How about a journalist asks Erica Stanford to explain what the “legal reasons” are why she “can’t” share a copy of her Social Media Ban (Forced Online Identification for All) Bill? In a sensible country this bill would’ve been preceded by consultation on a draft bill. www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

National wants to show Labour the social media ban bill, but 'we can't', education minister says

The education minister says she hopes to get a copy of the social media ban bill to Labour's caucus this week, after previously saying legal reasons were preventing her from doing so.

rnz.co.nz

Let me take a minute to tell you how bonkers this is. The first election I worked was (I think) 2008, before there was really any advance voting. At every election, if you weren't on the roll, we let you cast a special vote and then worked out if you were eligible afterwards. Two reasons: 1/2

Marc Daalder@marcdaalder.bsky.social · 2d ago

The Electoral Commission has told staff to turn away voters who aren't on the printed roll and who say they're unenrolled, but has no plans to count how many people will be affected. newsroom.co.nz/2026/08/03/t...

I've open-sourced another new container-based API tool this week for calculating a viewshed anywhere on earth using Corpernicus WorldDEM-30. github.com/InternetSoci...

GitHub - InternetSociety/glo30: Copernicus DEM GLO-30 Terrain Analysis API Server

Copernicus DEM GLO-30 Terrain Analysis API Server. Contribute to InternetSociety/glo30 development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

more good content! imagine publishing content that's just nice! reveals a little bit about having fun on the internet! people just doing things because they can and the internet was nice!

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper.com · 3d ago

this owns www.inverse.com/input/cultur...

I was listening to @bernardchickey.bsky.social's 'The Hoon' podcast this morning, and I must say I agree very much with Helen Clark (always find it amazing that her Bluesky account is suspended) that Winston Peters should be sacked as AoNZ Foreign Minister. thekaka.substack.com/p/the-weekly...

The Weekly Hoon: Helen Clark on why Winston Peters should be fired over his 'go home' comments, & on NZ's humiliation on a key UN vote

Bernard Hickey, Peter Bale & Cathrine Dyer discuss the week in geopolitics, the economy & climate; plus special guests Helen Clark & Janet Anderson on NZ's UN vote, the ICC & Winston's 'go home' jibe

thekaka.substack.com

TIL Python's subprocess.run() et al routines have a cwd parameter that specifies a directory for the command to run in. I foresee a lot less writing of directory-changing context managers in my future… (Well, a reduction from inherited 1 + wrote 1… …to zero.)

Considered asking one of the #InternetNZ Board candidates just what involvement she is thinking of in her statement “I believe Internet New Zealand’s involvement in assessing some views as misinformation/disinformation should be anathema for a regulator”… …but Do Not Engage is a better policy.

I simultaneously think AI psychosis is often caused by deeper underlying causes (rather than just exposure to the technology) while also thinking the massive disruption to coding as a lifestyle is giving an entire generation of engineers mental health issues.

It's actually antidemocratic for our media to be so uncritical about basic, commonly understood political agendas at this point Explaining politics *is your goddamned job*, you shouldn't need to have *basic context* suggested by a member of the public.

Kieran@nugmonster.cryptoanarchy.network · 3w ago

i just straight up emailed lillian hanly and said "hey it's nice you quoted all those nzfirst supporters whining about globalism, maybe some space could be given to explaining that "globalism" in the context winston and his users are using it is an explicitly antisemitic dogwhistle

I've known Paul Henry is dodgy since I was a teen in my dad's antique shop; Paul waited until my dad was out, then told me "Gary said I could have $50 off of this" and I was very naive, believed him. He know it was a small town, that my dad would tell people Paul's a dick but he didn't care...

Sassy Little Hobbit@sassypolitico.bsky.social · 3w ago

Of course no one is gonna ask David Seymour why he thinks a person who thought the Governor General couldn’t be a brown person is fit to hold public office. Oh well.

Slightly surprised to look again at my bio and see that I did indeed put the word “bioinformatics” in there…

Albert Vilella, PhD.@albertvilella.bsky.social · 3w ago

I am doing more investigating on the uptake of @bsky.app by the #Bioinformatics and #ComputationalBiology community. I found 2114 accounts where the Bio contains the words "Bioinformatics" or "Computational Biology", out of which the large majority are personal but there are some institutional ones.

