tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

This illusion was new to me. Does whichever dot you look at turn more purple?

Pretty neat how clearly this lets you see the reduced sensitivity to blue light in the very centre of your vision.

https://www.schulz-hildebrandt.com/9-purple-dots-illusion/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11582

An Asian man was travelling without a ticket, but the conductor stopped asking for his ID and enquired instead: "Have you eaten today?".

https://euobserver.com/220455/have-you-eaten-today-what-an-incident-on-an-italian-train-taught-me-about-eu-values/

Ukraine's and Russia's human rights commissioners met yesterday in Belarus (at the latest POW swap) and agreed to establish the direct exchange of civil documents (eg, pension records), family correspondence, and official paperwork for relatives of soldiers killed in the war. https://t.me/astrapress/114942

A Ukrainian naval drone drifted into NATO territory and detonated in the port of Constanța, Romania, after Russian electronic warfare disrupted its guidance, Ukraine's navy acknowledges. Romania's Defense Ministry reported no casualties or damage. https://t.me/ukrainian_navy/20766

"The authors report that the occurrence of extensive deforestation in tandem with climate change will cause the remaining rainforest to lose resilience at global-warming levels of or slightly higher than 1.5 °C — rather than 4 °C — above pre-industrial levels".

Wunderling, N., Sakschewski, B., Rockström, J. et al. "Deforestation-induced drying lowers Amazon climate threshold." (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10456-0

#droughts #deforestation #landGrab #landUse #landUseChange #forests #forest #carbon #carbonSinks #carbonSink #footprint #Brazil #beef #cattle #Amazon #Amazonia #climateChange

The UN General Assembly just voted 141-8 to endorse last year’s landmark International Court of Justice climate opinion, which says countries violate international law if they fail to protect people from climate harm. The resolution is non-binding, but it calls for stronger national climate plans, fossil fuel subsidy phaseouts and possible reparations. AP https://apnews.com/article/climate-change-vanuatu-trump-administration-international-court-90b89dc776e0bece17f2ab4064b7f71e
#ShareGoodNewsToo

after years of digging and research, i finally found the toolkit that was used to make MS multimedia software Encarta, Dinosaurs and Dangerous Creatures.

when i fell in love with these programs, i imagined they were built with a rich multimedia authoring environment/IDE like Macromedia Director. e.g. dragging and dropping images, sounds, text and video onto a stage, animating it with keyframes, and then scripting it for interaction.

the toolkit used was, as it turns out, a very roughly hewn collection of individual programs. there was no IDE. all of the content was written in RTF files, which were then compiled with links to external resources like wavs and avi's.

i cannot imagine what a nightmare this was for the MS Home teams to work with. there is no drag and drop of any kind, no object linking and embedding (OLÉ!), nor animation editor. this is a dog's breakfast of individual programs written by different people.

i'm frankly amazed that the MS Homes teams put together such well-designed programs *despite* how painful this toolkit is to use

the one thing i can say in its favour is that it has one badass tetricube logo for cover art :D

huge thank you to @david_rysk and @philpem for archiving this extremely obscure piece of software

https://archive.org/details/microsoft-multimedia-viewer-2.0-rips-20210921-1.7z

#multimedia #cdrom #retrocomputing #win31

Sweden’s right-wing and far-right coalition backs down on deportations of young adults.

The media coverage of several cases involving young people who grew up in Sweden and were forced to leave their families has shocked public opinion.

Facing pressure in the polls, the government is revising the rules.

https://mediafaro.org/article/20260602-swedens-right-wing-and-far-right-coalition-backs-down-on-deportations-of-young-adults?mf_channel=mastodon&action=forward

#Sweden #Politics #Deportations

Nu ska jag ta upp en EXTREMT viktig grej angående Socialdemokraternas snack om att "förbjuda vinster" i skolan. Det kommer inte att funka och börsnoterade koncernen Cedergrenska (såklart grundad av moderatkopplade skolor) skriver det själva rätt ut. *tråd* analystgroup.se/textintervju...

Intervju med Cedergrenskas arb...

döpartierna insåg att de hade opinionen mot sig om tonårsutvisningar. Så nu har de kommit överens om att kasta ut ungdomarna när de fyllt 21 i stället för 18.

Ser ut som att detta parti beräknar rätt mycket på det här sättet, genom att extrapolera väl valda delar från något som inträffat för typ 30 år sedan.

Muf hittade på Kristerssons ma...

RE: https://hails.org/@hailey/116657391001259044

all the criticism has been said, all the takes been had. the only metaphor i have been finding consistently useful for understanding what is happening with people and "AI" is addiction, and specifically gambling addiction.

The latest CFSv2 model results for El Nino (ONI) anomalies later this year are kinda nuts, with a peak at nearly 3.9C in November.

NOAA needs to once again raise the y-axis range; here is what it should look like without all the runs above 4C cut off: