akuchling

Or its modern incarnation, Gemini. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

Stray thought: adding a library the PR submitter controls would be a good starting point for an XZ/SSH-style supply chain attack: badger & threaten the maintainers to add the dependency, and then sneak something into a future library update.

That's not correct; Wired still produces a print edition every other month.

From https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/the-future-is-ours-to-...

Sex On Holidays Can Advance Happiness To Outrageous Amplitudes. Not suitable for a high school class, though.

Who would you cite as having done significant investigative reporting on Youtube? (setting aside the Pulitzers for poetry, music, fiction, non-fiction, none of which would be first published there...)

I have rarely read a smugger blog post than this one. While the author isn't wrong about Final Frontier and their ultimately doomed practice of completing Kickstarter N with the funds from Kickstarter N+1, I find it hard to believe that companies like Cephalofair or Stonemaier are unaware of an escape hatch as simple as using a different freight code.

Also Violet Blue's weekly cybersecurity roundups: the most recent is https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-15-126689368 .

Asimov's story The Feeling of Power seems relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power

A documentary from PBS's American Experience: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/nazi-town-...

Tom Lehrer: "It’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years!"

Rebecca Watson wrote about them a week ago: https://skepchick.org/2025/02/the-rationalist-death-cult-spr...

My rule: when buying a 'lifetime' service, assume that equals 10 years and weigh the cost accordingly. A lifetime Nebula subscription is $300, so $30/year. Is that reasonable to you for the service? Then go for it, and be pleasantly surprised if it lasts more then 10 years.

You're motte-and-baileying here, since you began with "WordPress has been built by people employed by Matt either via Automattic or via his other entities", and are now writing "WordPress would not be where it is today if it depended on free labour." The second sentence is unquestionably true, but doesn't mean that "every piece of Wordpress was produced by paid labour".

"The Good Virus", by Tom Ireland, is an entertaining book about bacteriophage therapies, their history, and why they're difficult to scale up.

Erm, Python has accepted semicolons to separate statements since version 0.9.2, released in the fall of 1991.

I noticed the README comment about NNTP's limitations. I wonder if a new NNTP-over-HTTP protocol could find enough traction among the text-using crowd, or if ActivityPub could be used to provide a similar feature set efficiently.

I think this just shows it's possible to write boring summaries, and log lines are often very non-specific. I read almost all of the Hugo-nominated fiction, and wrote these summaries for my own blogging:

SOME DESPERATE GLORY, by Emily Tesh, is set roughly twenty or so years after the Earth was destroyed by an antimatter bomb, deployed by a galactic civilization called the majoda. Now a small remnant of a few thousand humans live in an authoritarian military encampment, hiding in a small planetoid called Gaea. 17-year-old Valkyr and her brother Magnus are teenagers about to be assigned to their own duties, perhaps in the attack squads or perhaps to the internal divisions such as Oikos (maintenance), Nursery (pregnancy and childrearing), Suntracker (energy production), etc. Valkyr and Magnus are both warbreed, biologically enhanced for combat, so she's horrified to be assigned to Nursery. This leads to her escaping Gaea with an alien prisoner, and then things get complicated and timey-wimey.

... T. Kingfisher's THORNHEDGE is another re-spin of Sleeping Beauty that takes a different angle: our POV character is Toadling, the fairy who now lives in the forest surrounding the castle and spends a lot of her time in toad form. She watches passers-by with suspicion, hoping they don't notice the castle hidden behind the hedge, and then after a few centuries a knight arrives in search of the lost castle. Its approach is reminiscent of Gaiman's story "Snow, Glass, Apples", but brighter ...

"The Year Without Sunshine", by Naomi Kritzer, is set in St Paul MN after an unspecified disaster and follows a neighbourhood as they self-organize, share resources, and face different obstacles over the course of a year.

In the book club I run, we voted on books for a few years. I kept hoping the non-attending voters would choose the right books to bring them to a meeting, but the choices sometimes felt aspirational like that -- people voted for a heavy title but still didn't attend, and it was irritating to be reading dull books chosen by someone else.

So we switched to making selections in person at a session; if you can't come, you can submit suggestions, but the people who actually bother to show up make the final choices. We choose a monthly book for a whole year at a time, so we just do an hour-long discussion in December and pick 11 titles. In a monthly group you could probably do it in 10 minutes after the regular discussion.

Also, as the organizer feel free to put your thumb on the scale: pick 3 books you'd personally like to read, and ask them to choose one. You may want to be completely democratic about it, but people often appreciate someone else reading reviews and limiting the choices (avoiding the paradox of choice).

Of the names on that list, GvR, Barry Warsaw, and Paul Everitt were all at PyCon in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago. Barry is currently a member of the Python Steering Council and participated in a panel presentation about what's going on with Python 3.13. So, 29 years of contributions -- very good!

Iain Banks's "Against A Dark Background"?

For most entertainment topics, the-avocado.org has some lively discussion (based on Disqus).

He wrote "A Dog's Life" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/11/08/why-are-s...), a feature in the Post's magazine, in November 2021. (A heartbreaking story, if you're a dog person.)

Many bots are on bot-specific instances, like https://botsin.space/ or the very new https://beep.town/ .

Gift link to the original Washington Post story: https://wapo.st/49H3K0Q

Probably a sardonic reference to Mark Zuckerberg: https://venturebeat.com/business/start-up-advice-for-entrepr...

“I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he stated. If you want to found a successful company, you should only hire young people with technical expertise. “Young people are just smarter,” he said with a straight face.

Probably for far-right reasons; January 6th was called a "1776 Moment" by Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, and the Proud Boys once sold merchandise with 1776 on it. So auto-complete on its own probably suggests a bunch of alt-right terms.

Even in the 1990s, I saw the phrase "academic suicide by Usenet". Some people got so pulled into keeping up with newsgroups that they'd neglect their homework, thesis, or studies. A stream of anything engaging is addictive.

I don't see how this is the hospital's fault: they can't keep patients indefinitely. Today's Washington Post has an article on the increasing number of homeless seniors https://wapo.st/3q8Gzeb which includes this passage:

"After treatment for an acute illness, hospitals often discharge homeless patients, who wind up back in shelters or even back into their sidewalk tents and makeshift lean-tos, in what health practitioners in Phoenix ruefully call “treat-and-street.” ... A pinball effect takes hold, said health-care providers, shelter operators and advocates. Homeless people bounce from homeless shelter to hospital, then to a nursing home for a short-term recuperation stay. Once that short-term stay ends, nursing homes must decide if the person is infirm enough to qualify for long-term care. If the answer is no, they must leave the nursing home, starting the cycle over again."

Another perception game is Dive (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/304324/dive), which has a stack of translucent plastic sheets. Some of these sheets have silhouettes of sea creatures on them (fish, sharks, even a whale) and you need to estimate how many sheets down that shark is.