Steel mills dumped molten slag in parts of Chicago and nearby areas. The slag hardened in layers up to 15 feet deep. These places became barren wastelands. Other industries dumped hot ash and cinders there.
But eventually the steel mills closed.
The deep layers of hard, toxic material were not friendly to plants. Cottonwoods are usually 30 meters tall or more. In the slag fields, stunted cottonwoods grow to just 2 meters.
But rare species that could handle these conditions began to thrive. The lakeside daisy, a federally threatened species lost to Illinois for decades, turns out to grow taller on slag than on topsoil! The capitate spike-rush, last recorded in Illinois in 1894 and considered locally extinct, was rediscovered growing on slag.
And more! Native prairie grasses like little bluestem. Native milkweeds. Even tiny white orchids called sphinx ladies' tresses.
A team of women ecologists began studying these unusual landscapes. They call themselves the Slag Queens.
oh great benchmark buddy, localhost TCP skips checksums and most of the network stack using a shortcut path as well as getting to use a much larger MTU (16K on FreeBSD, 64K on Linux)
Ja, ich find's nämlich sehr schön, wieviel Zuneigung den beiden hier überwiegend entgegenschlägt. Der Käse ist der Prominenz geschuldet. Geht aber auch uns allen so. Sobald ausnahmsweise mal ein Trööt steil geht, fängt man sich die ersten idiotischen Kommentare ein. Oder meint ihr nicht? Ich hoffe die beiden stehen darüber.
@achimreinke Den Wunsch nach mehr Abrüstung verstehe ich. Gerade bei den beiden Beispielen muss ich aber sagen, dass sie sich wirklich nicht respektvoll verhalten haben, als sie um Inklusion gebeten wurden. Stattdessen Wurde zumindest von Herrn Blume eine ausgewiesene Expertin auf dem Gebiet übel beleidigt. Und bei allem Verständnis für überzogene Kritik, die zum Tagesgeschäft gehören mag: Da erwarte ich, den Unterschied zu erkennen und die Größe zu haben, sich auch einmal einen Fehler einzugestehen und vielleicht zumindest eine Woche danach mal eine Entschuldigung hören zu lassen.
Respekt und Umgangsformen sind nämlich wahrlich keine Einbahnstraße.
If you had a sex dream, no matter how weird or salacious, even if it didn't involve your partner, would you tell them even if it meant admitting you liked it?
Daniel Stenberg (creator of cURL) joins Coffee with Developers to explain why cURL is shutting down its bug bounty program—and what the flood of AI-generated...
Back to careers Senior Software Engineer Apply now Location Australia & New Zealand (Remote/Hybrid) Applications close Until filled We are Assembly Four, a fast growing, purpose-driven technology company dedicated to fostering positive change within …
usually I write a bunch of comments in my code anyway and thus the commit message really just serves as a way to convey the nature of the code change in a few words as the comments explain everything more thoroughly. Like how the title of a song doesn't need to contain all the lyrics
oh also, when I DO write a paragraph it's usually either a documentation, or more often, in the description of the pull request that ultimately ends up bundling my commits anyway
@typomustakes I don't like having it only in the pull request because that's just metadata that will be lost when the repo is cloned / moved away from that specific Git forge
good point, maybe my habit stems from the fact that I work in an environment where the commit message is the least significant, and frankly the least monitored medium of documentation. User stories, tickets, documentation and PR requests are the places where my coworkers of managers check to get some clarity anyway, and so I don't even have a reason to spend time phrasing long commit messages.
@typomustakes well, I'm more focused on hobby/open source type work in this thread I guess because workplace development rules can be BIZARRO
one giant company I have consulted with implemented a policy a year or so ago where everything has to be squashed and every commit must include a link to the JIRA ticket "for the auditors"
Some things really should be committed incrementally and atomically so you can see exactly how the code evolved and why. But no. Everything is now one giant squashed commit and all details have to live in JIRA hahahaha
Jesus Christ. What happens when they fuck something up and they can't revert the codebase to a specific version? Thats like one of the biggest perks of having a version control system.
