Periodic self-repetition: As a data librarian I can say that "AI" is not a matter of personal preference -- whether you like it or not, or whether you have found some use that you think is useful. It actively destroys organized knowledge, and therefore it actively destroys civilization.
Whenever someone looks for a human written text and can't find it because statistical near variants have been created and indexed, whenever "AI" "hallucinates" a reference, knowledge has been destroyed.
My new post on LinkedIn with data from a new research study that finds illnesses and workforce exits remain elevated above pre-pandemic #COVID19 levels.
- We now have a higher year-round baseline for work absences that resembles the levels we only used to see during flu season before 2020.
- Labor force exits after a health-related absence also continued to be elevated, with 13.1% more exits in the postpandemic period compared with before the pandemic.
Ok bunnies, your time is up. above: Psalm 56:12 ‘Exaltare super celos deus, et super omnem terram gloria tua’ ('Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: let thy glory be above all the earth’). Queen Mary Psalter, London 1310-1320. British Library, Royal 2 B VII, fol. 156r.
#medieval #MedievalArt
Let’s talk about AI art.
I can't keep up with reality, it's clearly beyond satire and taking the piss now: Palantir, whose UK CEO is the grandson of the notorious fascist founder of the British Union of Fascists, and whose Trump-adjacent leader has the knives out for democracy, backs away from key Starmer policy on digital ID cards, fearing *reputational damage* from being associated with something "Too Evil even for Palantir":
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/starmer-hit-major-blow-tech-36013892
Watching Hegseth and Trump today, I'm struck by their superficial concept of masculinity. It's so obvious they are terrified of being perceived as weak, so they convey a cartoonish version of masculinity that emphasizes anger, violence, and intimidation. But in your life, the most masculine men you know are confident, courageous, and independent. Men who put others down and strut around like puffed-up peacocks only project their fear and frailty. They are the least masculine men on the planet.
@cstross I was a little confused when I heard this proposal, don’t they already have a digital ID app I thought. Yes they do but only for non-citizen residents in the UK, which I was for about two decades. Almost 18 months ago I was informed I had (no option) to create a UKVI digital account to prove my right to work or rent in the UK, which obviously I did. I was uneasy about it but when you are a non-citizen in the UK you get used to being every politician’s whipping boy with constant threats to have whatever rights you have taken away if that will get a cheer on social media that day. I fairly soon after did get my UK citizenship and paper British passport; promptly deleted the UKVI prove-you-can-work app. What confuses me is that the government is saying this will change anything for non-citizens and how they prove their right to work — nope, the almost exact same system already exists for those folks and any abuse of that existing system will also exist in any renamed version of it, surely. This whole thing smells of performative politics.
Whenever you see someone recommend Cloudflare or something else that decrypts and re-encrypts TLS for something, esp. for something related to open social media or media storage etc., reply with this picture from the Snowden leaks
…What could go wrong go with Your Party hitching its signups to a database run by an
“Austin, Texas-based provider of cloud-based enterprise work-management software” that “reported a fourth-quarter loss of $3.4 million” in March?
I mean, who wouldn’t want to start a left-wing revolution based on data storage with a company that’ll go down the tubes when the AI bubble bursts and is in the meantime headquartered in Donald Trump’s proto-fascist country?
Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released 30 years ago today.
This version introduced a number of new features:
• Plugins! This was the first time a web page could make sound, via RealAudio.
• Incremental display of progressive JPEGs on slow dialup connections.
• Animated GIFs that were actually useful.
• HTML frames.
• JavaScript! That wasn't my fault, but you still have my apologies.
• And of course my baby, the first release of Netscape Mail and News:
❝It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”❞
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/charlie-kirk-assassination-maga/
Me: I've read thousands of medical studies and tracked data on infections, Long COVID, disabilities, and illnesses, and I think you should be concerned about COVID reinfections.
Too many of my friends: Well, I've read absolutely nothing, and I think you're wrong.
🙄
@alda As a nuclear engineer, I have never been asked to show my portfolio of reactor designs I maintain in my free time, I have never been asked to derive the six-factor formula, the quantization of angular momentum, Brehmsstrahlung, or to whiteboard gas centrifuge isotopic separation, water hammer, hydrogen detonation, or cross-section resonance integrals.
There's something deeply wrong with an industry that presumes you're a fraud unless repeatedly and performatively demonstrated otherwise and treats the hiring process as a demented form of 80s-era fraternity hazing.
I really think more people should have been tipped off by the fact that this hollow-eyed ghoul looks like an "after" from Evil Dead.
https://jwz.org/b/ykuO
Three small announcements:
1. RFC 9839, a guide to which Unicode characters you should never use: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9839.html
2. Blog piece with background and context, “RFC 9839 and Bad Unicode”: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/08/14/RFC9839
3. A little Go library that implements 9839’s exclusion subsets: https://github.com/timbray/RFC9839
Healthy life style. Cartoon from 2023.
@jplebreton @mhoye the fact that we wiped out a strain of the flu in 2020 due to COVID precautions and that didn't make everyone stand up and take note and ask why we shouldn't work to eliminate the rest (as well as the common cold) is pretty damning of society.
Rate my battlestation!
This is a Sony Anycast Station AWS-G500HD from 2007. It's essentially a Sony luggable PIII 933Mhz PC that runs Linux 2.4.20 with a ton of FPGAs to do the heavy lifting of a video switcher. Plus glorious physical buttons, faders, dials, and removable keyboard. Oh, and a jog wheel.
Email addresses are very simple, and you will score highly in this quiz.
