Notices by Simon Brooke (simon_brooke@mastodon.scot), page 3

@aral We live in a world in which a person who says "I will always be a friend of [a state actively committing #Genocide]" is not only not arrested, not only not expelled from Parliament and from her political party, but is allowed to hold the second highest political office in a country which considers itself 'civilised'.

#GazaGenocide

https://www.thenational.scot/news/25510910.rachel-reeves-says-will-always-friend-israel/

"the #AI bubble is driven by monopolists who've conquered their markets and have no more growth potential, who are desperate to convince investors that they can continue to grow by moving into some other sector...

when the bubble bursts, the money-hemorrhaging "foundation models" will be shut off and we'll lose the AI that can't do your job, and you will be long gone" — @pluralistic

#LLMs

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

@alexshendi @amszmidt @neptune22222 that, sir, is a dirty, low blow.

@amszmidt I must be doing it wrong, then.

@thibaultmol As an #ActuallyAutistic person, crowded noisy places, like rock concerts, festivals, sports arenas, city centres, aren't accessible to me. But you can't change these places to make them accessible to me without taking away the things which make them useful and interesting to a lot of other people.

There are accessibility things which you can do easily at no significant cost to anyone, like wheelchair ramps and #AltText and hearing loops and so on, but there are some you just can't.

"Open source, the thing that drives the world, the thing Harvard says has an economic value of 8.8 trillion dollars (also a big number). Most of it is one person. And I can promise you not one of those single person projects have the proper amount of resources they need. If you want to talk about possible risks to your supply chain, a single maintainer that’s grossly underpaid and overworked. That’s the risk. The country they are from is irrelevant."

#OpenSource

https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person/

I don't often quote Counterfire, but:

"Britain has many options for acting, such as:

* Supporting and enforcing the International Court of Justice rulings against Netanyahu and other Israeli ministers.
* Expelling Israeli diplomats.
* Inviting Israeli opposition leaders to meet with Britain and other countries to draw up a peace proposal.
...
* Calling a summit with EU member states to impose sanctions on Israel"

#GazaGenocide
#Complicity

https://www.counterfire.org/article/the-reality-of-israeli-genocide-finally-hits-british-politicians/

We're continuing with rendering the outside of the #roundhouse walls; the new render is sheltered by damp Hessian curtains to protect it from direct sun, to prevent it drying before the lime is fully cured. This is all hard physical work and we've at least six days more of it, but it's going well.

@catgirlQueer @vashti As I myself wrote, years ago,

"At nanosecond resolution (if I've done my arithmetic right), 128 bits will represent a span of 1 x 10²² years, or much longer than from the big bang to the estimated date of fuel exhaustion of all stars. So I think I'll arbitrarily set an epoch 14Bn years before the UNIX epoch and go with that. The time will be unsigned - there is no time before the big bang."

So, yes, if you're content with nanosecond resolution...

https://github.com/simon-brooke/post-scarcity/wiki/cons-space#time

@vashti and this is why we shouldn't store numbers in fixed width fields, or compute using 32 or 64 or 128 bit or any other fixed size integers.

Bignum arithmetic has been a solved problem in computing since Maclisp in the 1960s.

#Lisp

HM Govt is flushing another **fourteen billion pounds** down the toilet that is Sizewell C, a plant which will certainly never generate a kilowatt hour of unsubsidised electricity, probably never generate a kilowatt hour of needed electricity, and certainly cost our descendants far more to decommission than it costs us to build.

At the same time as stealing money from tidal and wave installations we urgently need.

#ClimateEmergency
#NuclearEnergy

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gr3nd5zy6o

@ntnsndr you're right about cathedrals, of course. But bazaars?

@quixoticgeek see, this is one of the things I know I get wrong. I've been doing 'ps aux' for decades, from when I used BSD, which is more than thirty years ago. I know I should read the GNU ps man page and work out what options I really need... But 'ps aux' is good enough, and I have (increasingly) limited brain space for new knowledge.

Humbaba was born on May 19, 2022, and was killed yesterday. Why did I choose to kill him? I wanted an animal to go in the freezer -- I eat about one animal a year -- I didn't want him for breeding, and he'd managed to rip out both his ear tags. So although he wasn't in any way a troublesome animal, he drew the short straw.

He was shot by a local vet who is licensed to shoot animals in the field, using a 9.2mm rifle.

Please, someone, check for me that the media in the post above is marked as sensitive? It should be, but I'm not seeing it so.

@amszmidt @khleedril @iris_meredith literally, how could it possibly be simpler?

@iris_meredith at least you don't #Lisp. Everyone knows that all queer people lithp.

@iris_meredith indeed. Significant whitespace is so much more macho.

@iris_meredith to write the same piece of functionality in #C as in #Lisp, you'll use exactly the same number of bracket ({[]}) characters; plus in C you will additionally have to use many other punctuation characters that you wouldn't have to use in Lisp. You will also, typically, have to write many more lines of actual code.

But of course Lisp syntax is much more complex.

@hellomiakoda It's interesting how different people's approach to, and motivation for, gaming, varies. Perhaps you are not the audience for which those games are intended?