Notices by Rob Landley (landley@mstdn.jp)

Culture is full of persephone eating pomegranate seeds, beware of greeks bearing gifts, don't eat fairy food, don't accept favors from demons because you'll owe them, monkey's paw wishes...

And then all these "ain't no such thing as a free lunch" fuckers tell you to check in LLM pull requests, and mock the reluctant as fools. STRINGS ARE VERY MUCH ATTACHED. This crap is fucking sticky at nuclear contamination levels. You pivoted from NFTs to this, we watched you do it.

I'm actually somewhat appreciative of google periodically doing the "prove you're not a bot" paywall, because it reminds me to run the search on ecosia.org instead.

(It's probably triggering because this entire apartment building gets natted out to the world through the same IP. Although that's an excuse: when you click the checkbox javascript is uploading your browsing history and contents of your clipboard for AI training. Pay-with-data. Hope you didn't have any passwords in there!)

Kids in the UK are defeating age checks by drawing on a mustache with eyebrow pencil.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/kids-are-bypassing-online-age-checks-by-drawing-fake-beard-on-their-face/

It's not that the checks are porous, I"m sure they'll get more expensive. It's that pearl-clutching fascist plutocrats are teaching a generation to rebel against authority en masse because their elders are fucking idiots who have no respect for them, and the only way to be treated like people is to break the geezers' power via direct action. The "law" is bad and wrong.

German rooftop solar company's sales tripled in march, expected to triple again this month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rklp7CB55-U

Renewables met all new demand for electricity in 2025.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMsjUM4cEq0

Octopus Energy's sales of solar panels and heat pumps each increased 50% last month.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/mar/26/octopus-sharp-rise-solar-panel-sales-iran-war

April 15 is the vote in the house to reauthorize FISA, the foreign intelligence surveillance act that allows the US government to spy on the domestic populace by buying everything data brokers collect.

Still time to call upon your lizards to vote no.

India was already converting existing vehicles to electric motors before the iran war. The question now is how fast they can scale up.

https://youtu.be/OlGxk4jHC2Q

Fossil fuel price spike du jour:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fupjRCIwvp0

Is getting even barely functional governments to accelerate renewable energy investment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9HbyZmd4LM

Because a crazy dictator starting a war thousands of miles away does not affect domestic production through existing solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries.

https://youtu.be/dDbCM-M2UWA

Storing renewable electricity in abandoned coal mines. No really!

https://youtu.be/nDfBayfTWy0

I don't want to feed balcony solar into the grid.

https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/balcony-solar-taking-state-legislatures-by-storm

I want to charge a camping battery (bluetti maybe) during the day and use it to run the TV, game console, and a lamp at night.

This would mean drilling a hole through 2 inches of sheet rock, which would require the apartment's permission. (Maybe a cable could be run through the existing outdoor outlet conduit, but still permission...)

Getting the power indoors is always the hard part with apartments.

New Zealand is converting its farm machinery from diesel to electric: https://youtu.be/L5pn5d9v2Lw

This is after New Zealand weaned its farm industry entirely off government subsidies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YJ-ZhDG7Jo

Even before the Strait of Hormuz closed, the US was already replacing diesel semis with electric. Diesel prices going up haven't exactly slowed this down.

https://youtu.be/ydyaOORlnJM

As for smaller delivery vans, don't forget Amazon started deploying electric delivery vehicles in 2022:

https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/amazons-electric-delivery-vehicles-from-rivian-roll-out-across-the-u-s

Their EV fleet increased 50% last year:

https://insideevs.com/news/787405/amazon-rivian-electric-van-fleet-2025-update/

France declares energy emergency:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBW-zXeaHTQ

The Philippines declares energy emergency:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VavXBDH7N0w

Meanwhile china's massive financing for other countries to buy its solar and batteries has been repeatedly compared to the "marshall plan":

https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-409-beyond-the-marshall

Mark Blyth explained how the sycophants puppeting trump do have a coherent fossil fuel preservation strategy... which is scary but was already failing before iran.

https://youtu.be/09AY6X2Xppw

Germany had a fossil fuel crisis when Russia invaded Ukraine, is having another one now the US invaded Iran, and is FINALLY going "renewables, eh?"

https://youtu.be/VeklF5H8sTA

Nuclear plants suck but even I'm starting to sort them above "resource curse" energy. (One or two, backup battery chargers to solar/wind of course.)

And from a supply security perspective...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_production

Canada, Australia, India, Nambia, Ukraine when it's not being bombed, heck Germany itself was #19 in 2011.

Any time women make something lucrative, men push them out of the field. A 1983 MIT paper documented that purge in computer science: https://simson.net/ref/1983/barriers.pdf

See also https://mastodon.social/@Sheril/109545727584656667 for "beer brewer" becoming "witch", Julia Child giving way to Gordon Ramsey, Sarah Taber's great thread about "egg money", the origin of the word "spinster" and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire...

Once there's money in it, douchebros terf out the founders then claim to have discovered what others invented.

The University of California didn't just explain how they're covering their exposed canals with solar panels to save billions of gallons of water from evaporating, they interviewed the woman behind it rather than appointing a man to take the credit.

https://youtu.be/EtJzOtOpYdo

@tante Source code wasn't copyrightable before 1976 and binaries weren't until 1983. The complete elimination of copyright in software would make open source the default again.

LLMs suck but "copyleft" was always a kludge. Might need to push the other way instead. (Stallman celebrating how the DMCA gave GPLv2 more teeth squicked me out at the time...)

@dalias @tante They never "let" us have anything. We push.

Fascism has _always_ been incompetent.

Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time, just claimed he did and shot anybody who disagreed. There's a snopes about it: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/loco-motive/

Some historicans had a great conversation about how poorly run nazi germany was, and the invasion of austria was because they'd run out of food and needed to steal gold to buy more: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/history-of-everything-vs-history-of-everything/id1598692909?i=1000674793848

And of course their military accomplishments were all meth ("pervitin"): https://time.com/5752114/nazi-military-drugs/