available. It doesn't seem to cause noticeable overhead either.

The BBC says "as we have made clear previously, we will be defending" against Trump's defamation lawsuit and "we are not going to make further comment" (Christal Hayes/BBC)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpvd81470v1o

BBC says it will defend Trump defamation lawsuit over Panorama speech edit
The US president is requesting $5bn (£3.7bn) in damages, according to court documents filed in Florida.

I sit in the sun and watch my children sift through the sand for green and amber (sometimes clear, white, or even blue) gems. Anywhere in the world you will find them, on any beach, the detritus of humans. Shardes of broken bottles, neglectfully thrown, turned by the waves into tiny magical treasures.
As our world shatters, I wonder what parts of it will be polished in the churning chaos that we may, with such childish joy, discover in a new and wondrous form.

Series C, Episode 04 - Dawn of the Gods
AVON: We will do nothing to counter the force acting upon the Liberator. We then plot the Liberator's course on the main battle computer flight predictor to see exactly how she is behaving. Once we understand how the force is operating we may be some way toward defeating it.
TARRANT: Strange. The Liberator's following a curve. Traction beams produce straight-line motion. Zen, I want a prediction of the Liberator's course based …

Good Morning #Canada
Good news... we've hit the low point of dark winter days and things will be much brighter going forward. I am referring to the Winter Solstice, which officially begins around 10am in these parts. This will be the longest night and shortest day of the winter and daylight will begin increasing tomorrow. So put away the snow shovels and slather on the tanning butter.
#CanadaIsAwesome #CelestialDays
https://www.insidehalton.com/news/ontario-canada-winter-solstice-2025/article_5adc2a0c-9ac6-50fd-9ef4-ca851ee6d6ce.html

The 2026 schedule isn’t favoring the Cowboys https://insidethestar.com/the-2026-schedule-isnt-favoring-the-cowboys

Today we are adding the remaining eight to our “Winning The House” campaign:
Jonathan Nez (AZ-2)
Sarah Trone Garriott (IA-3)
Sean McCann (MI-4)
Jamie Ager (NC-11)
Chaz Molder (TN-5)
Shannon Taylor (VA-1)
Elaine Luria (VA-2)
Rececca Cooke (WI-3)
With this single link your contribution will now be split twelve ways and help all these courageous candidates win.
You can learn more about each of the eight below (I am using the DCCC’s write up…

Chip in!
Show your support with a contribution.

Of course, economic pressure isn't the only tool we have. Diversity of tactics is critical. I'm not going to tell anyone not to throw buckets of screws into the parking lots and driveways of ICE facilities or blockading facilities with burning dumpstes. Even if i don't promote those types of tactics, we should all STFU if we see people doing them. We all have a place. There are things we can all do. Everything is on the table and it should be, because ICE agents will intimidate you, steal your car, and even murder you for just filming them.
You can cower in fear, or you can stand up and fight with everything you have. Which or those do you want to remember yourself doing?

Series C, Episode 03 - Volcano
VILA: Because we can't.
[Flight deck]
AVON: Zen, flight status?
ZEN: The energy banks still require two minutes before power will be available to make navigation speed.
AVON: We'll be dead by then
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/303/622…

Here’s the best info I have (which seems to be corroborated despite the scammy “CRIME” account name): now reported to be just one person hit, in the thigh. My guess is that the press will be picking up now and we won’t get really clear info until the dust has settled.
Will stop posting more from the chat rumor mill at this point unless I hear a really important correction.

In my head I'm just replacing "counter insurgency" with "horse cavalry."
"We're going to keep learning how to leverage horse cavalry against machine guns and tanks until we get it right."
No. No you will not. You will keep trying until you learn the hard way that it can't be done.

So this is percolating and the results so far are not surprising.
I'd vote NO, for the following reasons:
- oil demand continues to decline and risk is high we'll end up with an expensive underutilized pipeline. Therefore high risk we'll end up subsidizing any private entity that builds this thing.
- why would we invest public dollars to support infrastructure for a product where 75% of the profit leaves Canada? There has to be a net benefit, beyond steel sales and jobs, for this project to be considered.
- Indigenous land rights must be respected. They will be left with the rusting pipeline decades in the future, and it's impact on the land.
- the B.C. government must also have a final vote as they have to give up land and provide support.
- we don't need additional oil tankers on our west coast.
- and most importantly, with this MOU, Canada pretty much declared we aren't serious about protecting the environment or fighting climate change. We're oil whores. Harsh but....
#CanPoli #ClimateAction

What You Should Know About The NFL's Week 17 Saturday Slate https://insidethestar.com/what-you-should-know-about-the-nfls-week-17-saturday-slate

This will be the easiest way to go after this administration once it's over.
It will be the equivalent of getting Capone for tax evasion.
But it will be enough, especially if we can sweep the funders with them.
https://bsky.app/profile/bloomberg.com/post/3mcid2hfs…

Bloomberg News (@bloomberg.com)
Donald Trump’s social-media empire is muscling into Wall Street, entering the $14 trillion US ETF market with five new “Made in America” funds. https://bloom.bg/3NLRx4V

One of the things that made organizing a lot easier with the GDC was a thing called "GDC in a box." It was a zip file with all kinds of resources. There was a directory structure, templates for all kinds of things like meetings and paperwork you had to file (for legal reasons) and "read me" files.
We had all kinds of support. There were people you could talk to who had been there. There were people you could call to walk through legal paperwork (taxes). Centralized orgs are vulnerable and easy to infiltrate. They're easy for states to shut down. But there are benefits to org structures.
I think it's possible to have the type of support we had with the GDC, but without the politics of an org (even the IWW). I hope this most recent essay has some of the same properties. I hope that it makes building something new, something no one has really imagined before, easier.
This whole project is something a bit different. It's a collective vision and collective project, from the ground up. Some of it has felt like a brain dump, just getting things that have been swimming around in my head down somewhere. But I hope this feels more like an invitation.
Everything thus far written is all useless unless people do things with it. Only from that point does it become a thing that lives, a thing with its own consciousness that can't be controlled by any individual human.
Tech billionaire cultists want to bring a new era of humanity with AGI. That is definitely not possible with LLMs, and may not be possible at all. But there is a super intelligence that is possible, though it's been constrained by capitalism: collective human intelligence.
The grand vision of the tech dystopians is that of the ultimate slave that can then enslave all humans on their behalf. I think we can build a humanity that can liberate itself from their grasp, crush their vision, and build for itself a world in which people will never be enslaved again. Not only do I think it's possible, I think it's necessary. I think there are only two choices: collective liberation or death.
And that's what I plan to write about next time to wrap this whole project up. Today things often feel impossible. But people talked about the Middle Ages as though they were the end of the world, and then everything changed in unimaginable ways. Everything can, and will, change again.
"The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."

RE: https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/116087233502113204
While I don't think this will change things, I do think it's nice to be reminded that we are not alone. Direct action is always better than asking nicely for the horrible thing to stop. We are powerful enough to stop it.

But there is also a theatrical element to politics that's easy to forget. The "show" of something like this can be inspiring, and can inspire others who have been afraid.