Yay! I just had a 419 scam on Mastodon! (reported and blocked, but: if we're getting the spammers and scammers it means the fediverse has ARRIVED)

"At this point, women have been cleared out of all of the military’s top jobs"

By a former long-time Naval War College professor https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/07/hegseths-purge-of-women-from-us-military-leadership/683631/

Adopt the Juicero or be left behind. A vital shift is underway in juicing. The Juicero is no longer optional. It's tomorrow's future, today. 40% of jobs are impacted by the Juicero. The Juicero isn't the future, it's a present necessity. Nobody hand-juices anymore. To hand-juice is like an impairment. Everyone must now focus on the delegation and the verification of a juice. We become less juice producers and more juice enablers. Adopt the Juicero or be left behind. We are burning every forest and poisoning every river to produce more Juiceros. You will become obsolete if you don't get on the Juicero bandwagon. Students must not be taught how to hand-juice. 80% of jobs will be lost to the Juicero. Students must be taught to exclusively focus on how to collaborate with the Juicero. Education must focus on orchestrating agentic Juicero systems. The Juicero is inevitable. Adopt the Juicero or be left behind. Adapt or risk becoming obsolete. As the Juicero rapidly advances toward automating up to 90% of juicing, the skills that will matter most include juice design, Juicero fluency, juice delegation, and juice quality assurance. 110% of jobs have been replaced by the Juicero.

A brief history of the FBI.

It took a hundred years to create the Bureau as we knew it. And it took one dinner at the White House to destroy it. The purge comes on the heels of a "strategy session" about how to deal with the Epstein fallout that took...
https://jwz.org/b/yks0

Other German states already have them, and now Brandenburg is set to follow suit: randomly selected citizens' assemblies. The state parliament is expected to pass a resolution to this effect in September 2025.

https://www.buergerrat.de/en/news/brandenburg-to-get-citizens-assemblies/

#CitizensAssembly

Today’s stupid robot trick. Replacing an LED in the office. Took a picture of the bulb, and ChatGPT correctly identified it. Went to the supply store and stared at a WALL of bulbs uselessly for (5) minutes. Took a picture of the ENTIRE wall of bulbs, sent to ChatGPT and asked which one I should buy, and, not joking even a little, it correctly said, “Bottom shelf. Third in from the left.”

Welp, that's it for vaccines, then. Great job everybody:

Still eagerly waiting for someone to tell me where I can go meet my local Blade Runner at one of my city's famed Open-Air Drug Markets. I assume COVID vaccines will remain harder to get than heroin...

https://jwz.org/b/ykoV

#WritersCoffeeClub May 7: Share a special location you write in for inspiration.

My home office. (See yesterday's picture.)

Basically, I get distracted too easily if I try and write in public. Beer, coffee, and company are both bad for my focus. After 18 years my office has exactly what I need, where I expect it to be.

(Writing is not about inspiration, writing is just hard office work.)

A New Pope.

Time for a repost of this, I suppose.
https://jwz.org/b/yknW

How to reduce the spread of crypto.
https://jwz.org/b/yknE

I would encourage every Fediverse software project to implement a “dead-man switch" on registrations: if nobody with moderator permissions has been active in the last week, then disable new account creation.

The Fediverse has a significant number of abandoned instances that are used by bad actors to create accounts and send spam.

We implemented this in Mastodon (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/29318) and it has been highly effective.

John Birmingham calls it on Australian defense policy in the election campaign: "our senior alliance partner and preferred arms bazaar is busy having a psychotic break from liberal democracy and may decide that it quite likes being a lowbrow Mad Max reboot held together by sports betting apps, QAnon vibes, and the meth-addled rush of eating itself alive."
https://aus.social/@luciedigitalni/114396139144143517

@brianbilston Lovely stuff. The order of the questions distracted me just enough that I had no chance of seeing the punchline approaching.

To celebrate Shakespeare Day, here’s a poem about being in an exam and panicking that you can’t remember any Shakespeare quotations.

A web browser should *NEVER* be able to look inside your clipboard without an explicit user action (such as ctrl-v). Honestly, this should not be a controversial statement. Microsoft Edge is one of the browsers that ships this dangerous capability. Here is the dialog you need to hunt for to turn this API off.

Die #Strassenbahn Linie 1 in #Linz transportiert im Frühverkehr 11.900 Menschen. Beim aktuellen Besetzungsgrad bräuchte es für 11.900 Personen 10.300 Pkw, die aneinandergereiht auf 3-Spuren eine 15 Kilometer lange Kolonne ergeben würden. Mehr #ÖV, weniger Stau!

The Cringeocracy.

I knew one day I'd have to watch powerful men burn the world down -- I just didn't expect them to be such losers. I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men,...
https://jwz.org/b/ykgf

Well that's a new one on me. I've heard about poorly-written censorship algorithms blanking out people who live in Penistone, or Clitheroe. But now a suburb of Croydon called Coulsdon has been wiped off the face of the planet, or at least wiped off of Facebook.

https://insidecroydon.com/2024/11/08/coulsdon-gets-cancelled-by-facebooks-algorithm-police/

#coulsdon #Croydon #Facebook #Meta

Thought for the day: Truth Social is based on a fork of an old version of Mastodon. It almost certainly doesn't scale up any better than, say, mastodon.social.

So it's probably 20,000 fanatical Trump worshippers and a million mostly-inactive bot accounts that occasionally toot crypto spams.

So Truth Social is basically a Nazi version of Ashley Madison.