The weird thing we do is that we include the ID of the relevant Azure DevOps ticket in the name of the branch, like "2727603-fix-some-bug", and it becomes really annoying really quick, especially because I prefer using git via a command line rather than a GUI
Alright it seems that Claude is getting me further than Gemini ever did, even though I’m going into my extra usage LOL but at least I now have a somewhat working mobile version of Thrive.
@nixCraft otoh, isn't this what people wanted though?
Everyone proclaims they want to take down big tech and how evil it is. But now we want the government to ... make it illegal for them to shoot their own dicks off with bad decisions?
You can kill big tech but not without killing big tech jobs, that's just the way it works RT: mastodon.social/users/nixCraft…
Attached: 1 image
people might joke but this is where the IT industry is headed and nobody is safe. it doesn't matter if you are good or bad, you are just another commodity. just look at how many engineering jobs were cut in the past 18 months.
All of this is a logical conclusion of how the industry was going for at least the last decade. Rapid growth, everybody wanted to work in IT, everybody wanted to study IT. Eventual correction when businesses found out everyone isn't as necessary as they believed was inevitable.
Also from quoted post: > you are just another commodity. Yes, that's how this works. You sell yourself and your time to do work for someone else. That's it. As if the "resources" in HR wasn't clear enough about that.
alright well anyway i was writing that this is kind of an unrelated tangent, but it has some key points nobody talks about (except me and my degenerate friends):
Your corporate job was "cradle to the grave". They trained you. You were loyal. If you were good at your job, raises and promotions were guaranteed. Your understanding of the company was key to its long term success. These are important values. And as a result, you had job security. This means you can do things like... afford a 30 year mortgage.
Now we have banks handing out 30 year mortgages when people can't keep their jobs longer than 3 years. The banks are making a huge mistake. You can't do that; the risk is too high and it massively screws up the housing market long term.
@mangeurdenuage since before the industrial revolution unless you were a slave or owned a business. You are trying to find a Boogeyman where it doesn't exist.
It has been written before, but the main goal of AI is not to improve efficiency but to lower the bargaining position of labour (unions).
They don't sell managers efficiency (for the people they currently employ), they sell them a tool to negotiate down on your contract terms during review.
I love conversational interfaces, and I am a big proponent of automation. The trouble is when these tools are not sold as productivity software to empower people who are doing work, with skill and effort, but as ways to create value without skill and effort. 8/11
Videos prove, the Russian army stays online in Ukraine using network equipment from American company Ubiquiti.
Worried customers have been discussing this in Ubiquiti’s online forums, but threads have been shut down for “violating community guidelines”.
Many companies see their products sold to Russia, but Ubiquiti products are actually online, which means Ubiquiti could trace the illegal use and intervene — so why don’t they?
Based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting, Hunterbrook Capital is short $UI and long a basket of comparable securities at the time of publication. Positions may change at any time. See full disclosures below.
Think outside the box at work! Stop scheduling meetings to start and stop at the top or bottom of the hour. Schedule a call for 1:22 PM, and set it to end at 2:07. People will appreciate your innovative thinking.
Holy shit. TIL that Janet Jackson is the only Grammy-winning artist with a CVE.
CVE-2022-38392 indicates that playing Rhythm Nation near certain hard drives will cause a crash, because the song contains a resonate frequency with a 5400RPM spinning disk of a certain diameter and construction.
As it came up in a few conversations during "FOSDEM week", here's a link to the OpenSSF blog post about why the idea of "attestation for open source projects" is, in my opinion, and others, a bad idea:
Yes, FOSS foundations and projects need ways of getting funding, that is very important, but thinking that "attestation is how we will get that money!" might not be such a good idea given the risks involved, and the past experience for those that have attempted it.
@privacybrowser on privacy browser 3.19.3 fdroid android. when i use share url from another browser or from other app, it overrides my existing tab. ex. pbrower open tab is ddg.com. i am reading stoutner.com/ on fennec. when i click share button on fennec and choose pbrowser. ddg.com url is replaced with stouter.com is there anyway to change this behaviour
I read a great anti-AI screed today (not linking to avoid a pile-on on the author). I found it to be an almost perfect distillation of the typical anti-GenAI arguments I read. The basic form is:
1. *Lists various ethical problems with LLMs* 2. Therefore a consumer boycott is the only solution 3. Fuck you, you're a monster, etc if you don't agree with me
Do #2 and #3 follow, though? Let's think about it.
