«Truth be told, who gets to wear the pager for Rubygems’ on-call rotation is unlikely to impact my life. I can still run gem install, my code will still load, I can still upload new gems. The anxiety it produced in me ultimately comes from the feeling that there is no corner of my life that weird, creepy, rich people are not trying to dominate, to control.»

https://okayfail.com/2025/in-praise-of-dhh.html

@dgar

@dgar

“They’re far from the first species to go extinct on the planet but, to the best of our knowledge, they are the first to have live streamed it.”

– Species 3259 report on Sol III, 2062.

Good job, Democrats. The Republicans are still reeling from their drubbing on election day, so now is the perfect time to hit them with your secret weapon: capitulation!

They'll never see it coming!

Financial stress from AI infrastructure spending, overhiring, and recession fears, rather than AI adoption, is likely driving layoffs in the tech sector (Fast Company)

https://www.fastcompany.com/91435192/chatgpt-llm-openai-jobs-amazon
http://www.techmeme.com/251109/p15#a251109p15

Good morning Fedi friends!

I have a special request for people near Milan, Italy:

I've been on a mission to help @LisaBanana find a green plushie for her child from the #BalloonMuseum temporary exhibit. Original story here: https://eldritch.cafe/@LisaBanana/115382900374466722

They had plushies when I went but in the wrong color 😭

Do you know anyone who could help find it?

Technically one could go straight to the gift shop (without attending the exhibit) but it's a lot of fun - for kids and adults alike

#FindingBubulle

They had me at the headline: AI isn’t replacing jobs. AI spending is

"From Amazon to General Motors to Booz Allen Hamilton, layoffs are being announced and blamed on AI. Amazon said it would cut 14,000 corporate jobs. United Parcel Service (UPS) said it had reduced its management workforce by about 14,000 positions over the past 22 months. And Target said it would cut 1,800 corporate roles. Some academic economists have also chimed in: The St. Louis Federal Reserve found a (weak) correlation between theoretical AI exposure and actual AI adoption in 12 occupational categories."

"Yet we remain skeptical of the claim that AI is responsible for these layoffs. A recent MIT Media Lab study found that 95% of generative AI pilot business projects were failing. Another survey by Atlassian concluded that 96% of businesses “have not seen dramatic improvements in organizational efficiency, innovation, or work quality.” Still another study found that 40% of the business people surveyed have received “AI slop” at work in the last month and that it takes nearly two hours, on average, to fix each instance of slop. In addition, they “no longer trust their AI-enabled peers, find them less creative, and find them less intelligent or capable.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91435192/chatgpt-llm-openai-jobs-amazon

AI companies have managed to persuade the EU they need to cut GDPR up. https://www.politico.eu/article/brussels-knifes-privacy-to-feed-the-ai-boom-gdpr-digital-omnibus/

WordPress Reader Is Criminally Under Marketed

I must admit that I’ve known about Reader, which is the WordPress.com tool for following blogs, for years now, but never realised it worked for sites that were not hosted on WordPress infrastructure. It actually allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and import OPML files.

When you follow as many sites and blogs as I do, a good RSS Reader is the only way to fly.

I only discovered this functionality today when I decided to have a poke around after spying a post about a new feature called “Recommended Blogs”. It’s essentially a blogroll for your Reader profile.

Now I feel like a bit of an idiot for ignoring Reader for the past few years. Not only can I import all of my subscriptions from my current RSS reader, but I can easily reblog (republish or quote) parts of them on my own blog directly from within the interface, and can even write a post from within the feed.

I don’t have to switch to another service to find content to write about, and it’s all available on the web and in the Jetpack app on my phone.

I’m going to have to spend a few days actually using it as my main RSS reader to decide if the convenience is worth jumping ship for, but for now, I’m pretty impressed.

It needs a dark mode, though.

#RSS #tools #WordPress

Anyone know anything about solidagent.io?

They appear to be an EU hosted AI agent - in the sense that they have the trained models on their own platforms, rather than using an API so presumably queries etc stay on their servers.

Their statements of #privacy etc look good and the test queries I posted (on quite complex #coding problems) were very impressive, but I don't think it's strictly FOSS otherwise.

Would be happy to hear if others have good/bad experience with them as they seem quite new.

https://www.solidagent.io/privacy

Are you looking for a cheap and easy to build Raspberry Pi handheld? Check out the Bumble Berry Pi project which focuses on affordability and simplicity, letting you quickly create a portable cyberdeck perfect for terminal work, scripting, coding, or gaming on the go. Ha! You can have 37 Watt-hour battery that that lasts all day long with with Raspberry Pi 3b+.
https://github.com/samcervantes/bumble-berry-pi?tab=readme-ov-file

Floating leaves on the canal.

📷 GFX 100S
🔭 Fuji GF35-70mm

#Photography #FujiGFX #FujiFilm #GFX100S #MediumFormat #Autumn #Fall #Leaves

science needs to own its digital structure : that’s new, non-extractive, open publishing, data repositories, and new modes of peer review. But the glue that’s needed to tie that all together is communication tools owned and designed by scientists themselves. I really believe Bonfire can give us that …

if you can support their crowd funder, please do!

#OpenScience #science #OpenScienceNetwork

https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/bonfire/community