Taking a break from reality to watch high-speed film launches of the Space Shuttle.

Stepping back in time to a world when NASA was sending humans into space using a lot less computing power than your new TV.

It's a very calming video, watching thousands of pounds of fuel ignited as the shuttle and it's boosters slowly rise into the sky. 45mins of rockets on fire.

Very special.

fedi.video/w/d86a66bd-84c0-4f3…

@fedivideo
@FediThing

#NASA #SpaceShuttle #ShuttleLaunch #RocketScience

Mexican Navy tall ship #Cuauhtémoc collided with #BrooklynBridge a few hours ago:
edition.cnn.com/2025/05/17/us/…

Based on videos:
nbcmiami.com/news/national-int…

…it looks like the ship went under the bridge and then hit the shoreline here:
osm.org/go/Zct8EqDG?m=&relatio…

Which means it was going *up river* when it hit the bridge.

That doesn't make sense, it was supposed to be leaving #NYC.

The videos also show it was going backwards. My guess would be loss of control?

#Sailing

Relation: ‪City of New York‬ (‪175905‬)

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world, created by people like you and free to use under an open license.

^{OpenStreetMap}

"Only humans can do this because we're special" and other lies we tell ourselves

With a large enough dataset and a well trained model, all we need is compute and ridiculous amount of tokens and yes, it will be able to create and maintain subtext through a novel-length story.
RT: wandering.shop/users/JulietEMc…

Sigh. It's possible to remotely, physically locate any O2 mobile customer at any time over the internet with a trivial method using their mobile phone number, due to O2's poor implementation of 4G Calling which, by design, gives away the Cell ID.

mastdatabase.co.uk/blog/2025/0…

tieto párky? ahh to vám musím povedať tiež, kupujem si raňajky do práce a celkom nabitý týpek si ich kupuje, si hovorím tieto som ešte nevidel. naposledy nakupujem v potravinách #za_rohom a helemese, neviem uvidíme

edit: majú deväťdesiatštyri percent mäsa, to znie dobre

edit1: také iné, čo ja viem neboli zlé

"Privacy watchdog Noyb sent a cease-and-desist letter to Meta Wednesday, threatening to pursue a potentially billion-dollar class action to block Meta's AI training, which starts soon in the European Union."

Read more here 👇
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

Meta is making users who opted out of AI training opt out again, watchdog says

EU users have less than two weeks to opt out of Meta’s AI training.

^{Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)}

Aji Fama advocated for quiet mentorship via direct message in communities and to encourage recognition of the generally unseen work that goes into it.

#PyConUS #Community Organizers Summit

TIL that the Internet was apparently made in Switzerland 🤔

I guess somebody should fix this Wikipedia page then.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_…
#webisnotinternet #esc

history of the Internet, a global system of interconnected computer networks

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Here we go. Holocaust “skepticism”, hot on the heels of “white genocide”. Elected democratic officials should leave X immediately.

#grok #Musk #xAI

Auch ein paar Stunden schöner #Regen dringt nicht in die von vielen Pflanzen benötigte Tiefe vor.

#Bodenfeuchte #Wasser

Všem, co tvoří videa pro #VHSky bych chtěl poděkovat. Obzvlášť těm, co nahrávají pravidelně.

Já vim lidi, že nemáte tisíce shlédnutí, jako na #YouTube, nikdo vám nikdy za nic nezaplatí (naopak část vás spíš platí, aby nějaký VHSky byly :)) a je nás tam málo, ale když se podíváte, tak dneska už to neni poloprázdná stránka s ničím.

Jsou tam recepty, zvířátka, IT věci, přednášky i filmy a to všechno jen díky vám všem.

Teď bych ale měl žádost/prosbičku/apel na vás. Chtěl bych, aby tenhle post měl co nejvíc přesdílení a komentářů, aby o projektu vědělo co nejvíc lidí a třeba někoho dalšího napadne, že to jeho háčkování, 3Dtisky, výlety, politalky nebo třeba jiný varianty broukpytlingu můžou bejt pro někoho zajímavý a natočí je. Nebo někdo, kdo o VHSkách ještě neví začne pravidelně sledovat :)

Zároveň chci požádat o diskuzi o tom, co vám tam chybí, přebývá nebo co by šlo vylepšit. Chtěl bych vědět, proč tam jste (anebo ještě nejste :) ) a jestli třeba neznáte nějaký zajímavý účty, co ještě nemirrorujem.