For the sake of argument, let's grant point #1 entirely. Is a consumer boycott the solution though? Cory Doctorow has argued forcefully that this mindset is counterproductive: we hen-peck each other over individual choices while ignoring the real solution, which is collective action, regulation, etc: pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/con…
I suspect that a lot of the reason we do this is because of social media. Many of us honestly feel powerless in modern society, unable to pull the levers of power to effect change in governments and corporations. So we go on social media and scold each other for shopping at Walmart or eating steak or whatever, which feels good but frankly accomplishes nothing except making each other feel miserable.
In the case of LLMs, the idea of a consumer boycott just seems hopelessly delusional to me at this point. Over half a billion (with a B!) people use a chatbot every month, and among tech workers LLM usage is over 80%. The horse is out of the barn, at the race track, and doing victory laps. I love a good noble cause, but I also know a lost cause when I see one.
ChatGPT hits 400M+ users while DeepSeek drops 80% from peak. Our mid-2025 analysis reveals key audience differences between AI chatbots and what it means for brands optimizing for AI search.
Maybe my perspective is weird here because I'm a vegetarian. That's a consumer boycott! But the reason I do it is because I literally feel sick eating meat, since I know it came from a factory farm. Even Peter Singer, the godfather of vegetarianism, has argued that trying to convince people to go vegan/vegetarian has largely failed, and the best thing to do for animal rights is to enact policies to improve their living conditions: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
It's another reason that maybe the ethical arguments against AI, especially on copyright or energy grounds, don't resonate with me that much. I think factory farming is the single greatest evil that humanity is currently perpetrating. If a hyper-intelligent, hyper-empathetic race of aliens were to come to earth and judge us, I think they could look at factory farming, ignore everything else, and conclude we deserve to be annihilated. So getting worked up about copyright but not that baffles me.
(BTW I suspect this is the reason so many tech bros are terrified of a superintelligent AI and what it would do to us. We've embued AI with our values, and it's clear what we do to beings we consider "lesser." The entire premise of The Matrix could easily be construed as a parable about factory farming.)
So overall: I love seeing passionate people defending what they believe in. But all the scolding and moralizing in the world is, frankly, unlikely to achieve their aims other than getting high-fives from the already-converted and maybe making the rest of us feel a bit guilty. Or honestly just chasing us off of public platforms like Mastodon and onto less vicious private alternatives like Discord.
If you want advocacy (any kind of advocacy) to work, you have to go where the non-believers are.
This is why the movement to leave X is so self-destructive in that respect. If you want your voice to be heard, don't post to an audience of people who think the same way you do, they're already convinced. Missionaries don't preach on Saint Peter's square because there's no point, they go where they aren't wanted or liked, where nobody thinks like they do.
That's a good point, yes. My worry is that Bluesky/Mastodon and X/LinkedIn are bifurcating into separate echo chambers on this topic. Thats part of the reason I'm posting here even though it pokes the bear!
The thing that I don't see regulation and all that other great stuff solving is the cognitive effects of AI, which, so short a time after it taking off, have already been demonstrated by studies. People use Chat GPT and that has a negative effect on their problem-solving skills. Also the environmental impact.
But anyway, I think consumer boycots are a way forward but I'm totally against the scolding. Encouraging a boycot is fine,
saying you're evil and part of the problem if you don't abandon all evil big tech is just self-righteous, holier than thou barrier-building. And we need to work together. Look hard enough at anyone and you will see their double standards, inconsistencies and downright compromise of principles for the sake of avoiding risk or retaining comfort in a difficult life. Is that ideal? No. Is it to be accepted placidly and with resignation? No. But condemnation isn't the answer.
We had a very calm weekend. The system seemed really relaxed, nothing bad happened, and all our members spent time together with their close people. Probably the calmest and most positive things have seemed this year. - Kylie
that is awesome. When we have these moments, we try holding onto them, to remind ourselves life isn't always bleak, or negative, or stuff along those lines, but that there are actual good moments.
