Qole

@rightsprung@c.im @grumpydad@infosec.exchange @appassionato@mastodon.social "What are you looking at?!"

Ohhhh. It all makes sense now. Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr points out that Trump's trade shenanigans are all part of a long history of US enshittificaton of the international trade system, for all the same reasons as Facebook's and YouTube's decline. Who would have thought that an international trade system could be vulnerable to enshittificaton? It turns out that it breeds in the shadows of all kinds of monopoly. https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/26/i-dont-want/#your-greenback-dollar

@inthehands@hachyderm.io Absolutely fascinating. This never happened in Canada. Shelves in pharmacies and hardware stores are still mostly plexiglass free, especially for low value items like toothpaste. I find it hard to believe that US stores lock up toothpaste!

@anildash@me.dm I work in integration and I have been through several "agentic" automation demos, and the non-deterministic aspect of these agents really spooks me. When automating a process, you generally want the output to be predictable!

@randahl lol andorra

@veronica@explains.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr Absolutely! Privacy should be a right. Also, everyone deserves a place to live, sufficient food, healthcare, and a living income.

@Virginicus @loraxorg @clayfoot @PeachMcD @markhurst @pluralistic Technically, it should be called Factory Cheesecake 😂

I was listening to a slopvangelist (an AI believer) on the radio today, and he was talking as though the sparkling autocorrect *software* is going to follow Moore's Law for *hardware*, which Nvidia's CEO said was "dead" in 2022. I realized that if we were going to get to GenAI or anything approaching it, the models would need to get dramatically smaller and more efficient. Instead they're building data centres, which signals the opposite! @beyondmachines1 @drahardja

@MrAndrewD@aus.social @dgoldsmith@mastodon.social @rrustema020@mastodon.nl @notjustbikes@social.notjustbikes.com Best line: "...staring in mounting horror as the pump ticked past a figure normally associated with emergency plumbing..."

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social My general advice to every person living in the USA: If you can, you should move to Canada. Before you get cancer.

@dgoldsmith I really wish studies like this would be used in lawsuits against the fossil fuel companies.

@bodil @jonpsp Yeats said it pretty well: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity." https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

@EmilyEnough @drahardja Exactly. I too need my automations to be deterministic. The element of surprise is fine for a novel, but not for a health care integration.

@mcnado@mstdn.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr This got me thinking, what IS a better snake oil? I realized that it's probably something utterly without any effects at all, because at least it doesn't actively HARM the person taking it, like Ivermectin does.

@ptoothfish@beige.party @PapyrusBrigade@cosocial.ca Me too!

@sparrowsion @PapyrusBrigade This isn't the answer you were asking for, but I carry a small metal "wallet," which is an old fashioned cigarette case, to hold a few bank/payment cards, some ID cards, and some loyalty cards, all wrapped in an "emergency" $100 bill. It fits the watch pocket of my jeans. It's so much better than the fat wallets of my youth, and it has been sufficient for every transaction since I started carrying it years ago. My kid has a "wallet case" for their phone, which serves the same purpose. EDIT: I see that you use Google Wallet to consolidate online tickets. When I (rarely) have a set of online tickets to manage, I make a private "photo album" in Google Photos of ticket screenshots and QR codes.

@Lana@beige.party @PapyrusBrigade@cosocial.ca I can tell you, as someone who grew up in one of those churches, in the 70s and 80s, they very much were opposed to the very concept of being gay in general, there was never a time that they didn't care. I can't comment on abortion, I don't remember, but acceptance of birth control was the main differentiator between Catholic and Protestant.

@Flisty @pluralistic This stock market bubble has another similarity: the tech stocks have become a kind of monopoly, there's nowhere else to put your money, so the lock-in is even worse.

@mctwist@social.accum.se @cameron_bosch@floss.social We're looking at you, Rockstar GTA Online... 😡

We let the rich and powerful have their way with our technology too. Every time we invent something good, they twist it; they use it to enrich themselves and immiserate the rest of us. Can cheap "green" technology be different? It could give us more freedom and a better quality of life. It could help sub-Saharan Africa get free of its grinding poverty. But I'm sure it can be used against us too. I don't know how yet. But I wouldn't have believed you if you told me, in 1995, how the Internet would be turned against us. I was thinking only of a Wikipedian utopia, not Brexit, Q-Anon, and anti-vaxxers.

