Recently I had the incredibly good fortune to read a prerelease copy of Lessons in Magic and Disaster by @charliejane.

This book hits hard, and is full of flawed but loveable characters working to navigate relationships, grief, and a world (our world) that makes just existing as who you are incredibly difficult. I can't imagine a better book for the times we find ourselves in.

There's magic, community, love and danger here. No book in recent memory has pulled me in and not let go like this one. It'll be out in August. I already put in my preorder and can't wait because I want to dive back in to spend more time with these characters!

us.macmillan.com/books/9781250…

greenapplebooks.com/list/signe…

Book details - Macmillan Publishers

In the vein of Alice Hoffman and Charlie Jane Anders's own All the Birds in the Sky comes a novel full of love, disaster, and magic. A young witch teaches he...

^Macmillan

❝ I needed to work out what was going on, and how a person I had as a friend had this other part to his life that was for me new and rotten information, and also there was the rest of my life to deal with, which is not insignificant. ❞
whatever.scalzi.com/2025/01/15…

so, am aware of the awfulness about Neil Gaiman and think this post by John @scalzi is a great example of how friends, who didn’t know, need to process the grief of losing a friend because of their revealed awfulness… 🧵

Taking Leave

If you want to know when I pretty much drew a line though my friendship with Neil Gaiman, it was when Neil acknowledged that he made moves on his early-20s nanny on her first day of employment. Thi…

^Whatever

Cool project: "Nepenthes" is a tarpit to catch (AI) web crawlers.

"It works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into a the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change. Intentional delay is added to prevent crawlers from bogging down your server, in addition to wasting their time. Lastly, optional Markov-babble can be added to the pages, to give the crawlers something to scrape up and train their LLMs on, hopefully accelerating model collapse."

zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

“Should accordions auto-close sections?”
ashleemboyer.com/blog/should-a…

An ‘accordion’, by definition, forces a collapse. If you don’t want auto-collapse then build a disclosure widget.

That said, to answer the post question, It Depends™.

I see another post about naming things in my future.

Should accordions auto-close sections? | Ashlee M Boyer

Only if you want them to be harder to use.

^{ashleemboyer.com}

reform

#unix_surrealism #technomage #fosschild #comic #reform #mnt

Sensitive content Reveal/hide

Tammy Duckworth rips out Pete Hegseth’s eyes and pisses in his dead skull youtube.com/watch?v=-FTuT8CGxK…

WATCH: 'You're not qualified,' Duckworth tells Hegseth in confirmation questioning

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., told Trump defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth during his Tuesday confirmation hearing that she did not believe he was quali...

^YouTube

Made this disco track in Ableton last night. I wanted to try making something exclusively using samples, but also edit them to make them unique to me. I think it turned out sounding great, and Ableton made chopping and resequencing parts extremely easy and fun. Sorry no alt text for this one, for some reason I'm not able to enter it on the web, so I'll put it here.

A disco track in F Major with punchy drums and heavily processed samples.

Dnes jsem zjistil spoustu veci.

🤷 Udelat kolecko ze ctverecku je v realu tezsi nez v Blenderu.
🚗 V Pribrami opravdu nemaji radi chodce. Jako fakt.
☕ A taky tam maj blby kafe. Hipsterske jidlo vyborne (mozna jsme meli hlad).

Vylet za zazitkovym kovanim doporucujeme vsema deseti.

#vylet #prace #zazitky #pribram

thank you Jonah, for bringing to our attention the latest from @protonprivacy CEO, Andy Yen.
mastodon.neat.computer/@jonah/…

was already worried about the company going with a cryptobro as CEO, but this very public Cheetohlini bootlicking seals their fate.

no tech CEO should sing the praises of a rapist propped up by fascists with a 900+ manual on how to turn USA into a criminal cartel hellbent in consolidating fascism worldwide.

i need an EU company not ran by fascists. where to Toto?

I'm disappointed to see @protonprivacy co-founder and CEO Andy Yen shortsightedly praising the incoming US administration for “standing up for the little guys”.

That said, I am glad that Proton AG's primary shareholder is now a Swiss non-profit foundation, which means the Swiss Confederation and Geneva can intervene if the foundation improperly moves away from its statutory purpose.

mastodon.neat.computer/@jonah/…

Jonah Aragon (@jonah@neat.computer)

Attached: 1 image Hugely disappointing to see Andy Yen (Proton CEO) tout the Republican Party as the ones “standing up for the little guys” 🤢

^Mastodon

Amazed to learn that Jethro Tull has a new album. Wow.

jethrotull.com/jethro-tull-ann…

claudio.uk/posts/epub-to-audio…

Gosh I wish we could use a modern text-to-voice model like this for the screen reader in #GNOME

🔗One of the most important things to understand about accessibility is how people use the web.

The HMRC accessibility team built these interactive personas that show what completing tasks is like on inaccessible services personas-prototype.herokuapp.c…

Upcoming events:

We'll give two talks at #FOSSDEM about #chatmail and #deltachat in the modern email devroom, on Saturday late afternoon: fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track…

The friday before, we'll probably also appear and talk about about #webxdc at the #Matrix barcamp.

Sunday morning, our friends from @n0iroh namely @flub, will give a talk about the P2P-iroh network architecture fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event…

Otherwise, you'll find us mostly around #OFFDEM for chatting and more ad-hoc sessions.

FOSDEM 2025 - Building Peer-to-Peer QUIC

^fosdem.org

Evening sun at Lissadell

#MeerMittwoch #Sunset #Atlantic #Sligo #Ireland

Kokoro-82M is very likely the best free TTS model at the moment, it's incredibly fast as well. Here's a demo.

Now, it's even easier to generate audio books with it, thanks to Audiblez.

hexgrad/Kokoro-82M · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

^{huggingface.co}

Happy birthday to Russian #mathematician & writer Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevski (1850-1891). Her contributions to analysis, differential equations & mechanics include Cauchy-Kovalevski theorem & the famed Kovalevski top. She was 1st woman appointed to full prof in N Europe or to serve as editor of a major sci journal. She is also remembered for her contributions to Russian literature. All of this despite living when women were still barred from attending 🧵

#sciart #printmaking #WomenInSTEM

This fucking Free Our Feeds bullshit is basically trying to do for Bluesky what Mozilla does for Google.

And guess what, there’s Mozilla’s executive director and president on as custodians alongside two guys from AI companies and the executive director of Meta partner Social Web Foundation.

I’m so bloody sick and tired of bloody Silicon Valley asshats sucking all the oxygen out of the room with their bullshit and I truly hope the folks roped into legitimising it realise this and distance themselves as quickly as possible (you know who you are).

freeourfeeds.com

#FreeOurFeeds #SiliconValley #SanFrancisco #BlueSky #SocialWebFoundation #bullshit

Free Our Feeds

Let's take social media away from billionaire capture.

^{Free Our Feeds}

roadmap.sh is a community effort to create roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help guide developers in picking up a path and guide their learnings.

Role-based and skill-based roadmaps, project ideas, best practices, and other resources for various areas of development including Frontend, Backend, DevOps, Full Stack, AI, and more.

decoding.io/2025/01/bookmarked…