Tonight's blood moon / lunar eclipse. Alas, the SF Bay Area clouds made it quite murky, but they were thin enough not long after maximum to let me get a photo while it was still a little red.
#LunarEclipse #Astrophotography #BloodMoon

Good to see - 'Punk rapper Bobby Vylan will face no further action from the Met Police for chanting "death, death to the IDF (Israel Defense Forces)" at an Al Quds Day demonstration in central London.
The force said it had investigated chants made by the performer on 15 March at a static rally held on the Albert Embankment.'

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0lrwl2w82lo #BDS #Israel #IsraelFascism #Palestine #UKPolitics

@arstechnica How is this a court issue? It either states explicitly in the law who gets the discount or it doesn’t. They can change the laws language in congress if they want it to change. Horse shit abuse of the court system.

I hereby declare that Omaha, the most populous city in the great state of Nebraska, will henceforth be known as ‘Obamaha’. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

@jamiejennings most notably, when a checksum is used for software release integrity (which is itself applied on top of a separate archiving and/or compression protocol which is opaque and uncontrolled), the mathematical constructs employed are actively optimized to foil any forensic or explanatory capacity, should a file be modified, because checksums are designed for cryptographic signatures, which are architected to avoid leaking information about the message itself. but this obviously demonstrates cryptography's wartime origins continue to influence its modes of thinking--and it also demonstrates how bizarrely detached the filesystem is from the user and application code.

[filesystems are where i hope i can focus my graduate study]. this particular research i've done with robust checksum trees is i think so perfectly up your alley because it is very specifically derived from my domain expertise packaging software at big and small scale and it makes SUCH a great case study of how archival sciences and HCI are in fact a stronger basis than the field of academic cryptography to base robust ontologies around

Our journey choosing between Bullet and prosopite on a recent client project (and some unexpected OSS contributions that happened along the way): https://spinel.coop/blog/optimizing-rails-db-usage-bullet-prosopite/

The SF Ruby Startup Conference is bringing together a fantastic lineup of Ruby and startup speakers—including talks from WNB.rb members—with a big focus on community and connection. 💜

Expect great talks, organized networking, and plenty of opportunities to meet other Rubyists.

🎟️ Tickets are on sale now: https://luma.com/sfrubyconf2026

#ruby #rails #sfruby #rubyconf

UFOs. Theology. Psychedelics. What they share is a framework for understanding ontological shock, and AI is giving programmers exactly that. Travis Turner's talk is unlike anything else on the schedule. Strap in. 👽✨

A walk among giants.
I spent several hours in beech woodland on the slopes above Loch Libo yesterday, where the sunlight flickered through the dense canopy.
Beech understory is always rich in fungi, the soil beneath dark and fine from decades of leaf litter fallen at the massive feet of these ancient beings.
#Photography #WoodlandPhotography #Trees #Scotland #BlackAndWhite

@rubinjoni Lol, yeah, I've read Reich, obviously as anyone who has studied his work could tell. I just don't like to bring him up much because I don't want to get into alternative energy theories and whether or not the US government has a right to destroy a man's reputation because that man was A) a socialist and B) believed he could control the weather with a machine.

I could start a feed of stories about cops using Flock to stalk and terrorize current and former partners and I would never run out of material. https://www.404media.co/florida-deputy-of-the-year-used-flock-to-stalk-ex-held-gun-in-her-mouth-did-a-nazi-salute/

Les arrivées se poursuivent en Crète, plusieurs centaines de migrants débarquent en quelques jours - InfoMigrants.

«Plus de 500 migrants sont arrivés en Crète en l'espace de deux jours, entre mardi et mercredi. Depuis plus d'un an, la Crète et l'îlot de Gavdos, en face des côtes libyennes, sont devenues la principale porte d'entrée des demandeurs d'asile en Grèce.»

https://www.infomigrants.net/fr/post/73315/les-arrivees-se-poursuivent-en-crete-plusieurs-centaines-de-migrants-debarquent-en-quelques-jours

Once again, I find myself begging FOSS folks to recognize that open source is, by construction, a political movement. The onus is thus on us to make sure that our politics are in keeping with our actual values.

We cannot, especially during a global resurgence of fascism, act like it's possible to be apolitical.

Just picked up half our straw for the year under an eclipsed moon. COOL. Managed 3 truckloads tonight, will have to get the rest tomorrow.

If the moon is up for you right now, go look at it! It's FREAKY.

The sky cleared up in time for the peak. If my neighbors didn't already think I'm weird, this should clinch it. Stalking the sidewalk at midnight, with binoculars in my left hand, iPhone in my right hand, and a bug net over my head for mosquitoes.
#eclipse #LunarEclipse

Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says

xAI accused of training Grok on real and AI-generated child pornography.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/elon-musks-xai-used-child-porn-to-train-grok-models-lawsuit-says/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

@AnarchoNinaWrites (I've probably posted this before, but it's like tapping on the sign)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mass_Psychology_of_Fascism

Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and rival Fatah dissidents have united in an unprecedented coalition for the first Palestinian elections since 2006. But Israeli repression and foreign pressure raise doubts about whether free politics is under occupation.

https://mondoweiss.net/2026/08/after-two-decades-palestinians-prepare-to-vote-for-a-new-political-leadership-but-will-it-change-anything/

#Palestine #Israel #Gaza

My favorite pest control outfit round these parts. #wildlife #owl #photography