My grandmother's old Bernina is far superior to a newly purchased Singer. Less features, but better quality.)

I'm a trans woman who, if anyone ever asks, will give my deadname as a different male name each time. It's been the single fastest way to find people who talk behind my back. If that name leaks I know just who leaked it and just who to instant block forever.

#3183 - Pole Vault Pole

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A black-and-white line comic shows several small diagrams of stick figures and pole-vault equipment. In the top left, a stick figure stands on top of an enormous rolling cylinder (like a huge spool), with motion lines behind it; to the right are two tall uprights with a small horizontal crossbar between them. In the top right, a very long pole bends into a huge arch over another set of uprights and crossbar, with a stick figure clinging to the pole near the top. Along the bottom, the pole is coiled into a big ring rolling like a wheel toward the two tall uprights. A stick figure jumps onto it and clings to the strapped end as it spins, then rides up to the top and lets go, flying toward the uprights. Hidden text: "My goal in life is to be personally responsible for at least one sports rule change."

By @cstross "Barnum's Law of CEOs"
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/12/barnums-law-of-ceos.html

my favorite quote there is "LLMs are effectively optimized for bamboozling CEOs into mistaking them for intelligent activity, rather than autocomplete on steroids."

Well worth reading. #ai #llm #artificialintelligence #autocompleteonsteroids

@ai6yr As with butter in cooking, there's no such thing as too many clamps.

To the people who voted for Trump and now say this isn’t what they voted for.

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everything happens for a reason and sometimes that reason is you're stupid and make bad decisions

I have a new hobby. You see, our local Lidl is where a lot of the refugees in "temporary asylum accommodation" shop. And they are trying to get food that feels like actual food, in a place where there have been some really nasty xenophobic protests.

The other day it was two guys from South Sudan, and I have never seen two such tall, fine people try so hard to be invisible. But they were staring at the.tomatoes and about to buy the big, pretty, tasteless ones. Very carefully I stood next to them and picked up the small, tasty, same-price-or-cheaper ones and said, "these ones taste better." They heard me, but they weren't going to risk a conversation. So I said, to them, "These small tomatoes taste much better." Now they knew I was definitely talking to them, and having a normal market conversation.

"Better?"

"Yes, better, and not expensive. Sudan?"

"Yes! South Sudan." (Guarded smile)

"Welcome! I'm glad you're here. The fruit is better in South Sudan, isn't it?" (Other people are listening now, and see that these two men are far from home and miss home food, and how can someone like that be scary?)

Now we kept talking around the shop. And they straightened up and stood comfortably, and got better, cheaper food.

So that's my new hobby. Being friendly to refugees buying fruit.

Not quite the ad Target thinks it is.

The thing to remember when Marjorie Taylor Greene says the occasional sensible or decent thing these days is that she's demonstrating that she's been capable of being sensible and decent all along, but was deliberately choosing not to be.

Generate a heartwarming advert for your bookshop:

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Title: Heartwarming christmas television advert plot generator for bookshops. (choose one from each column to come up with a sentence) Choices in column 1: A lonely A grumpy A workaholic An elderly A poor Column 2: Book Shop Owner Learns The True Meaning Of Column 3: Literature Christmas Community Wealth Friendship Column 4: With help from a Column 5: Wise Celebrity Magical Kindly Clumsy Column 6: Child Mouse Parsnip Snowman Ghost Additional text below: Just add: twinkly music, wooly jumpers, computer-generated snow, poetry, bells.

Self-hosting does not make your data safe.

If you don't put in place, review, *and test* backup and recovery plans,,and security measures appropriate to the risk, your data are not "safe".

Your data might be less affected by the whims of third parties, which can be valuable for sure, but don't confuse that with your data being "safe".

And I say this as someone who loves self-hosting.

Any "beginners' guide to self-hosting" which doesn't lead with, or at least focus on, security and resiliency, is getting it wrong, IMHO.

#SelfHosting

Reminded (thanks @eyesquash ) of this @dylanbeattie presentation, which makes the details of unicode text encoding *far* more interesting and fun than it has any right to be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd5uJ7Nlvvo

the g in gobject stands for glib, and the g in glib stands for gtk, and the g in gtk stands for gimp, however the g in gimp stands for gnu, so really the g in glib stands for gnu, but you shouldn't confuse it with gnulib, which is developed by the gnu project, who shouldn't be confused as the developers of glib, which is the gnome project, in which the g also stands for gnu

My wife couldn't remember Benedict Cumberbatch's name and called him "scumbly numfkins" and I'm sorry but that's his name now

Million dollar idea: a new telephone signaling protocol so that when I'm put on hold, it signals the music app on my local phone to play my tunes rather than whatever random junk has been badly recorded into their PBX.

