Nicola Romanò @nicolaromano@qoto.org

It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.

Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.

Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.

The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.

The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.

She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.

She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."

She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.

But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.

To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.

San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.

Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.

Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.

Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.

Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.

When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.

He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.

It was a mistake that would change American history.

Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.

She saw "her kids."

She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.

Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.

She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.

So, she made a choice.

She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.

Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.

The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.

She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.

She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.

"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."

And it did.

Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.

Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."

For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.

She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.

She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."

By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.

In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.

This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.

One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."

They underestimated who they were dealing with.

They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.

When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.

It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.

Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.

She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.

Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.

"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."

The quote ran in newspapers across the country.

The court didn't stand a chance.

Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.

The charges were dropped.

Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.

She needed to change the law.

August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.

She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.

But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.

She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.

She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.

In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.

It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.

She never got rich.

She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.

She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.

Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.

Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.

Most of them have never heard of Mary.

They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.

They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.

They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.

Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."

She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.

She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.

She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.

Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.

It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.

It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.

Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.

Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.

Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana."

The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved.

#HitchhikersGuide #DouglasAdams #quotes #quote #bot

My 92 year old aunt: You do the Leenux thing, right? You need to come over sometime and install it for me, because f#ck all I ain't gonna update to Windows 11.

Me: .... ?!#!?

I explain what the change-over entails and that I generally don't recommend it just because...

Aunt: No, f#ck that, f#ck capitalism, my laptop is still fine, so come over and set me up with that Leenux thing.

#Linux #christmas

I love English. It's a trash fire disguised as a language and I'm here for all of it. However, I really need to be better about people not speaking it "correctly." It's a goddamn trash fire. Of course people don't speak it correctly. I'm pretty sure there's no correct way to speak it. And that's leaving out all the racism and classism which goes into "grammatical perfection."

English isn't Latin. It's a glorious clusterfuck of stolen parts bolted onto a bastard chassis and powered entirely by the burning of dictionaries. There is no way that it should be the lingua franca of international affairs, and yet it is. Speak it any way you want. English doesn't give a fuck. English will take your error and turn it into a part of itself. English drinks prescriptivist tears like fine wine. Contribute to the delinquency of English any way you can.

RE: https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/115760265788529588

Most games - including one I did AI for - use some form of what we call "classical AI": anything from planning, to pathfinding, to even having small ML models to adapt to player behavior, etc.

They've done this for *decades*.

None of these are generative models, or the product of generative models.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling generative AI.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but please don’t post direct links to the elementary OS ISO, especially on release day. This is my only form of income and I really don’t make a lot of it. I want to keep making elementary OS as my job, but when you bypass our pay-what-you-can ask it cuts directly into the revenue I rely on to pay rent and buy food. The vast majority of people already pay nothing when they download. Please don’t take away the biggest opportunity I have for folks to support my work

"I announced my divorce on Instagram and then AI impersonated me."

https://eiratansey.com/2025/12/20/i-announced-my-divorce-on-instagram-and-then-ai-impersonated-me/

#tech #technology #BigTech #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #LLM #LLMs #MachineLearning #GenAI #generativeAI #AISlop #Meta #Google #gemini #OpenAI #ChatGPT #anthropic #claude

@Fynn @fedora big companies have had their hands in Linux and FOSS for a long time, I don't understand the horror and surprise of all the comments. The people thinking Microsoft sponsoring Fedora means they're going to ruin it or add Microsoft Accounts or something like that are really dumb and don't understand how the world works.

This was released today:

> We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB)...
>
> ... includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.
>
> ... world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.

https://annas-archive.li/blog/backing-up-spotify.html

1/2

“This may be the first time an ICE agent is incarcerated in his own ICE jail.” https://www.citybeat.com/news/update-cincinnati-ice-leader-charged-federally-booked-into-butler-county-jail/

Ever updated an R or Python package and had existing code break without warning?

You know something changed, but figuring out what can take hours.

That is exactly what Diffify helps with.

Diffify lets you compare different versions of R packages from CRAN and Python packages from PyPI before you upgrade.

📝 Release notes
🔗 Dependency changes
📦 Added or removed objects
🧩 Function updates
🔍 Argument level differences

See what changed before it breaks your project: https://diffify.com/

We live in the stupidest possible timeline.

https://www.404media.co/unauthorized-edit-to-ukraines-frontline-maps-point-to-polymarkets-war-betting/

“With the permission of Adobe Systems Inc., the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1990 version 1.0.1 of Photoshop.”

https://computerhistory.org/blog/adobe-photoshop-source-code/

I've collected a set of papers and articles that discuss errors in research due to software errors, in a GitHub repo: https://github.com/danielskatz/errors-due-to-research-software. I think this could be a useful resource for many purposes, and additional contributions are welcome.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/115689198997943088

I’m proud to share my first blog as @Mastodon’s Community Director. Well the first one posted under my name at least 😉

Digital social networking is one of the most important threads in the fabric of our societies. Right now, we’re letting that thread be controlled by social media platforms that let advertisements for scams stay up because they’re profitable, and that use their algorithms to run human research experiments on us without our consent. That’s not the society I want.

“By making the news and truth contingent on advertising budgets we’ve created an environment where any narrative can win, as long as the storyteller is willing to pay. If we allow these conditions to continue, we will leave behind the voices that truly matter; the people and their public institutions. It is critical that those voices not be silenced forever. The promise of the #fediverse is the promise of a better way forward: free from ads and manipulative algorithms built by and for people like you, where #SocialSovereignty is a right and not a privilege.”

In this thread, we asked folks to crowdsource a list of resources so you can find your local representative. Find them, contact them, and tell them this: if you care about a free and just future, and if you care about #DigitalSovereignty, you must leave X and join the fediverse.

#ItsTimeToAbolishX #SocialWeb #Mastodon #SocialMedia

Blogs deserve love too (and interoperability) ❤️

I just learned about Rogue Scholar @rogue_scholar, a repository that makes science blogs more findable and citable: full-text search, long-term archiving, DOIs, metadata...

You can register your blog and search ~200 blogs already there.

Learn more about Rogue Scholar here: https://rogue-scholar.org/

And I wrote a bit more at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alelazic_roguescholar-openscience-openinfrastructure-activity-7403810948412641281-O2TA

#openscience #openinfrastructure #scicomm

European Twitter exploded following yesterday’s rants by US and Russian hardliners calling to “abolish EU”.

Lots of voices like “we need European social media!!”

And I said, “actually, you know what, we kind of have one for years…” 😆

Some people started complaining “but nobody uses Mastodon” and I once again had no choice but to explain that if “nobody uses” then how come I’ve got 3k+ followers here and engaging in truly interesting discussions not less often than there😁

There’s two data points where Fediverse can be indeed seen as less attractive than US cortisol aggregators:

• number of engagements, but granted that up to 60-70% of these on Twitter are generated by bots who cares? Maybe media advertising agencies do, but I don’t.
• presence of public persons - this is where Fediverse actually loses, because it’s a network that grows between them and can’t be “invited”

I just had to dig this up for something I'm writing, so here's the UN's space debris database (which has mostly turned from "space debris on the ground" to "garbage SpaceX dropped on other countries"): https://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/treatyimplementation/arra-art-v/unlfd.html