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  With U.S. elections a month away now, Donald Trump's disapproval rating on the economy is now at an astonishing 73%. A 65% majority also blame Trump for higher costs due to his policies like tariffs and his stalemated war against Iran: https://apnews.com/article/trump-economy-approval-trump-midterms-8d5809758a31b29c73f4351a8008147c

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  It's not often that covers of a song surpass the original, but I think this rendition of "You Are the New Day" by the King's Singers is even better than the Airwaves original. Incredible a cappella work here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3LduXNeicY

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  I think the reason so many people are inclined to imagine their chatbot is alive is that the human lineage never had to evolve the ability to spot linguistic imitation. Spotting visual simulacra was essential to survival for our ancestors, by contrast: https://plus.flux.community/p/large-language-models-and-the-textual

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  Reddit is cancelling its RSS feeds as part of a larger pattern of ending its support for unauthenticated API access. This is both a money grab since Reddit can make AI companies pay for their data, but also because AI crawlers have been slamming websites with API access: https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/30/reddit-is-killing-rss-feeds-ending-public-api-access-because-of-ai-bots/

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  AI doomers vastly overstate the negative applications of the current technologies, but that does not in any way mean that they should escape regulation. Unfortunately, far too much of the regulatory discussion is about fantasy scenarios about tech that can't solve captchas.

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  The Trumper DOJ claimed that 16,000 people were illegally registered to vote in Nevada. Once their allegations were actually inspected, 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙤𝙣𝙚 of them proved to be true. Voter fraud is exceptionally difficult to pull off in the present day, especially at scale. But Republicans don't understand how government works in general. When you're ignorant, everything is a conspiracy. Syndicated NYT story: https://dnyuz.com/2026/09/24/from-16000-to-185-to-zero-trumps-claims-of-illegal-voting...

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  I've been getting into #Incus lately as a replacement for #Proxmox and I have to say it is incredibly impressive. Super fast, super-low resources, has a mature OCI container support, and works on any major #Linux distro. Very cool piece of software!

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  Report: Trump administration exploring putting his name on other federal buildings after failing to steal branding of Kennedy Center. Among their targets: Ford's Theater, the place where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated: https://www.ms.now/news/trump-fords-theatre-name-kennedy-center

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  Christian reactionaries have many beliefs that are incompatible w/pluralist democracy & this is why many despise the modern US. They've become much more virulent in recent years because members of their own faith communities have been leaving in droves. Mormons are a perfect example of what I'm talking about: They lose almost 50% of young members. They know that their beliefs have lost intellectual credibility. They see it in their own lives. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/r...

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  Reactionary Republicans for decades have wanted to destroy the post-WWII international order. Trump is doing it, and the changes nations are making in response to him are going to be very hard to undo. Moreover, why should countries trust that Americans wouldn't elect a raging lunatic again? https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/09/allies-trump-canada-foreign-policy/688729/

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  Groundbreaking new Stanford brain study showing that human brains have essentially two main cellular lineages that work cooperatively rather than being a single organ or three ancestral ones layered upon each other. Even more fascinating is that the bifurcation of neural specialization can be traced to species documented as existing more than 500 million years ago. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2026/09/two-separate-brains.html

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  Tragic: Former Fox News producer Jennifer Eckhart died of suicide after lawsuits against accused rapist, ex-Fox anchor Ed Henry and the network. He currently is the chief anchor of Newsmax. She deserved better than this. RIP. https://www.dailymail.com/media/article-16148987/jennifer-eckhart-fox-news-suicide.html

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  The provost of Dartmouth University is accused of having a chatbot generate nearly 100% of each of his recent public writings. Kudos to the brave students at the campus newspaper for doing this investigation: https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026/09/schnell-ai-writing Edit to add: He admitted to extensive usage, this is not speculation.

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  Texas Democrats have been wanting a statewide win for decades. James Talarico actually has a legit chance for it in his Senate race this year. He's leading in most of the polls, and this is an abysmal environment for Republicans nationally. Add the fact that Ken Paxton is widely loathed by everyone except the furthest-right lunatics for his corruption and creepiness, and Talarico has a much better shot than any Texas Dem in a long time. https://newrepublic.com/article/215631/transcript-tru...

