@macandi@social.heise.de2026-07-02 06:04:00
@scott@carfree.city2026-06-01 06:32:41
Nice day in the #OakWoodlands of Golden Gate Park where along with oaks I saw bush monkeyflower, California sagebrush, hummingbird sage, coast buckwheat, beach strawberry, common yarrow, Hooker's evening primrose, and even a little rooreh by the path.
@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-02 00:45:58
Scott Pelley, a veteran 60 Minutes correspondent,
called out CBS News management in a heated meeting on Monday morning,
attacking the network’s decision on Thursday to fire the show’s executive producer, executive editor, and two fellow correspondents, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega,
as part of a broader overhaul of the show, sources tell the Guardian.
During a meeting of the show’s staff and Nick Bilton, its newly appointed executive producer,
along with the C…
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io2026-06-01 23:29:38
This is a Pioneer Stereo Receiver SX-850 from just about 50 years ago.
It’s not spying on you.
It doesn’t need firmware updates.
There’s no subscription.
It’s widely compatible with other audio equipment from other manufacturers.
It won’t suddenly decide you can’t listen to explicit lyrics anymore.
It won’t “autocorrect” you, interrupt you with notifications or get hijacked by a botnet.
If a component breaks, it’s pretty easy fixable, even by amateurs.
It still works great, sounds great and looks great and it will probably do so for another 50 years. It’s a piece of useful electronics that you can hand down for literally generations.
Can you do this with modern technology?
Why is modern technology considered “better”?
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.it2026-05-02 17:16:50
I couldn't care less about a bunch of rich people in Brooklyn, I just read the article for the delicious drama. However, about halfway through the article, I started to see so many #FreeSoftware parallels.
1) Volunteers spend countless unpaid hours creating/maintaining something to better their community.
2) For-profit business packages it up as part of their offering.
!["It wasn't an option for us to continue the status quo, which was, I guess, [Elite Minds teachers] had a key and would come and go as they pleased," he said. "For organizations, it's a separate process, and it's not something community gardens have to do, but we chose to do it. It's been an enormous amount of work to try to get the process put together." Stead told Hell Gate that Urban Meadow and GreenThumb have been trading a draft of the new policy back and forth, but that due to time constra…](https://mastodon-usw-cache.b-cdn.net/media_attachments/files/116/506/113/345/509/029/original/71aa9447307cd8f7.png)
@markhburton@mstdn.social2026-06-02 07:51:18
While I wouldn't support all the Spanish government's economic policies, given that like everywhere else, they are GDP growth oriented, it is interesting to see how unemployment, including youth unemployment, in all sectors, keeps falling. And it's not done by limiting workers' rights
El paro se reduce en todos los sectores en mayo y el empleo marca nuevo récord
@Ruhrnalist@mastodon.social2026-07-01 07:12:44
Der Widerstand gegen die maßlosen Rechenzentren wächst weltweit. Sie sind oft wie ein Turbo der obzönen Umweltzerstörung, vorangetrieben von offensichtlich seelenlosen Menschen, die keine Skrupel haben, die Welt verbrennen zu sehen. Nach mir die Sinnflut (oder Dürre) ist hier nicht nur biblisch zu verstehen.
Widerstand gegen Rechenzentren kann sich aber lohnen, so ein Beispiel aus Chile:
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2026-07-03 00:28:54
Just finished "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. A fascinating and epic science fiction novel with fascinating ideas about technology and also future societies. As I'm delving into a lot of sci fi looking for social imagination it's a good find in some ways but disappointing in others. The Qeng Ho culture is interesting, but their society is uninspiring; Vinge's rosy view of "trade" is not one I completely share, and their hierarchies and wealth accumulation are less compatible with their freedoms in my imagination than in Vinge's. That said, his perspective on the possibilities of galactic-scale civilization and the idea of the "age of failed dreams" are fascinating, especially right now, and his detailed ideas about programming, AI, automaton, and "Focus" are extremely relevant right now. Ultimately I didn't love some parts of the dénouement, and there's a lot of "great man theory of history" going on, including (only somewhat ameliorated) a focus on men over women. Vinge's damsels in distress have a lot more agency than usual for the role, but with the exception of Victory Sr. and Jr., the damsels are very much in distress, and Victory Sr. gets overshadowed a lot by Underhill.
It definitely helps one expand their imagination of what long-term and large-scale human existence could look like, which is great and no easy feat, and both the technologies that are written in and those written out are extremely convincing. The only thing I didn't find compelling was the transposition of capitalism onto such space and time scales. It's a very standard feature of sci fi from the last few decades, and I'm sure most readers don't question it, but I've become someone who can no longer imagine "capitalism across the stars" without questioning how realistic it is that its self-destructive tendencies could possibly last even a few more centuries, let alone succeed at interstellar travel.
One last extremely fascinating thing: how closely the strengths and weaknesses of Focus track with the strengths and weaknesses of modern generative AI. That, and the way that the "age of failed dreams" idea can help people imagine beyond generative AI in a positive way.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon
@mxp@mastodon.acm.org2026-05-02 19:53:23
@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-02 03:12:07
Now, inevitably, half of my Bluesky timeline is like:
oh, we need a service that’s resistant to this sort of shit,
something that’s not beholden to capitalist pressure,
something that’s queer-friendly and furry-friendly
-- quickly followed by "but don’t say Mastodon!"
Sorry, I’m saying it.
Mastodon. We want fucking Mastodon.
It’s run by an actual non-profit foundation,
none of this “public benefit corporation” bullshit.
It’s not s…