Sci-fi writer, software engineering lecturer, possible solution to bubble tea oversupply, and selective thing arguer. He/him.
(Old Twitter account: https://twitter.com/davidjacooper)
In Dublin, on Fenian Street, there's a factory that makes child sex abuse material.
You can pay it money, as a subscription, and that's one of the services it offers. This doesn't happen by mistake or because you've tricked or hacked the system.
It’s a feature.
seems like this is going great, the perfect environment to send a thousand oil engineers from the Dallas suburbs.
@peter I'm sure the militia are just after advice from passing US tourists on how to conduct US-style policing. And perhaps some practice.
If users notice your software, you’re already a loser
Nobody wants a computer. They want what it does.
SPECIAL SATURDAY EXTRA (cos I missed yesterday)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liFWMfriip0&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260110-if-users-notice-your-software-youre-already-a-loser - podcast
time: 7 min 08 sec
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/10/if-users-notice-your-software-youre-already-a-loser/ - blog post
@davidgerard I like this abstraction, and my brain is trying to connect it to everything else.
If you do force people to notice the software (my autocorrect actually just tried to say "disease"!) you're forcing them to give up some part of their brain to it, and they could have been using that to do something more productive.
I once made a little piece of software for a uni experiment, to try to determine how people go about code inspections. My tool would show some code to experimental participants, and then each minute pop up a box to ask them to write down what they were thinking. I didn't end up using it, fortunately, but the stupidity of this idea alone taught me something about how we use our brains.
I do in fact use Linux, but if asked "why", my most honest answer would be because I don't (any longer) have to think about it.
Let's ask the real question:
Firefox users,
do you want any AI directly built into Firefox, or separated out into extensions?
Trump’s statements about Greenland are generally discussed as an attack on a NATO ally, Denmark. But primarily and above all, they are an attack on the Greenlanders themselves, a people that is 90% Indigenous Inuit and that, in recent years, has been in the process of assuming its own sovereignty, and eventually independence.
The trumpist discourse is that of very old school colonialism: Greenland is a Terra Nullius that is not being adequately exploited by its population (“there are only 60,000 people on a vast and resource-rich territory!”). This is the frame of reference for the colonization of the Americas since the time of Columbus.
This kind of framing is very unfortunately reproduced by well meaning cartoons that try to underline the ridiculousness of the trumpist position by showing Greenland as an ice sheet with only some polar bears or musk ox or sled dogs, sometimes even waving little danish flags.
But Greenland is not some pristine ice cap populated by seals and bears, it is the ancestral land of the Greenlander Inuit! This is why it is important, I think, for the rest of us to try as much as possible to center them Greenlanders and their sovereignty.
Edit: In an Inuit voice: https://youtube.com/shorts/rlz2EOQWJgg?si=4g7LvcaBV-V9LKFX
Very difficult, even half-way around the world in Perth, to make sense of #ICE just flat-out murdering a passer-by in #Minneapolis. Not to lessen the plight of the thousands already brutalised and disappeared.
To then stay peaceful, to avoid escalating, is a very difficult pill to swallow, but also very strategic.
The world is paying attention.
One #scifi #fantasy trope that breaks the magic for me just a bit is the monster with improbably many and improbably long and pointy teeth. I'm looking at you, #DrWho, but not just you.
I'm no zoologist, but I like to imagine that a creature needs teeth for mundane, everyday hunting and chewing, not just for gleefully threatening passing protagonists and their attendant audiences. Having a mouth full of tent pegs isn't really the most economical way to eat your dinner, I suspect.
For one, you're going to lacerate half your own face (a la Agrajag from the #HHGTTG). Also, your food is just going to get a bunch of holes in it and become permanently stuck to you, rather than actually going down your throat in little pieces.
So, you know, sensible teeth please.
@ajft That's the one!
There could be all sorts of calculated mischief I guess. Protest symbols, or hate symbols, especially if a bunch of people get together with them.
Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on the product itself. I think it's intended as a kind of customisable fashion thing.
I really, really don't understand the baby pics in public though.
I just saw someone with a backpack that has a built-in, low resolution screen on the back, cycling through a photo album full of baby pics, like an electric photo frame that you lug around in public.
I do not understand why this was created, or why someone would buy it.
@SecurityWriter That's as good an analysis as any, TBH.
That being said, re Greenland, in all seriousness, I'm personally going for "because it's big". Not the mineral wealth, military significance, or any other means-to-an-end shenanigans. It's just geographically big (and close, and I guess not tainted so much by the concerns of racists). And Trump needs to have big things, because people who don't have big things are losers.
@stufromoz I discovered it today! I've never really been around that part of the city before.
"Unexploded ordnance and windy conditions have created challenging conditions for about 100 firefighters battling the blaze."
Oh yes, just the usual, normal, everyday bushfire threats. High winds, high temperatures, low humidity and HIGH EXPLOSIVES. Wednesday predicted to reach 35 degrees with a chance of shrapnel; air pressure at 1020 hectopascals, with overpressure at 50-170.
#SwinburneUniversity's DVC explaining that Bachelor degrees are "outdated" will, I have absolute confidence, go down really, really well. What a masterstroke.
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2025/swinburne-offers-formal-qualification-for-uni-dropouts.html
The Australian having a normal one.
@NewtonMark The one lesson we apparently must learn from this senseless violence is how grossly insufficient it is for some tastes.
Abuse of #trafficwardens is just disgraceful. They should absolutely get body cams, and abusers should lose their licence and their vehicle.
You get angry and belligerent because someone is doing their job to protect children? You can't be trusted to drive a tonne of steel down the highway.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-12-14/school-traffic-wardens-abused-in-wa/106132436
Dear OSS community on Mastodon,
Every day I scroll through my feed and I see proud announcements like:
“First Alpha Relase of HyperTurboWidget available"
or
“Version 2.7.1 now with improved glorb handlers!”
or
“Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is out”
… and I sit there wondering if I should be excited, terrified, or calling a licensed electrician.
Don’t get me wrong, I love open source. I just have no idea what three quarters of these projects actually do. Are we talking about a web server? A file system? A middleware thingy that keeps the flux from overflowing into the space–time continuum?
So, dear OSS developers of the world: When you announce a new release, please give us (your adoring but slightly confused audience) just a tiny bit of context.
Example:
We are proud to announce Flux Capacitor version 4.5 is now avalaible. While it creates a nice wormhole to 1955, it requires an underlying gigawatt stack 1.21 to work reliably.
Because nobody wants to cheer enthusiastically for “v2.7.1” while secretly Googling “what is a glorb and why does it need handling”.
Yours truly,
Someone who wants to celebrate your achievements
