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  Be sure you savor and re-savor this •incredible• right-wing self-own: Two “Project Veritas” operatives committed fraud at a Minnesota polling place to prove they wouldn’t get caught ••• and they got caught ••• and both are facing multiple felony charges. 1/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/28/voting-felony-disguise-minneapolis

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  Economics is a form of animism. *ducks*

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  RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/117492268256168064 “‘AI’ companies…have something to prove, right now, or they don't exist. So now everything is critical.”

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  RE: https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:htdsafwakqmzvuk2oivijzn6/post/3myt3ada7mk2l The word “algorithm” is derived from the family name of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a Persian who lived in Baghdad and not only wrote down the instructions for what we now call “long addition” and “long multiplication” etc. — the instructions that European schools used for 400+ years — but also… …invented algebra. You know, nbd, just a Persian-Arab thing. “They don’t produce science”?!??...

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  My controversial-not-actually-controversial take is that the Meta fine is still too small by a factor of 10, in principle the judge shouldn’t have discounted it (but I realize in practice he’s just trying to get some scrap of it to survive appeal), and if liability were actually an •existential• threat to megacorps instead of an expense line then that would mitigate a whole bunch of societal problems at once.

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  I just registered my kid for fall school athletics, and now feel like Heracles returning from the underworld with Cerberus on his back. WOW is that online registration platform bad software. 1/3

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  RE: https://mstdn.social/@DemocracyMattersALot/117503114528255910 I understand and share the joy of dunking on Trump, but please don’t do it this way: - IQ is largely a nonsense metric - Given its context and history, using IQ as an insult is playing with eugenicist fire - Purporting to quantify “intelligence” at all is wildly problematic (we don’t even have a good definition of the thing we’re measuring here, folks) - Purporting to quantify intelligence of someone at a •distance• is even w...

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  Surfacing from a conversation in someone else’s replies, advice many folks on Fedi might like (but I don’t want to swamp their mentions): ADVICE ABOUT GETTING A PIANO If you’re thinking about getting a •piano• (the acoustic instrument) and not an electric keyboard… 1/ #piano

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  Oh HALLELUJIAH macOS Safari recently added a “pull to refresh” feature that is triggered by the scroll wheel, and obnoxiously easy to trigger accidentally — so much so that I’ve already multiple times lost unsaved changes in a web form to it. You can disable it: defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugDisableRefreshControl 1 https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256358874?sortBy=rank

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@KraftTea/117493899019603708 Wow, this video is quite a mix of emotions.

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  RE: https://mastodon.online/@vwbusguy/116105608250025802 ICE is “de-escalating” in exactly the same way that cockroaches de-escalate when you turn on the light.

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  RE: https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5o6k7jvowuyaquloafzn3cfw/post/3myfjcm3isk2h I’ve heard reports exactly like this in • every • single • election • since 2004. And every time, when somebody finally manages to get to the bottom of it, it turns out the culprit is garbage UI design — not the machine secretly changing votes (because why would it •show• the user if it’s actually cheating?!). But these breathless stories about touchscreen voting aren’t going die unless touch...

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@Zygos/117461869086312391 It strikes me that there’s a real Catch-22 here for AI vendors: They want to argue that training an LLM on other people’s copyrighted work without permission is OK because the LLM and its output are transformative use. But if it’s transformative, then the people doing the transforming must be responsible for this new, original work they created. No more “we’re just indexing other people’s sites!” If it’s misleading or defamatory, that’s th...

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  RE: https://eupolicy.social/@jmaris/117461810385145539 Watched it the first time for the highly satisfying “Yeah! Go get him!!” reaction. But I’ll be bookmarking this to study exactly how El-Sayed handled it: his word choices and rhetorical structure, which parts he did and did not choose to engage with, how he did and did not let his interlocutor respond, what he left said and unsaid, how he held control of the framing of the whole conversation. This is a master class.

