Mastodon Feed: Posts

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

Her work is so cool

RE: https://www.threads.com/@hadieh%5Fshafie/post/DPM%5FjVtDJeA

Boosted by jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein"):
sophieschmieg@infosec.exchange ("Sophie Schmieg") wrote:

Random childhood anecdote, posted as individual toot in order to not derail some random joke post about kids these days not being into non-Euclidean geometry:

I have three siblings, spaced two years apart each. All four of us went to the same high school. My youngest sister's math teacher wanted to do a cute little segment about triangles always having inner angles sum up to 180 degrees. It was supposed to take the form of a trial. My sister was assigned the role of prosecutor charging a triangle accused of having an inner angle sum different from 180 degrees. Obviously, taking her role very seriously, she consulted the Schmieg dinner table, and a plan was hatched, involving a grapefruit and a marker. The trial came, and just as the defense had produced what they thought was irrefutable proof that their client was innocent, my sister took out the grapefruit, drew a triangle connecting one pole to the equator using three right angles, and said "So how do you explain this?!?" Leading to the teacher/judge having to explain non-Euclidean geometry to a bunch of 10 year olds.

And to make this anecdote even better, in a different class the same day she had a substitute teacher who didn't know my sister, but seeing the triangled up grapefruit, approached her and asked her "Are you a Schmieg?". Our family name has racked up quite some reputation…

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
LauraJG@deacon.social ("Laura G, Sassy 70’s") wrote:

Your art history post for today: by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), Women Carrying Sacks of Coal in the Snow, chalk, brush in ink, and opaque and transparent watercolor on wove paper, 12.5x19.6 inches (32x50 cm), Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands. #arthistory #painting #oilpainting #labor

Most people don’t know that before he became an artist, Vincent was a missionary to a coal mining region of Belgium. The story of his time there breaks my heart.

From Judith Moore, “Late nights with Van Gogh,” San Diego Reader, November 18th, 2004:

‘Van Gogh headed as a missionary to the Belgian mining district of Borinage.

What Van Gogh found in Borinage horrified him more than London’s slums. Sweetman: “There were sights to pierce the heart: stables 2000 feet underground where ponies broken with toil spent their wretched lives; worse still, children, girls as well as boys, some only eight years old, filthy and in rags, pulled sledges of coal through tunnels too small for the animals. And hanging over all this was the constant fear of accidents.”

Van Gogh responded by giving away his clothing, food, bed, and finally, he moved out of his comfortable room to live with the miners to whom he ministered. When Esther, Van Gogh’s former land-lady, asked him why he behaved as he did, literally handing out the shirts off his back to be torn into bandages, Van Gogh replied: “Esther, one should do like the good God; from time to time one should go and live His own.” His superiors disapproved Van Gogh’s charities; they chastised him for overzealousness and after six months as a missionary, then-26-year-old Van Gogh was fired.

What a terrible moment! The occasion of his firing feels heartbreaking to the reader. How must it have felt to Van Gogh, who had set such hopes on being permitted to bring the remedy of God’s love to the miners? Sweetman guesses: “He was utterly cast down...he had done everything for God and God had surely rejected him.”

… During the months before he was fired, Van Gogh had been sketching miners and their families. (“I should be happy if some day I could draw then,” he wrote, “so that these unknown types would be brought before the eyes of the people.”) After his dismissal Van Gogh stayed on in the Borinage. He acquired a primer that taught drawing — “clear black-and-white studies of faces,” writes Sweetman, “with anatomical outlines that the learner was encouraged to copy as faithfully as possible” — and gradually, laboriously, Van Gogh taught himself to draw and paint.’

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

As well they fucking should have. Cowardice should be costly.

Disney reportedly lost 1.7 million paid subscribers in the week after suspending Kimmel https://share.google/W3VbvOkOrbKwMMhX8

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

You call that a chicken? Of the woods?

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/09/29/tastes-like-chicken/

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz ("Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿") wrote:

This is magnificent and harrowing: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qGXcDz8PU4A or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGXcDz8PU4A I've long thought we need to break the taboo about questioning what our peers do for work, and what 'markets' corporations choose to fulfil. And, to be clear, BigTech is just another head of the white military industrial complex hydra.

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
dthompson@toot.cat ("dave") wrote:

The 2025 edition of the Autumn Lisp Game Jam begins on Halloween! 👻 🎃 Mull some cider, warm up your REPL by the fire, and make a little game with your favorite Lisp dialect!

Sign up for the jam now over on itch.io: https://itch.io/jam/autumn-lisp-game-jam-2025

#lispgamejam #lisp #scheme

Boosted by NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈"):
rbreich@masto.ai ("Robert Reich") wrote:

Boosted by jwz:
Voline@kolektiva.social wrote:

A message from Portland City Councilor and US Army veteran Mitch Green, urging Oregon Guardsmen to remember their oaths to the Constitution and refuse deployment to Portland.

