sojournTime @sojournTime@qoto.org

No words.

"…U.S. State Department will work with the Department of Homeland Security to aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students…"

https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2025/05/new-visa-policies-put-america-first-not-china/

Curiosity has a natural predator.

It’s called optimization.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/how-convenience-kills-curiosity/

Thanks @masonasons for the tip that yt-dlp can download from RSS feeds. Here's the command I came up with to download all available podcast items from a feed in chronological order (oldest first) to nicely numbered files with the title and date.

yt-dlp --no-abort-on-error --color "no_color" --download-archive ".download_history" --windows-filenames --embed-metadata --embed-chapters --playlist-items "::-1" --output "%(n_entries+1-playlist_index)02d %(title)s (%(upload_date>%B %d %Y)s).%(ext)s" --format bestaudio "https://example.com/rss"

Email is the cockroach of the internet - it outlives every wave trying to kill it. Forget Slack, forget Discord, forget chat apps. Email is universal, decentralized, and asynchronous. It's not sexy, but it's the ultimate survivor.

It's certainly possible that a new knowledge-sharing paradigm could eventually bloom, one that's native to the properties of a distributed network.

But if you want to preserve the value of Wikipedia _today_, its connection to audiences _today_, you're not going to win by dodging it with clever tech.

You have to actually fight this.

Many nerds dream about less-censorable distributed tech, and think a great event like this will finally make their dream relevant. Move Wikipedia over and the audience will switch!

The audience will not switch. Distributed networks with no chokepoints are possible, but are always inconvenient or insecure. The audience was already finding it more convenient to chat with AIs.

The audience may not even be allowed to switch! The government can easily influence device manufacturers.

Beloved programming community: many of you are hearing about the US DoJ threatening Wikipedia.

Some of you are thinking of ways to thwart this. Download the Wikipedia dumps, put it on IPFS or hand-couriered USB drives or other less-censorable systems.

A good impulse, but missing the point.

Wikipedia is not just a big document or a software artifact.

Its true value is that it is effortlessly available to a wide audience, can be updated rapidly, with no preconditions to view or edit.

The diffusers on the new LED polyhedron (dihedral hexacontahedron, right) looked so much better than the first build that I had to print new ones for the truncated icosahedron (left). I also synced up the patterns on both builds (with #pixelblaze) and will be sitting here staring at them for the rest of the day.

Which one of you Fedi weirdos* was at the Edinburgh trans rights demo holding the sign saying:

private String gender
not
public const bool gender

* affectionate

Wow – didn’t think I’d be in tears today, but this message sent home from Gaia as it was shut down forever today hits hard

What you’re seeing is a map of the 106 CCD detectors that Gaia used to measure the positions of billions of stars in the Milky Way for the past 11 years

They were turned off in a special sequence …

#SpaceScience #Astronomy #Science

Yeah, it can happen to pilots too!

ABC7 Los Angeles: "United Airlines flight from LAX bound for China turns around after pilot forgets passport"
https://abc7.com/post/united-airlines-flight-bound-china-turns-around-pilot-forgets-passport/16077746/

Friendly reminder.

#Aprilfools #Aprilscherz #aprilfoolsday

About a year ago, my parents made the switch to Linux on their home machines because they really hated Win 10... Today I got a call from my mother to help her out with something, but I did not expect that "something" will be figuring out a sed pattern for a shell script she wrote to bulk rename files.

When I asked her why she didn't use some GUI program she said "I was an accountant in the DOS era, this makes more sense to me than a ribbon menu in Excel".

So, science friends.

When in the 1930s would you have decided “no, I’m not going to go to that conference in Germany”?

Because the question now needs to be posed looking westwards across the Atlantic.

If your phone can be taken on arrival & searched for messages critical of the government & then you can be denied entry (or perhaps worse in the future), why would you even think of going in the first place?

Absolutely horrifying slide into totalitarianism.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/trump-musk-french-scientist-detained

Doonsbury compares Al Gore to DOGE. www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2...

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau fo...

@LovesTha @molly0xfff the old 32-bit Excel limit was 64k, right? Maybe they are stuck on Office 2005. Which is funny in so many ways in my Head. Starting from 'Excel?' to my new head canon that they rejected to upgrade because they hated the ribbon layout.

@LovesTha @molly0xfff whoa whoa whoa, how do your spreadsheets go beyond 65536 rows? /s

(The quoted number is suspiciously close to this)

Elon Musk's favorite supposed data expert, who he's retweeted at least a dozen times, claims she can only process 60,000 rows of data before her "hard drive overheats".

Perhaps someone should rescue her from where she's apparently stuck twenty years in the past, which is the only possible explanation for those hardware limitations and the apparent lack of access to cloud compute.

Unless, of course, she's just completely making shit up.

#USpol #USpolitics