Notices by The Sleight Doctor 🃏 (apostateenglishman@mastodon.world)

@cstross I can't recommend LibreOffice enough! It's intuitive, reliable, feature-rich and stable. Plus you can import or export in pretty much any document format in existence.

I have had compatibility issues in the past - a job application form which didn't work in LibreOffice because all the input fields were broken, for some inscrutable reason - but it's a rare enough occurrence to not be worth worrying about.

Provided they're well-hydrated, an adult human can go some weeks before complications arising from malnutrition take their lives. Our ancestors were persistence hunters who went for big game, and alternated between "starvation mode" and gorging themselves on big kills.

The same is not true of human children, whose condition can rapidly deteriorate without access to nutritious food - hence the high infant mortality rate in preagricultural societies.

Israel is deliberately starving 290,000 kids.

Fun fact: I was in a band in college, whose access to a studio was part of a local government-funded youth initiative. There was a meeting of all the bands, and we were handed a sheet of paper with questions on it. One of them was, "What's the name of your band?". We put "nothing" because we hadn't thought of one yet.

Then shortly afterwards, our bassist quit. And that's the story of how our band became named Less Than Nothing.

Spain has had a democratic socialist government since 2018, and has now fully transitioned to renewable energy, showing what's possible when the political will exists.

"Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewable energy for the first time on April 16, with wind, solar, and hydro meeting all peninsular electricity demand during a weekday. Five days later, solar set a new record, generating 20,120 MW of instantaneous power – covering 78.6% of demand and 61.5% of the grid mix."

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/04/22/spain-hits-first-weekday-of-100-renewable-power-on-national-grid/

Still seeing the odd AI evangelist pop up in my feed arguing that ChatGPT is good, ackshully.

Erm, missing the point. That it can be misleading or wrong certainly provides ammo to critics of generative AI, but the main problems are that LLMs trade short-term results for future understanding, and slowly erode our critical faculties. Some of us value our ability to think for ourselves and do our own research and writing, above convenience.

Plus why hand even more power to the tech broligarchy?

@StillIRise1963 I think Americans are waking up. They're just waking up painfully slowly...one by one, like there's time for that shit.

It's going to take some catastrophic event to speed up the process. It brings me no joy to say this, because so many will suffer, but the economic shock the Trump admin is about bring may actually do it.

@jmax @StillIRise1963 ...and of course you're talking as much about the Great Depression in America as you are about the rise of the Third Reich in Europe.

Double whammy for Americans. It's so fucking sad that people have to relearn the lessons of history again and again and again.

A reminder that France brought out the guillotines right about now.

@Perrin42 @Janeishly

These things happen. It's not a big deal. 🧐

@Janeishly I saw someone say something like "Facebook is where all the boomers and Gen Xers who need help with their computers live. The fedi is where all the boomers and Gen Xers who *designed and built* the damn computers live".

If the spontaneous, international campaigns to destroy Tesla weren't working by seriously hurting Musk in the only place he can be hurt - his wallet - then there wouldn't be media campaigns to stop them. And there wouldn't be right-wing conspiracy theories that these efforts are being funded by George Soros (or whoever the bogeyman is these days).

Exactly as I said early on, Tesla is Musk's Achilles Heel, so go harder. It's pissing him off, and that's better than nothing.

@Lana I love how they can walk right into the point, and not even feel the rake handle slapping them in the face. 😆

@hakan_geijer This a great guide, however, it's worth mentioning that if you're going to some protest or direct action, it's a good idea to buy an unregistered SIM and take a decoy handset with location settings turned off and a VPN turned on.

You don't have to be a cybersecurity expert to just not use your everyday comms tech. Way easier and probably safer.

I don't know which is scarier, that an actual FBI director is suggesting the UFC should train its field agents, or that the media is largely taking the proposal seriously.

MMA is a sport with strict rules for that specific arena, not a complete fighting system suitable for chaotic situations with no time to limber up, civilian clothes (!), no rules and no referee. Many of the moves you'd need to escape such a situation are banned from UFC!

Plus who trained the elite commando units, Mike Tyson?

When SpaceX launched a Telsa into space, the "mission" had no scientific value. There were no instruments on-board sending back data. There wasn't even a destination, it was car-shaped space junk flung haphazardly into the void.

Nothing but a publicity stunt to inflate Telsa's stock and make Musk even richer. So it sure would be a shame if everyone helped make Telsa a radioactive brand, and Musk had to default on any loans collateralized by its stock value.

Today, Telsa is his Achilles heel.

@crazybutable @petrillic @ColesStreetPothole "Freedom of speech" has become race- and sex-coded. It's a dogwhistle for "absolute right of white, cishet males to dominate public discourse without fear of contradiction".

Similarly, "cancel culture" is code for "people with the temerity to publicly disagree with me", and "woke" is code for "non-white cishet male perspective or anyone who thinks other perspectives matter".

As you say, it's reactionary culture war bullshit.

Hundreds of locals are currently kettling a small disorganised collection of right-wing groups, including Nick Tenconi, in Manchester, England.

The police are standing around not taking sides.

Today in Manchester, England. An apparently spontaneous gathering of hundreds of antifascists are blocking UKIP and Parents Against Grooming from entering Piccadilly Gardens. The police have so far appeared clueless as to what to do about this unexpected show of public resistance.

#AntiFascist #ResistEverywhere

Remember when Kurt Cobain with Nirvana did their truly soul-chilling, off-key cover of Lead Belly's song, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" on MTV Unplugged?

Awful fact: Lead Belly - among Kurt's biggest influences - was also responsible for the earliest audio recording of the phrase "stay woke", in a spoken afterword to the 1938 song "Scottsboro Boys", recounting the tragic story of nine Black teens and young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931.

#BlackHistoryMonth

This is the Federal Bureau of Investigation's breakdown of what it can gain access to via subpoena from the various "secure" messaging apps. As you can see, if you're using Signal even the FBI can only see when you first registered and when you last logged in. That's it.

Use Signal.