#PDX #ICE #Antifa

Attachments:

• video: Mitch Green, a bearded white guy in a US Army fatigue shirt with his name on it, looking into camera and talking. https://bsky.app/profile/councilorgreen.bsky.social/post/3lzx7troojk2n

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
mttaggart@infosec.exchange ("Taggart :donor:") wrote:

My business plan for artisanal, hand-crafted software now includes boutique spreadsheet and document creation, formerly known as "actually doing work."

https://www.theverge.com/news/787076/microsoft-office-agent-mode-office-agent-anthropic-models

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
rgadellaa ("Roderick Gadellaa") wrote:

No. No, no, no. This can't be happening *again*.

https://webventures.rejh.nl/blog/2024/history-of-safari-show-stoppers/#anchor--2019-audio-stops-playing-when-standalone-web-app-is-no-longer-in-foreground

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

I'm toying with making and releasing an #11ty template based on the fromjason.xyz structure. What do y'all think?

#digitalgarden #blog #eleventy #JamStack #staticwebsite I

adam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:

This is untrue. Many of us have indeed stopped wearing our robes while performing the rites, but we nonetheless remain committed to such controversial sacred values as “inclusion” and “empathy”.

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

Tim Cook's 24 karat golden trinket at the Oval was an embarrassment, but more than that, it was a token of policy corruption. What Apple wanted from the WH was exactly what it got this weekend: blatantly corrupt pressure to undercut rules that create fairness:

https://on.ft.com/46tYoXZ

It's part of a playbook that works to erode democracy, and more overt than even I expected:

https://infrequently.org/2025/09/apples-antitrust-playbook/

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
milo@types.pl ("iitalics") wrote:

i present: "scheme" compiler in ~600 lines of C, via wasm GC

https://git.lain.faith/iitalics/scm2wasm/src/branch/main

Boosted by fromjason ("fromjason.xyz ❤️ 💻"):
sonder@xoxo.zone ("susan ⚔︎") wrote:

bonus: i don't think the subject matter cares for it. lmao

#shibainu

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
astronomerritt@hachyderm.io ("Steph (they/them)") wrote:

Identifying a raven is dead easy. If you're looking at it and going "ooh, is that a crow or a raven", it's a crow. If instead you're going "christ that bird's fucking enormous" it's a raven.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social ("Kevin Beaumont") wrote:

“Microsoft says its (vibe working mode) in Excel has an accuracy rate of 57.2 percent in SpreadsheetBench, a benchmark for evaluating an AI model’s ability to edit real world spreadsheets”

Imagine being a hiring manager and hiring somebody to use Excel who says they do their job wrong about half the time. Welcome to AI.

Attachments:

• gifv: Fairly Oddparents Burn GIF

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social ("Kevin Beaumont") wrote:

vibe working

vibe working

I am gone

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your friendly 'net denizen"):
meg@fediscience.org ("Megan ⚘") wrote:

Bandcamp's Album of the Day: Neko Case, “Neon Grey Midnight Green”

https://daily.bandcamp.com/album-of-the-day/neko-case-neon-grey-midnight-green-review

#Music
​

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

He did successfully make this liberal cry.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/09/29/just-another-liberal-atheist-terrorist/

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

Step 1: Claim your new technology is a great equalizer that will end poverty or something

Step 2: Claim utopia

Step: 3: Turn your product into spy-ware

Step 4: Shopping!

Step 5: Assume no one has noticed the pattern. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

#AI #OpenAI #ChatGPT

https://fortune.com/2025/09/29/openai-rolls-out-purchases-direct-from-chatgpt-in-a-radical-shift-to-e-commerce-and-direct-challenge-to-google/

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
jaffathecake ("Jake Archibald") wrote:

SVGOMG has been updated to use SVGO 4! (thanks Adrien Crivelli!)

This is the URL for SVGOMG. Unfortunately someone maintains a fork with ads, so, err, don't use that 😀

https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/

adam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:

19th century #Pokemon

https://mastodon.art/@zencolor/115288060813311110

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

So, I have just been on a book tour and have gone to a dozen cities, large and small, and I have six more stops for festivals in cities ranging in size from 76,000 to eight million. I haven't felt a single scintilla of fear being in any of them, and none of them could come close to being called a "war zone." The problem is not cities, it's that our president is a racist shithead fronting a racist shithead administration and that a bunch of their supporters are fearful cowardly shitty racists too

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

I was just reminiscing about some of my favorite places in Portland. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Has anyone mentioned to Trump that he's a lying moron?

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/09/29/how-are-you-holding-up-oregonians/

adam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:

Neato is (of course) still not ready, but my dev version publishes directly to Bunny, where content delivery is simply excellent in every possible way.

If you can imagine yourself serving a static website on Europe's very best infrastructure and want to get a head start on playing with their amazing platform, you can sign up with this link to support Neato development directly: https://bunny.net?ref=78iezsfq3y ❤️

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

No, I don't want to think of Disney as a champion of free speech.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/09/29/i-dont-want-to-care-about-jimmy-kimmel-or-disney-corp/

adam@social.lol ("Adam") wrote:

Bunny is one of the good ones. https://bunny.net/blog/trust-speed-and-sovereignty-bunny-nets-commitment-to-europes-digital-future/

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Werewolf ⁂🐧🌱☕ 🎃💀🕸🐺"):
Black_Flag@syzito.xyz ("Androgynes 🏴‍☠️🫂🔞") wrote:

Imagine being the UK Labour Party that thinks chasing the racists' votes is the thing to do rather than condemning racism and chasing the anti-racist vote.

Everything Labour does basically tells the racists they are right because it concedes their racism has a point.

RANCID.

#ukpol #ukpolitics #racism