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  RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117461057426428454 Is code a machine that performs a task, in a way that is verifiable and measurable? Or is code an embodiment of hard-won shared understanding of problem and context, understanding that extends into human systems far beyond the code? The correct answer is “both.” Neglect the latter at your peril.

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  RE: https://newsie.social/@servelan/117453769304899627 My inexpert take on this is that these scumbags •are• actually concerned about whether they have the legal right to scrape what they’re already scraping, and we should press that case hard.

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  A neighbor shared two short documentaries made by students about how the ICE invasion impacted students in Minneapolis. Folks on Fedi might like to see them. The first one is face-to-face interviews with students at Roosevelt High, the place where Bovino and a bunch of unhinged agents stampeded school grounds hours after ICE murdered Renee Good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFOoUTNgTOM 1/ #Minneapolis #ICEout

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  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@evacide/117266977480037384 This! This! Louder! Flock isn’t just mass surveillance. It’s •redlined• mass surveillance. Same for ShotSpotter.🧵

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  Here the IMF is finally saying the things about an AI bubble that people in my Fedi TL were saying 2 years ago. I could mock them for being late to the Market Analysis party they’re supposed to be hosting — and I do, I do mock them — but also I’m happy to see that this conversation has broken through to IMF circles. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/oct/13/ai-share-crash-risk-global-imf-debt-corrowing-cyber-attacks

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  It’s down a ways in the article, but The Guardian spells it out plainly: ❝As the most prominent Somali-American in the United States, Omar has faced years of racist attacks from the president and his supporters.❞ There it is. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/12/federal-agents-ilhan-omar-home-raid

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  Something that’s largely flown under the news radar: The Trump administration recently made changes — capricious, xenophobic, deliberately hurtful, almost certainly illegal changes — to a program called CPT. These changes make it effectively impossible for most international students to get internships. It’s wrecked the fall plans of multiple students I know personally. I am •pissed•. Today a coalition of educational institutions announced that they’re fighting to shut this down in court. I’m...

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  RE: https://cosocial.ca/@renata/117405306950696640 I really feel this. I think it’s hard not to. I also feel — intensely, with a fire — that •we• outnumber the billionaires, that •we• still shape computing, and that every time •we• choose to play with code and treat it with creativity and wonder and joy and then obsess over quality and care for the people it affects…when we do all of that, we are not just blowing against the wind. We are engaging in rebellion. Meaningful, substantive, powerful...

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  RE: https://universeodon.com/@memeorandum/117405235987173121 ❝Miller did not want the facilities that were comfortable. He did not want facilities that were humane. We were told point-blank that that was not what the administration wanted.❞ Cruelty is not only the point, but the explicit policy goal.

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  RE: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/117398841498726860 The linked report still has a “rah-rah industry rag” feel, but the pattern it’s reporting is damning. I’ll repeat it again: I’m not sure LLMs are doing much to increase productivity at the quality ceiling, much less raise it, but they’re doing a lot to lower the quality floor.

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  RE: https://werd.social/@ben/117377849465845687 ❝…a predictable playbook…warning that America will lose to China….❞ It’s scaremongering: ❝America won’t lose; •Amazon• might.❞

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  People are all excited about a new sewing machine that stitches in a gorgeous herringbone pattern, but it seams pretty fishy

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  Heads up Twin Cities: anti-ICE rally tomorrow! #Minneapolis #MSP #Minnesota #ICEout

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  I looked something up on Stack Overflow, thought the existing answers were kind of meh, mulled the problem over, found a •much• better answer to the question, and then…I didn’t post it. I thought about Stack Overflow itself and all the harvesters and scrapers digesting my answer and not giving me one cent or even credit, and I just…didn’t. The capture and extraction of the commons come with costs that are slow, pervasive, and hard to measure.

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  I made a thing! https://wogl.innig.net WOGL is a graphics programming language in which every input string is a valid program. It’s designed to reward play and experimentation. Please play! Have fun!

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  Urgent big picture reporting from The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/sep/28/ice-us-immigration-new-tactics