Please weigh your heart against this feather to prove you are not a robot

There's still this widespread misconception that the EU mandates cookie banners on all websites, and that is just plainly untrue.

Most websites do need a few cookies to function properly. And those are perfectly fine according to EU legislation. It is only the malicious cookies for tracking purposes that require consent.

All those cookie banners you see on the web are examples of malicious compliance with EU law. The operators of these websites want to track everything you do because they want to earn money off of that. That's why they implemented technically unnecessary cookies, and that's why they have to ask your consent when you visit their website.

The important takeaway is: the EU regulation isn't the problem. The profit motive is. And the shitty things it makes profit-oriented companies do.

one in four animals on the planet earth is a beetle. think of your three closest friends. if none of them are beetles, statistically speaking you are probably a beetle.

I declare that today, Nov. 19, 2025 is the 50th anniversary of BitBLT, a routine so fundamental to computer graphics that we don't even think about it having an origin. A working (later optimized) implementation was devised on the Xerox Alto by members of the Smalltalk team. It made it easy to arbitrarily copy and move arbitrary rectangles of bits in a graphical bitmap. It was this routine that made Smalltalk's graphical interface possible. Below is part of a PARC-internal memo detailing it:

Beavers are really important.

After the huge wildfires in Oregon in 2022, a biologist went out to survey the damage. Not only were the forests blackened, thriving trout populations in the streams were gone, choked to death by ash. “I was in total shock. It just looked like devastation.”

Then he stumbled upon something even more surprising: roughly five acres of pristine greenery in an otherwise burned-out area! At the center were eight active beaver dams.

But this was more than a refuge from the fire. While fish had disappeared upstream of these dams, the downstream water was crystal clear — and trout were thriving as though the fire had never happened! The beaver dams were acting as a water treatment plant.

[Paraphrased from this article: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/beaver-dams-help-wildfire-ravaged-ecosystems-recover-long-after-flames-subside/]

I hope this email finds you with an extraordinary amount of energy.

they killed god and replaced her with an autocomplete and a subscription model and the devil does not haunt this world anymore because our souls are no longer worth taking

Really nice list of "today-I-learned" facts about HTML/CSS/JS from Manuel Matuzović:

https://www.matuzo.at/til

Among other things on the list it taught me about the existence of the "nullish coalescing operator" in JS, wild.

The list hasn't been updated since 2023 but just in case you want to track, here's the RSS feed of those posts: https://www.matuzo.at/feed_til.xml

"If you're not on board with AI you're going to get left behind"

Boost if you'd like to be left behind and would consider paying extra for a life without this bullshit.

😀 🦖

little experiment by drawing lots of curves connecting points along tree graphs (a bit hard to explain, there is no randomness or noise)

A reminder that people didn’t stop dying of covid: we gave up trying to count deaths in 2022 and mostly gave up on even estimating deaths when we hit around 30 million dead in 2024

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-economist-single-entity

The insurance companies are keeping it honest tho

https://www.swissre.com/institute/research/topics-and-risk-dialogues/health-and-longevity/covid-19-pandemic-synonymous-excess-mortality.html

While US venture capitalists were buying monkey jpegs, and DOGE coins, and figuring out how to get Black women fired, and tweeting about white birthrates, and trying to mandate which bathroom trans kids should use, China was making progress on climate change and taking the lead in a real industry.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/11/06/chinas-clean-energy-revolution-will-reshape-markets-and-politics

"The world" has already taken the win. Every country *except the US*🤡 now has access to cheaper power, cheaper cars, non-polluting buses, less dependence on coal and oil, which means slightly less geopolitical instability based on the price of oil.

Oh, and as a side effect, will produce less C02.

A11y is about the least accessible way of writing 'accessibility' possible. A-11-letters-Y is not enough information to go on unless you've already been primed to understand it. It's aesthetically (a11y) ugly, astonishingly (a11y) pretentious, and has just this awful whiff of artificiality (a11y) about it. In an age where machines will automatically (a11y) type entire words out for you using the shorthand is aggravatingly (a11y) lazy and unintuitive.

Quite frankly it strains acceptability (a11y). I don't think that this numeronym is being used appropriately (a11y).

I do enjoy how excited the geese sound in fall. They just honk-honk-honk and I have no way of knowing their internal state (maybe they have road rage?) but I like to think of them as like "Awww, yeah! Flying in a V! Going This way! Awesome!"

Passports didn’t list sex until the 1970s when governments around the world stated freaking out about men with long hair and unisex clothes. Now we pretend like this was some always set, eminently important thing that must carry value. We only got it as enforcement of binary gender.

#Meme #Humour

Why reactive moderation isn't going to cut it, aka, "The Sucker-punch Problem".

Imagine you invite your friend—let's call him Mark—to a club with you. It's open-door, which is cool, because you like when a lot of folx show up. Sure, it might get a little rowdy, but they have a bouncer, and you've never seen things getting out of hand.

So, you're busy dancing when a new guy walks in wearing a "I Hate Mark" shirt and promptly sucker-punches Mark. You didn't see it happen, but Mark is upset and tells the bouncer, who kicks the guy out.

A few minutes later, the same guy walks back in and sucker-punches Mark again. Same result. Some people in the club say they'll tell the bouncer if they see him come in again.

Mark wants to leave, but you tell him it's not that bad—after all, you've never been punched, and you didn't see Mark get punched, so maybe he's just being sensitive.

A different guy walks in wearing a "I Plan On Punching Mark" shirt. No one tells the bouncer, because they've never seen *this* guy punch Mark.

He sucker-punches Mark. At this point, Mark is pissed and yelling about being punched.

The club members talk about putting up a "No Punching Mark" sign, but the owner is worried it'll hurt his club's growth.

Another Mark in the club proposes they turn away anyone wearing an anti-Mark shirt or espousing anti-Mark rhetoric at the door, but this gets shot down for the same reason as the sign idea—then someone sucker-punches him.

By the end of the night, your friend Mark is beat to fuck and says he'll never come to this club again. In fact, he's going to tell anyone named Mark to stay clear of this place.

The next time you go to the club, half the folx there are wearing "I Kill Marks" shirts, but there aren't any Marks there, so it doesn't come up.

I've been sucker-punched every day, for the last three days in a row by some of the most vile hate-speech and imagery. The accounts are using open registration servers and signing up with variations on the username "heilhitler1488". I fully expect it'll continue as long as we have open registration servers.

And no, username pattern blocking alone won't fix this, it'll help a little, but mostly it'll just make them wear a different shirt while they sucker-punch us.

#OpenRegistrationHurts

Blood test developed that can diagnose ME/CFS with 96% accuracy. Links to long Covid found. Epigenetic connection confirmed (it's how the test works).

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/11/251102205021.htm

HT @bamboy

#MECFS #LongCovid #ChronicIllness