Notices by Valerie Aurora (vaurora@wandering.shop), page 3

There are a lot of ducks, too! They're super cute and you can see a lot more of the gradation of sizes here

"At that point, legal questions or analysis of company actions becomes secondary, because [social media companies like Meta and X] are no longer seeking to win in court, but to make themselves politically untouchable."

Good analysis of Meta's recent changes by @AugustB arguing that focusing on the specifica of policy changes and the DSA, etc. misses the point: these companies see an opportunity to get hard power through corruption

https://bourniquelaw.com/2025/01/13/facebooks-new-villain-arc/

LLMs are a near-perfect rentier technology. The cost of training them to the point where they're even marginally useful is so prohibitive that only people with very deep pockets can do it. The goal then is to make us all reliant on them, by shoehorning them into as many products as possible.

And it doesn't matter whether or not we actually need them if products won't work without them.

My corporate training business email somehow ended up on a radiation safety spam list and I'm not even mad? I replied and asked if they have anything a hobbyist can afford

@paulknightly my Philips Sonicare is still going strong after 7 years (with brush head replacements). The error a lot of people make is recharging it after every use; instead put the charger in a drawer and only pull it out when the toothbrush requests charging

@matuzo I think you have your priorities straight!

The other -- you know I'm always going to recommend Cheryan! -- it's Cheryan & Markus (2022): Masculine Defaults: Identifying and Mitigating Hidden Cultural Biases

https://psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2020-59614-001.pdf

While working on my emergency preparedness here in Amsterdam, I started looking for a backpack to carry stuff in an evacuation, and then realized I will almost certainly be riding my bike! Emergency evacuation hits different in a city with 1.9 bicycles per person

@kf this is such a great idea!

@Aphrodite @dx @pikhq DAFT worked for me. It's surprisingly easy!

@baldur this sounds familiar - the newsletter pace preventing you from thinking about bigger questions while also not helping with business. One pattern in my life is avoiding bigger questions by inventing work for myself that doesn't help me (and often doesn't help others). Stopping that was really hard and admire you for the newsletter pause

I have succeeded in creating an account using English on the European version of the domain registrar, but now I have to wait out the rest of the 60 day waiting period before I can move my domains again

Lesson learned: assume there might be a non-EU version of the EU service with identical branding and UI and don't accidentally sign up to that version instead 🙄

@Fiona @nevali names of my favorite Nabokov books

Arrrgh does anyone have a recommendation for a hugo theme that is very very simple (no sass or npm etc), text-centric, responsive, and accessible? I am trying to move off Wordpress for this site:

https://frameshiftconsulting.com/

🤦♀️ When I clicked on the "EN" language version, it redirected me to the Canadian version of their services. Now inquiring if I can get customer support/web UI in English with an account from their EU-based entity. I'll still do it if I can't, just need to figure out how I can order my services from the entity I want

Alternating between moving a web site from Wordpress to hugo and revising a horror story involving Santa and feeling good about my life choices

@sophieschmieg @projectgus makes me yearn for the days of programmers merely believing that SHA-1 would never be broken

Continuing my migration off US-hosted/owned infrastructure. Somehow the domain registrar I chose because it is EU-hosted/owned is using nameservers with a .ca TLD and all my customer service and billing is also coming from .ca addresses??? 😑

Come on, you fuckers, knock it off, this is embarrassing https://mastodon.social/@appleinsider/113766618970266062

@vicgrinberg "Estrogen Matters" went through in detail the statistical and methodological mistakes in the US study of menopausal HRT that were misinterpreted as raising the risk of cancer. The only real risk is for strokes if you are menopausal for several years and then start HRT - something about the plaques coming loose when the arteries re-soften. I can't remember the exact protocol for which types of hormones but it is all in there