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

Brian Lauer is an expert liar.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/07/27/i-missed-the-tccsa-debate-until-now-nothing-was-lost/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QzDQEGX8y0

Boosted by jwz:
gregeganSF@mathstodon.xyz ("Greg Egan") wrote:

World’s least believable phishing email subject line:

Your Amazon Prime Membership has been cancelled.

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

Be sure to always call it please “research”.

https://bsky.app/profile/opalescentopal.bsky.social/post/3luxxx27nos23

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

A long time ago, we used to be friends...

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

“Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

RIP Tom Lehrer

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

one of my heroes has died, a light has gone out

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/arts/music/tom-lehrer-dead.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.Zk8.9mN8.lHtXVRK84lgX&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Boosted by jwz:
ThisIsTrue ("Randy Cassingham") wrote:

Fossilized pizza from the late crustaceous period.

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

oh, well, tnx for the advice @CARROT

Attachments:

• video: 125fc255d15c78d3.mp4

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
shriramk ("Shriram Krishnamurthi") wrote:

Pleased to announce that the third edition of my PL book, PLAI, is finally available on paper! Same price as it's been for 20 years (-:. Also made it available on Kindle EPUB, and a few other options. (Always free options, of course.) Enjoy!
https://www.plai.org/

jwz wrote:

The South Park thing.

There are many takes on it. This is mine. Formulated as a series of bullet points because they don't deserve better. All of these things can be true at the same time:
https://jwz.org/b/ykr5

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
SpindleyQ@gamemaking.social ("Spindley Q Frog") wrote:

came across COMFY-65 the other day, I forget how. https://oneofus.la/have-emacs-will-hack/files/sigcol04.pdf

It's a compile-to-6502 assembly language implemented in emacs lisp, with the main thing it provides over raw assembly being structured flow control. (of course you can just use lisp as a macro assembler too, that comes for free.) uses an extremely neat trick of emitting code _backwards_ so that it always has enough context to generate the most efficient branch instructions in a single pass. extremely my shit.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
dalias@hachyderm.io ("Cassandrich") wrote:

PSA: On stock mobile Firefox, you can bypass Mozilla's lockout of about:config using the alternate URL:

chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml

Note that "chrome" here has nothing to do with the Google browser. Google stole the name from what was previously the Mozilla-internal name for "browser UI components".

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

In 2007 Tom Lehrer put all of his music in the public domain.

https://tomlehrersongs.com/

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
wohali@timeloop.cafe wrote:

RIP Tom Lehrer, a man whose music helped me see through political bullshit when I was just a kid as clearly as seeing the craters on the Moon through a brand new telescope.

Wikipedia has a bunch of great stories about him. This one was new to me:

In 2012, rapper 2 Chainz sampled Lehrer's song "The Old Dope Peddler", on his 2012 debut album, Based on a T.R.U. Story. In 2013, Lehrer said he was "very proud" to have his song sampled "literally sixty years after I recorded it". Lehrer went on to describe his official response to the request to use his song: "As sole copyright owner of 'The Old Dope Peddler', I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?"

Boosted by jwz:
mcnado@mstdn.social ("McNadoMD") wrote:

Right now there are hedge fund managers, CEOs, engineers, lawyers, marketing directors, and lobbyists meeting and drafting plans to make money building American Dachau. They have looked at what it costs to starve people, what regulations exist for dealing with bodies, how many people can share a mattress and if you even need mattresses. They have talked about sites, and probably have spoken to certain governors.

These people must not be allowed back into society when they are named.

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.