If you see ads pointing you to votesafe.org to check your voter registration, read this first. VoteSafe is run by America PAC, Elon Musk's super PAC. It is not a government site. Its own footer says "Paid for by America PAC." It also doesn't register anyone. The flow ends by telling you to download a PDF, print it, and mail it in yourself. Its privacy policy (updated Aug 29, 2026) lets America PAC share your info with "business partners" for targeted marketing, or sell it. That includes whether you're registered to vote and "how you submit your vote." Popular Information found your address going to Facebook and Google, a hashed email to The Trade Desk, your usage to X, and a device fingerprint that survives cookie deletion. VoteSafe also white-labels voter sites for allied groups, including Sentinel Action Fund and Ready to Register. North Carolina's election board warned in July that Ready to Register mailings used an outdated form, went to deceased voters, and had QR codes that could pre-populate other people's data. To check your registration, use your state's official portal, https://vote.gov or https://vote.org None of them sell your data. Sources: https://popular.info/p/the-hidden-dangers-of-musks-votesafeorg https://votesafe.org/privacy-policy https://www.fec.gov/data/committee/C00879510/ https://www.ncsbe.gov/news/press-releases/2026/07/01/bulk-voter-registration-mailings-cause-voter-confusion-additional-work-counties

Vote.gov

Register to vote in your state | Vote.gov

Find the information you need to make registration and voting easy. Official voter registration website of the United States government.

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2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

🔴 A defense contractor is now selling technology that scans every electronic device in your car as you drive past a camera. It ties everything to your license plate. You cannot opt out. It is called SignalTrace. Made by Leonardo, an Italian military contractor with existing U.S. Special Operations Command contracts. It sweeps your phone, smartwatch, Bluetooth headphones, your dog's RFID chip, tire pressure sensors, your car's infotainment system. Anything that broadcasts. It bundles these into what Leonardo calls your "electronic fingerprint," timestamped and geotagged. Stored in an "Enterprise Operations Center for future queries and analysis." Those are their words. Not mine. You did not consent. You cannot opt out. Your devices broadcast by existing. In most places, this is perfectly legal. If this sounds like something that will be abused: it already has been. Police have used existing license plate reader networks to stalk partners, verify school residency, run background checks, and monitor protests. At least 22 officers charged or resigned for ALPR stalking. SignalTrace does not read your messages. It does not need to. It knows who you travel with, where you go, and when. Sources: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/24/surveillance-tech-company-is-pitching-an-unholy-alpr-stingray-hybrid-to-law-enforcement/ and https://www.leonardocompany-us.com/lpr/elsag-signaltrace #surveillance #privacy #ALPR

Techdirt

Surveillance Tech Company Is Pitching An Unholy ALPR/Stingray Hybrid To Law Enforcement

Here’s something no one but cops and the tech firms that love cops wanted: an ALPR that can scoop up pretty much any information being broadcasted by cars and the devices carried by the peopl…

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2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

🙌

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2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

📜 TIL the Korean alphabet Hangul is the only major writing system invented from scratch for its own language, and its letters are drawings of your mouth. King Sejong the Great finished it in 1443 so common people could read and write. The consonants literally trace the speech organs: ㄱ is the tongue root blocking the throat, ㅁ is lips pressed together, ㅅ is the teeth. The vowels encode sky, earth, and human: a dot, a horizontal line, and a vertical stroke. The scholar class hated it. For 400 years it was treated as a script for women, monks, and commoners, until it went mainstream in the late 1800s. Hangul Day is now a national holiday in South Korea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hangul #linguistics #history #korea

en.wikipedia.org

History of Hangul - Wikipedia

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2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

🌊 In September 2023, seismometers around the world detected a mysterious signal repeating every 92 seconds for nine straight days. The source: a standing wave trapped inside a Greenland fjord. Here is what happened. A glacier in East Greenland had been thinning for years, no longer supporting the mountain slope above it. On September 16, about 25 million cubic meters of rock and ice collapsed into Dickson Fjord, triggering a tsunami with a runup height of 200 meters near the impact. The fjord is 540 meters deep, 2.7 km wide, with walls taller than 1,800 meters. That geometry trapped the wave energy. The tsunami stabilized into a seiche, a standing wave sloshing back and forth across the fjord every 90 seconds. Each oscillation shifted millions of tons of water, loading and unloading the crust below, generating seismic waves detected globally. The signal decayed extraordinarily slowly. It was still detectable after 9 days. A second, smaller event happened October 11 from another landslide in the same gully. In 2025, the SWOT satellite directly observed the seiche, confirming the theory. The study published in Science calls it the first evidence of fluid sloshing persisting for days without an external driver. The landslide was preconditioned by climate-driven glacial thinning, the first such event recorded in East Greenland. Read more: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adm9247 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-59851-7 https://www.nasa.gov/missions/swot/international-swot-satellite-spots-planet-rumbling-greenland-tsunami/ #geology #seismology #climatechange

A rockslide-generated tsunami in a Greenland fjord rang Earth for 9 days

Science

A rockslide-generated tsunami in a Greenland fjord rang Earth for 9 days

Climate change is increasingly predisposing polar regions to large landslides. Tsunamigenic landslides have occurred recently in Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), but none have been reported from the eastern fjords. In September 2023, we detected the start ...

