I was born in 1990.

I grew up through the last days of shareware and the early days of modern free software.

I got to watch the shareware model die, I got to watch the Open Source revolution.

If you weren't there for the shareware days, what I'm about to say might sound impossible, but small software projects released as limited demos with paid upgrades used to handily pay a *good* wage to solo developers or small teams.

The 24/7 lectures: a technical summary in 24 seconds, a clear summary in 7 words.

"To understand space, first, dig a hole" is the 7-word plain-language summary of the Einstein Telescope team: https://einsteintelescope.eu/

#IgNobel

“It's been a rapid unwinding in the last two or three years that local people have also noticed. How could you not notice these streams and rivers have, all of a sudden, turned orange?”

#Indigenous #FirstNations #environment #climatechange #Yukon

https://windspeaker.com/news/windspeaker-news/yukon-first-nations-investigate-orange-rivers-and-wildlife-impacts

@rvstaveren @ash
@lightweight runs the instance I'm using, can tell you how easy/hard that is

@foxbutt possibly!

Out of context work quote: "we should find these machines, take their CPUs, and mount them on a stick as a warning to the others"

Dog

Pollution levels in London after 10 years of advancing sustainable transport.

@quentin_ld thanks!

"Ceremonial safety gesture" from Dr. Stephan Bollinger, winner of the 2009 IgNobel Peace Prize for determining whether it is worse to be smashed over the head with a full beer bottle or an empty one: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jflm.2008.07.013

(He smashes a prop bottle over his head)

#IgNobel

@pkw

Makes sense to me, as without thinking and empathizing doubt is unlikely to creep in. Similar to how actual frauds never experience impostor syndrome because they know they are full of *redacted*.

If you happen to have a copy of those quotes, I'd enjoy reading them.

US senator calls on the NSA to give guidance for use of VPNs

Open source, commercial, single-hop, multi-hop, mixnet? The array of options is dizzying.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/09/us-senator-calls-on-the-nsa-to-give-guidance-for-use-of-vpns/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

So. News.

Am selling my narrowboat and moving to New Zealand.

Anyone want to buy a 50 foot liveaboard?

More details to follow

#UKCanals

@eevee the reason complex numbers make sense at all is because the number 1 actually forms the origin point where two bases meet, and that's where the function f(x) = 1/x (not a polynomial) comes in

Another brilliant idea!

THIS is what the great John Lewis would call “GOOD TROUBLE” — Protesters in Minneapolis have reportedly been dressing up in jeans, body armor, and masks, and then walking into groups of ICE agents and accusing one or two of them of being imposters until they all start fighting each other, and then the protesters sneak away.
And now, it’s happening nationwide!

@david_chisnall @sophieschmieg fun fact still vulnerable to side channel attacks when mounted on sticks

@cstross @pleia2 When PCs kicked minicomputers up into the server space, turns out there's only one server space, so they fought to the death with mainframes and IBM took DEC's head and queen played and there was all this lightning, but the result was timeshared instead of punched card batch jobs.

When smartphones kicked the PC up into the server space there was a marketing budget to call it "the cloud". Amazon EC2 won. Queen is still playing. Phones are not yet self-hosting, and I am sad.

I want the internet to be:

Cat content

📚 RSS feeds written by humans

Mastodon and Fediverse connections

Educational videos running on PeerTube

Free, open-source, privacy-by-default, and AI-free software made with love

📖 And unionized Wikipedia

#Internet #Fediverse

What's this? Oh just Snickers using ClickFix and indirect prompt injection as part of a marketing campaign.

https://www.snickers[.]com/hungr-ai

https://www.snickers[.]com/digitalsnickers

The second URL contains prompt injections to change model behavior.

And this is the best-case scenario