Pojďme si ten náš #PeerTube doladit tak, aby si každej něco našel.

(A ještě jednou díky všem!)

Widely covered MIT paper saying AI boosts worker productivity is, in fact, complete bullshit it turns out.

wsj.com/tech/ai/mit-says-it-no…

Tak jsem si dnes cely den hral s Codexem od OpenAI. Rozhodne je to posun smerem k vetsi pouzitelnosti AI pri kodovani.

Asi nejvetsi wow efekt pro me bylo, jak dokaze hledat v kodu. Moje repozitare jsou totalni bordel, takze neco najit je vykon.

Jeho crawleni si muzete uzit v primem prenosu. Nebo behem nej hrat pinces. Takove 2025 "Kompilujeme".

Historie se opakuje!

#it #ai #swift

America's largest remaining antebellum plantation, Nottoway Plantation in Iberville Parish, Louisiana, has burned to the ground. The cause is still under investigation but Parish President Chris Daigle says the building is "a total loss." In recent years, the plantation had been rebranded as Nottoway Resort, a luxury hotel described on its website as "restored to her days of glory." Sharing a video of the burning building on Facebook, a local man named Brad Gordon wrote: "If you don't understand why Black Americans are celebrating the symbolic dismantling of this monument to bondage and generational oppression — well, today, we simply don't care." Here's more from @AxiosNews.

flip.it/3.fpec

#BlackHistory #BlackMastodon @blackmastodon #USHistory #USNews

Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper was first published in 1962 and was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1963. It’s not hard to understand its popularity: The titular “Fuzzies” are an adorable alien species, the story travels along at a good pace, and the clash between big business and the little band of pro-Fuzzy prospectors and naturalists is entertaining and ultimately satisfying. But the book is also thought-provoking in its exploration of what it means to be sapient and how humans interact with other sapient species.

As one character notes, “Anything that talks and builds a fire is a sapient being, yes. That’s the law. But that doesn’t mean that anything that doesn’t isn’t.”

The Fuzzies are silken-furred, large-eyed, and doll-sized in appearance and curious and childlike in their behaviour. They arouse in their first human friends a protective (and possessive) instinct, particularly in Jack Holloway, who has the honor of being their first contact with homo sapiens. Jack is in his seventies, living out in the wilds of Zarathustra and mining for valuable sunstones. There are hints that he’s come to the planet to escape some messy mistakes (and possibly a drinking problem), but he’s an intelligent, if idiosyncratic, character with a formidable reputation who takes great delight in interacting with his visitors, Little Fuzzy and family, and they quickly make themselves at home with him.

However, Zarathustra is a class-III uninhabited planet owned by the Zarathustra Company, which is farming, mining, and settling the planet at an incredible (and lucrative) rate. Should a sapient native species be discovered there, the planet would be reclassified and the company’s ownership would be made void. So when the first news of Jack’s visitors reaches the company, they’re quick to send their own scientists out to disprove any claims of significant intelligence.

The picture of Fuzzy intelligence is built up by degrees within the story, largely through Jack’s interactions and observations, but human treatment of the potentially sapient race remains questionable throughout the book. They are intelligent tool-makers capable of surviving in a dangerous eco-system in which they appear to be food for a number of larger predators (not least of which are the imaginatively named “damnthings” and “harpies”). They are inquisitive, and it is thanks to this quality that they learn that humans (as represented by Jack) are generally a safe bet—Jack gives them food, new tools, and toys and tolerates them bedding down in his cabin, so what’s not to like? They are treated, however, like little children at best and, at worst, like pet dogs. Early on, even Jack catches himself putting a bowl of water down for Little Fuzzy “as he would for a dog” and instead supplies a cup. There is an element of consternation in almost every interaction between humans and Fuzzies, perhaps more so because the argument for their sapience occurs at the same time that Fuzzy dolls and hats are being made and people are owning and naming their Fuzzies as if they are the “fur-bearing animals” that the company claims them to be.

Little Fuzzy remains an entertaining story that encourages the reader to question how humanity sees and behaves towards other intelligences. Since 1962, we have been surprised again and again by what we have learned about the intelligence of the animals we share our planet with, from elephants and octopuses, to crows and bees—reminding us, hopefully, to continue to challenge our assumptions and justifications.

This book is now in the public domain and can be read for free on the Internet Archive’s Open Library or Project Gutenberg websites.

Mayri Cooper

seattlein2025.org/2025/05/16/f…

#HBeamPiper #LittleFuzzy