I try to use my feed as a way to broaden my horizons by mixing in publications that are a bit outside of my usual wheelhouse. Normally what happens is I’ll randomly run across an article and, if I enjoy reading it, I’ll add the publisher’s feed for a while to see what else they have. For example, Smithsonian Magazine, Aeon, and Planetizen can all be interesting from time to time.

I would also recommend subscribing to at least one publication focused on your city or state/region to help stay informed on local news and issues. If you’re in the US you can try checking out the local member of States Newsroom.

And of course, make sure you get your regular dose of XKCD and SMBC

Or go straight to the linked github page which seems to be where they’re storing all the data and analysis

https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings

This makes me wonder if it’s possible that modern battle rap is a direct descendant of medieval flyting, or if this a case of convergent cultural “evolution” where two very similar practices arose without any apparent connection.

Qwant and Ecosia are especially notable for their efforts to build an independent search index.

For those who don’t know, most “independent” search engines, including DDG, still rely on Bing or Google results behind the scenes. They basically just act as a middleman by taking your query, forwarding it to one of those providers, and then returning the results to you. Some of them will attempt to reshuffle the order of those results to push the ones they think are best towards the top, but they’re still fundamentally limited to what Google and Bing choose to give them.

Presently a lot of Qwant and Ecosia searches go through Bing, but they’re collaborating to build an independent index which will allow them to become fully independent. I believe they’re already serving a mix of results from Bing and their own index, with plans to bias more and more towards their index as it matures.

Topologically a dog is a sphere (assuming it keeps its mouth shut…

Next time I want someone to stop talking, they’re going to be very confused when I tell them to “become topilogically spherical.”

Isoamyl acetate, the chemical which is traditionally used for artificial banana flavor, was first synthesized in the UK where it was marketed as Jargonelle pear flavor. Companies importing it to the US believed that the American public wouldn’t be interested in pear candy, so they decided to call it banana flavor instead.

Also, as an aside, Lecroy now sells “sunshine” flavored sparkling water which I’m 90% sure is flavored with isoamyl acetate. I think they just decided to lean into the fact that it tastes distinctly fruity, but not like any one fruit in particular.

Now do yourself a favor and buy a good quality cable thats at least 10ft long and rated for 240W. The feeling of having one cable that can charge any of your devices from any seat on your couch is incredible.

Even in the wide world of dubiously useful AI chatbots, Copilot really stands out for just how incompetent it is. The other day I was working on a PowerPoint presentation, and one of the slides included a photo with a kind of cluttered looking background. Now, I can probably count the number of things that AI is genuinely good at on one hand, and context aware image editing trends to be one of them, so I decided to click the Copilot button that Microsoft now has built directly into PowerPoint and see what happens. A chat window popped up and I concisely explained what I wanted it to do: “please remove the background from the photo on slide 5.” It responded on that infuriating obseqious tone that they all have and assured me that it would be happy to help with my request just as soon as I uploaded my presentation.

What?

The chatbot running inside an instance of PowerPoint with my presentation open is asking me to “upload” my presentation? I explained this to it, and it came back with some BS about being unable to access the presentation because a “token expired” before requesting again that I upload my presentation. I tried a little longer to convince it otherwise, but it just kept very politely insisting that it was unable to do what I was asking for until I uploaded my presentation.

Eventually I gave up. The photo wasn’t that bad anyway.

I’m not sure who would be considered the “main character” of strange new worlds, but I’d be happy to have any of their jobs.

“Gunpowder caliber guano” is an absolutely amazing way to call something batshit insane and I will be taking every available opportunity to use it in conversation from now on.

Reminds me a bit of the work of Shou Xin https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/shouxin-graphite-cat-drawings/

Every time I see a headline like this I’m reminded of the time I heard someone describe the modern state of AI research as equivalent to the practice of alchemy.

Long before anyone knew about atoms, molecules, atomic weights, or electron bonds, there were dudes who would just mix random chemicals together in an attempt to turn lead to gold, or create the elixir of life or whatever. Their methods were haphazard, their objectives impossible, and most probably poisoned themselves in the process, but those early stumbling steps eventually gave rise to the modern science of chemistry and all that came with it.

AI researchers are modern alchemists. They have no idea how anything really works and their experiments result in disaster as often as not. There’s great potential but no clear path to it. We can only hope that we’ll make it out of the alchemy phase before society succumbs to the digital equivalent of mercury poisoning because it’s just so fun to play with.

I’m hopeful that when the bubble pops it’ll be more like the dot com crash, which is to say that the fallout is mostly of the economic variety rather than the superfund variety. Sure, that’ll still suck in the short term. But it will ideally lead to the big players and VC firms backing away and leaving behind an oversupply of infrastructure and talent that can be soaked up at fire sale prices by the smaller, more responsible companies that are willing to stick out the downturn and do the unglamorous work of developing this technology into something that’s actually sustainable and beneficial to society.

That’s my naive hope. I do recognize that there’s an unfortunately high probability that things won’t go that way.

I looked into it a while ago but I gave up on the idea after realizing how few programs can actually run on one. There’s no “reverse VM” software that allows you to seamlessly combine multiple physical machines into one virtual one. Each application has to be specifically designed to take advantage of running on a cluster. If you’re writing your own code, or if you have a specific project in mind that you know supports cluster computing then by all means go for it, but if you’re imagining that you’d build one and use it for gaming or video editing or some other resource intensive desktop application, unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.

Edit: I dug up a link to the post I made about it in /c/linux. There’s some good discussion in there if you’d like to learn more https://lemmy.world/post/11528823

Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It’s also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department’s refresh cycle. Only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you’re willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.

TBH I just use the Feeder app on my phone. Fully self-contained. No account, no server, no middleman of any kind. Just the app.

I’ve been meaning to set up something more elaborate, but this really does work fine, and I like to mention it in these threads for anyone who’s interested in RSS but thinks it’s a big lift to set up. It can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Download an app and start adding publications that interest you. That’s all it takes to get started.

Time to quote Dan Olson again. This was originally written about NFTs, but just replace “crypto” with “AI” and it’s still 100% relevant:

When you drill down into it, you realize that the core of the crypto ecosystem … is a turf war between the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy. Techno fetishists who look at people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, billionaires that have been minted via tech industry doors that have now been shut by market calcification, and are looking for a do-over, looking to synthesize a new market where they can be the one to ascend from a merely wealthy programmer to a hyper wealthy industrialist.

From the incomparable line goes up

No Man’s Sky

Isn’t this the one that crashed and burned on launch, but the devs owned their mistakes and put a ton of work into patching and upgrading? What a fuckin redemption arc for it to end up on this list unironically.

Trying to bring the thorn back, are we?

Maxim 43: If it’s stupid and it works, it’s still stupid and you’re lucky.