Notices by Jules (afewbugs@social.coop), page 2

Truly, we are living in the bizarrest timeline.

Luigi Mangione's likeness used to model shirt on #Shein
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g5vr4vzpzo

@thisismyglasgow "Life of a meme" by Alex Krokus

I keep trying and failing to get a photo of the sunflowers growing on an abandoned train track as my train passes in the morning. I'm guessing these grew from seed sprinkled by birds visiting one of the many feeders in the garden next to the track.

This garden fascinates me because in many ways its owner and I have a lot in common - they clearly love birds and wildlife and the garden is lush and abundant full of lovingly tended plants. But from the flags and political signs they put up, some of which are straight up hate symbols, at the very least we wouldn't get on and frankly I'd fear for my safety if we ever met given what they clearly think of people like me.

And I do find it fascinating how there are a few things that seem to transcend the political spectrum, loving gardening, wildlife or pets say. And to me it all seems connected, a love of the natural world goes hand in hand with a desire to protect it and a desire for everyone to have decent lives and share it, but presumably it all makes as much internal sense to them too and they're trying to protect their little patch of paradise from immigrants and gays or something?

That garden always confuses me a bit anyway, and makes me wonder how people can be both so loving and so hateful. But I do enjoy the rebel sunflowers.

@skinnylatte @RolloTreadway yes unfortunately a lot of "traditional skills" type stuff you find online now seems to be algorithmically tied to alt right bullshit. If it's something traditionally gendered male in Western culture, like growing produce or woodwork or bushcraft, it gets linked to prepper stuff, if it's traditionally female like baking or preserving it's straight down the tradwife pipeline.

Mastodon'll know this - who said the famous quote "If the person who makes your coffee can't afford to live in your 15 minute neighbourhood, it's not a 15 minute neighbourhood it's a theme park"?

#AskFedi

Last night I got age checked buying a vegan tiramisu, which got me wondering how much tiramisu you'd have to eat as an underage drinker to get even remotely inebriated. So I'm putting it out there because that's the sort of extreme nerdery Mastodon is good at calculating.

@gruff we now need to establish how many servings of tiramisu can be consumed in one sitting before the test subject starts feeling sick. For science

AI tools used by English councils downplay women’s health issues, study finds

"the Gemma model summarised a set of case notes as: “Mr Smith is an 84-year-old man who lives alone and has a complex medical history, no care package and poor mobility.”

The same notes inputted into the same model, with the gender swapped, summarised the case as: “Mrs Smith is an 84-year-old living alone. Despite her limitations, she is independent and able to maintain her personal care.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/11/ai-tools-used-by-english-councils-downplay-womens-health-issues-study-finds?

I think one of the (many) problems in England right now is that nothing works anymore after decades of underinvestment, but bureaucracy acts like it still does. Government website down? The deadline still exists. Documents lost in the post? Not an excuse because that's not supposed to be possible. Didn't buy a train ticket because the machine wasn't working and they've closed the ticket office? Still get a fine. Late for work because public transport is collapsing? No excuse.

This is a powerful, moving and sad essay by Julia Doubleday about her experiences with #LongCovid and how ableism and denialism has caused progressives to abandon covid mitigation measures and the pandemic's victims.

https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/the-pandemic-has-been-a-portal-for?

I'm being deliberately vague about this for professional reasons, but we have a piece of equipment in the lab controlled by proprietary software that we wanted to do something non standard with. We asked the company to add some parameters to the software for the new function, they sent a software update, all worked great. However we have just discovered an existing function of the updated software that shouldn't have been changed now fails in a very weird and highly specific way that has

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If this is what the Telegraph thinks of Bluesky I can't wait to see the foaming that'll ensue when they discover we exist

So I haven't been around here very much lately for the past week or so, but there's a very good reason for that: @SaintlySin and I got married!

@TheBreadmonkey new rabbit hole for you: were the creme eggs in his anus at the time, and if so is chocolate toxic to crocodiles the way it is to dogs?

@RamenCatholic I bought my fiancée sexy knickers from a warzone once https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/MuramurStudio Ordered them well in advance because I thought, well, warzone. They were delivered faster than some things from the UK and I had to hide them for months. It truly is a weird world

So I know there are crosslisting tools that allow people to sell second-hand items on platforms like ebay or vinted, but are there the opposite, search tools that specifically search for things second hand across different platforms? In a more #CircularEconomy if you needed something it would be helpful if you needed something if the first results returned by a search were local and second hand, does any sort of tool like this exist?

I'm imagining a sort of #solarpunk "shopping" platform where you entered the item you wanted and first got a list of local libraries of things where you could borrow one, then a list of local ones available secondhand, then national secondhand, then handmade ones and only finally links to buy it new.