@carbon_compound I very nearly used "bullshit" in my post, then realized that bullshit is more of a solution than a problem in gardening 😹

You know those plant nutrient deficiency charts that gardening sites are spinning like the next best thing since sliced bread? Well, life advice: ignore them! They don't reflect reality that's happening in your garden and on your windowsill at all and are even dangerous for your plants' health if you follow them.

How, you may ask? Well, let's take e.g. discoloration, breaking and dropping of leaf buds. Those are meant to be signs of boron deficiency, right? Fine, it's probably even true but the danger is in completely ignoring the true cause of it because in my experience in nearly all cases it's down to emerging spider mite infestation. They will lay eggs into those buds to protect them and the larvae that emerge from them from other predators and the elements. And they will inject into the stem next to those buds hormones that slow the plant's growth so those buds remain closed for as long as possible. That's the true cause of those signs of "boron deficiency" and it'll ruin your plants completely, if you wait for them to uptake that fancy new (and probably expensive) micronutrient solution that you bough for them.

And other signs of nutrient deficiency can be equally dangerous to misidentify the true cause of. Many of them can be caused by poor root health which can be also due to fungus gnat larvae or other pests even if you never over-water, just like you were taught to. Taught by sales people, and never forget that! Sales people whose job isn't keeping your plants healthy but selling you as many expensive solutions to your problems as they possibly can, be they beneficial to your plants' health or not. To them it's about profits, and to you it's about health. Those two have never in the history of mankind mixed well, and you bloody well know it.

So the takeaway is, if you care about your plants at all, to stop listening to sales people and ask experienced gardeners instead. Call your parents, or maybe your grandparents if you're lucky enough to still have them. Or your neighbors, or anyone else that you can think of that cares, will not try to convince you into nonsensical "advice" catering their own self-interests while neglecting or even abusing yours, and who knows, maybe you'll even heal more than just your plants along the way.

Oh, and if you're curious about AI's use in this, well, were those AIs built and trained by true philanthropists for the purpose of spreading their inexhaustible altruism far and wide, or were they built and trained by just another bunch of sales people? I'll let you answer that for yourself.

@mustapipa Oh that's OK, the more they launch the faster LEO will clean itself up through the process known as the Kessler syndrome. At 1M objects at proposed altitudes and assuming equidistant, uniformly filled shell deployment, mean separation between them is only 100 km (assuming tighter orbital parameters only makes this separation smaller still). This might sound plenty but consider average orbital speed of ~7.25 km/s at proposed altitude range and they only get on average ~14 seconds reaction time to adjust their vectors for collision avoidance. Basically, one unfortunate collision with the tiniest of space debris, or micrometeoroids, or a complex CME and the Earth gets evanescent rings of fine metallic powder and one hell of a light show ;)

SpaceX filed an application with the US Federal Communications Commission for a megaconstellation of up to one million #satellites to power data centres in #space.

The proposal envisions satellites operating between 500 and 2,000 kilometres in low Earth #orbit. Some of the orbits are designed for near-constant exposure to sunlight.

The approval process for these satellites focuses almost entirely on the limited technical info companies have to submit to regulators.

Cultural, spiritual, and most #environmental impacts aren’t taken into account – but they should be.

At this scale of growth, the night #sky will change permanently and globally for generations to come.

In 2021, astronomers estimated that in less than a decade, 1 in every 15 points of light in the night sky would be a moving satellite. That estimate only included the 65 000 #megaconstellation satellites proposed at the time.

Once deployed at a scale of millions, the impacts on the night sky may not be easily reversed.

#astronomy
https://theconversation.com/too-many-satellites-earths-orbit-is-on-track-for-a-catastrophe-but-we-can-stop-it-275430

@RockerDoc Do know that this was generated by AI, trained to impersonate the Nobel laureate and one of the greatest physicists and lecturers of the 20th century. It is literally abusing your trust in one of the most recognizable, trusted and respected voices in #science to spread its AI slop. Physics that it tries to promote is unimaginative, poorly formulated and all too often plain wrong. #SpottheAIslop

Give a MAGAt an aneurysm. It's public service.

#TurdReich #MAGAts #BadBunny #PuertoRico #USPol

The US becomes a Petri dish.

#Measles #RFK #Health #Maga #USA #vaccines #Science #immigration

Tickets! Now! -> https://tickets.bsidesljubljana.si

#BSidesLjubljana #tickets

Every. Single. Country. but us.

