Mike Agg @countingquoll@social.cleverlibre.org

Oh, this is *masterful*

"My husband plays the trumpet, which is a sort of loud pretzel originally invented to blow down the walls of fucking Jericho and, later, to let Civil War soldiers know it was time to kill each other in a river while you chilled eating pigeon in your officer’s tent twenty miles away, yet somehow, in modern times, it has become socially acceptable to toot the bad cone inside your house before 10:00 a.m. because it’s “your job” and your wife should “get up.” What a world! If one was feeling uncharitable, one might describe the trumpet as a machine where you put in compressed air and divorce comes out, but despite this—despite operating a piece of biblical demolition equipment inside the home every bright, cold morning of his wife’s one and only life—the trumpet is not the most annoying thing about my husband."

— Lindy West: The Witches Are Coming, p. 122

I saw this quote floating around the internets a while back and as a husband and former trumpet player I knew I had to read this book.

I'm nearly done with it and so glad I picked it up.

what will be the big hot shit after AI dies out?

I hope it's naps

Pillaged from BlueSky:

It is essential to stop using Chrome.

Under the pretense of saving users from third-party spyware, Google is creating an ecosystem in which Chrome itself is the spyware.

Given Google's overwhelming presence in the browser market, this is unconscionable.

We should all despise the ad-tech business, and have no sympathy for the companies getting whacked by Google's actions. But we should not permit one monopolist to replace them all.

I just started Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy and I feel like I'm 11 years old again. I read her books more slowly than I have read anything in years because I don't want them to end. Treasure❤️

#Fantasy #Bookstodon

A different perspective for those folks who are having trouble seeing women's point of view.

#AbortionRightsAreHumanRights #Abortion

"Earlier this month, Polish hackers known as Dragon Sector accused one of Poland’s largest train makers, Newag, of intentionally bricking its own trains when they’re repaired by third parties. Newag threatened to sue Dragon Sector, but the story exploded as an example of why we deserve the right-to-repair and the company is facing an investigation from the Polish Office of Competition and Consumer Protection"

https://gizmodo.com/how-a-group-of-train-hackers-exposed-a-right-to-repair-1851128745

I guess this is turning into a real project so putting this out there if anyones interested:

We're making a very lightweight tool to create RSS feeds for journals from crossref metadata (with room for other sources). If ya dont know, many publishers are shutting down their RSS feeds to drive people onto their surveillance platforms, and every enshittification leaves behind an opening for adversarial interop.

This opens some interesting possibilities like creating feeds for keywords indexed across journals to start breaking down journals as the major organizational scheme of scholarly lit - papers have metadata keywords, but they mostly arent used, so lets use them!

Eventually wed like to write a FastAPI plugin similar to activitypub-express so we can make all feeds available on the fedi as well, and that would be a really nice set of tools to build for smaller AP projects that dont necessarily want to be full instances.

This is designed to be extremely deployable so you can run your own feed generator, but we'll also host a reference instance here at feeds.neuromatch.social once we get it running.

Just getting started, help wanted and welcome from anyone who loves #RSS and reading papers ♥

Repo: https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/journal-rss

Cc @lili and @roaldarboel

Stems from this thread: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/111668885237921256

One cannot simultaneously value my privacy and share every detail of my visit to a website, down to the &#%* screen size, with 1505 partners.

"Their final objective (is)... using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

MathsJam is a monthly opportunity for like-minded self-confessed maths enthusiasts to get together in a pub and share stuff they like. Puzzles, games, problems, or just anything they think is cool or interesting. See how to join in at mathsjam.com!

Reminder: Fireworks are for pricks.

Hey, let’s have “Talk Like a Ninja Day” where everyone just shuts the hell up.

This December, if there’s one tech New Year’s resolution I’d encourage you to have, it’s switching to the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox. According to recent posts on social media, Firefox’s market share is slipping. We should not let that happen. There are two main reasons why switching is important.

1. Privacy

Firefox is the only major browser not built by a company that makes money from advertising and/or selling your personal data. There’s been a lot of talk about websites tracking users using cookies, fingerprinting and other nefarious technologies that hurt your privacy. But owning the browser puts Google, Apple and Microsoft in a position where they don’t even need those tricks. We need to use browsers that are independent, and right now that means Firefox.

2. Browser engine monopoly

Wikipedia lists four browser engines as being “active”. Browser engines are the bits that take a web page’s code and display it on your screen. Ideally, they conform to the official W3C standards, and display all elements as it describes. If that’s the case, web developers can easily write sites that work on all browsers. No proprietary vendor lock-in nonsense, just glorious open standards at work.

It’s happened before

In the early 2000’s, Internet Explorer had a massive 95% market share. This meant that many sites were only developed for use with IE. They’d use experimental features that IE supported, in favor of things from the official HTML standard. This was a very bad situation, which hindered the development of the World Wide Web.

Currenty, Chrome, Safari and Edge all use variations of the closely related Webkit and Blink engines. If we want to avoid another browser engine monopoly, we need to support Firefox, and its “Gecko” engine.

Firefox is actually really good

If Firefox would be a bad browser, I would not recommend you to switch. It’s fast, has a nice user interface, and feels every bit as modern and elegant as its competition. I’ve been using it as my main browser for a couple of years now, on Linux, Windows, MacOS and Android. As a web developer, I usually have at least three browsers open, but when I go look something up on the web, I pick Firefox.

So please, help save the web by using the best browser out there. It’s an easy thing to do, and it makes a big difference.

https://roytanck.com/2023/12/23/in-2024-please-switch-to-firefox/

#Firefox #privacy