#solstice #humour #humor

When the AI techbros are finally hauled up on charges and asked if they are guilty, their only options for reply should be "yes" or "maybe later".

It's that time of year again when the sedums start outcompeting the mosses. Always interesting to see. Later in the season, when the days become less sunny, it's the other way around, mosses take over again. The result is an evergreen garden spiral that changes with the light.

I created it years ago, back when I had no gardening experience at all. It's still my favorite feature in my garden. It’s what taught me how to garden, and to enjoy it too!

#foreverWIP #WIP #gardening #mosstodon

The death of physical media was accelerated by the insecure housing situation of young people. A big CD /DVD collection is a lot less fun if you have to move it between flats every 12 months.

A thing I've seen sci-fi/fantasy writers do a few times now is, write a few books with one set of protagonists, and then get them married and continue the story with their kids. It's always jarring, and it feels like an admission that the writer is out of ideas. That's not to say I've never seen it done well, but half the fun of reading a series is continuing with the same characters.

got an email advising me that there's a class action settlement for Criterion subscribers because Criterion was telling third parties (incl. Meta) what we were watching, which violated the Don't Tell Anyone What Videos Robert Bork Rented law

and it's indicative of how fucked American internet privacy generally is that my first reaction was "oh, I assumed it was my credit card info or something, this is hardly a big deal" 🫠

God, this bubble burst is going to be so brutal

Grey kitten living the life of luxury in the bedroom 🐱💖 #fosterkittens #cats #catsofmastodon

A few weeks after adding a monitor, trackball, and keyboard to my 5-year-old notebook, it still feels like I bought a new computer

Pontificating in the shower drain of languages.

Scotland made buses free for under 23s and it's driven record attendance at soccer games and a decade+ reduction in average age of attendees.

Free public transport has huge ramifications for society and the economy.

Ah, okay, so your order is one coffee and your order is a coffee, and you have the two coffees, and you have the three coffees, and you have the *five* coffees, and you have the *eight* coffees-

We're better than 25 years out from Dolly the cloned sheep and a number of other exuberant announcements about genetics research. How many genetic diseases have we cured in adults at this point?

a par­ent said she was not send­ing her son to cam­pus for the final days of classes for fear of hav­ing him snatched by ICE agents. She’s not mak­ing this up: the city’s top school offi­cial has taken pre­cau­tions to pre­vent ICE agents from round­ing up stu­dents at their gradu­ation cere­mon­ies this week.

The fam­ily is in the US leg­ally, but this does not guar­an­tee safety. “ICE is tak­ing cit­izens too. Stay Safe,” says graf­fiti scrawled on a lamp­post near where our fruit-selling friend sets up his stand. The graf­fiti writer is cor­rect.

“The fed­eral gov­ern­ment has taken Amer­ican cit­izens into cus­tody — not just undoc­u­mented people,” our dis­trict’s coun­cil­lor wrote to his con­stitu­ents at the week­end. “People are being dis­ap­peared and given no access to their fam­ily or a law­yer.”

2/3

@jeffjarvis

Interesting fact: When did the first doctor notice asbestos caused lung problems?

Two-thousand-fucking-years-ago. A Roman doctor noticed the slaves in the asbestos mines all died young of lung disease.

*sigh*

I haven't really watched the local TV news in a while.

Now that I have... I don't think I'll be complaining about the ads on Youtube anymore.

"ah yes I see you don't have any money currently, we're gonna have to charge you more money for that"

@tusk81 Keeping America safe from high school volleyball players

“The detainees began to notice that Gomes Da Silva spoke English, Spanish and Portuguese. The teenager said he became a translator for those in the holding cell. They brought him papers and he explained to them what they meant, he told MassLive.”

https://www.masslive.com/worcester/2025/06/god-has-a-plan-milford-teen-says-faith-gave-him-strength-during-ice-detainment.html

Here’s what else I found:

— There is some research showing that AI tends to overuse certain words, like "delve" and "meticulous." But this is based on looking at hundreds of thousands of papers and can't really tell you anything about one piece of writing. Don't stop using these words!

— Software-based AI detectors are also quite bad at what they're supposed to do.

— Marginalized groups are far more likely to be falsely accused of having used AI in their writing, and this causes real harm.