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  In an Instagram post, Macklemore says he has been banned from performing in several American stadiums after saying "Free Palestine" in a concert and expressing support for the oppressed Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. According to Macklemore, right-wing billionaire Robert Kraft pressured stadium owners to ban him from their venues. This is what actual cancel culture looks like. Billionaire oligarchs excluding someone from society based on his views. https://www.instag...

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  TIL: The first artificial sweetener was made from lead, and it made Romans crazy https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/lead-the-ancient-and-deadly-artificial-sweetener #history

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  Language doesn't produce meaning, it approximates it through mental reenactment by the listener. #philosophy #linguistics

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  Donald Trump has done far more to curtail free speech than any recent president. His actions to use government power & private lawsuits to bully private citizens are unprecedented. This is a great recounting here of many of them which also relays Trump's false promises that he would protect free speech. Worth keeping track: https://archive.is/WYDpe

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  Tim Scott, a Republican senator from South Carolina, just demonstrated why left-wing parties surrendering on trans rights or any other issue will never work. Yesterday, he claimed that Democrats want to steal people's children from them for not using the right pronouns. This is a total lie. Not one Democrat has advocated for this. Republicans (and Reform, and many others) run against imaginary people. So just stand for what's right. And communicate constantly to anyone you can abou...

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  North Carolina Republican Senate nominee Michael Whatley invited a sex offender to pray at his campaign rally. It would be nice if this wasn't the only kind of diversity Republicans liked. https://abcnews.com/Politics/wireStory/convicted-sex-offender-offered-opening-prayer-rally-gop-136378663

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  There's a new conspiracy theory in the #UK that recently induced two elderly people to think a traffic light was a "deadly weapon." https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/pensioners-attack-devon-traffic-lights-11148748

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  Another literal Republican Nazi outed: 𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗪𝗼𝘆𝘁𝗲𝗸, a senior employee of Ohio Republican Senator 𝗝𝗼𝗻 𝗛𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗱 was just exposed using a photo of Nazi SS soldiers as a Facebook profile picture. He also curated a music playlist honoring a South African apartheid enclave: https://archive.is/U4ZfN

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  1/2 Noted mathematician Terrence Tao has coordinated a great open letter about AI and society. The technology in use now will never become sentient. How it is used and who owns it are the actual issues to consider. Humans have not achieved anything close to alignment among ourselves, and that is the real issue rather than imaginary scenarios about computers. The things to think about are the impacts on jobs, income distribution, and education/workforce development https://terrytao.wordpress.c...

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  Cultural decline narratives are so easy to believe because the past is a story whose ending has been spoiled. The present is one that hasn't even ended. People have complained about "kids these days" forever. Today's "get off my lawn" people are yesterday's youthful degenerates. This paper illustrates the phenomenon very well with an opening quote that seems written by a crotchety reactionary from today. But no, it was written by the Roman historian Livy: htt...

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  🧵 About 30% of American adults say they are unaffiliated with a religious tradition, but as people are rejecting ancient epistemic systems, many of us are struggling to find meaning from life, to take care of ourselves, and to develop ideas about minds and ethics. That's a problem. Having a #philosophy makes your daily life better. Secular people should have one. This is the topic of my latest podcast episode. Join me for a summary or click through: https://plus.flux.community/p/non-re...

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  The Trump administration will soon be flooding the country with imported beef with no laws requiring suppliers to state where they got it from. Not coincidentally, the CEO of America's biggest meat processing company is a massive Trump donor. This is also at a time when Trump is decreasing food industry regulations. Being vegetarian has never been better! https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/07/opinion/trump-meat-import.html #vegetarian #vegan

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  Sound up on this one #trailcam #cats #catsOfMastodon

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  Why retro games look so much better on CRT monitors than LCD ones: https://www.xda-developers.com/retro-games-look-better-on-crt-tv-it-is-not-nostalgia/

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  #Audacity, the open-source audio editor has released version 4.0, a complete overhaul of the codebase which now uses the best UI toolkit, Qt. Really fantastic work here: https://www.audacityteam.org/audacity-4/ There's a handy AppImage download as well for #Linux users.

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  I'm not going to use Omarchy because I don't like racists, but as far as I can tell, it's just Arch with a guy's dotfiles. It's absurd for any #Linux noob to be switching to a purely Arch-based distro. Is it just racists flocking to support an open racist, or is there something else here?