@Techmeme@techhub.socialNorwegian startup Lace, which is building a form of lithography that uses a helium atom beam instead of light to create chip designs, raised a $40M Series A (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific
@davidaugust@mastodon.online"The flu killed 15,849 U.S. soldiers in France and another 30,000 in stateside camps. That’s 45,849 killed by the flu versus 26,277 killed at Meuse-Argonne — documenting that the flu was by far our most deadly battle.
More civilians (over 50 million) died from the flu than from both World Wars and the Holocaust combined. Another 500 million civilians were incapacitated by the flu."
@jake4480@c.im
@detondev@social.linux.pizzaLearning how to psyop Third World populations with Manual of The Mercenary Soldier
https://archive.org/details/PaulBalorManualOfTheMercenarySoldier
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSources and docs: the US "effectively gutted" the Internet Freedom program that dispensed $500M since 2016 to help build tech to evade state internet controls (Aisha Down/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb
@pre@boing.worldStory one was set around the building of the tower of London, with moats and spies and helicopters and submarines. The workers were being exploited, underpaid, whipped and suffering.
In league with the architect, the workers planned to murder the contractor. Take their revenge, and the tower.
Meanwhile Russian spies witness all and plan to take the tower and it's lake of rose wine.
@cdarwin@c.imThe scale of Orbšn’s defeat has left Moscow with little choice but to acknowledge the loss of a key partner in Europe.
“Hungary made its choice. We respect that choice,” Russian Foreign Minister Peskov said on Monday.
“We were never friends with Orbšn,” said Peskov,
adding that Moscow remained open to dialogue and to building good, mutually beneficial relations with Budapest.
Moscow appears to be playing down the loss of a key ally in Europe,
striking a tone rem…
@lpryszcz@genomic.socialIt is absolutely unacceptable that those leaders who are incapable of fulfilling this duty use the smokescreen of war to hide their failure and,in the process, line the pockets of a select few-the same ones as always;the only ones who profit when the world stops building hospitals and starts building missiles,…We will not be complicit in something that is bad for the world and that is also contrary to our values and interests, simply out of fear of reprisals from someone.
@rmdes@mstdn.socialNow my CV Editor plugin for #indiekit is able to handle both personal projects or work projects https://rmendes.net/cv/
@Techmeme@techhub.socialAlphabet's X spins out Anori, which seeks to streamline building approvals through a unified platform for developers and city regulators, with $26M in funding (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/19/alph
@waidler@bayerwald.socialHeute mal Hugo ausprobiert. Gewöhnungsbedürftig - aber schauen wir mal. Ein Blog-System, das keine Datenbank verwendet, sondern nur statische Webseiten. Nach jedem neuen Beitrag muß ein Build durchgeführt werden. Fühlt sich an wie ein Bastelsystem, kann aber mit etwas Gewöhnung und Einarbeitung gut funktionieren. Alles sehr, sehr schnell. Einen Versuch ist es wert.
https://
@stiefkind@mastodon.social»The removal of the first of four steam generators from the reactor building has begun at the shutdown Grafenrheinfeld nuclear power plant in Germany.«
https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/steam-generator-removal-begins-at-german-plant
@brian_gettler@mas.toOver the weekend, I read Rebecca Campbell's Arboreality (2022). It's an enthralling novella about climate catastrophe, community, and collaboration with the natural world. The story, set in British Columbia, bounces between loss and hope, suggesting that doing the hard work of building a new world from the ashes of the old is how one staves off despair and keeps hope alive.
Check it out.
#SolarPunk
@ubuntourist@mastodon.socialHashtag No King graffiti in the rubble
Seen on The GUARDIAN (URL below): An Iranian flag hangs amidst the rubble of a building at the Sharif University of Technology, which was damaged in a strike, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran.
In the rubble, a piece of wall spray-painted with "#NOKING" (hashtag No King)
Photograph: Majid-Asgaripour/Reuters
@mgorny@social.treehouse.systems#Gentoo is still one of the bright outposts in #FLOSS where human work is valued and #LLM contributions are banned. However, sometimes I feel that this matters very little.
After all, Gentoo is a distribution. While it has its own value, it cannot exist without all the software it is shipping. It makes no sense in isolation.
And let's be honest, I don't think you can avoid slop today. We are trying our best to sieve out the worst: the copywashing chardet, the vibecoded NIH Perl crypto packages… but it's just that.
As someone who bumps Python packages, let me tell you this: LLMs are omnipresent. I notice Claude in commit logs, I notice the blasphemy of agent instructions all over the place… and there's probably much more than I don't notice. With many core components giving in, you can't avoid it without literally freezing on old, vulnerable versions, or spending hours looking for alternatives or creating them.
FLOSS is dead. People don't care. They don't have conscience. All they care about is the sick idea of "productivity", i.e. generating more slop.
