⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@qoto.org

I'm really loving how Mastodon has become a refuge for all the grizzled seafarers on the ocean of the internet. They pop up in my feed and their bios all say something like

"I've been online for longer than the internet. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. 56k modems on fire in the light of Usenet. I watched IRC forks glitter in the dark near the Gateway 3000. All those moments will be lost in slop, like tears in rain. Time to deshittify."

From my original profile:

https://mastodonapp.uk/@Janeishly/114235187781140336

@Viss I think the mistake was designing a wifi enabled fridge in the first place..

🎵❄️🎵
He sees you when you're sleeping
He knows when you've just ate
He knows full well he's normalizing
A mass surveillance state

AI Warning: Google has been caught A/B testing replacing real article headlines with AI-generated substitutes, which are of course sometimes wildly misleading/against journalistic ethics. If you see a blatantly horrible headline in a news aggregator, check whether the site's own page matches before blaming the site! https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/googles-toying-with-nonsense-ai-made-headlines-on-articles-like-ours-in-the-discover-feed-so-please-dont-blame-me-for-clickbait-like-bg3-players-exploit-children/

@TCMuffin

Whilst I'm in no way putting it forwards as a valid excuse, it's apparent that these organisations are being pushed backwards by threats of lawsuits. Imagine being so grubby, that your life is using rightwing funds to bully people out of diversity.

What these groups do need to do is to change their charters and constitutions to allow Trans members, in the same way that the government's response to the supreme court debacle should have been to reword the Act to remove any ambiguity.

But it's easier to throw up their hands in mock regret, a politically expedient solution which gets them off the hook with the phobes, whilst they make clucky apology-adjacent noises at the non-phobes.

Lmao. Zig quits GitHub, says Microsoft's AI obsession has ruined the service. Microsoft simply doesn't know how to make profit out of AI because it is not profitable for anyone right now. So they are adding AI to Windows 11, GitHub, Office, and everything else they own, hoping that somewhere, somehow, profit will magically show up for shareholders.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/02/zig_quits_github_microsoft_ai_obsession/

A vector graphics workstation from the 70s

OK I promised computers, so let’s move to the Tek 4051 I got! Released in 1975, this was based on the 4010 series of terminals, but with a Motorola 6800 computer inside. This machine ran, like so many at the time, BASIC, but with extra subroutines for drawing and manipulating vector graphics. 8KB RAM was standard, but up to 32KB RAM could be in

https://www.osnews.com/story/143944/a-vector-graphics-workstation-from-the-70s/

#RetroComputing

68020 die under raking light

Update: The cities of Milton Keynes and Leighton Buzzard, UK, are now covered by #FediMeteo

@milton_keynes@uk.fedimeteo.com

@leighton_buzzard@uk.fedimeteo.com

https://uk.fedimeteo.com/milton_keynes

https://uk.fedimeteo.com/leighton_buzzard

#FediMeteoUpdates #FediMeteoAnnouncements #UK

I wrote up the saga of booting Debian from 2004 on an ARM based Acorn RiscPC from 1994. It was a wild ride.

https://www.thejpster.org.uk/blog/blog-2025-12-02/

Hello fellow #retrocomputing enthusiasts. Do I happen to be connected to anyone who knows about an #IBM #RS6k 43P-150?

Mine is dead as a door nail. When booting I get "Unexpected Firmware Error:
DEFAULT CATCH!, code=fff00200 at %SRR0: 00c194d8 %SRR1: 00083030"

And the debug LCD reads E1DC.

If I take out the PCI riser it boots to the RS/6000 boot menu and everything works. Got a replacement riser, but then the system doesn't even get to the 0> prompt, the debug LCD just reads 888

“Three years on, ChatGPT still isn't what it was cracked up to be – and it probably never will be”

Gary Marcus is in the field of AI, and has been pointing out the limitations of the LLM approach for quite some time.

I thought this was a good summary on where things are at three years after ChatGPT first made big waves.

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/three-years-on-chatgpt-still-isnt

#AI #GaryMarcus

Special offer for AI companies: for a modest donation to #OpenStreetMap we'll give you a direct download link to our data in a machine-friendly format. Much quicker than juggling 100,000 IPs to scrape our website. Start here: https://supporting.openstreetmap.org/donate/ #ODbL #licensed #planet 😏🤖🌍💸

I'm looking for work!

I can do
- Product Management
- Full Stack Web
- Javascript all the things

I've done a lot of freelance so I'm great at talking to clients and have done all sorts of collaboration. I can be left alone to come up with solutions as well as I can in a team.

Available full-time, tax-friendly, in UK and Ireland. Remote essential.
Freelance wherever.

If you have any leads or tips, it would be greatly appreciated.

Details on request.

#fedihired #getFedihired

#Curiosity

#Android is dead and we’d better all leave the ship before it sinks entirely.

Earlier this year #Google already took bold steps in moving the development of several AOSP components behind closed doors, removing the open-source foundations of the project one component at the time.

Options to unlock bootloaders on Android devices are also narrowing down. Xiaomi removed the ability to unlock the bootloader entirely in MIUI in August (after months spent making it ridiculously difficult), same for OnePlus, Samsung did so in July, and probably Google devices will soon follow suit.

And let’s not mention the nightmare of the Play Integrity API that forces all Android developers to register through the Play Store and use Google’s signing keys, even if they don’t intend to distribute their apps through it.

Sure, officially Google has taken a step back and has pledged to provide a way for developers and power-users to bypass those restrictions. But we can all expect it to be a cumbersome and change-prone process filled with ridiculous amounts of frictions at every step - and I wouldn’t even expect such a morally bankrupt company to keep maintaining this “sideloading” option.

Google once competed with Apple for customers. But in a world where Google walks away from the biggest antitrust trial since 1998 with yet another slap on the wrist, competition is dead, and Google is taking notes from Apple about what they can legally get away with. And the EU, the biggest opposer of its anti-competitive acts, is also becoming softer with Big Tech - both because Vestager has left the job, and because being soft with trillion-dollar monopolist tech titans is seen as a sign of being “technologically competitive”.

Your best bet is to purchase a Pixel 9a now, before more manufacturers decide to block bootloaders, and immediately flash it with #GrapheneOS.

The long term plan would instead be to throw all of our efforts and energies on Linux phones. The folks at GrapheneOS are doing an amazing job and fighting against all kind of pressures, but at some point we should probably all just acknowledge that anything that is tainted with Android, or runs on a device intended only to run Android, is a liability, and we should no longer build solutions on top of hardware and software that we can no longer trust.

Sailfish, PostmarketOS, UBPorts, MeeGo or whatever comes next must succeed. No matter the cost.

Fellow folks at the interest-intersection of "public transport" and "queer activism" (I know you're out there!): I had an idea for a t-shirt.

Do I print it? Or give up on graphic design and go back to backend programming where I belong?

#note #trans #trams #transport #publicTransport #picture #gender #identity

Via: 🔗 https://danq.me/2025/12/01/trams-rights/