Your daily affirmation:
Being called weird is a badge of honor, but you can be weirder still. Don't hold back.

@fediforum How should we send them to you!

🇪🇺 European Citizen's Initiative against ID age verification online

Just yesterday, Stop Killing the Internet, from the people at @StopKillingGames, launched an ECI against ID age verification! This is great but it needs 1 million signatures !

So, if you live in #europe, please sign it! If you don't, or even if you do, still share it around so more people know about it and can sign it!

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/066/public/#/screen/home

Reaching the signature threshold will not mean that ID age verification will immediately become illegal, but the subject will be brought to the @EUCommission and they'll have to do SOMETHING about it. This is already a huge step in the right direction!

Please boost and share this post to spread the word! Thank you!

@privacy

#stopkillingtheinternet #ageverification #privacy

Okay.

This is a new rule for myself (which I need to communicate to students as soon as I stop being royally pissed off about it).

If your recommendation request to me is AI slop, the answer is automatically "no."

Do not slop me asking me to write Real Words for you. It's rude as all HELL.

@lauren Had to tell Logi Options to reset and it's fine now.

"another sandbox escape"

"sandbox escape or you didn't really box the sand to begin with?"

"... they were restricted to contacting specific domain names but had write access to their own /etc/hosts"

@itgrrl @quinn @Perrin42 @carlmalamud @paul_ipv6 I can't stand that guy.

"El Niño is being supersized before our eyes. The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up,"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c17jqp0xzpzo?at_campaign=rss&at_medium=RSS

#elniño #climatechange #science

Trump admin fights ABC lawsuit as watchdogs worry Disney will settle with FCC

FCC tells court it is “open-minded" about whether ABC should lose licenses.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/trump-admin-fights-abc-lawsuit-as-watchdogs-worry-disney-will-settle-with-fcc/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

🔭 'A giant leap forward': Nasa launches powerful new space telescope

｢ The Nancy Grace Roman telescope will capture vast panoramic views of space, with a field of vision 100 times larger than both the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, Nasa says ｣

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce87e55vgpjo

#science #astronomy #exoplanets

In the early days, the Free Software community necessarily(?) and grudgingly depended on proprietary software, such as the operating system, the C compiler, the shell, and set out to fix this asap, creating GNU and Linux, working to achieve freedom and autonomy.

It seems that the "Open Source" movement in the late 90s already threw some of that progress away by depending pragmatically on proprietary software and happily buying "technically excellent" hardware that needed non-free firmware.

After some 40 years, now that we finally cut all dependencies to non-free software (and almost! hardware), a surprisingly large part of "our" community runs after yet another "shiny" proprietary service, advocating for the "right" to inject this new dependency and throwing away our autonomy. I'm so puzzled.

#AI #genAI #LLM #FreeSoftware #GNU #Debian #Guix

Apple's latest round of state-sponsored hacking notifications is starting to bear fruit. Students and opposition activists were targeted with spyware in Serbia. Pegasus was installed remotely. NoviSpy was installed while a target was being held in police custody. https://www.ft.com/content/c9c3a0ef-98d5-4aeb-9d20-e6250d6fcf99

@djsundog All good! I don't think I'm in the mood to fight with it rn, but I'll see how long I end up hanging out.

@afewbugs @suearcher Thanks 🥰

I'd rather lose a couple of hoodies and a blanket than die of hypothermia on the kitchen floor though!

(which is what would have happened)

"So what is your purpose on this sofa, big beardy one?"

Early #caturday

The Mercator map projection keeps generating controversy, because it is completely fucked up. Greenland looks like it's the size of South America (it's about the size of Algeria). Antarctica looks like it dwarfs all of Eurasia (it's a bit smaller than Russia). Africa looks like it's a lot smaller than it actually is, and the centre of the world (at least longitudinally) is conspicuously Greenwich in England.

It has one redeeming feature (and all the aforementioned was *not* considered politically incendiary back in the 1500s!), and that is that a straight line on a Mercator map corresponds to a straight bearing on the actual globe. So it's incredibly useful for navigation - especially when this involved compasses and sextants and paper, rather than GPS trackers and satellites and computers.

But *because* it so greatly distorts the sizes of landmasses, it's probably not the best choice for eg. a school classroom world map, where it mostly creates misconceptions and its main quality has little use.

Here is my favourite alternative, the Dymaxion projection, which balances right on the knife edge between "utterly brilliant" and "batshit insane".

@NilaJones @futurebird even when they get soft, they're still sour!
Still, Damson ice cream is amazing. I need to make some more, although it's more like sludge than ice cream when I make it 😅

@quinn @Perrin42 @mattblaze @carlmalamud @paul_ipv6

spotted in the wild! 🖖