BibbleCo

@TrueNorthSpice@mastodon.world @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social now I have that Manics' song stuck in my head, thanks

@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social Welp, one way or another, we'll either be living on Mars in 10y time or fighting endless low intensity guerilla wars to stop the village next door from stealing our potato harvest.

@i_give_u_worms@beige.party @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social woah, woah, woah, let's not get ahead of ourselves. I didn't mean we'll own our own potatoes; sorry for setting expectations too high. The potatoes will be lent out at the start of the season by the lord of your manor, at a moderate interest rate (say, half a turnip per potato.) As long as you don't have to make up a potato repayment deficit by handing over children or minor limbs, it should all work out splendidly. I'm in a rural area where medieval agricultural peasant society's still visible on street and footpath maps, interesting relief visible when the sun's low in the sky, etc. It worked really well for us last time, so another 1200 years of serfdom and we'll be ready to start taking the world over again. "1200 years of serfdom" would be a great slogan for an election manifesto...

@Keltounet@mastodon.social what a time to be alive

Proper meteorology and climate science plucked from the swirling slurry of online hype and misinformation about the current, very strong, El Nino. If you only read a few articles about it, make this one of them. https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2026/07/this-could-be-the-strongest-el-nino-on-record/ #EotS #YCC

@hanse_mina@mastodon.social Well, insofar as it moves along the vital process of our species learning not to trust bullshit AI,.. ultimately, a good thing. Obviously a terrible thing in the short run, but I had a bang on the head yesterday and now I feel all optimistic and weird ;)

@TheSecondVariation@graz.social @gwynnion@mastodon.social Traditionally, US foreign policy with respect to bad guys is either "bomb them", "have the CIA organise a coup" or "make them a key regional ally".

@samlitzinger@journa.host Any society has its discontents, misfits, oddballs, contrarians and those for whom finding alternatives to social norms is just who they are and what they do. Times of stifling convention sometimes (often?) spawn very tough or resilient or wildly demonstrative opposition. Perhaps we'll get a new Beats subculture, or jazz or something. I must have got too much sun today, that's a suspiciously positive way of looking at it for me!

@i_give_u_worms@beige.party @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social Excellent point, I need a new shorthand for "imaginary tech-topian wonderland". "Existing as diffuse clouds of pure thought", perhaps - except that clouds of pure thought probably can't drink coffee. Further research is indicated

A rather beautiful picture. From https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/21/no-electricity-no-water-no-fuel-ukrainian-drone-strikes-bring-darkness-to-crimeas-summer #CrimeaBeachParty #Putin #Ukraine #Russia

@ManyRoads@mstdn.social I found myself watching an American analyst doing battle damage assessment on US bases in the middle east using open source Chinese satellite images yesterday. Those "wait, is this really happening?" moments just keep coming, don't they

@csilverman@mastodon.social ooh, lucky guess on my part! XD I imagine all the cantilevered box structures would need to be thicker / stronger (more expensive) for a structure with large overhangs like that, compared to a standard "vertical stack of rectangular units" style. Incidentally it also slightly reminded me of Simon Stahlenhag's style.

Yep, I know that feelin'

@csilverman@mastodon.social Evocative... And a bit reminiscent of the Nakagin capsule hotel in Tokyo, sadly gone to the great architectural experiment rubble heap in the sky now IIRC https://inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2015/08/Kisho-Kurokawa-Modular-Nakagin-Capsule-Tower-at-Airbnb-1.jpg

@DaveMWilburn@infosec.exchange "...prohibitive compliance costs and bureaucratic burdens..." I'm sure AI will eliminate the need to monitor or enforce compliance. It'll probably eliminate the need for policies, too, which will save an _awful_ lot of time. How splendid!! FX: gunshot, thud

The man who hacks Russian drones https://youtu.be/K9RJfZC5P2E?is=VF_N7ibBB1mMMRqN Homegrown Ukrainian medium and long range strike capabilities and capacity (it seems large numbers of even the very long range weapons are available) have taken enormous leaps in the last year, every Russian refinery of any significance has been struck repeatedly, and the consequent fuel crisis is causing major economic disruption in Russia. I'm glad they're on our side!

@rbreich@masto.ai at that rate, they'd equal Musk's wealth in only, what, 200 years or so. Assuming Musk doesn't get any richer in the next 250 years, anyway.

@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online @cstross@wandering.shop 'I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that"

@BrianJopek would prefer it with references, though I'm sure they're accurate quotations. Incidentally we've had versions of all those sentiments from various politicians and newspapers in the UK over the last decade or so. Today the Home Secretary said peaceful Gaza ceasefire demos were "polluting the streets"; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemies_of_the_People_(headline) ; https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/apr/24/katie-hopkins-cockroach-migrants-denounced-united-nations-human-rights-commissioner ; & so on & so forth. Deeply scary and depressing.

@catsalad I use the same password (which was exposed several times in previous hacks) on low value sites - those that don't take CC details and aren't email, SM or public forums. Convince me I'm wrong ;)

@afrozenpeach@geek.gay PS Nature abhors a void. *steeples fingers

@AngharadHafod@toot.wales Concur. Very slim chance of ditching the local MP, but important to add one to the "not the Tory" count, I think.

Spoiler alert: BS.

@AngharadHafod@toot.wales I will bd turning up at the Polling Station purely to register that I'm not going to produce ID, and uf ghat means I can't vote, so be it. Hopefully the Electoral Commission or suchlike will be gathering feedback on how many people are turned away. (There's no chance of affecting the local result.) If its not abandoned by then, I'll probably pinch my nose and produce at the GE, though.

