Ben Taylor @VoxDei@social.cleverlibre.org

Taken from Glastonbury Tor this morning looking out towards the festival site. #Glastonbury #glastonburyfestival #glastonbury #somerset #sunrise #sunrisephotography #glastonburytor

Want an honest reaction of the British public to the resignation of Boris Johnson?

For those who don't know or don't live in the UK, "Any Questions" is a BBC radio political panel that broadcasts live on a Friday and repeats on a Saturday lunchtime.

We were driving home today and caught the end of the repeat announcing Boris Johnson's resignation.

Here is the unprompted and unedited audience reaction.

Anything else is spin.

The opposite of “return to office” advocates isn’t “work from home” advocates. It’s a rich tapestry of “open offices are distracting” people and “I’ve never gone this long without being sick” people and “commutes are a waste of time I don’t get paid for” people and “I’m an introvert and playing house with coworkers sucks the life out of me” people and “I have a family and appreciate the flexibility” people and “I primarily communicated with coworkers through Slack anyway” people and “no one wa…

Key point by Moira Donegan - and exactly the intended effect: Make Twitter completely unusable for those who dare to use it as a tool to publicly question reactionary dominance in any way.

A weaponization of “free speech” to sabotage whatever is left of Twitter as an instrument to democratize the public discourse.

Cats Protection has a specialist fostering service in some UK areas for people fleeing domestic abuse, so that your cat will be taken care of until you can be reunited. Please share and let more people know about this important service. #abuse #cats

https://www.cats.org.uk/what-we-do/paws-protect

@antlerboy

On the capitalist ledger, a bot is an investment. A human is a cost.

"Thanks to accounting conventions and tax laws dating back centuries, a robot doesn’t need to be better – or more efficient – than a human being at a task to make a business more profitable. It just needs to be 34% as good, or 11% as good, depending on that business’s accounting and amortization policies.”

https://hq.hatcher.com/blog/How_Medieval_Accountants_and_AI_Created_the_Jobless_Future

The new ".zip" domain is being used almost solely for malware. Some of the clicks are very deceptive, even to technically knowledgeable people. See the attached image for an example.

You can block all zip domains with the following uBlock Origin rule:

||zip^

Tell everyone you know.

Current wildfires in Canada.
Red - out of control
Yellow - being held
Blue - under control

#ClimateChange is not some future distant threat, it is here and it will get worse if we don't demand a transition to renewables.

I am HORRIFIED by the current UK attitude to the problem of net zero oceanography - it’s basically to remove humans from the ocean as much as possible and automate everything. Of course ships are currently carbon-intensive, but we cannot afford to separate ourselves from the ocean, to deprive our scientists of experiencing the sea. We need more accessible electric/sail coastal vehicles & to take seriously that ocean scientists need a relationship with the ocean. #science #ocean

Nikki Haley said the most important issue facing teenage girls is unfair competition from transgirl athletes.

An estimated ONE MILLION high school girls have been raped based on a 2021 (NBC) report. In 2021, 2590 children under 18 were murdered by guns (Pew). Before age 18, 3.5 Million girls have been stalked. One in 10 girls is a victim of dating violence.(Childrens Hosp of Phila).

Meanwhile, (Apr 21, 2023) Newsweek reports 15 high school transathletes competed in high school sports, of those 15, only THREE are girls.

MAGA will exaggerate and lie about victimization to justify hate and bigotry. Nazis did this, too. It's not harmless.

Regardless of What Mr. Bean Says, EVs Are Much Better for the Environment than Gasoline Vehicles - Inside Climate News https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05062023/electric-gasoline-vehicles-rowan-atkinson/

Terrific @pluralistic piece about how AI hype — both from those who make AI, and some who critique AI — serves mostly to promote the idea that it’s *jussst on the verge* of being wildly competent at everything …

… instead of being basically an advanced form of autocomplete that will be used mostly by monopolized firms to make their already-crappy services crappier (and more profitable) by pulling more humans out of the loop

https://doctorow.medium.com/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee-4ac92fa2eed

"Why is GPS free?" https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/13y7ee7/why_is_gps_free/ where a GPS engineer gives the top answer.

"Now we'll see who wrote all this terrible code."