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  RE: https://werd.social/@ben/117377849465845687 ❝…a predictable playbook…warning that America will lose to China….❞ It’s scaremongering: ❝America won’t lose; •Amazon• might.❞

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  People are all excited about a new sewing machine that stitches in a gorgeous herringbone pattern, but it seams pretty fishy

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  Heads up Twin Cities: anti-ICE rally tomorrow! #Minneapolis #MSP #Minnesota #ICEout

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  I looked something up on Stack Overflow, thought the existing answers were kind of meh, mulled the problem over, found a •much• better answer to the question, and then…I didn’t post it. I thought about Stack Overflow itself and all the harvesters and scrapers digesting my answer and not giving me one cent or even credit, and I just…didn’t. The capture and extraction of the commons come with costs that are slow, pervasive, and hard to measure.

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  I made a thing! https://wogl.innig.net WOGL is a graphics programming language in which every input string is a valid program. It’s designed to reward play and experimentation. Please play! Have fun!

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  Urgent big picture reporting from The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/sep/28/ice-us-immigration-new-tactics

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  Once again, @404mediaco@mastodon.social has managed to make a single story act as a horrifying emblem of a dozen things that are wrong with modern human society. https://www.404media.co/humans-reading-copilot-prompts-images/

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  Crossing the Mississippi this morning, there were times and angles when I couldn’t see the Short Line Bridge through the fog, but •could• see its reflection. #Minneapolis #MSP #TwinCities #bicycling

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  I’m glad they’re putting this in the spotlight, really glad, but Mother Jones absolutely biffed something here, something a lot of folks are getting wrong: The quote about how AI is “the largest theft of labor in human history?” That’s not “how tech leaders talk when they think no one is listening.” No no no. •That• is the kind of email you send when you think the company is doing something terrible, and you want your objections preserved in writing. 🧵 https://www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

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  RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117326705107715161 That last paragraph is a compelling point that runs deep.

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  RE: https://cyberpunk.lol/@mxchara/117323165008451725 ❝Yet behind all the joy there has been concern and even alarm—not about the treatment itself, but about the threat Donald Trump poses to the research ecosystem that made its creation possible.❞

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  Ah, I was trying to remember what it was that GitLab did that had made me think their leadership was fash-flavored. This was it. Thank you, Fedi edit notifications, for reminding me of this post. https://mas.to/@markwyner/114136898936177266

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  In Minneapolis, ICE routinely targeted US citizens, didn't give a damn about immigration status when they harassed and detained people, and they told us as much. They bragged about the money they were getting per person brought in, “by the head,” like cattle. It was all about race. They knew it, we knew it, they knew we knew it. Article: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/federal-agents-mistakenly-target-u-s-citizen-during-operation-outside-chicago-270305861852 via this post: https://libretoot...

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  My spouse and I finally watched “9 to 5” and…it's kind of batshit? and awesome?? How did this movie ever get made at all, and how had I not already seen it??? It makes Office Space look timid and safe by comparison.

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  RE: https://indieweb.social/@jbz/117307751875743641 ❝It's a gambit for regulatory capture. They're hoping to be appointed to some position in the market where their word is unassailable and everyone else has to ask them for permission to do things. It's frankly kind of ridiculous to commercialize this tool while saying people have to ask them for permission to use it.❞ So glad these thoughts are increasingly seeping into the nerd-mainstream and even the mainstream-mainstream. 1/2

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  RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117304269712239346 The linked article is pretty good, and worth the click. (Spoiler: it’s the humans who are the real monsters.) I suspect it’s especially good for its audience: people who are just now realizing the AI doomsaying carries ulterior motives, and aren’t quite as deeply embedded in all this as us salty old engineers are. It stops short of the conclusion I hoped that it would reach: the panic mongering serves the interest of insidious ultra-wealt...

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  I think I need to share an experience I just had recently. I was talking with an elder, in his mid-80s. He was showing me pictures, and showed me his wife’s “grandson” — cue photo of a stunningly fashionable young woman, wow does she know how to dress — “except he's trans, he did his trans-…he transitioned…” ME: Does your grandkid use “she” pronouns now? HIM: Yes! ME: So she's your granddaughter now, I think? HIM: Yes!! And he switched to using she/her and did not switch back for t...

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  ❝Most journals and conferences require authors to ensure correctness and integrity of their papers and take responsibility for them. This is particularly relevant given potential AI generated or heavily AI-assisted submissions. When authors could not answer questions about the technical parts, and sometimes even basic questions about the paper, it is difficult to see how they could have verified the paper’s contents.❞ jfc https://medium.com/@TmlrOrg/asking-authors-about-their-own-papers-3d2e04...

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@renardboy/117281470390128892 And CSS is pronounced “cuss,” obviously

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  Shotspotter lets cities pull a particularly dirty redlining trick: The company has claimed they detect gunshots and •only• gunshots with a very high accuracy rate. Even a cursory glance at data they publish, however, suggests that they’re registering a •lot• of false positives. Which means… 2/

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  I've been getting a steady stream of these unsolicited messages. The pitch is always the same: “Use your US location to attract clients, pretend to be the one doing all the work, and we'll subcontract for you on the sly.” Are we looking at a return of old-school offshoring? but now with a sort of Mechanical Turk flavor?

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  This post is correct. Also…those people Katelyn's talking about are sweeping under the rug what actually happened: Obama supported gay marriage in the mid-90S. When that became an electoral liability in larger races, he took the position of supporting same-sex civil unions instead of same-sex marriage (which would still have been a big win in 2008 if legalized nationally, and was still a risky position to take). Then he switched back to favoring gay marriage in a hot second as soon as it...

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  My daughter has discovered the existence of my Mastodon account. Me: “Did anything on there surprise you?” Her: “No, it’s •so• you.”

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  This is the desired outcome, and it is by design. The chaos is not a stepping stone on the way to a compromised election; it •is• the compromised election. 1/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/08/supreme-court-ruling-missouri-gop-congressional-maps

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  Another command-line typo?? whatever, just put it on my corntab

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  There is a point where corporate wealth and even •individual• wealth can grow so large that private entities can function like state actors, complete with their own diplomatic wings, intelligence apparatuses, election interference, control of vassal states, and proxy wars. We are not approaching that point. We are long, long •past• that point. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/07/afd-thanks-elon-musk-german-state-elections-2026-win

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  Yes, do this, market this, but with a completely straight face. Sell it to boards. https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/new-ai-designed-replace-ceos

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  I agree with @ben@werd.social: this one will hurt. I've been a loyal 1Password customer for 18 years. 18 years. Dang. But this is a red line.

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  Goblin mode but for course prep #teaching #iykyk

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  Overhearing my spouse on the phone: “I need a •human being•“ …in that withering tone one uses to speak to a machine that represents the crushing omnipresence of corporate techno-dystopian suffocation