@ml@ecoevo.social Fair point!

@bethsawin@spore.social Seem to me that w can't know the counterfactual; we don't know whether, or how much, better or worse the climate / environment in general / wider social problems would be in the absence of the sophistication, however poorly it's doing.

@ml@ecoevo.social woah, what a profligate, uh,.. "use" of corks! I drill small holes in mine and use them as eye protection guards on those thin 400mm canes, but it took me several years to accumulate my hoard. The plastic ones used to be easier to spot & weed out but now they're moulding fake textures and speckled colour variations to make them harder to skim. I once had a mad idea of developing cane topper corks as a commercial product, & bribed the bar staff at my local pub to hang a carrier bag up behind the bar for their used corks. But you know how it goes, "half a page of scribbled lines" etc.

@womble@infosec.exchange @i_give_u_worms@beige.party @GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social "This one simple trick made my gruel ration taste delicious! Yes, there's nothing like a savage extra-judicial thrashing or the fear of losing one's gruel ration for the rest of the week to put a smile on the face of YOUR peasants. Keep 'em toiling with all-new Brute Squad Deluxe Edition.

@mattblaze@federate.social @karlauerbach@sfba.social @divVerent@misskey.de @alyx_woodward@universeodon.com I see confusion about basic aspects of the US system that do seem very odd to Europeans; public party registration is one (absolute anonymity of political beliefs is fundamental here.) The public primaries system seems strange to us, and the electoral machinery's just one small part of it. (Ditto the two party system, the mechanisms for allocating representatives to regions, the absurd spending on ads, the absurd volumes of cash sloshing around, electing civil servants and police chiefs, etc etc.) Still, my country still reserves seats in the legislature for unelected religious leaders and hereditary aristocrats, and the other members of our second chamber are political appointees, so... democratic strangeness is in the eye if the beholder, to some extent.

@jbond@mastodon.social @AngharadHafod@toot.wales I'm not - it would be a cold day in hell when my council ward returns a non-Tory. Of course I'll be polite and respectful to the poll workers - apart from any other considerations, it's a small village :)

Who's the wanker in the comedy suit yelling before the kickoff? #WorldCup

@servelan@newsie.social A story that could have been (and very probably was) run in the glory days of #Slashdot, 25 years ago. Nothing in #infosec ever changes except the brands and the jargon and the hype o'the week. The fail remains the same.

"public services back under greater public control" - #Burnham in his first speech as PM repeating the formulation he'd been using for the last couple of months (and earlier?) Problem is, most of the public will hear that as "public ownership" - a promise he can't possibly hope to keep, which in a year or two means that any of the people he's mostly aiming this stuff at who are giving him the benefit of the doubt for now, will have him firmly filed under "promise breaker just like all the others".

Random earworm that popped into my head from nowhere of the day https://youtu.be/wXgc0I0zsYs?is=74LH05ApAFGaSv2z

@zackwhittaker /o\ For getting on for a decade I was sole, or one of two people, security people at a "security firm" responsible for gargantuan amounts of (huge, systemically important / CNI type) customers' super-sensitive data. Naturally, the cobblers children go barefoot; couldn't open s cupboard without being buried under a cascade of dusty skeletons. It was one of those "all the responsibility, no authority to fix anything" scenarios. The stress levels, I realise in retrospect, were horrific. The people in the trenches ag that gir have my deep sympathies. (The CISO/CTO who should have known and, I guess, likely took the big bucks and crossed their fingers that the music wouldn't stop til they'd left? ...not so much.)

https://youtu.be/dYBj_qAJtRA?is=oxL-EAu-Mcw0hMjn Arf arf arf! #manCity

@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social To be fair, "imaginary technology that's impossible philosophically, let alone technically" is a pretty low bar

@jennifercobbe /o\

I suspect Andy #Burnham's Achilles' heel will turn out to be ego,!in the end -- unless circumstances combine to give him a really rough time for the first, say, 6-9 months. If his magic plan can somehow square the circle of growing demands on public services with very little to no tolerance of payslip tax rises, he'll be feted as the god-emperor of British politics, and that sort of thing will wreck anyone's head.

And while I'm at it,.. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/20/leave-voting-areas-foreign-workers-decade-since-brexit-referendum Yet another Grauniad journalist who likes slinging around statistics without having studied statistics at even GCSE / O level. How many possible explanations could there be for the apparent correlation? What was the trend before 2016? Do they not realise that causes and effects are different things?

@mattblaze@federate.social Many thanks for this thread, I've been keeping my eye open for an authoritative source on US election security for a gullible friend (it seems she got the wrong sort of autism... :/ ), didn't want to pester you but hadn't got round to a proper search.... Greatly appreciated, thanks again

@ManyRoads@mstdn.social It'd futile, anyway, It's never going to be practical for US or most other democracies to suppress news of military disasters, because soldiers are human and aren't likely to be strongly motivated to respect orders not to talk about things just because they reflect badly on the civilian leadership - especially those who lost comrades or friends, or had previously served at a base that was struck, or arrived after the event. And then the families... Etc. Perhaps the idea is to flood that zone just like all the others, making people without personal knowledge feel they can't really believe anything in the infosphere,..

@divVerent@misskey.de (Removing Cc's) Ding ding ding! You triggered me to mention my nutty hobbyhorse theory that almost all the massive intractable problems in US society can be traced back (usually it's a short chain) to a constitution that, although it was probably jolly good as an early attempt at such a thing, is completely obsolete now & does much more harm than good. Try it, see how far you get before "...because the Constitution says so". The problems arising from a politicised judiciary is one huge and obvious example