The few of us who do care can do very little. We will continue doing our best until they kill us (as they're literally slowly killing the whole humankind). But that's it. Maybe it will pass once the bubble pops, maybe it won't. Either way, the damage is beyond repair. We will never be able to trust one another like we did. We will never again be a community building a better world.
It's just like everything nowadays. It's hard to find a good washing machine (one that will actually be repairable), good shoes (that won't fall apart shortly after the warranty expires), good food. You need lots of money, and even then you have to sieve through all the scammers who just sell the same shit with higher profit margin. #OpenSource is just another branch of business where people are trying to "sell" you shit, and don't care anymore if it explodes in your face. They don't even care if they're actually making a profit.
#AI #NoAI #NoLLM #enshittification #AntiCapitalism
@cheryanne@aus.socialBuilding Better Basketball
A Basketball Australia Podcast for coaches and volunteers in clubs and associations around the country to hear some interesting discussions from people all over the world...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/buildi
@geant@mstdn.social🆔 DC4EU final report proposes pluralistic trust model to realise EUDI Wallet vision
A key message in the report: no single trust model fits Europe’s diversity. Instead, DC4EU proposes a pluralistic approach, weaving together three complementary trust infrastructures.
⏳ With less than a year left to achieve Europe’s 2026 digital identity mandate, the report calls for coordinated action to move from feasibility to real-world deployment at European scale.
Read more:
@cdarwin@c.imSaalumarada Thimmakka Dies;
Planted and Nurtured Thousands of Trees
Believed to be 113,
she spent decades building an environmental legacy in India,
inspired by her grief at being unable to conceive children.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/06/wor…
@Mediagazer@mstdn.socialRunway launches a $10M fund to invest in early-stage startups building across AI, media, and world simulation and a Builders program offering free API credits (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/31/excl
@robpike@hachyderm.ioOver the holidays last last year I was building an Airfix model (good way to ignore the outside world) and discovered two pieces had fallen off the sprues and were not in the box. I considered constructing them myself but I didn't have a good reference image to go by. 99% certain it wasn't my fault, I looked up how to contact Airfix, followed the instructions, and never heard back.
Until Friday, when two tiny pieces of plastic arrived in an adorable little pouch and the modelmaking can continue.
I love good customer service. I just love it.
@pre@boing.worldWith the eight week improv course ending last week, I timed it well to start a new group with a new set of eight sessions this week.
The Free Association seem more serious than Hoopla. They have 50% longer classes for a start. Three hours rather than two.
More instruction and notes rather than just positive encouragement. Clearer aim even from the early levels. More like a classroom than a playground.
First couple of sets of eight at Hoopla are just aimed at getting you to lose your decorum and allow yourself to be free and spontaneous. All really short form games, lightning rounds. Parlor games rather than theater.
But the Free Association's aim from the start is to get you building scenes and then stories. Their first set of lessons is titled "intro to long form". This one "Scene work".
Not so much the one minute parlor games, more focus on acting and characters and drama.
In vague terms at early stages that is. I mean, they have more in common than different. Plenty of short games in warm-up at FA and I just finished a whole set on drama and story with Hoopla.
Three hours is pretty long though. Starts half an hour earlier, ends half an hour later. Good thing it's also much much closer for me. Ten minute walk instead of 40 minutes on the bus.
We did lots and lots of first-scene head-to-head, mostly concentrating on trying to get specific. Check that after two minutes the audience knows where you are and who you are and how you know each other and what you're doing and none of the players are unsure either. Make it all specific as soon as possible, ambiguity is the enemy.
And everyone got that and exercised it pretty much flawlessly right away. So good group.
#theFreeAssociation #improv #london
@benthos@mastodon.sdf.orgDando Shaft - s/t (1971)
The singer Polly Bolton is fantastic on this.
#NowPlaying
@hex@kolektiva.socialAs 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.
@bthalpin@mastodon.socialMusk over-promises and under-delivers.
Again.
And again.
Everyone laughs at him, but he's still the richest person on Earth and press reports do not continually ridicule him.
WTF is wrong with the world?
https://science.s…
@lpryszcz@genomic.socialSome workers are going all in on AI while also questioning whether all that AI is good for the world. Others are effectively training machines to do their jobs better than they can. And many of the same workers who are racing to build the future are now wondering if the future they’re building has a place for them in it.