Today in 1962, 63 years ago: in the United States, the leader of the majority in the Senate, Mike Mansfield - on his return from Vietnam, where he had traveled at the request of President John F. Kennedy- becomes the first American official to comment adversely against American intervention in the internal affairs of that country.

#OnThisDay

We've all heard the tale of how to own a Nazi bar, i'm fairly sure.

I was drumming up interest in a local board game group i really enjoy, on my local queer Discord server. I got some interest.

Someone on the board games group's server asked "why did you make a point about us being queer friendly?" Not rudely, just curious.

"Because a lot of community groups are invisibly closed to us. We daren't reveal ourselves because of antipathy to queer folk. This place doesn't do that, at all. So i tell people it's safe, and they feel more comfy coming along."

Someone said, "Oh, so it's like the Nazi bar story, only good." I thought for a moment, and they're right. Sort of. Because unlike Nazis, queer folk aren't an invasive species. We don't push people out. Assholes just self-select choosing not to be associated with a bar that's queer-friendly.

Which is fine, system working as designed.

So...how do we tell the tale of the Queer-friendly bar, and the positive feedback loop that can occur when a business is explicitly friendly to queer folk?

Cause I think that could be a simple, true, and effective point about the great difference between choosing to be nice to Nazis instead of queer folk. Or vice versa, being nice to queers and bum-rushing the Nazis.

The Nazi Bar story is one we all know. Anyone got a proposal for how to do a good tale of how the bar got so lively? "Oh, I bought a drink for this gay fella once, and soon there were loads. But they're great guys, and if ya tell them no, they stop bugging ya, which is giving me weird feelings about how I treat women. And we get a lot fewer assholes, too."

Someone? Got a seed for the good story lurking here? I wanna make us some rippin' good properganda.

(At least unlike “Sound and the Fury” you are aware of when the narrator changes.)

#Oops: The seminal paper that has been used for 25 years to justify that the use of #Glyphosate is safe has been retracted.

"Concerns were raised regarding the authorship of this paper, validity of the research findings in the context of misrepresentation of the contributions by the authors and the study sponsor and potential conflicts of interest of the authors. "

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273230099913715

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Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology ELSEVIER Volume 31, Issue 2, April 2000, Pages 117-165 RETRACTED: Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans Gary M. Williams 9 Robert Kroes °, Ian C. Munro © 2 This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal

Whenever I go to museums, I like to pause in front of stuff that definitely isn't art and talk about the "art" and how it makes me feel just to make the other people think they're missing something.

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I initially thought this was a step stool, but now I have no idea what it is. It's like a red metal thing that has a hinge and a shelf? Anyway, it's propped against a white wall in an art museum.

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Vintage light switch with a silver-aluminum/stainless steel switch plate in the corner of an art museum.

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Drinking fountain in a long hall in an art museum

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Restroom entrance in an art museum. There appears to have been some flooding in the past because the light wood floors have some water damage and staining.

Thank you Past Me for writing the breaker on the back of the light switch cover

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Light switch with the cover off, with “breaker 19” written in marker on the back of the cover

”Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” – Dale Carnegie

#quotes

Four bendy buses managed to enter a roundabout at the exact same time from four different directions in Oslo yesterday afternoon and get properly stuck, each bus blocking the exit for the one behind it. #BigBusStuck

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A scene showing four red bendy buses making up a squarw around a small roundabout. There are cars trapped inside them and long lines on the two visible sides going into the roundabout. Photo was found in Avisa Oslo, a local newspaper, and was sent them by a guy named Endre Helgeland.

(That is what I do for all of my extra fresh chiles when I hit up the Mexican and Asian markets here and buy too much.)

The problem with fact checking...

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Text in image reads:- I think this is all best summed up by a comment on a random right-wing typepad post from 2022 that has weirdly been making the rounds as a meme on social media lately but that is not satire, as far as I can tell, and is a genuine thought someone had. Username Right side rick says: “Unfortunately, the problem with left-leaning media is they’re intrinsically more strict with their propaganda to only using verifiable sources so it’s really hard to poke holes in their ideology and arguments in comparison to a lot of quality rightwing content. That makes attacking their points with fact checkers not very effective unless their fact checkers use misinformation tactics as well. In essence people like us on the right have to work harder and more creatively to push our agenda as statistics and, unfortunately, official studies aren’t usually on our side.” Oop! Right side rick, I think you just said the quiet part out loud buddy. But good job identifying the problem. Source https://www.leejamiller.com/episodes/2025/1/8/fact-checking-is-bad-for-business

If I had a child today I would probably name it Inspirational Skeletor.