“For every item, experts face the agonising question of whether to save it as heritage – or, in cases where the contamination is considered a public safety risk, put into a nuclear waste facility.”
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250605-the-hunt-for-marie-curies-radioactive-fingerprints-in-paris

#Python 3.13.5, aka "oops".

https://feedsin.space/feed/python_releases

My secret hobby is feeding story ideas to the 404 Media crew via Signal group chat. This was one of them! https://www.404media.co/spam-blogs-ai-slop-domains-wowlazy/

If you use Mastodon; please pay for your use. Please.

This is not the corporate web of Twitter and Google. No company is paying for your use of this service. Your use of the service is not being sold to ad companies.

You use it? That is costing your admin owner literal actual money.

Pay for things you like. Or they go away. Or they stay but get taken over by exploitative people that will eventually destroy it.

Please, find your instance owner and pay them some money.

Thanks.

@tbridge @Tiffany congratulations!

“On June 10, 2018, the rover Opportunity sent its last message from the surface of Mars. Originally expected to serve a three-month mission, Opportunity functioned for over 14 years, traveling over 28 miles (45 kilometers) across Mars and unveiling critical discoveries about the planet’s geology.”
https://apnews.com/today-in-history/june-10

I didn’t know Mikeal Rogers well, but I knew him a bit and wish I’d known him better. Wish I’d gotten to hang out with him more than just a couple-three times. He was always so nice, so funny, so genuinely curious and interested in everything. Fuck cancer. https://b.h4x.zip/mikeal/

A cool thing that @nnnnnnnn has been cooking up for the last little while: https://github.com/apple/swift-binary-parsing

1/2 “My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because it focuses on cost, working backward from there.”

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/06/06/My-AI-Angst

The SF Dept of Public Health is hiring a director for their data team https://careers.sf.gov/role/?id=3743990007820346

If you look at 'role type' it is a permanent civil service job which is great.It just takes an ass long time to get hired and there is a pretty arcane process. (Almost all city jobs *are* union jobs, but permanent civil service jobs — as opposed to permanent exempt, which the city often used to hire software people in the past — have far more protections)

#GetFediHired #Jobs #Data #SanFrancisco

Great to hear Dr. Hayden speaking about her work at the Library of Congress. It was a true honor to help bring her vision to life: a library for Congress and the people. As Dr. Hayden reminds us, libraries aren’t just buildings—they’re vital civic infrastructure for democracies. https://youtu.be/rme21qIbVHM

“Daring Fireball: Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74”

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/07/bill-atkinson-rip

Aw, man. Atkinson was a one person turning point for entire history of computing. Without him, computing would have been less playful and more inhumane and much, much less friendly.

“A tiny Pentagon office had spent months investigating conspiracy theories about secret Washington UFO programs when it uncovered a shocking truth: At least one of those theories had been fueled by the Pentagon itself…

At times, military officers spread false documents to create a smokescreen for real secret-weapons programs. In other cases, officials allowed UFO myths to take root in the interest of national security—for instance, to prevent the Soviet Union from detecting vulnerabilities in the systems protecting nuclear installations. Stories tended to take on a life of their own.”

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinformation-45376f7e?st=kEAaJz&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

@jimsalter @SorceryForEva @s0 @gsuberland @hailey It hits the deeper problem that humans are much better at recognizing wrong things in front of us than we are at recognizing that something is missing. LLMs don't create that problem but they're a catalyst for hitting it more since they often exude confidence and don't leave the same tells as a human in over their head might leave.

@platypus get the party started!

I'm looking for security consultant recommendations! I support a non-profit that’s building PII-storing open source software that integrates with government data storage systems, and they would like a third-party security assessment. This is *not* about compliance, this is straight-up wanting somebody to review their code and practices, try to break in, etc. If you've worked a small or single-person (read as: not really expensive) consultant you'd recommend for this, I'd love to hear about them.

Words to live by: “whatever you do, don’t try to express the logic of the Internal Revenue Code as YAML”

https://chrisgiven.com/2025/06/saying-goodbye/

“These columns of ads that are not really looking for applicants underscore the challenges facing American tech workers and the striking disparities in the current immigration landscape. While restaurants, meatpackers and countless other businesses now risk having workers targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, tech employers have largely escaped Trump administration scrutiny for their use of foreign labor.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-immigration-h1b-visas-perm-tech-jobs-recruitment

“Here’s some fun math. At our current rates, if you become a member of this website at our lowest annual price (a little less than $4 a month), in order for us to make the same amount of money by just seeing ads, you’d have to view a minimum of 6,500 articles a year.”

https://www.theautopian.com/online-media-is-at-a-fork-in-the-road-so-were-removing-ads-for-members/

@petrichor @edsu the setup should allow us to keep doing that until we’re happy. I do agree that making it even easier to run is a great goal and I wanted to review the code for any lingering Python 2-compatibility checks while we’re modernizing.