@tardis Absolutely, we do this too. When we can gain these very positive moments, we always try to hold on to them, or at least the impact of them, for as long as we can. If anything to draw comfort and energy from them. - Kylie
Part of me wants to make the native VLAN, that is, the VLAN that provides access to devices who don't talk 802.1Q VLAN-speak, one that has Internet-only access, and if any devices want access to the local network, they have to speak to a certain VLAN. Of course, that means that anything requiring local access would need to be 802.1Q compatible to speak VLAN, and be properly configured. The other part of me says that my local network is simply not that big of a security target, and I'd just be creating extra headaches for myself. But the geek in me still insists, LOL. So the decision is not yet decided.
when I wrote my critiques of the centralization of the internet, it wasn't because I hated that internet, I love the internet! Same now, I don't hate AI, there is actually a lot I love about it.
What I don't love is centralization, proprietary software, bad dev practices and exploitation.
I love conversational interfaces, and I am a big proponent of automation. The trouble is when these tools are not sold as productivity software to empower people who are doing work, with skill and effort, but as ways to create value without skill and effort. 8/11
To by si měli nějak sjednotit, aby bylo jasné, co se tím myslí. Já bych od obědového menu čekal salát, jídlo, aspoň vodu a kávu. Ale přijde mi k ničemu, když recenzent A pod tím vidí, přeženu, samotné hranolky, zatímco recenzent B pětichodové menu se spárovaným vínem.
(To je samozřejmě kritika těch recenzí, zejména teda asi Googlu, ne tebe ani restaurace.)
@nuintari I can certainly second gnuplot! I have a script generate plots for my weather web site from the mysql database on request. It beats having a hard drive full of pre-generated plots, as I had over a decade ago.
I was so excited about the new feature the Polish government added to our government app recently, the ability to sign documents using a "qualified digital signature", *for free*.
For the non-Europeans in the audience, a qualified signature is the European equivalent of DocuSign, except far less intuitive, far more expensive, and, by extension, not accepted anywhere near as widely. By regulation, it's the only kind that has the same power as a classic paper signature.
This feature requires an electronic ID card, and as my old ID was soon to expire, I recently got one of these anyway.
I tried doing this with two different providers, and it turns out that both of them just return a very helpful "Server error, without even an explanation of what's wrong."
As they say, disappointed but entirely not surprised.
In January 2025 I received the European Open Source Achievement Award. The physical manifestation of that prize was a trophy made of translucent acrylic (or something similar). The blog post I above has a short video where I show it off.
I'm getting a slightly weird result with #Fedra. My impression is there's a slight lag on focus changes, maybe 50--100ms or so, just enough to be noticeable. Anyone knows what's going on? I could also be wrong, it's borderline enough I'm not certain.
@modulux NVDA's gesture timing add-on tells me that tabbing through the window from list to list takes around 22 ms, and arrowing on the list takes about 9.
Right, it's on tabbing that I notice it. It's not awful or anything, just a tiny bit more latency than I'm used to when tabbing from button to button. Just curious if it's an issue with the gui toolkit or possibly just me making it up.
Yeah, I think it gets just a tiny wee bit more lag than I'm used to. But it's not really unbearable or anything. Given it's hard to measure it might be completely in my head.
Huh, and how does this work? I tried shift-nvda-f12 but I don't seem to get any report, and the log doesn't say anything (maybe I need to increase log level)?
Transform your favorite cities into beautiful, minimalist designs. MapToPoster lets you create and export visually striking map posters with code. - originalankur/maptoposter
Wow, so flashing Graphene OS on the Pixel 6 Pro was actually quite easy, just plugged the device in and followed the guide at grapheneos.org/install/web. By now I'll just update this thread with any new discoverysI make, and yes I do plan to write a detailed blog post about that as soon as I can and know more, I really can't wait to explore this honestly. #GrapheneOS
Flashing the OS itself is possible without sight, setup isn't so I'm waiting for someone to help me. Since the bootloader GUI is that simple though, using a tool like Seeing AI or Envision to read out the menu options which you change with volume up and down, and confirm with the power button, works quite good.
Holy moly dude, installing e-speak on there took me about half an hour, longer than even flashing the thing. Had to guide my non techy mother through the stuff, firstly tried to get it through the F-Droid site, but according to my mom the browser wouldn't let her select a download location so I pulled out an USB C stick and put the APK on there. And after surely 10 minutes of idling and apparently loading voice data, E-Speak finally came to life and started speaking. Now it's time to customise this. Not sure whether a simpler option would've been the installation through ADB, but I think you have to enable all that first so the stick route was probably the easiest.