@wndxlori@ruby.social @GeePawHill@mastodon.social So glad you mentioned Naomi Novik, her Temeraire series was an AWESOME read for the whole family!

@Chrishallbeck@mastodon.social That kind of humour can be very grating

@lucyweirphd@mastodon.ie @jensorensen@mastodon.social I guess it isn't a two-ended spectrum then, because the polarized, radical people on this end of the spectrum are loving their neighbours and standing up for empathy *so hard* that it gets them murdered...

@xyla@shitpost.trade This is giving @SwiftOnSecurity@infosec.exchange

@vwbusguy@mastodon.online @dacmot@sunny.garden @libreoffice@fosstodon.org Yeah, Collabora MUST be involved in this somehow. Their homepage states, "We are the leading contributor to bringing LibreOffice based technology to the browser, the largest code contributor to LibreOffice, and have the largest team of certified LibreOffice developers."

@Shrigglepuss@godforsaken.website Do you have a vector (svg) version?

@straphanger @dgoldsmith It sure feels like a boondoggle to me, too. They should have the first station open in 2030, not just start digging the first holes!

Bad ideology is usually the root of the problem. The underlying belief for most of the economic decisions being made all over the world is that most people need to work hard for their whole lives to "get by," while a handful of people can spend their days drinking cocktails on their yachts. But what if everyone could work less, at the expense of having fewer cocktails on yachts?

@rahmstorf@fediscience.org @dgoldsmith@mastodon.social The problem is that the leaders here in Canada have stopped talking about the climate crisis. They don't mention it in their election platforms. And people voted for the leader who promised to roll back carbon taxes. I don't think that the leaders are worrying about it at all. 😕

@pzmyers @cstross I see how they got to their "extravagant" conclusions, though. They looked at contemporary octopuses, and noted that they're intelligent predators, and they then said, "What if today's octopuses were huge?" Their answer, that they must have been top predators, makes sense, because we tend to equate "large predator" and "top predator," although that's a bigger stretch for something published in Science!

@bruces I was briefly interested, until I learned that Zorin is just another Ubuntu variant...

@vwbusguy@mastodon.online @dacmot@sunny.garden @libreoffice@fosstodon.org I'm curious now too, will this be connected to Collabora? Will they be funding any of this work? It's honestly a good idea, if they are, pushing some of this infrastructure upstream...

Jobs are often used as a deceptive proxy for profits. Extractive industries will always cry, "But the workers will lose their jobs!" when the industry is threatened. From logging to coal mining, it's always the same. This is where good policy can help. Assist the workers, while dismantling the industry.

@freakonometrics@mastodon.social "I'm here to tell you that when someone's path through this world is marked by acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades. Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true: The kindest person in the room is often the smartest."

@ketan@climatejustice.social When the AI bubble bursts, there's going to be so much debris... All these gas turbines, unneeded...

@cameron_bosch@floss.social @mctwist@social.accum.se I've heard different versions; some people say that the Linux version is the same as the Windows version, and some people say that the Linux BattlEye is different, and it's not sufficiently kernel-level for Rockstar.

@nixCraft I would love to find an OS that could run on an old iPad that stopped receiving updates years ago and is slowly becoming a brick as fewer and fewer apps work on it.

@flipper@mastodonapp.uk @jensorensen@mastodon.social lol at "mostly" to soften the statement 😂

We don't notice the water we swim in. We move and breathe in the assumptions of our culture. We don't realize that the idea that we have to work a "job" for a "living" is a very modern idea. The idea that some people "deserve" special treatment because of their birth, well that's ancient. But we tend to defer to the powerful, let them have their way, even though they wouldn't be able to stop us if we all just decided that they're not that special after all, and they should share that golden hoard that they're lying on.