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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@fj/117411071737595095 This would be funny but in reality it’s so sad that this kind of marketing is virtually guaranteed to kill people who will buy into it and do foolish things off the back of that belief.

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  Feel like I got what seems to be called occipital neuralgia, aka a headache that’s very painful behind my ear and eye, from cycling in the wind a few days ago. It hasn’t gone away yet. Accepting any and all tips to deal with it with my eternal gratitude if they work.

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@Blender/117445308134669945 C++ friends remote or willing to relocate to Amsterdam, this might be of interest!

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  It's been fascinating to compare the bottle return systems in Poland and Romania. Poland got it last year, Romania has been running it for a while, not without challenges. Romania launched recycling in late 2023, after years of aligning producers and retailers, and returns usually happen inside supermarkets near the tills. The machines fill fast, queues form, impatient glares abound, but at least someone's there to empty them most of the time. Entrepreneurial folks even added...

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  Character.AI may be on the brink of failure but that doesn’t stop them from advertising in the few places our adblockers can’t reach. At this point it feels incredibly scammy to advertise on your way out, and a lot of it is targeted at children—some ad variants run messages about “changing the ending” of a story they already like

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  Weekend, therefore time to work in the garden! We said goodbye to an 30-ish-year-old plum tree that was sadly battered by two storms, a bad one last year and one last week, and threatened to fall over at the next one. A new tree will soon take its place, very likely a local gingko biloba cultivar developed by a local university. More research needed to make sure it will work but fingers crossed. Until then, a strawberry lemonade 🍓 🍋 to slide into the weekend.

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  Having a garden is a source of so much work but also so much joy. There’s always something to do, research, plan and try. And honestly it’s the best place to relax in, to the point where I don’t feel like I need a holiday from my life as it is. Just stepping out in the garden on a nice day is good enough. #gardening

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  "According to the Harris Billionaires Survey, 73 percent of Americans believe that wealth inequality is a serious national issue, up from 66 percent in 2022. A UMass Amherst poll found 58 percent of Americans saying that billionaires are a threat to democracy, with 45 percent saying that America is an oligarchy, “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” Only 28 percent disagreed." https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/el...

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  We spent a lot of this year building an end-to-end encrypted app that we call #Rhizo (short for Rhizome). It’s been in our heads for years and we’re finally getting to the stage where it’s about to escape into internal testing and validation. Rhizo is built for when a secure group chat stops working when trying to organize something, and the only alternatives are often paid corporate tools; some secure, some not, and some where the ownership/values “ick” is real for people we talked to. We’...

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  I appreciated Codeberg’s new policy to prohibit “vibe-coded” projects and the reasoning provided for it. Some people criticized it as vague, but it’s not: they’re simply banning a pattern of single-person projects generating CI/CD load and release cadence like they have a community and dozens of apps to support when they actually don’t. The part I love most is the emphasis on collaboration: the free/libre ecosystem is about *people* making software and sharing with each other. Small ideas tak...

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  Those pictures of people on beaches around Bordeaux (Lacanau and Cap Ferret) are so strange to witness. I understand holidays are sometimes booked ages in advance and you only get a few days off from your employer so you have to make the most of it BUT when you see the fire and smoke not far in the distance, feels like ideally you don't wait for the military to evacuate you, you either a) run because it might be coming your way or b) pack up and cut your losses because you're breathing...

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  The funny thing about Mullvad is that a VPN product is a promise to keep you safe. Protect me, don’t let the state or some corporation see what I’m doing. Then the cofounder funds a fascist party into the mainstream; and not small money, but enough to move them from the fringe to somewhere on the national scene. The blog response this week: “We need a diversity of voices” Like. Please. Stop. That’s something you say on a panel or podcast, not as a way to keep supporting the kind of people who...

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  Yesterday someone on a forum was furious about Chat Control passing via the emergency vote procedure (rightly so) and wanted to see how their MEPs voted. Well good news: howtheyvote.eu already exists. Or the more specific fightchatcontrol.eu, that even allows you to email them. But, “Nooo, I’m building a new tracker. It will have votes, corruption, and a button to initiate a protest.” I'm willing to bet it’ll be LLM-built, though they didn’t say that. They don’t even need to nowadays....

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  The code red and orange weather warnings include “(expect) significant damage to property” and “expect infrastructural breakdowns.” But for many people I know, that’s too abstract of an idea unless it’s a storm. No one thinks fire can strike dry twigs in *their* garden because *they’re* not living in a fire region. In a heatwave, infrastructure damage starts to look like transformers and other equipment failing and being left with no electricity, like a few thousand households in France. As...