With E-Speak installed though, I must say I already enjoy using this without having any apps installed. Talkback is really snappy, I already get notifications about certain things apps like the playstore try to do without having permission, gonna be fun exploring this thing in depth.
Buying a google pixel and installing grapheneOS on it is a much better move for your privacy and mental health than buying any of these crappy e-reader phones or some flip phone that only works over unencrypted communication channels. The rise of 'dumb phones' has lead to an influx of poorly build, insecure phones built by people with no business developing complex tech products. What I find 90% of the time is that people buy these products, realize they actually do rely on features like maps, good cameras, banking apps and all the other smart conveinences of the modern world. Ultimately they end up throwing the device away or in a junk drawer and it just becomes another e-waste waste product. If you want to actually break free from your phone addiction use a product that gices you thr conveinence you want but doesn't try to guide your towards addiction every day. A stock grapheneOS phone is basically a dumb smart phone and thats how it should be.
🤯🤯🤯 Got a hand-made #XMPP developers post card with a personal mention!
🤯🤯 Got a "Thanks Ge0rG, keep up the good work!" while walking the food mile!
🤯 Met an IRC contact from 25 years ago, @olbohlen ("Apparently I'm the only operator of #OpenFire on #Solaris") and connected him to @guusdk who brought stickers and hugs!
🤯 Accidentally met an IRC contact from 20 years ago
and you ran away before I could hand you a bunch of the DI.DAY flyers! 😱 It was a pleasure meeting you and thanks for your talk! We really need to unite our efforts!
Also wanted to ask you what specific messenger "N" stood for in your slides 😉
(P.S.: I've omitted from OP all the people I *intended* to meet, only recounted the unexpected things that happened!)
@bogo yeah, they had a really tough schedule for cleaning up and bringing everything back to the before-FOSDEM state. We had 30mins to pack our stand as well.
I really applaud the volunteers that run the #FOSDEM organization!
This year for #FOSDEM I gave a demonstration of wolfSSL cryptographic benchmarks on the wolfDemo board I designed. Question for next year, should I demo it on an Amiga instead? 🙂
What the headline claimed: "Microsoft is walking back Windows 11's AI overload".
What the article said: Microsoft might, like, remove a few buttons and possibly rename their Recall spyware but then again they might not and either way AI is here to stay because other operating systems have it.
@jakobrosin I'm not sure market logic even matters that much anymore. Many people don't want it, many more couldn't care less whether it's there or not. I doubt there is a significant market segment who is actively enthused about it, and yet...
@JustinMac84 Where copilot exclusive features actually become useful for a business to show a ROI for example. It shure is nice to chat to, and it can try to work with your documents, but so can a lot of other things and usually better. @jscholes
@jakobrosin Would you count this? I used the copilot website to design internal spaces for a game I play. There is the possibility, within that game to create floors, walls, lighting and ceilings. Not knowing anything about interior design, colour coordination and lighting, I turned to copilot. I found the responses enlightening and they elevated my creation. Not saying this offsets negatives, but I regard it as my biggest AI success. @jscholes
@JustinMac84 Shure. I am not saying that the entirety of Copolot is useless, its just most of its implementation is in areas where ti does not make any sense. @jscholes
Apple will not give me a 11.2.2 version of Logic Pro that I had before. It's obvious that they want to move to subscription model, but I don't want to. So Apple blames the victim, saying "you should have had a backup"? A reputable company would give me the previous version. No warning about this before udate.
This is not cool, Apple. Too busy swanning around the White House, Tim? Let's have some support.
EDIT: it only did that once. @Onj YES! This is why I would not have updated had I known that. In fact, some say v12 is incompatible with my Intel older Mini. 1. The update to an incompatible version should NOT have worked. 2. Or they should have shown a warning. 3. They should give me access to the 11.2.2 version. We know they have old versions. Normally, I would have gotten v11 on this computer, not 12. I know because on my older iMac, it can only get v10.
Borris
in reply to Toni Barth • • •Toni Barth
in reply to Borris • • •Sarah Russell
in reply to Toni Barth • • •