Discussion
Dolly Parton’s Dollywood Foundation “was initially focused on reducing school dropout rates in Sevier County, in part by offering $500 gifts to graduates. Cold, hard cash proved a powerful incentive; high school dropout rates plummeted to just 6 percent in the county, from 35 percent.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/business/dolly-parton-philanthropy-books-covid-vaccine.html
hi @wwu – an odd question for you: i have a use for MediaWiki (historical knowledge of movements in Minneapolis) but @agaric hasn't hosted it ourselves for over a decade, so it would be great to find a #LibreSaaS hosted MediaWiki provider… and then i thought maybe a union member or the union itself might be such a provider we could pay…
Sometimes I hear non-technical people speculating that this is a thing that could happen and I am posting it here to let them know that yes, this is a thing that happens.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/26/fake-thinktank-israel-ai-propaganda
#Wissenswert | Über die Kontakte der #Wikinger nach Westeuropa wissen wir inzwischen viel. Weniger bekannt sind ihre engen Beziehungen zu den #Slawen rund um die Ostsee.
Der Archäologe Leszek Gardeła untersucht, wie slawische und skandinavische Eliten im 10. und 11. Jh. miteinander handelten, diplomatische Beziehungen und Ehen eingingen – und gemeinsam in den Krieg zogen.
Über seine Forschung berichtet er in einer Videoreihe, deren zweite Staffel gerade erschienen ist 👉 https://lisa.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/slawen_im_norden_episode5?language=de
Le ministre de l'éducation nationale veut supprimer la carte scolaire
They are lowering US flags to half-mast for a week, but if the government really wants to pay tribute to Dolly, they should fund education, the arts, and medical research instead of trying to eradicate them.
A profound late-winter dawn hike, out to see if we could find an elusive giant Rata (fwiw my #1 native tree species) deep in the Akatarawa rainforest, & considered to be Aotearoa New Zealand's largest.
We had found her sister prior, but not this giant.
Today we had the privilege, & I'm still feeling it. Estimated by botanists to be between 1000 and 1500 years old, we measured her girth with paracord to be ~16m.
To stand at her base was to be at the foot of a living cliff face.
China's rapid push into humanoid robotics is shifting the AI race toward "world models" that give machines physical understanding, positioning the country ahead in the next phase of development. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2026/08/27/world/humanoids-need-brains/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #commentary #worldnews #ai #artificialintelligence #llms #moonshot #kimik3 #china #shanghai #worldaiconference #tencent #alibaba #bytedance #openai #anthropic #googledeepmind #nvidia #chatgpt
🏛️ Une initiative de démocratie directe !
👉 https://www.uncommunaccord.fr/
Loin de la course d'égos des présidentielles, du mirage de l'homme ou de la femme providentiel·le, et bien loin du fantasme du vote comme seul outil participatif, ENFIN UNE ASSEMBLÉE CITOYENNE tirée au sort (re-)fait surface à l’échelon national 🙌
[1/2]
Italian tech collective Autistici/Inventati @cavallette have been put under US sanction for their autonomous digital infrastructure for artists, activists, associations. https://cavallette.noblogs.org/2026/08/10076
They provide immensively important digital spaces and tools for antifascist, anticapitalist community work.
Their work is for me one of the brightest example of autonomous network community.
More then ever, they need solidarity and support.
Radiation Link In Flight Attendant's Breast Cancer, French Court Finds https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/08/26/2356248/radiation-link-in-flight-attendants-breast-cancer-french-court-finds?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon
These should be the default settings for everybody. Well, everybody anywhere but Meta's services, because nobody should use those.
"Accounts belonging to people under 18 get a default two-hour daily limit that only a parent can lift, a block from midnight to 6am, notifications silenced overnight and through the school day, hidden like counts, no cosmetic-surgery filters, and the option of a feed that is not personalized."
My son is looking for a software job.
He graduated this year with a BS in CompSci. He's been writing software since he was tiny — the degree just made it official.
He got great grades, has strong hobby experience, and stellar references. He's great with high level code, the new AI hotness, but great with old school C too. And he's an all around nice guy.
