⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@qoto.org

Last night I finished up The Mercy of Gods by "James SA Corey" (the guys who wrote The Expanse.) It was a mixed bag for me. As many have previously noted, I mostly found it dark and depressing, although it kept my interest and was mostly well-written. It reminded me of a modern take on an old school scifi story from the 50s or 60s... It's the 1st book in a new series & apparently destined for an Amazon Prime show, which I have very mixed feelings about. Fingers crossed. #scifi #book

7 MHz | Amiga 1000
#Commodore #RetroComputing #Voxel

European Commission: "Today, we have opened formal p…" - European Commission on Mastodon
https://ec.social-network.europa.eu/@EUCommission/113667953191464986

This machine you think you drive directly is going to save your life hundreds of times a second until its engineers cannot defeat the laws of newton and soft body physics on your organs. It's going to let you do this. That's what you paid for.

#Atheism #Atheist #ReligionIsPoison

Happy Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve.

#Introduction Hi #fediverse ! We’re the European Southern Observatory, and we design, build and operate ground-based telescopes.

One of them is our Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction in #Chile. It will have a 39 m mirror, and its rotating enclosure will weigh 6100 tonnes, or about 700 mastodons!

We’re looking forward to chatting with all of you about #astronomy

📷 ESO/G. Vecchia

#astrodon #astrophysics #space #science

It’s been 30 years since Netscape Navigator 1.0 was released and 10 years since I wrote about it being 20 years.
https://adrianroselli.com/2014/12/20-years-since-netscape-navigator-10.html

#Netscape #browser #web

Why good morning Patreon, thankyou so much for flagging my latest post about the harmful impact age verification will have as "sexually gratifying" and hiding it, always delightful to wake up to such egregious bullshit

This is Apple Intelligence’s summary of Mona’s (Mastodon client) notifications regarding replies. Note the “@“ symbol icon Mona adds for those types of notifications, on the right of the bubble.

This is emblematic of faux-AI: it understands nothing, but is designed to produce output using the language of understanding, and is thus always a lie — and a dangerous one — even when coincidentally accurate.

@cstross I want to make a movie so painfully obvious in its satire that everyone who understands it lives in perpetual psychological torment inflicted on them by all the people who don't.
— Paul Verhoeven on Starship Troopers movie

I know the etiquette is evolving around this so here's my quick guide to sharing the road with self-driving cars:

If you find yourself in a city whose political leaders are corrupt and vain enough to have allowed this scourge onto their streets, you absolutely do not owe them the basic courtesy you would extend to any driver.

Bearing in mind safety and basic physics, it's perfectly fine to, for instance, not let them proceed at a stop sign; not let them merge in traffic; take the lane and bike super slow in front of them; take your sweet time in a crosswalk; accidentally leave your personal traffic cone on its hood; etc, etc. Just remember that they are recording you, should you choose to escalate your discourtesy beyond the the obnoxious-but-basically-legal.

Self-driving cars do not deserve the right of way, because rights are for sentient beings, not roving death cameras.

If you are worried whether someone is riding in back, just imagine it's Jeff Bezos and he's on his way to a very important meeting. The more inconvenient these things are to hire, the more ordinary people will choose better options, the more swiftly these businesses will fail and disappear.

@Edent I would be offended if I was asked for consent. You beep the goods, I tap my card, we do not make eye contact. Anything more is IRL equivalent of nag screens and popups.

I never heard of these whole ass deeply evolutionarily preserved organelles in my cell bio class. Anyone know what these dang things are?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_(organelle)

OpenStreetMap.org will shortly be available READ-ONLY. You will unfortunately NOT be able to save any map edits. We will be running on our backup infrastructure in Dublin. We are working to restore full services and we are waiting for our ISP to restore services in Amsterdam.

UPDATE: All up and running again (17 Dec 2024 13:45 UTC/GMT)

It occurred to me today that there is no reason that releasing our entire stash of CIA secrets to the Russians, or even our nuclear codes, could not be proclaimed “an official act,” for which Trump could not be prosecuted. He’d only need to say HE believed it’s in our best interests. On what grounds could/would that be contested? We are so fucked.

@pluralistic

^ Some good news from the EU: