Low Quality Facts
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THAT'S HELPFUL TO KNOW.
MIT student exposed to Dimethyl Mercury (rumoured to have synthesized it himself and took it to a lab meeting, whereupon there was a spill).
NB: DMM is pretty much the benchmark for nerve agent toxicity. See also Karen Wetterhahn's entry on wikipedia if you want to know more. (This is the organic chemistry equivalent of building your own "demon core".)
@cstross Oops. Had a couple of high school students come to me with "can you check?" problems, one inadvertently made a closed system full of hydrocarbons to be heated, the other accidentally rediscovered gun cotton cleaning up after a spill. Both checked way before there was a serious hazard. But yeah, that's...iffy...and then some.
jbz
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if anyone is legitimately listening to Bill Gates, who probably hasn't written a line of code in a few decades now, for advice and guidance on anything: please re-consider your position
East Germany’s Iraqi embassy, abandoned after unification
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Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch)
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at the POST office trying to GET my mail
Quixoticgeek
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takin’ a nice chill break from talkin’ about AI to talk about fascism, and oops actually turns out it’s AI again
Joseph Nuthalapati :fbx:
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@Snoro/117178590537249647
I began my climate activism 35 years ago:
- Decided to not have children
- Became a vegetarian
- Cut my use of the automobile, switched to cycling
- Started organizing in my community to build local infrastructure to help others take similar direction action
- Committed to no air travel
- Commited to a low consumption life
Most Americans will quit before they even try because they don't want to be bothered. They'll say it has to be systemic change via legislation but won't bother to lobby "their" representatives nor will they protest. They'll put a lot of effort into making excuses for why they can't do anything and why they shouldn't bother because it's the wealthy and the "corporations" that are the real problem. They'll refuse to acknowledge that they themselves are a part of the wealthiest 10% of the global population and consume far, far beyond their fair share of resources. Again, they'll wag their fingers at the wealthiest 1%.
1/
#Climate #US #Capitalism #Politics #Degrowth
hypebot
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It didn’t rain at all for three months (very unusual for NL) and now it’s monsooning. Mommy is soaked to the bone after a ten minute walkie. Odin the Waterproof Newfie is unaware of any difficulties
@globalmuseum doesn't even look like her, Her eyes were never dead like that
@Lizette603_23 I totally agree. Andy must been smoking some 'wacky backy' at the time!
I know this is a bit tmi, but I have a complicated relationship with clothes, and pants in particular. I found a pair of pants I get on with and literally don't buy any other kind. They are reasonably priced and comfortable. Everything fits in and doesn't move around too much (sorry for being sexy on the internet, but we've all got a bum - deal with it). However they do have a tendency to fall apart after a while. I will charitably say this is because I clean them fastidiously and not that my balls excrete acid somehow, like someone in my marriage who will remain anonymous has theorised. I therefore have to occasionally sadly say goodbye to my old friends, with whom I have shared many adventures. But I went through some Very Hard Times not that long ago and took to mending my pants (which for the interested, are exclusively black - that's just how I roll). And then I discovered I got a kick out of mending them with gold thread. And now I can't stop. And I imagine it's not terribly appealing to Mrs Bread to have a husband who refuses to throw away his old pants, but instead spends hours badly sewing them with the wrong colour thread. But the thing is.....a) she's not interested in me at the moment anyway, and b) my brain has decided it's like kintsugi. Whatever the pants version of kintsugi is. Pantsugi. And it means I rescue my old friends and we go on even more adventures, and they get a chance to live the second half of their life a little snazzier. Just me and my pants with their lil gold sparkle. Going running around town and getting into mischief. Anyway I've just done a bunch of sewing and it's made me strangely happy. And it's not like I never buy new pants. I did recently. And I got them from somewhere else. A trusted premium brand. And do you know how much they were? THIRTY POUNDS!!!!!!!!!! FOR PANTS!!!!!!!!!!! It should be a crime. The worst crime. Charging £30 for pants. And when they inevitably die, I will need to decide whether they deserve to be inducted into the Gold Club. Honestly I think they may not deserve it. I think they might be one and done. The audacity. Sometimes I read what I've written and genuinely wonder if I'm ok.
@TheBreadmonkey Sewing is amazing, it's magic and people used to do it all the time. Even in the s-hole that Thurrock is now, in the olden days there were fabric shops with a good range of affordable materials, and a lot of households had a sewing machine. Clothes were mended, not discarded.
I fix mine. I spend a bit more on quality and only buy those that I can be proud of, and then I maintain them. To me this is the only way to be.
jbz
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Reflecting on the recent shift of a number of Linux FOSS projects embracing AI slop, I think there's an aspect to this that's being overlooked. Apathy.
A lot of these FOSS devs are overworked, burned out and otherwise checking out mentally with maintaining their codebase, and that was before the proliferation of LLM chatbots. It's often a thankless job that has little to no compensation for the time and effort spent, and then the onslaught of code submissions from Claude started flooding the git pages.
Frankly, I'd check out too. The constant drama over code submissions causing a ripple effect, the community being toxic and full of drama... If I were on my own with this, I'd sincerely go "fuck it" and sell out to the nearest tech corp so I don't have to deal with the constant misery anymore. Doubly so if there's a payout structure involved. (I personally think this is what Linus Torvalds did.)
Not saying that's okay in any form or capacity to justify it, but I can understand the reasoning behind it. We need to address *this* if there's any hope of reclaiming FOSS from big tech.
My wife bought new salad cutlery and because of the weird number of arms on the fork my first impulse was "that's AI". Which of course doesn't make sense because I was holding the object in my hands.
@tante
Now just try to pic yourself holding that fork and let the reactions flow...
Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:
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@blogdiva @sidereal it's very ironic that the birth of free software was motivated by replacing commercial closed-source developer tools with free ones (both as in beer and speech). Tying a FOSS project to a pay-by-use closed commercial product is not only bonkers, but profoundly ignorant of the historical context.
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@cathy_garcia_canales quelle taille ? On dirait des mirabelles
GeofCox
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“will generate 14,000 megawatts of clean, renewable power – nearly tripling the current generating capacity of Churchill Falls. That is enough power to light, heat, and cool all the homes in Toronto, Montréal, and Vancouver combined.”
There’s also a video on Instagram saying it could power every car, truck, bus in Canada if electric.
Prime Minister Carney announces the largest clean energy investment in North American history | Prime Minister of Canada https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2026/08/17/prime-minister-carney-announces-largest-clean-energy-investment-north
You can make chilli out of literally anything
@TheBreadmonkey Yeah, you can make it out of racists and unionists and all sorts of shit. 🙂
wakest ⁂
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Someone questioned whether I’m really a teacher and called me a beggar because I kept asking for a can of milk.
This is a short video from my humble school, where I teach orphaned children and children who survived genocide.
I am not a beggar. I am a classroom teacher.
I need a can of milk for my baby.
My link: https://chuffed.org/project/144437
@aral @fabio
#gaza #palestine
wont be long before corporate goons go door to door force-feeding all of us slop down the throat
@thomholwerda "If you do not register for a SlopID, one will be registered for you!"
manisha
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Who else here discovered later in life that they were never an introvert, they were simply a neurodivergent extrovert who was depleted from constant masking in social environments?
It can't just be me.