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  Trying really hard not to read about those child deaths in France where parents forget them in cars. But they find me anyway. And f*** they make me so angry. A kid almost the same age as my boy died in a car instead of being dropped off at daycare. It’s just so tragic. I’ve seen the threads where people discuss those seatbelt clamps that send you alerts three you left the child in the car. People argue whether 5 or 15 beeps and notifications is best. Yes, a lifesaving device. But hardly anyo...

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  TIL that in the recent heatwave, rich Parisians booked hotels with AC to deal with pregnancy. If it gets too hot, you may start to get contractions - and there's no worse time to give birth than when hospitals are already at capacity. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/30/how-i-survived-record-paris-heatwave-while-seven-months-pregnant

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  RE: https://ioc.exchange/@malb/116844905292418554 Today's mission: read the entirety of this. I remember vividly when the arrests started across Europe but had no idea of the extent of this enterprise. Really eager to get through this, toddler and work allowing.

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  From my journalist friends I’ve learned that when someone renames their climate newsletter to “energy”, it means the climate reporting is dead, and it’s been bought by big corporate interests. It’s either explicitly fossil fuels, or just someone who doesn’t want to offend fossil fuel-adjacent businesses like advertisers and conferences. Recent examples they quote: POLITICO absorbing E&E News, an outlet that wrote about air and water pollution, public lands and utilities. It will now pu...

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  Cancelled Proton mail this week after seeing how they handled the political influencer situation. It was a small subscription that won’t hurt their coffers but doing it is the point to me. There were signs before but it’s weird to see them spend their credibility this way. We’d already moved off them on the business side. Now I’m tidying up the personal. I left honest feedback in their recent annual survey. The political theatre was the final straw, but the drift had been ongoing; their mess...

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  Sometimes I think it would be nice to start the house renovation and that waiting for planning permission is tedious, but then again it's better that we're doing potty training on floors that will be ripped out anyway

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  Today is an exciting day. Summer at our house means we’re building a CNC machine, our idea of holiday fun. The parts start arriving today, and so is an ice cream maker. Since neither is easy to find where we are, guess we have to roll our own.

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  Random European developers on LinkedIn, HN and beyond are just now discovering the US can turn off their coding agent. Cute. They could’ve turned it off whenever. But that’s not the scary part. The scary part is that 23 out of 28 European countries run their national defense systems on US cloud infrastructure, with very few exceptions. Most European countries are classified as “at high risk” due to their exposure to US cloud providers. Not having access to an LLM model should be the least of...

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  Sometimes I have to end a work email on a “PS: hope you’re all OK in the office l, I’ve been reading about a lot of bear incidents in your city lately” meaning at least several bears shot in the last few weeks after disturbing houses, tourist areas and other public places.

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  This article about overpriced and now useless Google smoke detectors is funny and yes a bit sad. It takes you back to the era when Google wanted to do an Apple and each product, including mesh hardware that everyone in SF was lusting after, cost a few hundred dollars more than your average hardware that worked but didn’t come with Design and Branding. Google promised 10 years of support. Spoiler: they didn’t. Google is not run by design lovers, as some people used to think, but by finance typ...

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  For my sins, I spend time on LinkedIn and I can almost feel my brain cells shriveling as I see what people post about AI, W Social, and just about anything technology related.

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  Summer solstice, what better way to “celebrate” the moment than two code orange weather advisories for both temperature and thunderstorms? We got battered a bit last night by strong winds by thunder and a hailstorm and now we’re back to the ongoing heatwave. Real feel is supposedly warmer. Whatever it is, it’s oppressive. #ClimateDiary

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  @policy@social.opensource.org left them a giant piece of my mind, thank you for promoting this.

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  The other day I thought, I’d love to go back to coding. It’s fun. I want to sit with computer and make it do things again. But alas, I’m in a chapter in life where it’s not easy to make it happen. And I realized, one reason why I never liked AI for code and never understood people who say they do: it takes the fun out of coding. It doesn’t make it more fun, not for me at least. Part of the fun *is* in the figuring out of things. Maybe what it does, for most people, is it gives them the il...

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  In doing research for our app, what are some apps out there that handle #accessibility really well, in your experience? Not in a token, "look we did it" way. This is a broad question, so it can be anything from low vision accessibility all the way to simple, clear language that makes it accessible for mixed (technical) literacy people. Thank you in advance for any suggestions!

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  This quote from the late Robert Kime is for you if you're also the kind of person who puts soul into their work and wonders if it's all worth it. It is. To the right people who can see it and read it, it is: “I don't know how you describe romance actually... but some objects have it, they just have something that is more than themselves. If you're interested in them you can communicate it and they can communicate it too, and it's just magic, it's...