It's like, suddenly, the world around us is full of millions of microcults, each with its own understanding of language, and its own secret interpretation of common actions.

@vidak @screwlisp @stunder Yeah, most likely some of the anxiety is from that. I don't have much of an academic background. I also think that the solution to these problems might more properly be political, rather than technical. It feels like there may be a sort of ineffective, individualist/libertarian tendency to approaching these problems as if writing the right bit of software might solve them, and I guess I worry about falling into that tendency a lot these days.

OH RIGHT

while yall are investgating alternate browsers, STAY AWAY FROM BRAVE

• run by homopobe and financial backer of other homophobes Brendan Eich

• crypto is all over the fucking thing. they drip feed users tiny amounts of crypto for unblocking certain ads and fill the home screen with crypto trackers and shit

• they "block ads" but inject their own affiliate links into sites you view

this is not the browser youre looking for

@chrisamaphone @neauoire I can guess at some reasons, based partially on my own. I began going because I figured that it would be harder to injure myself, absent a trainer, with machines than w/ weights or sport. Advertising for gyms is a lot more prevalent, too, and barrier to entry is lower. Years ago, my big box gym membership was $9 a month, and I could wander in and get sweaty at any time, without any technical training.

I probably *was* doing things that would have led to injury, granted.

The destruction of #Palestine is breaking the world

The rules of the institutions that define our lives bend like reeds when it comes to Israel – so much that the whole global order is on the verge of collapse

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/jul/06/destruction-of-palestine-is-breaking-the-world

#142holdheap

@lykso @vidak @jlamothe
I talked to @aral here:
https://communitymedia.video/w/kTjUgHSYCZsJwucUPVoLgx
Aral's Kitten uses a nodejs server and websockets to provide live access to clientside html and html slots.

I'm going to be talking to @thegibson around HOPE about Veilid. Veilid is our local onion routed ad hoc social media cum content addressed storage (that's live.).
Solves a different problem to Kitten, where people basically run local websites, and the occasional public website is effectively a communication gateway.

Ah, this is getting a lot of attention pretty quickly, at least by my standards. Maybe I should write a post expanding on my thoughts. They will be half-baked and a bit unfocused, I promise, but maybe you will find them interesting.

Edit: All I could write in 10 minutes: http://lyk.so/human-web.html

@vidak I worry also that maybe I'm over-inclined toward technical solutions where they may not be appropriate because that's where my skillset lies. Maybe I'm approaching the problem all wrong because I'm positioned wrong?

I dunno.

Can't really get anywhere without struggling with this in one way or another, anyway.

I've got a problem where I want to shore up the "human web," but my brain can't settle on a shape for a solution. I start out thinking "web of trust, but better somehow," then "could this just be a network of TLS-signed blogrolls?" And then "what about secure communication away from crawlers and AI bros? Should there be a private network/walled garden attached to this somehow?"

I probably don't know exactly the problem I'm trying to solve. Seems to be several overlapping ones.

"We often have to charge an investigation fee to find out what has gone wrong, as they don't want to admit it," she told the broadcaster, "and the process of correcting these mistakes takes much longer than if professionals had been consulted from the beginning."

Companies That Tried to Save Money With AI Are Now Spending a Fortune Hiring People to Fix Its Mistakes
https://futurism.com/companies-fixing-ai-replacement-mistakes

Just a reminder that any time someone online is exhorting you to espouse, plan, or threaten violence publicly online, that's suspicious behavior to me. That's Fed behavior.

I used to think packaged pre-cut veg at the supermarket was for lazy people.

Then a disabled person pointed out it was a lifeline for them because they lived alone and couldn’t cut it up themselves most days.

I had never even considered that. It changed my perspective and I think from then on when something seems “lazy” I always ask myself “is this just accessible?”
And it’s nearly always the latter.

It’s not hard to listen to someone when they say something is not accessible and it’s not difficult to shift your perspective.
I don’t know why so many people won’t.

Whenever I mention that boycotting is a privilege, I inevitably get people trying to explain how wrong I am.

How “easy” it is to find alternatives.

How “important” it is not to support big businesses like Amazon.

How “lazy” it is not to shop local.