@toxi@mastodon.thi.ngCan't stop thinking about the world building exercise/setup in Stephenson's Anathem where the "avout" (aka intelligentsia) were forced to live in gated monastic communities isolated to varying degrees (and by rank[1]) from secular society. This setup was decided on for a number of self-serving reasons (by the avout), but also largely imposed on them due to a long history where technology & academic pursuits led to several catastrophic events, incl. periodic civilization…
@rmdes@mstdn.socialI’m starting to be really proud of the claude assisted development I have been doing on my #indiekit blog
* https://rmendes.net/cv/
* webmentions widget
* podroll
* blogroll
* microsub reader
@hacksilon@infosec.exchangeI have to say I find it weird how people who would usually defend stuff like Burp as "legitimate dual use tools" are now criticizing Anthropic for building a dual-use tool and at least trying to mitigate the harms.
I mean sure, it might just be marketing, or a shakedown of software- and exploit developers alike to get them to burn tokens, or an evil plan to make the world less secure, or something. Might all be the case.
I personally tend to believe that most people are…
@cjust@infosec.exchange
@adrianco@mastodon.social @Techmeme@techhub.socialThe Trump family's World Liberty Financial faces an investor revolt; Justin Sun accuses WLFI of building a "backdoor" that could be used to blacklist investors (Olga Kharif/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20
@hanno@mastodon.socialChina's Green Methanol Industry is racing ahead 🇨🇳🌱⚗️🏎️
Many expect that Green Methanol is the future clean shipping fuel🚢⛽, as well as a promising feedstock for sustainable aviation fuels✈️ & fossil-free plastics🧴
In 2023, something happened in China🇨🇳.
Suddenly, announcements for Green Methanol production plants started appearing. They had one thing in common: they were huge💪. 500,000 tons here, a million tons there🏭🏭🏭
@m0les@aus.socialWent to the new Capital Brewing Lager House in the new East Trading Hall (which I think used to be Anzac Park East). I had the steak frites, which was pretty good with a nice smokey flavour and tarragon butter. The only slight let-down was the packet gravy (which just tastes of salt, MSG, corn starch and Parisian brown) - but the steak's good with the butter and you can drown your chips in the gravy. Their house lager's pretty acceptable too. The building is still a little incomplete…
@lschiff@mastodon.sdf.orgFighting back is one piece; building the world we want is another. For The People will host an Open House on Feb. 19th for folks interested in strengthening their #libraries by getting involved in Friends of the Library & Foundation groups.
@ubuntourist@mastodon.socialHashtag No King graffiti in the rubble
Seen on The GUARDIAN (URL below): An Iranian flag hangs amidst the rubble of a building at the Sharif University of Technology, which was damaged in a strike, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran.
In the rubble, a piece of wall spray-painted with "#NOKING" (hashtag No King)
Photograph: Majid-Asgaripour/Reuters
@cdarwin@c.imIranian parents had just dropped their children off for class on Saturday morning when they found themselves racing back to school gates,
as bombs began to fall across the country in a joint US-Israel attack.
At one elementary school, according to Iran’s state-controlled media, they arrived to find devastation.
💥At least 80 children had been killed in the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, the IRNA news agency reported, with dozens more unacc…
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSome startups and researchers who can't access the most advanced chips are adopting a "frugal AI" approach, building smaller models on open-weight systems (Rina Chandran/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2026/frugal-ai-big-tech/
@pre@boing.worldThe talking heads on the corporate media are assuring me that Iran was building up its forces and threatening apocalyptic war and that now they can't do that.
But seems to me that it was the USA which has a large cache of apocalypse weapons and were threatening to drag the entire world into their bullshit war.
Iran was never a bigger threat than the USA, the USA is the biggest threat to world peace that exists, possibly next to Israel.
Still. Glad to see the crisis is postponed for a while and that the USA has backed down, humiliated, for now.
Trump's pointless stupid war has left Iran empowered and triumphant, the regime strengthened with more support than before.
But the talking heads can't admit that at all.
#iran #wordPol
@Techmeme@techhub.socialASML CTO Marco Pieters says ASML plans to expand beyond EUV into advanced packaging, bonding, and connecting, and is building AI-based machine inspection tools (Max A. Cherney/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/asml-plo…
@lschiff@mastodon.sdf.orgFighting back is one piece; building the world we want is another. For The People will host an Open House on Feb. 19th for folks interested in strengthening their #libraries by getting involved in Friends of the Library & Foundation groups.
@Techmeme@techhub.socialRunway launches a $10M fund to invest in early-stage startups building across AI, media, and world simulation and a Builders program offering free API credits (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/31/excl
@BBC3MusicBot@mastodonapp.uk🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #SaturdayMorning
Arthur Bliss, Rumon Gamba & BBC Philharmonic Orchestra:
🎵 Things to Come - VIII. The Building of the World. Allegro mode
#ArthurBliss #RumonGamba
https://open.spotify.com/track/4gZJFhYjic0nAHYhffQQAg
@Techmeme@techhub.socialSources: OpenAI is considering using biometric verification like World's eyeball scanning Orb for its planned social network to ensure its users are real people (Anna Tong/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026
@pre@boing.worldAsimov 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
