If “plug” and “socket” work just fine, do we really need to keep assigning genders to electrical cords and garden hoses?

Some industries are moving away from “male” and “female” connectors.

https://theconversation.com/male-and-female-plugs-and-connectors-gendered-language-for-the-ends-of-garden-hoses-electrical-cords-and-pipe-fittings-sparks-debate-270142

💦 Aujourd’hui, avec Meriem Naili, nous avons présenté à la presse la « Balade aquatique » dans l’Isère prévue dimanche à #Grenoble.
Derrière cette baignade, il y a un projet qui avance. Sérieusement, progressivement, sans raconter d’histoires.
Et surtout une question : comment retrouver l’accès à cette eau qui coule au milieu de notre ville ? 🌊
**[1/7]**

Vandaag liet ik in het @NOS Journaal zien hoe lang het nog duurt voordat deze recordwarme zomer een heel gemiddelde zomer zou zijn in een warmer klimaat. Dat is in het warme scenario van het KNMI al over minder dan 20 jaar, in 2045. Dan zou deze zomer heel gemiddeld zijn. En in 2060 zou je na zo'n zomer zeggen: poeh, dat was een frisse zomer.

I want to chime in on something I've seen other people saying now that Meta has settled a lawsuit for #SocialMedia addiction of children and teens and #AI is proving harmful for children and teens learning capacity. So we need to protect the children, right?

LISTEN UP! *It's not just 'the children'.*

If something is harmful when you are a kid it can be harmful if you are an adult. There's no magic age at which you become 'safe'. The potential for harm does not simply disappear.

[contd]

But they find our brand of racism, fundamentalism, overt cruelty, and crass self-promotion very gauche. They don't hate us, but they are not deceived by our façade, or intimidated by our bluster.

I don't think I am speaking out of turn here, because I've read their academics saying the same thing, but Canada is a country that in part defines itself by what it is not - specifically us, America.

What Trump thinks he can do is change how a whole ppl see themselves. He will never succeed.

#PennedPossibilities 1111: Do you respond to feedback, reviews, or comments? Why or why not?

I answer direct questions (if they're polite). But I NEVER argue with reviewers over an opinion they hold about my work because authors arguing with reviewers are radioactive:

"This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

"What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger."

Look, to be clear, Canada is also a fake country, created by colonialism, full of white people. There is a dark underbelly to this whole place you don't notice when you first come here, but gradually starts to seep into your consciousness and much like America, almost all of that ick revolves around whiteness and capitalism, in so much as they are even separate things.

@cstross @davidgerard @henryk I spent five years researching SMRs and nuclear power and the grid in general as a hobby. My conclusion is tech billionaires are funding nuclear reactor startups 90% as a counter argument to data center electricity use by their main businesses, and 10% because of the "this is cool as shit" factor. (SMRs are cool as shit, and also completely impractical and dangerous.)

Bootstrappable Builds: How and Why

https://lwn.net/Articles/1088279/

Comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473868

#HackerNews #Bootstrappable #Builds #How #and #Why #tech #innovation #software #development #open #source

Today is announcement day 🔥

Bonfire is shifting its centre of gravity: from social features to community tools. Four things ship today, and the whole story is here: bonfirenetworks.org/posts/bo...

1. Bonfire for communities
Groups and topics, community rules, decision-making (from quick polls through structured consensus to weighted score voting, where an objection can count for more than an approval), events, shared organisation profiles, announcements.

A ready-to-use space you can then take apart: add what's missing, fork what almost fits, switch off what you don't need.

2. Our first Mosaic case study
Six months with Jacobin's German edition, building jacobin.social from the ground up: a home for 3,000+ readers, wired into their Ghost publication, in their language and their look and feel. Their readers crowdfunded the project, which included a reboot of the magazine and a new community space. Now every publisher can benefit. What one community funds, every community inherits. Details: bonfirenetworks.org/case-stu...

3. A deep Ghost integration
Keep publishing exactly as you do now, and Bonfire can become the home for everything that happens around the work: your archive imported, new articles followed, members and tiers synced, sign-in through Ghost, federated discussion under every piece. Details: bonfirenetworks.org/ghost/

4. The Telling
One script tag turns any web page into a federated conversation. Readers reply with an account they already have, on Bonfire, Mastodon, anywhere. The thread lives on your server, and you can take it with you. Details: bonfirenetworks.org/telling/

Being straight with you: this is a 1.0 beta. Groups work within a server and don't federate yet. We're designing that in the open with the W3C groups task force, because we'd rather it work across the whole fediverse than ship a dialect only Bonfire speaks.

