Notices by Mike Taylor 🦕 (mike@sauropods.win)

"I don’t think I’m going out on much of a limb, politically, when I say that the armed men in masks who attacked and killed both a woman who was trying to drive away, and a man who was trying to help a person up off the ground, are NOT the heroes of this, or any conceivable story. The idea that anyone might be offended to hear me say that shows how far we’ve fallen."
https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2026/2/2/how-to-finally-piece-things-together

"The collapse of the AI bubble is going to be ugly. Seven AI companies currently account for more than a third of the stock market, and they endlessly pass around the same $100bn IOU."
— Cory Doctorow, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

"I’ve read many historical books on the subject [of Open Source], including [Richard M Stallman]’s biography and many older writings.

And something struck me.

RMS was right since the very beginning. Every warning, every prophecy realised. And, worst of all, he had the solution since the start. The problem is not RMS or FSF. The problem is us. The problem is that we didn’t listen."

https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html

@acdha See the opening of the quoted article:

"Disclaimer: Lot have been said about the fact that Richard Stallman had some questionable or inadequate behaviours. I’m not discussing those nor defending the man himself. I’m not in favour of blindly following that particular human (nor any particular human). I’m defending a philosophy, not the philosopher. I claim that his historical vision and his original ideas are still adequate today. Maybe more than ever."

Douglas Adams on selling the idea of Arthur Dent to Hollywood executives:

"I’ve hit a certain amount of difficulty over the years in explaining this in Hollywood. I’m often asked ‘Yes, but what are his goals?’ to which I can only respond, well, I think he’d just like all this to stop, really. It’s been a hard sell."

https://shreevatsa.net/post/douglas-adams-cultural-divide/

It should be genuinely shocking to the Mozilla people how unanimous the 861 (so far) comments are on their recent blog-post "Building AI the Firefox way: Shaping what’s next together"
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/building-ai-the-firefox-way-shaping-what-s-next-together/td-p/109922

It's clear from these responses that virtually no-one wants AI in Firefox. Skim through the comments and you'll see 98–99% are saying: please just stop. Or AT LEAST make it trivially easy to turn off.

Will they listen to their users?

#Mozilla #Firefox

@libreoffice Yes, I did get it from the website instead. Are the MacOS-specific improvements documented anywhere? (I don't see it described in the App Store itself.)

I'm setting up a new MacBook, and I need #LibreOffice obviously. It occurred to me that it might be available in the App Store, which would be slightly more convenient than a separate download. It is ... for £8.99. What on earth is going on?!

CC @libreoffice

Today I learned that all those pointless collective nouns (a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, a pride of lions), which are only ever used in pub quizzes, were made up by one woman 500 years ago.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/01/04/brian-wildsmith-birds-company-terms/

#TIL #TodayILearned

"How are [Wikipedia] competitors doing, the ones you all insisted students use instead? That’s right, they were supposed to go to the American Journal of Social Sciences, Powered by OpenAI. Or museums, like the Smithsonian’s Charlie Kirk Shrine to American Greatness. I guess they can still count on credible journalism, once they get past the paywall for Palantir Presents: The Washington Post, so they read the Pulitzer-Bezos Prize-winning work of Bari Weiss and Grok."

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hi-its-me-wikipedia-and-i-am-ready-for-your-apology

@Swede1952 JFI, I reference this photo on our sauropod vertebra blog: https://svpow.com/2025/10/01/necks-the-lying-liars-that-just-keep-lying/

@anon_opin See also: "with all due respect".

I was just thinking to myself "It would be good if #Mastodon let you follow someone's original posts without seeing all the stuff they boost, which is not relevant to me".

Then it occurred to me to look and see if it does ... and it does! Click on the person's username, then click the three-dots menu near top right of their profile, then choose "Hide boosts from …"

This is a game-changer!

@Paradox @Rasp I like to think the potion is a placebo. It's just his excuse.

@Gargron @anon_opin People will stop using Amazon when there's another choice that delivers a huge range of low-priced goods as quickly and easily as they do. I detest Bezos as much as anyone, but what the world really needs is an actual competitor.

The Met Office (UK) invites you to suggest names for future storms. Make your own suggestions at https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/forms/name-our-storms-call-for-names

Here are mine.

It's astonishing that Scientific American is having to publish an article on How Not To Be Killed By The Police, but here it is: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-protect-yourself-during-protests/

(Update: as several people have pointed out to me, this article is from 2020. Not that that makes it any better.)

@jwildeboer There's always a dry humour just beneath the surface in Kernighan's book. In Kernighan & Pike's "The UNIX Programming Environment", one set of exercises has you add a sequence of a features to the "cal" program, then finishes with the question: When should you have stopped adding features to `cal'?

"If someone’s expecting actual professional human writers to keep to very simple, rigid parameters, purely to ensure that the clueless AI that’s going to ‘acquire’ and regurgitate their work without permission or compensation doesn’t get things wrong… Do you want me to hold my front door open while you rob my house as well?"
https://theneuroscienceofeverydaylife.substack.com/p/no-ai-i-do-not-think-nuclear-war

The Royal Society is dead

A few months ago, Dorothy Bishop resigned her fellowship in the Royal Society in protest at Elon Musk's continuing fellowship. This was a highly principled stand. Eight weeks ago, Steven Curry wrote an open letter to the President of the Royal Society asking him to explain how Musk's activities and pronouncements can be considered compatible with the Society's code of conduct.

http://svpow.com/2025/04/04/the-royal-society-is-dead/