I'm reaching out to you folks to see if anyone is looking for a young guy to fill out your team.
Please repost to spread the word. Thx!
Chinese foreign minister calls for US and China to 'overcome obstacles' ahead of presidential summit
https://apnews.com/article/china-us-wang-yi-trump-xi-meeting-735838b80c7d4169936f1ba47f889546?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub
Posted into International News @international-news-AssociatedPress
Ich hab für @digitalrechte den Meta-Vergleich und die 17 Milliarden Strafe analysiert und wie die Auswirkungen auf unsere EU-Debatte sein könnten:
Der Vergleich, den Meta selbst mitgeschrieben hat. Meta geht als Gewinner raus.
https://digitalrechte.de/news/der-vergleich-den-meta-selbst-mitgeschrieben-hat
@markus_netzpolitik @digitalrechte
Und alleine schon deshalb sollte man META nicht nutzen.
#DollyParton still doing good after her death
"Judge strikes down #Texas ban on #drag shows, tells people offended by them ‘just don’t go’"
Judge Hittner cited Dolly in his ruling, pointing out "erotic" elements targeted by #SB12 would apply to Dolly as well
One of the plaintiffs in the case is #BrigitteBandit, a Dolly impersonator. Dolly gifted a rhinestone guitar to Brigitte in 2023
Brigitte will be performing in #Austin on Saturday in Dolly's honor, as Dolly
👏👏👏
I meant to boost it, but I came across a post yesterday from a linguist talking about the difference between a slur (a term applied to a minoritised group to encourage people outside that group to dehumanise them) and an insult.
His view was that ‘clanker’ was an insult, not a slur.
I don’t mind using insults to describe people doing objectionable things. I just don’t think ‘clanker’ is a good one.
I don’t know if it was the original coining, but I first encountered ‘clanker’ in The Clone Wars (which is, what, 20 years old now?). And there it very much was a slur, applied to the droids in the separatist’s droid army. Set in a deeply problematic universe where droids are simultaneously shown to be self-aware and have complex emotions and treated as property and destroyed by their owners with zero consequences: it meets the linguist’s definition, it’s a term applied to a minoritised group (droids) to justify treating them badly (killing them without regarding them as people).
It seems to be used now for LLMs and users of LLMs. It doesn’t meet the definition of a slur for either. LLMs are not self aware, they can’t be the target of a slur. LLM users are not a minoritised group.
But it’s also just not a great insult. What does it even mean? You are like a droid in General Gevious’s army?
I much prefer terms like ‘sloperator’ because they convey the agency of the person making the conscious choice to use LLMs and generating rubbish as a result.
@david_chisnall @theodoraward grunped about nearly exactly this in the gc a few days ago. most of the "it's a slur" types are shouty for telling-on--themselves reasons, but the collective presumption of it assigning agency to a bloody prompt is just frustrating
that the promptfans and promptfondlers are so very upset people might _learn_ that they touched the prompt is all manner of telling
Wait a cotton-pickin' second!
@sjvn alt-text in the transcription at https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2228:_Machine_Learning_Captcha
The Northern Rātā (with accents this time!) is a very special epiphyte. It begins life as a vine that grows down from a seed dropped in the canopy by a bird that ate its fruit. With gravity its guide, the vine eventually makes contact with the forest floor, and takes root.
Then, over an enormous amount of time, it grows to surround the host tree (by then often already aged-out) in a final embrace, taking its place in the canopy.
The tiny vine in this clip could one day become such an ancient
Rātā, esp great mother trees like this, are keystone species, essential to the health of whole forest biomes.
And now for the bummer finish. Australian Brushtail Possums, introduced by settlers to est. a fur trade, can kill a 1k yr old Northern Rātā in < 5 yrs by gorging on new shoots
The grim reality is this Ancient is kept from death by volunteer conservationist possum trappers maintaining traps in the Akatarawa forest. Without them, she would not stand a chance
(I say that as a herbivore)
Sorry, the app encountered an unexpected error
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
