Light @light@qoto.org

CSS text-decoration-inset landed in Firefox 146! Here's how it works:

Just discovering "the Usenet Oracle"
http://www.textfiles.com/internet/vm_oracl
https://internetoracle.org/bestof.cgi?N=101-125

Don't want to sell your home to allow companies to build an AI data centre? No problem! See, the government has this thing called "eminent domain"...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/georgia-power-ai-data-centers-eminent-domain/

#Housing #Georgia #AI #DataCenter #Government #EminentDomain

I just saw a video of an AI executive saying that people will connect their brains to the cloud so they can have 1,000 times more thoughts.

Neurotypical people. Please listen to me. I promise you, with all the ADHD in my body-

You really do not want 1,000 more thoughts.

You may think you do, but you extremely do not.

Chinese electricity is now 37% from renewables.

In 2003, renewables’ share of electricity generation was about 15 per cent, nearly all of which was produced by hydropower. By 2025, this had increased to 37 per cent.

getting there. have a sunny day.

from https://www.ft.com/content/e67f40b6-48d6-4057-8d57-a9f5f6b0a741?syn-25a6b1a6=1

#thefarside #farside #comic https://www.thefarside.com/2026/07/13/4

Knowing how it could change the lives of canines everywhere, the dog scientists struggled diligently to understand the Doorknob Principle.

Here's something I'm terrible at, but I want to work on;

If I'm ever discussing a contentious topic online, once I've made my point, *stop posting*.

When people start to experience cognitive dissonance, one way out is to try (unconsciously of course) to escalate the discussion into a fight. Then they can conclude I'm just a dick, and ignore everything I said. If I stop when I have nothing new or useful to add, they're left to chew on what I've said, with no convenient excuse to discount it.

@strypey
One magic incantation that does this on a linux commandline (might work on mac or WSL - IDK)

du -h . | sort -h

List files in current directory and its children in size order, biggest last

I'm forever finding myself trying to free up space on a digital storage medium. If all files took up roughly the same amount of space, then as with piles of paper, there would be no alternative to just sorting through them looking for stuff I don't need. But digital files can be anything from a few KB to several GBs, and the upper size limit is increasing all the time.

I'd love a simple-to-use tool that presented the files anywhere in a drive, from biggest to smallest, ignoring folders.

(1/?)

ChatControl, but for EU politicians/commissioners/council etc to make sure every text message they get cant be deleted and will be permanently archived and requestable under FOIA.

"Burn Book suggests Swisher doesn’t necessarily see tech’s cozy relationship with the military as problematic. Early on, she admits she dreamed of working as a strategic analyst for the military or Central Intelligence Agency but gave up that path because of how openly anti-gay the military was."

#EdwardOngwesoJr, 2024

This is 21st century Democrat politics in a nutshell. Technofascism is fine, as long as its power positions and their benefits aren't hoarded by straight, white, cis men.

(1/2)

Highly related: https://hightimes.com/culture/the-frank-gallagher-thesis-is-wrong-and-the-data-proves-it/

#UBI #politics #CDNPoli

US representative Ro Khanna was recently in the West Bank where he was detained by armed Israeli settlers.

When Israeli soldiers arrived, they sided with the settlers and continued to detain Khanna.

This is an excellent illustration of the concept of “legitimacy” when it comes to state violence that I’m frequently harping about. The legitimacy of an actor’s violence is a measure of the probability that other actors will endorse or support that violence. Here, the Israeli state is telling us that the settlers are adjuncts of the state and that the state will endorse and support their violence.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0qyk9jwq9no

Also, I feel like the USA deserves a round of applause from Europe for this World Cup, where we not only hosted, but generously identified ourselves as movie villains and then were promptly destroyed. Really, what more could you want?

I love reading. I love writing. I love coding. I love drawing. I love creating.

Go ahead and make the slop machines faster, you can't take away what I love.

So if you ever wonder why the US political system seems so broken, why every progressive gain is so hard-fought and then easily reversed, why the easiest solutions seem endlessly out of reach, why someone as obscenely awful as Trump faces so little institutional resistance, why both major political parties share so much in common, why so many politicians seem to share the same handful of family names…

…then you will wonder less once you understand the US political system was, from the start, explicitly designed to behave in exactly this way, as a system of shared oligarchical rule meant to guarantee elites’ ability to extract rents from the vast majority of the public.

That was the point. They said so. They wrote it all down. This is easily knowable history. It’s just been obscured in the public understanding by the religious cult that US elites have built around the constitution and the framers as divinely guided sages who built the most perfect political system ever.

16/end

Nevermind that the wealth of those elites was built overwhelmingly on the exploitation of other people: on landed estates carved from indigenous lands and granted by the crown; on rents charged on landless tenants on those estates; on enslaved African and indigenous labor; on the importation of huge numbers of impoverished servants; on royal monopolies.

All of that wealth, those elites believed, was the product of those elites’ intelligence, hard work, and thrift. And those greedy poors would steal it from them the moment the had the chance.

At the opening of the constitutional convention, Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, declared that “Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.”

12/

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/democracy/our-chief-danger

The German government now intends to put into law to punish Germans with up to 5 years in jail if they deny Israel's "right to exist".

Such a law would of course very likely violate the German constitution, like virtually everything the current German government does these days. And Germany already has a law that protects anyone from incitement and hate against the group they belong to, including jews. A law that specifically protects Israel no matter what Israel does serves of course only to suppress valid criticism of genocide and Israel's hard-right course who currently want to attack Iran *again*. In a country that respects its own constitution, this planned law would never even have been proposed.

Hat tip to @mago.

As I write this, Germany's foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, is on visit in Israel, Germany's "good and close friend", to "keep communications channels open" as public hostility towards Israel increases.

And Germany's minister of the interior, Alexander Dobrindt, and the federal presidents of Germany's police have had multiple visits in Israel, Germany's "natural partner", to start training each other's police and to learn from Israel how it controls a population in an apartheid state using technology and AI (the real, working all-too-well AI, like computer vision, not the LLMs that are sold to us as "AI").

https://www.nd-aktuell.de/artikel/1201039.bundesrat-existenzrecht-israels-bundesrat-will-leugnung-des-existenzrechts-israels-bestrafen.html

#Israel #Germany #surveillance #authoritarianism