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jwz wrote:

Finally got my Emacs setup just how I like it.

This is from a marketing installation for the new Alien series. I am not linking to the original article because the author kept using the word "activation" to mean "advertising campaign" and I threw up in my mouth a little.

Also, that is *not* Semiotic Standard. It looks like someone hand-drew it from memory.

https://jwz.org/b/ykr3

Boosted by adam@social.lol ("Adam"):
adam24@social.lol ("Adam Phantump") wrote:

Hello omg.lol!

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
nhok@ieji.de ("KOHN der baba") wrote:

Attachments:

• video: 7fe083aa6743b7d3.mp4

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
krig@goto.liten.app wrote:

@unsoluble @atpfm This is amazingly terrible. It’s almost like someone at the UI department is at war with the UX department.

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
oldladyplays@wargamers.social ("Cait the Proud Trans Woman") wrote:

A thought about public transit.

Why do we have to pay for it?

We built it. It was our tax money and our labour and our commonly-held land. The buses and trains we bought, we paid for. The people who drive them? We pay that.

So why do we charge people to use it?

We don't charge road users to use the roads. "We pay for them," the drivers say. "So do we pay for them," say I. "We have to have insurance!" "So do transit vehicles."

"We have to pay for our go-juice of choice!" "Us too."

"We have to pay to maintain our own vehicles." "Yep, that's a pain for us too."

So why, exactly, do we provide use of the roads free to people who have the money to have their own vehicle, but NOT to the people who *don't* have that money, or choose not to spend it on a car for all kinds of society-benefiting reasons?

It's ridiculous. In order to facilitate the fare collection, we have to have MORE POLICE in our lives, people going up and down the LRT trains, bothering people trying to journey, and writing expensive tickets if they find someone forgot to tap their card on the out-of-the-way pedestals for such. How many hundreds of thousands are we paying in the salary for that couple of dozen people? Do we come even CLOSE to recovering that money by catching so-called "fare cheats"? No. Nothing like it.

It's a big ripoff, in favour of individual car use, and allows them to underfund our public transit so that it can take me an hour and a quarter to get to an appointment a private vehicle could reach in fifteen minutes, because it's about five km from my apartment. But in our rattletrap system, that's 3 buses.

This kind of thinking is burning our planet and our people alive. And still we hem and haw about whether it's worth the expenditure, and make it easy for people to live 100+km from their place of work - and yet still attend every day.

Madness!

Boosted by kornel ("Kornel"):
ProjectFearlessness@mastodonapp.uk wrote:

Welcome to Scotland. Again.

#TrumpScotland

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
portugeek@c.im ("mia") wrote:

@oldladyplays In Luxembourg, where I live, all public transit is free apart from the TGV. At some point, the government realised that the money collected from fares was irrelevant, there were loads of jobs they were paying for that brought little to no money, and the benefits in terms of public health would be huge, so they just dropped the whole charade.

And this didn’t mean they stopped investing in the network, on the contrary. Bus and train lines have been expanded, and the tram in the capital has grown non-stop; I can now get to the airport from my place faster (or at least as fast) with the tram than I would have with a taxi. And the money lost, budget-wise, is peanuts and will be a net positive when you consider the long-term health benefits (and thus the savings it will provide in the healthcare system) due to having less traffic.

jwz wrote:

Bobby Brainworms levels up.

Charles Johnson: Hey, USA, here's the leader of Health and Human Services, allowing parasitic lampreys to bite his arms, presumably to let the bad humours out and make him healthier than a normal human. We'll all soon be...
https://jwz.org/b/ykrz

mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

We lost the sadly-not-literally-immortal Tom Lehrer https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/arts/music/tom-lehrer-dead.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Zk8.Ev-a.821ngjvbjLMj&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻") wrote:

This really pisses me off when companies do this shit. Nature Valley advertises 50% less sugar, but to achieve that they jack up the carbs, rendering the reduced sugar absolutely useless. There are zero benefits.

This practice is wildly deceptive, and possibly harmful for people with diabetes, who are uneducated on nutrition, or just assumes companies wouldn't do this.

