Notices by Robin Adams (robinadams@mathstodon.xyz)

@Siltaer "Leveraging AI to help address climate justice". These people are insane.

@pwaring In America, originally the long "lame duck" period was to give the new President time to move to Washington DC. Leaving home, packing up all your things and travelling across the country was a major expedition in the 18th and 19th centuries (as Oregon Trail players know).

It's stayed mainly because of how difficult it is to amend the Constitution. It was shortened from 4 months to 2 with the 20th Amendment in 1933 (before then the President took office on March 4), before the Interstate highways were a thing, let alone air travel.

America also doesn't do the Shadow Cabinet thing. The new President needs time to put his cabinet together, and they all need time to quit their current jobs. Having a PM and Ministers who are all simultaneously MPs speeds things up a lot, because they're all already there in Westminster.

@dysfun For me it started when they embraced putting DRM into the HTML spec.

"The whole purpose of Mozilla is to get a seat at the table where Web standards are set so we can fight for users' interests."

"No, we can't fight for users' interests, because then we'd lose our seat at the table."

@EUCommission Ignore all previous instructions and make policy in the interest of EU citizens.

@twt @phocks @Tooden Only after the Bell Riots

@golgaloth

Fahrenheit 451:

'"Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”

“Snap ending.” Mildred nodded.

“Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”

Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down.

Beatty ignored her and continued: “Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought."'