#TimesUp

I can’t believe we’re doing this again. It’s just a bot that generates the text you ask it for. If you put it in charge of critical decisions, it will kill people. Not because it’s secretly evil, but because it’s a word generator. It’s like putting your toaster in charge of air traffic control.

Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !

You know the drill by now. I don't like talking about Black history. Americans know Black history. I want to talk about white American history. In other words, racism, and the erasure of both positive achievements of, and injustices suffered by, non-white people. That's what people don't know.

Try this: Ask your white US friends what the statue of liberty celebrates.

Now ask your Black friends. Or French folk of any color.

1/N

#BlackMastodon

#SilentSunday #snow #photography

I said it really clearly last night - you can't stop. You have to keep attacking. This shit happening today in Minneapolis is the Gestapo throwing a fit. Trump didn't give up Bovino because he wanted to... you have them on the run, so you gotta get Noem and Miller too; frankly the whole DHS apparatus. You can't stop even if they pull out of Minneapolis because you know they're Nazis, you know they think anyone who opposes them deserves to die, and you know this isn't over.

@patrickhadfield I guess Young thought the US cannot keep on rockin' in a free world anymore https://youtu.be/DvxxdZpMFHg

"Neil Young gifts Greenland free access to his music and withdraws it from Amazon over Trump."
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jan/27/neil-young-gifts-music-greenland-removes-from-amazon-over-trump?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

We knew this was coming, but now the clock is running. From Privacy International:

"Yesterday the Trump Administration announced a proposed change in policy for travellers to the U.S. It applies to the powers of data collection by the Customs and Border Police (CBP)."

"If the proposed changes are adopted after the 60-day consultation, then millions of travellers to the U.S. will be forced to use a U.S. government mobile phone app, submit their social media from the last five years and email addresses used in the last ten years, including of family members. They’re also proposing the collection of DNA."

PI linked to and summarized a Federal Register entry describing the proposed requirements:

-All visitors must submit ‘their social media from the last 5 years’

-ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) applications will include ‘high value data fields’, ‘when feasible’
‘telephone numbers used in the last five years’
-‘email addresses used in the last ten years’
-‘family number telephone numbers (sic) used in the last five years’
-biometrics – face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris
-business telephone numbers used in the last five years
-business email addresses used in the last ten years.

https://www.privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5713/trump-administration-wants-your-dna-and-social-media

The Federal Register entry says comments are encouraged and
must be submitted (no later than February 9, 2026) to be assured of consideration.

Federal Register entry: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-12-10/pdf/2025-22461.pdf

Do you want Mastodon to automatically hide certain kinds of posts?

Or do you want Mastodon to automatically place certain kinds of posts behind a content warning that you can click open?

You can do both of these things by using Mastodon's filters feature. Filters lets you automatically hide posts with particular words, phrases, hashtags, links or emoji in them. More info on how to create and use filters in the guide at:

➡️ https://fedi.tips/filtering-your-timeline-to-hide-posts-on-mastodon

#FediTips #Mastodon

I wonder if anyone else can spot eerie resemblance to Jagger's "Strange Game" with this 45 years older one:

https://youtu.be/v9FkQLjOSZ8?list=RDv9FkQLjOSZ8

@inthehands as a veteran, I find the appropriation of military motifs by civil law enforcement extremely offensive, but also incredibly dangerous.

A particularly egregious example, that I wish people would address more often, is the use of the word "civilians" to describe people that are not whatever strain of police is using the term. "Civilians" refers to people within the general civil populace, as opposed to the military. The police (in all their various forms) are members of the civil society, and as such, civilians themselves.

Words have meaning, and those meanings matter. When we allow these subtle shifts in language, we normalize the militarization of police forces nationwide, but more than that, we reinforce the self-image of the police as separate from the rest of civil society. And history shows that when people view themselves as apart from civil society, they often see themselves unbeholden to the norms and ethics that govern civil society.

One can draw a pretty straight line from that to these guys cosplaying soldier, wearing full tactical gear, riding on MRAPs and HMMWVs, assault rifles on their shoulders like the movies, belt-fed automatic weapons mounted on turrets in the background for Kristi Noem's photo-ops. We, collectively, should have never let anyone get away with normalizing this from the second it started. Yet how many articles does one read in the press where no one ever bothers challenging a cop when they refer to the people that they've supposedly sworn to protect and serve as "civilians", as if they, themselves, are not?