Kelloggs pulled this shit like a decade ago and I believe they got sued. Anyway, fuck Nature Valley.

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Don't care about code. Care about users enough to master code.

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

Being a kindergarten teacher provides an unexpected selective advantage.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/27/true-superheroes-can-resist-the-malign-influence-of-plague-rats/

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
foone@digipres.club ("Foone🏳️‍⚧️") wrote:

38 years ago today, July 27th 1987, a song was released that would change the world forever.

https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:

It's okay to favor people over GPUs...

denschub@schub.social ("Dennis Schubert") wrote:

You know what would be fun? having a model of each DB Baureihe I've ever ridden. Maybe I should get that started.

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:

Also I like people, and I don't care about your data centers, venture capital, or business plans.

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:

I've said this before, but I think training generative "AI" on the corpus of human culture is not the same as individual people learning from their culture.

People studying their own culture is an heirloom project. It's an act of preservation and propagation as generations pass along knowledge, skills, acts, and ideas. When one person studies their culture and reproduces and regenerates it and adds to it, it enriches and refreshes the culture. Generative "AI" is not part of that.

denschub@schub.social ("Dennis Schubert") wrote:

I do repeatedly get spam trying to sell me "exquisite model ships Limited supply, global shipping. Interested?".

And like... why?

Don't they know that offering me model trains would be much more effective?

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:

If you've ever enjoyed a pinball game and like learning how things are made, this video from the Tested Team about the making of the Dune pinball machine might be worth a look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCKm3ncUXaQ

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
me_@sueden.social ("Michael Engel") wrote:

Did you know that there is not only Matt Godbolt's Compiler Explorer at https://godbolt.org, but also a Decompiler Explorer, appropriately named https://dogbolt.org, which compares the output of Ghidra, BinaryNinja, IDA and other decompilers?

#decompile #ReverseEngineering

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

I wonder if the food explodes, or injects microchips into your brain, or rusts on the plate.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/27/everything-he-touches-turns-to-crap/

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
feorag@wandering.shop ("Feòrag") wrote:

I suspect that I will never find out about every batshit 19th century transport , because there are always more. Like this, for example, which is powered by five tonnes of caustic soda surrounded by water. Link to English-language Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soda%5Flocomotive
https://ridesbik.es/@herrbett/114892929584207321

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:

Anybody who talks about efficiency of a person or group of people without actually discussing how that is being measured isn't really talking about efficiency.

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:

The NO$GMB emulator provided superior insight and debugging tools, and the flash carts were cheaper, faster, and easier to use.

The Nintendo dev kit was to remain on my desk in case of a visit from Nintendo, and I was told not to mention the use of the tools that actually allowed us to create games.

Everything is so silly...

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:

However, I was also told they didn't use those for much of anything. What they really used was the NO$GMB (registered) emulator and flash carts we'd buy directly from somebody in Hong Kong.

https://problemkaputt.de/gmb.htm

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
jeffjarvis ("Jeff Jarvis") wrote:

Die Zeit asks whether parents should send their children to the US now.
Soll mein Kind da noch hin?
https://www.zeit.de/familie/2025-07/auslandsaufenthalt-usa-kind-schule-donald-trump

cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen") wrote:

A long time ago, I was briefly employed[1] as a game developer for GB/GBC/GBA games. When I started, they handed me an official development kit from Nintendo.

https://consolevariations.com/collectibles/nintendo-gameboy-color-is-cgb-emulator-development-kit

[1] I tried it. Realized I didn't like it. And got out. It wasn't the people. I liked everybody I had the opportunity to work with. While I like the problem solving aspect of games, I actually didn't have enough "passion" for them to put up with the industry.

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
Swede1952@universeodon.com ("Swede’s Photographs") wrote:

Velvet Red Rose

This close-up of a red rose is one of my favorites. I adjusted the light to evoke a soft, painterly effect—giving the petals a dreamy, almost ethereal quality.

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

“thank God nobody over-reacted”

https://loops.video/v/88ujGYToRa

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

oh yah, too sexy for your fur…

https://loops.video/v/6GLC3jRxXM