An interesting read about an issue that has slipped under my radar until now. There is no direct Australian equivalent at the moment, but there are a number of similar undercurrents in operation here: Covid brainrot, Trump malevolence, parties at risk of zombification etc www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

The Alberta question: How separatists took hold of the province’s governing party | CBC News

A fifth estate investigation shows that the Oct. 19 referendum is the end result of the efforts of Alberta separatists to change the United Conservative Party to get the secession question on a refere...

cbc.ca

This morning, I'm dealing with two different stacks for the same goal: a specific PHP deployment. In one setup, the developers sent me a Docker stack. It builds the images, then mixes and matches the contents of the containers, then runs a whole series of deployment scripts so the developers […]

Coding agents reduce software development to a simple matter of: * specifying requirements * verifying correctness and quality * maintaining and operating software you didn't write As we all know, those have always been the easiest, most well-understood parts of the craft, so everything is fine!

Farewell, Margaret Hamilton. You were an inspiration to so many, and a remarkable example of what code optimization can achieve. You showed us how to make the impossible possible, even with limited technology. And in some way, your example helped shape my own journey in computing […]

Google is under fire for clearing over 300 hectares — the equivalent of almost 500 football fields — for two new data centers in the northern part of Finland without concluding the necessary environmental assessments. Despite the assessments still being in progress, the tech giant’s contractors […]

Anthropic IPO filing: the disaster in numbers when you can’t fiddle the numbers any more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20VYK0-Q-3o&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261001-anthropic-ipo-filing-the-disaster-in-numbers - podcast time: 6 min 56 sec

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/116939858992907996 This explains very well why "bad" code contributions by enthusiastic people can still be very worthwhile in the long run. Also LLM's will not share a drink with you at a conference reminiscing about that time you collaborated on a […]

Well ouch.

When looking for a hotel booking.com is a great resource. The correct way to use it is to look for a place you like, then find their phone number and call them directly. They will always give you a lower rate and you won't be sending money to a faceless corporation.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@RuthMalan/117044650433913260 One thing we are not talking enough about is removing stuff: removing features noone is using, removing abstractions that haven't worked out, removing dependencies that have outlasted their usefulness. The risks are ever-growing systems […]

The bill is starting to come due for businesses that adopted GenAI/LLMs. Suddenly, they're finding themselves with an unpredictable bill for tokens that can double or triple from one month to the next. They're completely at the mercy of the US dollar exchange rate. The reductions in headcount […]

Remember the culture war outrage around a decade ago over the idea that statues of Confederate Soldiers and slave owners should be removed? Including the far-right violence in Charlottesville in the US? Remember the self-righteous indignation at the suggestion that displays highlighting Ben […]

Learning a lot from Cory Doctorow's new book "Reverse-Centaur's Guide". Clear, eye-opening reasoning on important present issues. Did you know that the AI companies' outlandish claims are marketing directed to venture capital firms? Not to you or your boss. #ai #aibubble #llm #reversecentaur

*Big* shoutout to the #FreeBSD team that created #pkgbase and the 15.1 release. I upgraded 3 different notebooks and a desktop today, each update just took a few minutes. This was the first upgrade since a very long time that was completely smooth by just following the excellently documented […]

Nadia Comăneci 🇷🇴 to return to Montréal for 50th anniversary of 1976 Olympics and her perfect score https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/nadia-comaneci-montreal-1976-olympics-9.7187179 - - - Nadia Comăneci 🇷🇴 reviendra à Montréal pour le 50e anniversaire des Jeux olympiques de 1976 et son […]

RE: https://discordian.social/@LordCaramac/116422856339147958 First compiled language I learnt as an undergrad before C and C++. I have a soft spot for Pascal and remember using it both on a mainframe and PC with Turbo Pascal. Fun days.

Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC@lordcaramac.discordian.social.ap.brid.gy · 6mo ago

Of all the programming languages that I had to learn over the years, my favourite is still Pascal. Many programmers hate Pascal because it has such a rigid structure, but my Pascal code has much fewer bugs than anything I write in any other language, exactly because that rigid structure keeps me […]

RE: https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@lightweight/116260557245260521 Ping #DanmarkSkifter Denne kunne godt spredes mere. Hvis de kan, kan vi også!

This is an interesting development: https://linuxiac.com/germany-mandates-odf-for-public-administration/ - the UK did this, too, quite a long time ago - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/open-document-formats-selected-to-meet-user-needs - like 2014 - but then reversed its decision due to being […]

We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the […]

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116148772813747144 To expand this point: software is composed of code, organizational processes, and people. A surprisingly large number of software developers are narrowly focused on generating code and miss all the surrounding processes and people (skills […]

This is worrying. I always suspected that exposure to X's algorithmic feed shifted people's views to the right, well, it's been confirmed by this research. This is why the Right invest so much in X, it's a tool to move whole demographics to the right.

Registration for BSDCan 2026 is now open https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html and tutorials schedule is published. #bsdcan #openbsd #netbsd #freebsd #libresoftware #freesoftware #conference #development #networking #sysadmin #devops

If you happen to be at #FOSDEM2026 come and see us Saturday at 15:50 at the BSD devroom! https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/BGPF3M-smolbsd/ witness the fastest booting BSD UNIX!

White folks in the U.S.: I encourage you to sit with the fact that this feeling you're feeling, that you could be gunned down by a cop for no reason without them facing any repercussions, is a feeling that every Black person living in the U.S. for the past 400 years has justifiably felt for […]

A day on, and like so many people, I'm still really affected by the passing of Rob Hirst. This powerful Midnight Oil song always brought me to tears, and this is a wonderful, moving 'homemade' video for it, too. MIDNIGHT OIL - RIVER RUNS RED youtu.be/o-0GKprWTu8?... via @YouTube

MIDNIGHT OIL - RIVER RUNS RED

YouTube video by Jonatas Lima (Web Designer • WordPress)

youtu.be

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...