I got all the way caught up to the latest Emptiness Effigied update today and it’s once again excellent, and this recent batch of stories contains my favorite entry yet! There’s four that were just added, and the last (and lengthiest) is exemplary, but everything is well worth your time here.

Madiha S.@emptinesseffigied.com · 5d ago

Last month I published several new stories in my Emptiness Effigied project, a supernatural lesbian detective novel that you can download and read for free! Have you experienced the romances and tribulations of detective Mona Alexandri yet? Let me know what you think! emptinesseffigied.com

idk man i think you should be able to enforce this

Now you can opt out of having your posts shown to non-followers in the Discover feed. We know not everyone wants to go viral. Sometimes you're just posting for your followers. This is one of a few updates we're working on to give you more control over your experience and help you find your people.

So the people launching a new Twitter under the name Twitter launched their thing so I signed up. Turns out they have an AI scanning tweets for "truth" and it currently has no idea what it's doing. Posted something innocuous about Star Wars Zero Company and it essentially blocked it from all feeds.

Academic freedom is when a foreign government dictates how and even whether a university investigates misconduct

Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · 8h ago

Nathan Cofnas and the US Ambassador to Belgium say that the University of Ghent have now lifted his suspension, thanking the US government for supporting him (with threats of retaliation). The Ambassador says that Cofnas will be able to complete his one year appointment to March 2027.

its SO fucked up that in the time since he recorded that line, capitalists corrupted space

Tim Curry has escaped to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism...

[That way she looked at Murati– with such fondness and tenderness– it was frightening.] Murati Nakara and her adoring dog girl adjutant Aatto Jarvi-Stormyweather from the webnovel Unjust Depth, commissioned from @/the_quipper on twitter! #unjustdepths

Disgusting.

Reuters@reuters.com · 2d ago

BREAKING: Meta reached a settlement to resolve claims brought by states across the country that the company designed Instagram and Facebook to addict children, misled consumers about their safety, and improperly collected personal data of children who used its platforms reut.rs/4ccCj2r

LLMs are not abstractions, they are not analogous to compilers, and anyone claiming otherwise is being basically dishonest about the basic nature of computer programming

We've been getting a lot of questions about how the Internet Archive digitizes books. The short answer: page by page, by hand. You may remember our viral 2021 video of Eliza Zhang scanning a book. That's still how we do it. Meet Eliza, and learn how we scan books: blog.archive.org/2021/02/09/m...

it's crazy that people think we are in the beginning of a social and technological paradigm shift when actually what is happening is we are in an economic depression

the games of 2030 are going to be whatever indies manage to scrounge up, a competent but middle-of-the-road nintendo game, and fortnite any games that come out in 2030 should be starting development now, and games companies have more or less given up

Citizen Platano 🇵🇷@daniloc.xyz · 2d ago

of course the answer is entertainment the games of 2030 are going to be so fucking weird, you don’t even know agentic engines would allow games to construct novel environments on the same mechanics as procedural generation and roguelikes, with far more depth and sophistication sure. but… weirder

the corrrect reason not to call ai "clanker" isn't because it's a slur it's because they're beneath our notice and don't deserve that level of empersonment

canyon.mid@canyondotmid.bsky.social · 2d ago

Here's the official announcement of Parton's passing from her reps, along with the request that in lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to be made to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library at www.imaginationlibrary.com

Alex Zalben@azalben.bsky.social · 2d ago

Dolly Parton, among a thousand other amazing things she did in her life, gifted over 330 million books to kids through her Imagination Library program. Her passing is a tremendous loss to the world, but you can support the program today to keep it going imaginationlibrary.com

Democracy takes many forms, and giving the bus its own lane so 40 people on a bus can sail by a handful of people driving alone in private cars is one of them.

Qagggy!@qagggy.bsky.social · 3d ago

Holy shit we’re flying like a bat out of hell. #Acceler8

bluesky account "museum of twitter" reposts a twitter account reposting a tumblr post. the people long for federated social media

IM RIGHT IM LITERALLY ALWAYS RIGHT

Wire Mother by Isabel J. Kim

Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.

clarkesworldmagazine.com

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 3d ago

I got nothing.

these people are working their hardest to make the internet less safe, all in the name of safety, while doing nothing about the fact that their kids are getting radicalized on roblox by a guy named gropenfuhrer1488

There are a LOT of useful idiots doing the heavy lifting on this who appear to have no active understanding of censorship, biometric surveillance and the corporate privatisation of the state. It is possible to acknowledge the harmful content without giving in to the digital Papers Please agenda.

You think this shit won’t be leveraged to de-bank people or remove activists from the internet if and when govt and corporations go off the rails? How nice it must be to live in a fantasy world where coercion doesn’t exist. We used to aspire to designing an internet that was free of these risks.

thinking about what sam altman was up to before openai took off. people have forgotten about worldcoin, the crypto venture that wanted to use Orbs to scan your eyeballs on the blockchain.

i don't care about the record but it IS really funny how this clip ends

NBC News@nbcnews.com · 4d ago

A Chinese humanoid robot outran Usain Bolt’s 100-meter sprint world record on the opening day of the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, posting a time of 9.39 seconds — 0.19 faster than Bolt’s pace in 2009.

losing my mind at this Rick Steves clip

also for what its worth the dollar general and vape shops probably employ more people than the datacenter does

Pyramid Chad@pyrameadhead.wifeguy.online · 4d ago

You missed the funniest part of the tweet

Kirby Get Cell Phone

the french language one is how you can tell they deliberately framed these so they'd be rejected and could whine about how unreasonable the canadians were being

IMMACULATE OP

NESbot@nesbot.bsky.social · 5d ago

The Duskbloods: Steam Release information found in-game www.resetera.com/threads/16...

doing ftm prog after listening to the cruise chaser theme on loop for to long and find yourself just going through some things