They talk over me, condescend and accuse me of not fighting for the cause.

Disabled people need your support and solidarity.

We’re all in this fight together.

When we tell you something is inaccessible, believe us.

Most of us already feel guilty we can’t do more, but there’s many things that aren’t “easy” for us.

Survival is resistance. It’s not “lazy” to utilize a service that will keep you alive.

Fight the fascists. Not one another.

We Also Broke Into an Airbase to Stop War Crimes. Thankfully, We Were Two Nice White Boys.

https://novaramedia.com/2025/06/27/we-also-broke-into-an-airbase-to-stop-war-crimes-thankfully-we-were-two-nice-white-boys/

#gaza #GazaHolocaust #Freepalestine #FuckIsrael

I can't think of any better way to achieve extremely high lossless compression for human text. I'm imagining trying to send the familial communication for a city of people over an extremely low bandwidth link like the spinning-pathfinder-head in the film The Martian.

Here's that mug, glazed and fired. First time in while. Got some crawling and pitting.

The lump next to it is my toddler's creation. He's calling it his rock. :D
#pottery

Tesla's so-called "autopilot" turns off automatically a fraction of a second before a crash, so the driver might be blamed even though the driver has no time to respond. (It's been that way for more than a year since originally publicly documented by the NHTSA, this is clearly a choice someone made.)

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jul/05/the-vehicle-suddenly-accelerated-with-our-baby-in-it-the-terrifying-truth-about-why-teslas-cars-keep-crashing

(This is just one example out of many terrible things in their software.)

And while Tesla management clearly just loves doing terrible things, an individual engineer implemented this.

You don't want to be that engineer:

1. It's immoral, and a dereliction of your professional duty.
2. If your action ever goes to court, there will be some very expensive lawyers trying their best to make you the scapegoat and claim you are either incompetent or malicious, but you very definitely did this on your own.

When Volkswagen cheated on emissions, the CEO blamed... the engineers: "This was not a corporate decision, from my point of view, and to my best knowledge today. This was a couple of software engineers who put this in for whatever reason... some people have made the wrong decisions in order to get away with something that will have to be found out." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal#US_Congressional_Testimony,_October_2015).

And most of the time the things you'll be asked to do aren't as bad. I know someone who was asked by their manager to put a CE mark on products that were from the non-CE factory. These devices weren't safety critical, this wasn't going to kill anyone. But it's still fraud, and the incentive was still there for the company to make this engineer the scapegoat.

The engineer said "no"... and that was the end of it. Sometimes that's all it takes to enforce standards.

If "no" isn't enough, asking for something in writing (signed and dated) is a good next step. Chances are that will be the end of it, and meanwhile you can start looking for a new job.

Be careful not to buy too many art supplies. You could have an excess stencil crisis.

Okay, I've mentioned this a few times, but let's talk about The Orange Alternative. It's Poland in the 80's and an art history student noticed that when someone would paint an anti-authoritarian message, it would very quickly get painted over by the government. He decided to paint a dwarf with an orange hat any time he'd see the white paint that covered these messages. Soon other people were doing the same. They embraced this kind of absurdism, what the government was doing was ridiculous, so they leaned into it. The paintings of dwarves soon became organized street parties. They would all wear orange pointy hats and walk through the streets with banners, chanting Dwarf Dwarf Dwarf! They would pool what little extra funds they had together and buy things that people needed like toliet paper and tampons, and would have street fairs with food and dancing, and hand them out. At Christmas, they would dress as Santas, and do the same. The police were flummoxed by what to do, if they arrested people for wearing hats and giving out tampons, they looked foolish and would be embarrassed, not sure what to do with these surreal forms of protest.

There is so much more to this, definitely read up on it, but it was an effective form of protest, creating community, spreading joy and absurdism, because authoritarian governments are absurd. Protests are going to look like a lot of different things, and this is just one of them.

In Russia, they have created Little Picketers, tiny rough clay figures holding banners, that they press into people's hands to remind them, that they aren't alone.

So, don't believe the propaganda, you aren't alone in caring, you aren't alone in wanting a different world, put on your goofiest hat, and let people know they aren't alone either.