@ethanschoonover Brilliant! I have bunches of chargers and with my vision, even with the best magnifying glass I can lay my hands on, I can't *tell* which ones are interchangeable and which aren't. It's a real hassle to have to keep track of probably-duplicate chargers, but I don't want to fry anything. Chargers should have had clear visible labelling like yours from the start! If I can ever figure out what I've got, I'll follow your lead.

@mneme I know each Worldcon instance is its own organization (and corporation?). I don't know a lot about the overall governance, beyond the votes for locations. I imagine that, as with many things, a few big players who actually have the resources to make cons happen have a lot of say in how things run, and those people might or might not be well-aligned with the membership at large or fandom in general. It's a hard problem, I know -- putting on a Worldcon is a huge effort and that matters too.

@starraven I hope it does. The US (or even North America) is not the whole of the world, after all. And there are reasons to avoid authoritarian regimes (especially after the one in China), and the US is currently problematic in that regard.

@mkj I hadn't realized GDPR covered this sort of thing until today. Good to know! (Rectification I knew, but I didn't know it banned automated decision-making/profiling.)

Wow. The 2025 #Worldcon used ChatGPT to vet participants, with neither consent nor the opportunity to contest the predictable false results. They say they need this because web searches are slow. They have access to an "expert in LLMs", but don't have someone who can write a search script? In a science-fiction org??

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/01/seattle-worldcon-science-fiction-convention-vets-panelists-with-chatgpt - has links to Worldcon statement, with comments.

Starting to wonder how much Worldcon actually reflects SF fandom, especially after Hugo ballot censorship.

Huge power outages in #Pittsburgh after big, fast storm Tuesday. At peak ~450k customers were out; I just got my power back after ~44 hours & my provider still has 100k to go plus there are others. Must be really rough on the crews, ouch.

With careful freezer packing I saved about half the meat & some fish. Waste is sad but getting sick is much sadder. I wonder if Costco has fixed their kosher supply problem yet -- will find out soon. Lost all the cheese, alas.

https://duquesnelight.com/outages-safety/current-outages

finally took a few minutes to solve a real world UI problem

Yet another wrong guy swept up in an #ICE snatch and disappear.

#MApoli we need to do something, this is egregious.

https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/video/video-shows-ice-agent-smash-car-window-to-detain-man-in-massachusetts/

How old am I?

I'm so old I remember when Google search provided more value than surveillance advertising.

I'm so old I remember when an operating system was not considered an advertising platform.

I'm so old I remember when "Artificial Intelligence" was a serious enquiry filled with brilliant people, and not a scam machine populated by sleazebags.

I'm so old I remember when "user" didn't mean "product".

I'm so old I remember when "corporation" didn't mean "person".

We believe that information deserves to be shared and that everyone deserves access to it.

Re-affirming our core values: https://meta.codidact.com/posts/293835

I see the date, but as a pedestrian, there have been times I have wished for something like this in my city... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kP6R0clBGY&ab_channel=AboutHere

@slyborg oh great. As if ordinary people here weren't already paying too much for this folly. :-( But you make a good point; that's probably one of the next steps.

saw a t-shirt this morning that said "mad scientist" except "mad" was crossed out and "angry" written above it in sharpie and yeah… that

I got to see a *male* calico cat today! This little kitten has XXY chromosomes, which happens in about 1 in 3,000 cats. Go intersex kitten, go!

The downside is that due to his genetics, he may develop health issues and not live for very long.

This kitten is looking for a furrever home. Call Rose City Vets in Portland, Oregon for more info if you want them to connect you to his foster home for adoption.

This lil sweetie is a total people person. He wants to be held all the time. He was sooo mad he was in a room without people to give him love and his tiny meows caught my attention. I got to hold him and he purred so much. This boy is spoiled with love.

#FosterCat
#AdoptDontShop
#Caturday
#Cat

I'm hiring a PhD student in Copenhagen, Denmark to do #HCI research on #privacy and #interoperability in messaging apps!

This is a fully funded 3-year position in the Copenhagen campus of Aalborg University. The student will join my project "mInt" (for "messaging interoperability" ;)) and will be co-supervised by me and @nielsvanberkel .

More info and application form here: https://www.stillinger.aau.dk/phd-stillinger/vis-stilling/vacancyId/1219575. Deadline is May 18.

#hci #interoperability #messaging #dma #phd

Well-played, Europe! "The U.S. is the world’s second-largest soybean producer and exporter, and the EU tariffs would hit a sector already battered by China’s retaliatory measures, rising global competition and falling prices. That's not all: 82.5 percent of American soybean exports to the EU come from Louisiana, the home state of House Speaker Mike Johnson." https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-tariffs-trade-war-donald-trump-republican-states/

Keep your eyes open folks. Apparently this is a thing some scammers are doing now. Swapping English characters for Cyrillic characters to fool people into clicking on their sites.

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1jrztlt/be_careful/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

For whoever out there needs to report "five things I got done this week," I offer a tech-bro-speak writeup of the activities of a small child:

1. Resolved an apparent paradox in knot theory, resulting in substantially improved system security (tied my shoes).

2. Isolated the root cause of a blocking problem and removed the barrier, retaining relevant evidence for post-mortem analysis (sneezed and wiped snot on my sleeve).

3. Stress-tested a rapid response system, demonstrating successful mobilization of key individuals with extremely low latency (screamed).

4. Discovered an important resource unavailability and implemented an alternative last-mile delivery protocol in order to meet a time-critical need (peed myself).

5. Completed scheduled downtime in response to substantially degraded system performance and restored operating efficiency to full (took a nap).

Fuck I love Mastodon! No other platform has ever given me as a Blind person such access to the public sphere as I've gotten today from alt text of protests in the United States. Thanks to all you gorgeous folk for demonstrating that inclusion matters, cause it sure does to me!

@ChristineMalec I had a professor in college that was blind and it was incredibly enlighing experience. It was a technical writing class but I learned way more about how important accessibility is in our world. I now always try to keep accessibility in mind when I write software.