RE: AIRSTRIKES
Two reports into aerial atrocities vis a vis the conflict in Ethiopia.

Firstly, HRW conducted a visual probe of an Ethiopian airstrike on the Tigrayan capital of Mekele in late August. It was one of a slew of strikes in the lead up to war breaking out Tuesday. 13 civilians were injured. HRW found no evidence of any valid military targets. A residential area was targeted, HRW say it was an indiscriminate strike and a possible war crime.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/09/25/ethiopia-indiscriminate-airstrike-in-tigray

@marick I'd already be happy if more people realized that there is not one universal documentation style that's good for everything we call software!

@PaniczGodek @liberty

@lowqualityfacts only if you are rich

@sundogplanets

It's mansplaining because it was trained on mansplaination.

@abstractcode farts are funny, according to my kids who are in no way medically trained

Sweet dreams, sis 😴🖤 #FosterKittens #cats #CatsOfMastodon

How do we *know* your phone doesn't taste like lemon unless I try?

@marick Journal clubs exist all over academia, for much the same reasons.

@PaniczGodek @liberty

A talk with a friend this evening has me wanting to remind people of something: if you know someone who’s experienced loss recently, send a message to let them know you’re thinking about them. It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture or some beautiful elegy about the person they lost. Just let them know they’re on your mind, and you’re there to talk if they need it.

@suricrasia dios mio

@marick Before WWII, science was much smaller, and didn't (have to) care about the outside world. Personal communication mattered much more, and in-person conferences mattered more than papers, whose role was a longer-term record.

But change after WWII was gradual, not revolutionary. A shift towards larger scale and more anonymous collaboration, and with that a growing importance of written communication.

@StOnSoftware @PaniczGodek @liberty

I really want to buy this terrible lockpicking set off of Amazon so I can review it.

#Locksport

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is not a reflationist, her finance minister said, seeking to allay investor concerns her government would spend excessively and pressure the Bank of Japan to keep interest rates low. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2026/09/26/economy/japan-katayama-takaichi-reflationist/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #business #economy #inflation #satsukikatayama #sanaetakaichi #defense #budgets #japaneseeconomy #us #jgbs #boj #financeministry

Putin claims to have liberated Bilytske in Donetsk.

How long will we Europeans let this continue?

@randahl Good thing they're protesting in the woods for all the squirrels to see.

New achievement unlocked: running over a baseball with a lawnmower.

the Mandarin term for "a little" is "yi dian." literally "a dot".

but, if you are in Beijing, you replace the n with an R, rendering it as "yi diar."

My Chinese teacher has split the difference by writing it as "yi dianr". with dian being more standard and diar being more realistic.

but now I read EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) as yi diar. EDRs give.....a little security. yi dianr security.

@jpm Going to need a medical opinion on that. By which I mean do not give me any medical information on that.

@sundogplanets I guess I read it as cherry-picked to say something that makes their plan sound less harmful than it is.

I guess that’d make it a bit like motivated reasoning as a “service”, but it’s the service of helping a motivated customer to influence other people’s reasoning

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117325293459803287

This is I think the most consequential thing I found in the muse VM, or at least the thing that would be most worth following up on. there are no other plain string matches I can see for what uses it, I'm looking in the binaries now, but the comment seems to indicate pretty clearly that a) meta uses anthropic's models internally, presumably to develop the thing (the code, comments, and skill text reek of claude), but also b) they use some kind of internal proxy that intercepts and proxies all requests to anthropic's API. the only reason I can think of for doing that would be model distillation.