@davidgerard @secbox @dat

Signal was absolutely up to the task of journalism in danger, 100% would recommend to everybody ('cos the bigger the network the better) as just a daily messenger

This is really critical. The privacy of Signal users is significantly enhanced by the fact that tens of millions of people are sending mundane traffic via the same servers. Doing traffic analysis on this is hard.

It's also helped by the fact that this includes the people using it for sensitive things. If you use Signal for talking to journalists and WhatsApp for talking to everyone else, it's easy for a passive adversary to see that you're doing something unusual.

https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/130067-000-A/grece-la-tragedie-soudanaise-aux-portes-de-l-europe/

La mail provocatoria di lavoro di questa settimana l'ho mandata alle 9:01.

E anche questa settimana l'abbiamo portata a casa, signore!

#LoveMondays

Our second keynote speaker of the day is a Mercator Fellow of the CRC "Prominence in Language" @dingemansemark. Mark's asks "What makes LLMs so irresistible?" and begins with our ancient "amazing ability to make sense of nonsense" citing bone-throwing, hand-reading, and horoscopes, before moving to ELIZA and ChatGPT. Mark stresses the need to distinguish between 'understanding' and 'regurgitating', and 'predicting' and 'responding' and introduces what he sees as useful mental models to describe LLMs such as 'stochastic parrots' and 'mansplaining as a service'. In the second half, Mark walked us through the many problems he sees with a recent publication on the supposed metalinguistic abilities of LLMs. Much food for thought for the discussion over coffee and the poster session! 4/🧵

#LLM #GenAI #linguistics

yeah i guess that's what this is huh

"The Kodak Camera"

It begins with an anagram—
What will Eastman name his invention?
At a card table, he shuffles

letters with his mother. Give me a strong letter,
a K, Eastman mutters, like the click
of the camera. They pick up an O, the shape

of fog clearing over the tip of Yosemite
as Ansel Adams takes his best shot.

[...]

---
Excerpt from Shannon K. Winston, "The Kodak Camera" (A-Minor Magazine, September 2025)

Full poem available here:
https://aminormagazine.com/2025/09/28/the-kodak-camera/

#TodaysPoem #Poetry #ShannonWinston

a thousand year pox on those who paywall standards

Beautiful UK rainfall map

(elevation and wind direction play a big role)

(By Alasdair Rae @@undertheraedar)
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alasdair-rae-17640a124_reposting-my-great-britain-rainfall-map-in-activity-7350067721176317952-zOAz/

@dneary wrote

I'm not trying to sugar-coat Lincoln, but he did not support the institution of slavery.

He allowed it. Is it morally worse denying something is evil, or admitting it's evil but letting it happen anyway for political convenience? (Leave that one to the philosophers.)

You can call Lincoln's actions a "trade-off" or "compromise," but an exchange where he got all the benefit while Black people bore all the cost — often on their very bodies — was nothing admirable. So let's at least stop making a hero out of him.

p.s. The Civil War was definitely about preserving slavery for the South, as you rightly point out, but the North didn't want war and would have been quite content to muddle forward with the status quo. They started fighting only because the Confederacy forced their hand by declaring independence and then attacking Fort Sumter.

@mekkaokereke

@thomasfuchs When I started it IT, we used RL02 drives. They were the size of a washing machine, and if they got out of balance they could start to walk across the (raised) floor. Some people would take old disk packs apart and use the platters to make wall clocks.

They held an astonishing 10 MB of data.

“One of the misconceptions about autistic people is we take things literally” #KiwiPyCon

🎄🎁 An #OpenScience countdown to Christmas! 🎁🎄 Every day in December we highlight a different tool, service, or resource related to #RDM and/or Open Science. Add https://24-days-of-open-science-11ab75.pages.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/ to your bookmarks for our advent calendar! (of course licensed under CC BY 4.0 😊)

Help is needed: https://codeberg.org/LibreLingoRelive/LibreLingoRelive/issues/2

We want to wake up LibreLingo from the dead to have an open source alternative to Duolingo again, but what's an alternative without working audio?

Anyone here who can help out?

#opensource #librelingo #devs #boost #duolingo

The proletariat is simultaneously judged as being frivolous spenders (ie chase bank: "can't save money? Have you tried cutting on overpriced coffee?") but also when we *do* save money by not buying a new phone for a decade, then we're boomer luddites about to crash the tech economy.

‘Tis the season 🔔🎁

Posters printed out and installed in @DoESLiverpool - one in the Events Space and one in the kitchen.

There's a version online if anyone wants to dig into the details.

tl;dr - we need more folk in using the space or we'll cease to exist. Tell all your #Liverpool friends who need a #coworking or #makerspace to come join!

#weeknotes

Super rare tech for good job, @Bellingcat is hiring a Director of Development and Partnerships.

They very rarely hire, so jump on this if it looks like a good fit.

- US remote
- Focus on fundraising + revenue with clear goals
- Est 30% travel to US/EU
- $160-200k

https://www.on-ramps.com/jobs/3518

#FediHire