“Why do you always try to merge bioconda samtools et al updates yourself, John?” Due to inline functions, merging the bioconda htslib/samtools/bcftools PRs fully correctly is not as straightforward as it looks. These releases occurred at 3am in my time zone and someone else got to them first… 🫠

Update htslib to 1.24 by BiocondaBot · Pull Request #67046 · bioconda/bioconda-recipes

Update htslib: 1.23.1 → 1.24 Info Link or Description Recipe recipes/htslib (click to view/edit other files) Summary C library for high-throughput sequencing data formats. Home https:/...

github.com

Release 1.24 of HTSlib, SAMtools, and BCFtools is now available from GitHub. See htslib.org/download/ for links to tarballs and release notes. 🧪🧬🖥️

🔥 Does switching to a pangenome reference actually improve your association study? We tested it, and the answer is yes, measurably. Our preprint is online now: "Pangenome-based human genome analysis improves trait association and genomic prediction": doi.org/10.64898/202...

Pangenome-based human genome analysis improves trait association and genomic prediction

The Human Pangenome Reference Consortium has generated 462 open-access reference genomes and a variation graph that represents differences among them, providing a substrate for pangenome-based analysi...

doi.org

On the 12th of feburary, Paul Goldsmith had two meetings, one with the free speech union, and one with the human right's commission. I submitted an OIA for documents relating to those two half hour meetings, and apparently that was such an onerous request, Goldsmith requested an extension in order

I've been vaguely assuming there's a pyproject.toml way to express dev requirements instead of using relatively ad-hoc requirements-foo.txt files. TIL it's called Dependency Groups and tools like `pip install` and `uv add` have ‑‑group options to install packages listed in such groups.

I'm tired of making submissions to select committees with the expectation of being ignored, and I was going to sit this one out. (“Ignored” is not what I'm expecting in this case, but… still tired.) Then I read @queenoliviaiii.com's summary of their submission in this thread, and changed my mind.

Queen Olivia III@queenoliviaiii.com · last mo.

🧵 Submission on the Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill [summarised for Blue Sky word count] I oppose this Bill and ask the Committee to recommend it does not proceed.

Glorious example of why the American style convention of “the outside sentence's punctuation goes inside the quotes” sucks. Except that maybe they get away with it, as /. is just that same directory again so it's still annihilation. But the joke loses impact as the familiar “rm -rf /” is missing.

Joshua Mask@joshuafmask.bsky.social · last mo.

Banning social media for under 16s seems like a distraction from real regulation of social media #JustSaying

One for the bioinformaticians

everlee is free - please RT, all the details here: www.webworm.co/everleeisfree/

Everlee Is Free

Webworm can report that Everlee Wihongi is finally free.

webworm.co

Exactly this. Why does big tech now have to mean building silos and wanting to be The App? It's not entirely rose-coloured glasses to remember the old times as being when the approach was to describe an open protocol in an RFC, make an implementation, and see what happens…

Robin Berjon@robin.berjon.com · 2mo ago

So our approach is to do what Europe excels at: well-governed shared infrastructure and an ecosystem of competing actors on top. That's how mature sectors run. Tech, with its vertically integrated monsters, is odd and a poor example to follow. Infrastructure is financed by usage at low margins.

🧵Just ten years ago today Helen Joanne (Jo) Cox was murdered just down the road from me. She died after being shot and stabbed multiple times in the street in the town of Birstall, where she had been due to hold a constituency surgery. Words are a very powerful and potentially dangerous

But I don't want to cuddle my `else`s… #WeirdCCodingStyleLament

It's great to see the BSA — in the person of its CE, Stacey Wood — stand up for itself amidst a lot of disingenuous and uniformed discussion and commentary. I just wish I had more confidence that people would listen.

If 'The Racist Hour' goes to air, do we just tell people to turn it off?

Important questions remain over the future shape of media safeguards in New Zealand, writes Broadcasting Standards Authority chief executive Stacey Wood.

stuff.co.nz

Today I'm posting a new blog about an astonishing scientific own goal. Hundreds of papers have reported using a totally wrong antibody to investigate the tumor suppressor p16. This mistake has happened because scientists have muddled the names of two proteins. forbetterscience.com/2026/06/02/m...

malloc: Heap corruption detected, free list is damaged *** Incorrect guard value: 3735928559 It was funnier in the original hexadecimal.

Closely reading RFC 7233, and realised that §2.1 and §4.4 are inconsistent with each other. Further realising that: • I have probably made this observation before; • There’s an erratum on the topic from 2018; • The RFC has been obsoleted by RFC 9110 which does not include the error.