Discussion
For people who miss the ol' hard drive spinning up and down when powering their #retrocomputing PC: my friend Peter found a solution for that. It's called a HDD Synth
https://brainbaking.com/post/2026/08/bring-back-the-noise-with-hdd-synth/
This poll sends shivers down my spine.
On Sunday, the German state of Sachsen Anhalt holds its state Parliamentary elections. And here is the problem:
43 percent of voters say they will vote for the ultra far right AfD party — the party with strong ties to Russia.
Was ist aus dem guten, echten Deutschland geworden?
@randahl
I share your concern.
I think the only strategy that democratic parties are left with is to start reviewing and checking how the AfD is carrying out its promised policies from the first day. Not only the blatantly anti-democratic and anti-liberal ones, but also and specially all their "bread-and-butter" promises. Why?
AFAIK the AfD program makes policy commitments that would cost an added 900 mio. Euro yearly. No way S-A can finance that.
So keep demanding that the start delivering (+)
Zoe Williams gets it:
"Starmer, in short, was bad at politics in so many ways, and in ways that oughtn’t to coexist within the same politician. He wasn’t a communicator, but nor was he a meticulous or far-sighted planner. He had no backbone, and yet was incredibly rigid. He was extremely tribal in his determination to extinguish the left of his party, and yet he didn’t seem to have his own loyal tribe."
If anything, I think that she is too kind.
“The boat strikes are, perhaps, the most stark testament to the lawlessness of the Trump administration.” https://theintercept.com/2026/09/02/military-boat-strikes-killings-year
So, hard pill to swallow, but I think there are a class of AI enthusiasts who got that way because computing fundamentally failed them, for whom getting a computer to do anything _for them_ not being a whole-ass bullshit ordeal still deserve our empathy and solidarity. We, computer-people we, can’t escape responsibility for abandoning user empowerment in favour of corporate consolidation and vending machine interfaces decades ago, now that we’re reaping the whirlwind of mechanized capitalism.
"I didn't realize until recently," my boss just said, "that you basically grew up in Lake Wobegon."
I laughed - I hadn't been expecting this, but I had just told him that I was happy to speak to someone he was struggling to deal with, I said I'm very good at saying the meanest things in the nicest way, so maybe that's what reminded him of what he knows of rural Minnesotan culture.
(And he said he was disappointed Garrison Keillor is a sex pest. Nice when I'm not the only one thinking this!)
@bright_helpings re that last thing: I was a big Writers Almanac fan, and it sucks that I can no longer listen with a clear conscience
@thomasfuchs yes you'll note that this discussion occurred before they had decided :-)
@heavyimage I think the problem is that they’re not deciding, just blindly drinking from the poisoned well of US government data
RE: https://social.lol/@brennan/117182194255361262
Everyone wants to be "punk" because of the cultural capital being "anti mainstream" can give but doing that with LLMs really misses the whole point.
Punk is about _DIY_ and LLMs/"AI agents" are the opposite of that.
The pitch of "You know three chords now you're in a band" and "make a zine on a copier and staple it together" was about you being able to do what you want your way. To actually empower you to explore what you can, want to, have to say and change in the world. The "output" is an accidental side effect of the exploration of self and (very importantly!) community. LLMs are about isolated creation of artifacts without relation to the process and the self.
LLM usage is by definition _anti-punk_.
That blows my mind.
FIREFOX ANDROID test requested.
1) Go to https://www.quirksmode.org/m/tests/meta-viewport.html
2) Change orientation from portrait to landscape or vice versa.
3) Do the line lengths change? I.e., does Firefox Android adjust the layout viewport when the orientation changes?
Thx.
@ppk Yup, works great on Firefox 153.0.2 (Build #2016175759), Android version 12 on a Samsung Galaxy S10e. Here are screenshots.
I have one, simple, straight forward job that I was planning to do today. And my brain has decided it doesn't want to do it.
Ideally... I'll do the thing at some point. But the much bigger challenge is not trying to force it, which I know from #ADHD experience will just block me from doing everything else.
As always, I think reports of Nazi defecting en masse because Trump is "just that cringe" are a shitlib fantasy about "bipartisan cooperation." That having been said - yeah, America is getting sick of his shit.
Now my question for you is are you sure that'll cause him to self reflect and fuck off? Or does his pattern of behavior suggest he'll double down on the Hitler shit to show us all?
Right. I am concerned.
Like, I think the best thing that could have happened to us, whereas "us" is "the people who don't want to speedrun the 3rd Reich under even dumber Hitler", did happen to us in 2020. Trump convinced himself he was gonna win anyway, so the coup plot ended up being half baked - especially with the US military sitting that one out.
I don't think Trump thinks he's "gonna win" anymore. Which you know, probably is not going to lead him to be uh, less fascist.
@WizardOfDocs @pfriedma COBOL is obviously one of the most successful programming languages of all time.
I am not qualified to comment off the cuff on whether its level of natural language-ness, compared to the more compact languages that followed, concretely helped its adoption by people who otherwise would have struggled with coding.
The canonical success in this area is SQL, which is both very "natural" and very manager friendly.
Dell Stock Surges On Record Orders For AI Servers https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/02/0551240/dell-stock-surges-on-record-orders-for-ai-servers?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon
In het Overheidsbreed standpunt voor de inzet van generatieve AI staat een belangrijk punt als het gaat over het gebruik van Big Tech:
> Voor overheidsmedewerkers is het gebruik van generatieve AI-toepassingen onder consumentenvoorwaarden, ook voor
individueel gebruik, niet toegestaan omdat er met de leveranciers geen afspraken kunnen worden gemaakt.
https://open.overheid.nl/documenten/bc03ce31-0cf1-4946-9c94-e934a62ebe73/file
puh.. ux... irgendwie dachte ich bei invoiceninja grad auf speichern zu klicken aber ich habe auf senden geklickt.... aber ich glaube alles richtig geschrieben zu haben was ich schreiben wollte - nein halt ... ach ... hoffentlich nicht so wichtig 💀
und vorher stirbt die vorschau der nachricht dauernd seltsam weg, und ich hab vorher extra nen update gemacht 🙄
The devastating deluge that swept through the mountain valleys on the border between Nepal and China's Tibet region is a potent reminder of a growing green-energy risk in one of the world's most hazard-prone areas. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2026/09/02/energy/floods-threat-hydropower-nepal/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #environment #energy #nepal #floods #renewables #hydropower #energy
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