Notices by Dan Sugalski (wordshaper@weatherishappening.network)

@mekkaokereke the sentence “we have too many pies” is proof that in English it is possible for an expression to be simultaneously syntactically correct and semantically meaningless.

@neil The worst part about the cloudflare outage is that even if you *are* self-hosting you may still be fronted by cloudflare as it's the only well-known free/affordable way to either fend off the AI bot swarm or expose a behind-the-firewall service to the outside.

I'm using Cloudflare's free tunneling service and got burned by this but I don't know that there's any alternative (and setting that up myself is both even more work/expense and also more hassle and annoyance, which sucks)

The government shutdown continues and SNAP benefits still haven’t gone out for November. If you need to use your local food bank, do it. And if you’re lucky enough to not need them (or not need them any more) then if you can then drop some cash on them — it’s by far the best way to help.

In eastern MA and the #Boston area there’s the Greater Boston Food Bank: https://www.gbfb.org

Y’know, I really didn’t expect IKEA, of all places, to be the driving force behind cloud-free home automation, but I really should have.

Going to have to get some of those water sensors, at least. Those are going to be handy. https://mastodon.social/@verge/115502717743511663

@Infoseepage I suspect you could reduce the mosquito population but not rid the whole island of them -- mosquitos bite a lot of animals so there's a big reservoir of unpoison blood to eat. (Which may be why some of the field trials with people weren't stellar)

Not sure it'd be good ecologically, mosquitos are food for a bunch of things, but I admit that's something I think I could live with.

Holy shit, if this pans out that would be *amazing*.

The tldw is that when mosquitos take a blood meal from someone on ivermectin, ~50% of the mosquitoes just... die within 2 days, and none of the mosquitos laid eggs. There's also some (conflicting) indications that it inhibits plasmodium reproduction. (y'know, the parasite that causes malaria) Plus ivermectin's cheap and generally safe.

Current modeling says 3 doses over 3 months could reduce new malaria cases by 71%.

https://youtu.be/tD8cqvlC0BE

@jalefkowit They've already priced in the tariffs to the new one, I assume.

@cwebber @dthompson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqMs9WsJg2k

The Onion is out there, once again, showing why it should be the paper of record rather than the NYT or WaPo.

https://theonion.com/rift-widens-between-elon-musk-anyone-who-ever-met-him/

@dangillmor The funny thing is the security on the Google form data is likely significantly stronger than anything they’d put together themselves.

Ok, not funny so much as sad, but…

@artemis Fascism is basically Authoritarianism crossed with Magical Realism, and manages to emphasize the worst elements of each.

@cwebber The incentives in education currently make ChatGPT and other cheat tool use pretty much inevitable and inexorable and that was a really depressing sentence to have typed out.

Fixing this isn't complex, but like many not-complex things I don't think it's going to happen. Unfortunately.

@tchambers Every company I've seen who wants Chrome would be unarguably worse for the browser than Google. And I have no illusions about how good (or not) Google is for Chrome.

I think you're right, this is the kind of resource where a non-profit (I'd say governmental agency, but *gestures wildly*) with stable funding should manage it. I could make the case we should have several, just so the whole world doesn't settle on Chrome as the One True Browser.

@cwebber Voting "Getting out" though it's more "I want to get out, do know how, making plans".

I wonder if all the infrastructure slashing and burning from the acquisition has *finally* caught up to Twitter. https://mastodon.social/@verge/114139122939934347

I will note that the solution to about 75% of the current set of problems the West has right now involves taxing the rich more.

"1 BTC TXN on avg consumes as much power as a US household over 1.5 months.

It just gets even worse if you consider e-waste generation & water consumption as well, since on average one iPhone’s weight worth of e-waste is generated on every single BTC TXN while a full backyard swimming pool worth of water goes up in smoke as well"

Good grief. I knew they were bad but I didn't realize *how* bad. (Money laundering, turns out, can be extremely profitable...)

https://mastodon.nl/@digiconomist/113902314417904379

Whenever I see the phrase "no in-the-wild exploits" for an exploit I silently add "that we know of" to the sentence and I suspect 90% of the time I'm right.

https://geeknews.chat/@theregister/113879714566271850

@cwebber The only thing IQ scores are good for is as a quick sorting function -- anyone who goes on about how high their IQ is can generally be dropped right into the "raging douchebag" category and ignored with some enthusiasm.

@drahardja @liztai aw, c’mon, Dave — if we started questioning whether we’re the greatest country on earth the next thing you know someone’ll notice the country was built on genicide, conquest, and slavery! Can’t have that, what would the neighbors think?