Want to poke at it? Groups are live on the campground, our open test instance. Make an account and try it out: campground.bonfire.cafe

Finally, we've rebuilt the website to reflect the new direction: bonfirenetworks.org/

Now back to following up with crowdfunding backers to organise install parties, co-design workshops, and other rewards. Thank you for your patience 💛 #fediverse #ActivityPub

We’re delighted that the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation is following Bonfire’s evolution with such interest.

The EEF supports the #Erlang, #Elixir, and wider #BEAM community, which is the ecosystem behind the technology Bonfire is built with. The foundation plans to deploy Bonfire and explore how it could serve that community. We’re excited to see what they discover and to collaborate with them.

Read the update from the EEF: com.erlef.org/wg/com/2026/08...

What should digital infrastructure for open science look like, and more importantly, who should shape it?

Universities and scholarly communities are starting to explore new directions together. This includes a living lab at Warwick, governance research with Princeton HCI and experiments with the Prosocial Design Network.

We invite more scientists, research communities and universities to join: experiment and study it, co-design what comes next, and help govern the Open Science Network.

bonfirenetworks.org/science #OpenScience #science

@johannab I inherited a CiviCRM installation a few years ago, and I get the sense that if the guy who set it up hadn't been so enthusiastic about installing every shiny module that caught his attention to see if it was something he wanted and then never uninstalling anything but also not documenting which modules were necessary, I would like it a lot more. Even with the garbage installation, though,it's working pretty well for the small arts nonprofit whose data it holds, and once I am done with the Salesforce death march I'm currently on at my paying job, I'm looking forward to seeing if I can clean this thing up, or install new and copy everything important over.

A tiny Bonfire feature that we’ve grown quite fond of 🌱

Instance admins can define their own set of default avatars, which are randomly assigned to people who haven’t uploaded a profile picture yet.

It sounds like a very small thing and technically, it is.

But after experimenting with it on the Jacobin community, we noticed how much these little details can contribute to giving an instance its own visual identity and fostering a sense of belonging to a shared digital place.

Not every feature that shapes a community needs to be big. Sometimes it’s just a bunch of tiny avatars 😊

Read more about our work with Jacobin in our case study: bonfirenetworks.org/case-stu...

Here's another neat Bonfire feature: organisation profiles.

You can create a shared profile for your co-op, collective, project, or any other organisation or team, and invite trusted people to manage it with you.

Each team member signs in with their usual Bonfire account, with no insecure sharing of passwords, and together they can post as the organisation, access its feeds and private messages, manage its settings, and add or remove other members.

It’s similar to managing a Facebook Page, but built for the #fediverse: one shared public identity, securely managed by multiple people.

Rest in power #YayoiKusama

Posted into FLIPBOARD USERS - ARTISTS @flipboard-users-artists-JanetteSpeyer

@hipsterelectron as much as prime numbers are an obsession of the fascists, I caution against genuinely letting that cloud the fact that they are actually very special, since they emerge from the most basic ordinal enumeration we do as a very important structure. I think the lede is buried: the absurdity doesn't even lie in the zeta function (which is a valid analytic continuation with branches and some really interesting and miraculous properties) or in the primes themselves, which emerge from very concrete and tangible phenomena (like the gears I mentioned before for example, and there's also a trippy correspondence with all this number theory stuff extended to the rational powers e^iπn/m with the roots of unity that shows why this has to generalize to wheels and all rational cycle lengths generally because of the torsion group; i.e. why the chinese remainder theorem is reversible).

The absurdity lies in the absolutely ridiculous idea that the primes are somehow utterly unassailable in a bizarre and angry mental model of the cosmos where the indivisible units of arithmetic are somehow the ultimate war machine. They're as good a war machine as anything that's hard to reckon about for now, but that doesn't make them remotely unassailable; in fact, if their own findings turn out to be true, then factorization is quasi-polynomial at worst (the heuristics are getting insanely good, and there was a recent periodic table of primes discovery as well), meaning they're basically not capable of being the thing for super secret nazi war messages anyway. I personally think it's super super exciting that we're getting closer to cracking the mystery of ratios and wheels once and for all.

One thing that always pissed me off to no end was the endless big-O bounds being done on their relative frequency in N as n grows. It legitimately doesn't help, like at all, without the explicit assumption that their indivisibility somehow means your goose is cooked finding them as a factor. It's the same worship of randomness that leads to the vast majority of people to have a completely stunted understanding of particle physics that is only shared by ideologically motivated (capitalist) popular physicists, and which is heavily linked to the ideological determination that causal efficacy isn't real. That doesn't mean physics is fake, it means that it's being held back by a refusal to accept first principles (see Gabriele Carcassi's amazing work) by people whose ideological motivations preclude their acceptance. It has always amused me that Bell's theorem, while correct and predictive, only has such an insane implication because of a refusal in the first place to admit that combined states exist with or without somebody looking.