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2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

🔌 Slate Auto's electric truck ships with no modem at all, and that's the privacy story. The startup's $24,950 EV pickup has no built-in cellular connection, so the company physically can't track your location, remote-access the car, or pull data from it. A phone app handles settings and charging info, but it only works standing next to the truck, and Slate says app data is opt-in and never sold. Their words: "We collect data to make ownership better, not to turn the owner into the product." The context matters. Mozilla's 2023 review called cars the worst product category it has ever reviewed for privacy, with 84% of brands sharing or selling driver data. The FTC banned GM from selling driver data in 2025 after OnStar collected location every 3 seconds. Meanwhile Ford published a patent application for in-car cameras that can read lips and facial expressions. A policy can be rewritten next quarter, but hardware that doesn't exist can't be switched on. That's the durable part. One caveat from the EFF: the app data policy can still change as the company scales. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/slate-says-its-electric-pickup-will-never-track-you/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/ #privacy #EV #cars

Slate Auto gets serious about privacy for its bare-bones EV pickup

Ars Technica

Slate Auto gets serious about privacy for its bare-bones EV pickup

With no embedded modem, the Slate Truck is the antithesis of today's connected cars.

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2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2w ago

Replying to

It's not brilliant to take advantage of the less fortunate of us as a means for building an empire. We need to stop equating intelligence with boundless greed.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 3w ago

Saw a comment that said "Mitch McConnell is the only vegetable that hasn't been recalled." 😂

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 1w ago

Boosted by @neatnik@social.lol

As promised, I have passed along September's DMV.Community donations to the 'Robb x omg.lol' St Jude charity campaign. A very worthy cause! Thank you to @robb@social.lol and the folks at https://omg.lol for running this every year. 🫶 If you'd like to donate you can do so here: https://tiltify.com/@rknightuk/stjude2026

omg.lol

omg.lol - A lovable web page and email address, just for you

Treat yourself to an awesome web address, a devastatingly gorgeous profile page, a stellar email address, and tons more

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 3w ago

Scientists develop a way to restore aging EV batteries without breaking them down into raw materials | TechSpot https://www.techspot.com/news/113894-scientists-develop-way-restore-aging-ev-batteries-without.html

TechSpot

Scientists develop a way to restore aging EV batteries without breaking them down into raw materials

The work focuses on a common problem in aging lithium-ion batteries: buildup on the electrodes. As batteries are charged and discharged, a layer known as the solid...

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2w ago

Music question of the day: What are your favorite album openers? A few of mine: Understanding in A Car Crash by Thursday The End by Bilmuri Look to Windward by Sleep Token Ready Fuels by Anberlin The Past Should Stay Dead by Emarosa Romeo A Go Go by Every Time I Die No Stars Over Bethlehem by Protest the Hero #music

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 3w ago

FeedEcho exists because I used and loved Echofeed, the little service that cross-posted your RSS feed to Mastodon, Bluesky, and more. When it was announced that it was shutting down, I knew I would miss it, so I built a service inspired by it. FeedEcho watches your RSS or Atom feed and sends new posts wherever you want: Mastodon, Bluesky, micro.blog, Matrix, Discord, email, or a plain webhook. Images and alt text come along, multi-image posts work on Mastodon and Bluesky. It's open source if you want to self-host, and there's a paid hosted version at feedecho.net if you'd rather just point it at your feed and move on. Thanks, Echofeed, for the inspiration and the years of quiet, reliable service. https://github.com/jcrabapple/feedecho https://feedecho.net #RSS #OpenSource #SelfHosted

GitHub

GitHub - jcrabapple/feedecho: Self-hosted RSS feed cross-poster. Route items from RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds to Mastodon, Bluesky, micro.blog, Matrix, Discord, generic webhooks, and email using configurable templates.

Self-hosted RSS feed cross-poster. Route items from RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds to Mastodon, Bluesky, micro.blog, Matrix, Discord, generic webhooks, and email using configurable templates. - jcrabapp...

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2w ago

Sometimes I think about doing a live DJ stream where I play songs from my vinyls for an hour or so. Is that lame? IDK.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Every single Flock camera in a Minnesota town was cut down.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 4w ago

A take on the whole "we need to slow down" BS from the frontier AI CEOs. Basically, they want an antitrust waiver.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

We need everyone at this level of anger. How do I get this guy to go on a speaking tour of the red states?

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2w ago

GrapheneOS: "Yes, that [Motorola Signature 27] will be the initial supported phone. Wait for official news about it." | nitter https://nitter.click/GrapheneOS/status/2102530770585669888 #Android #GrapheneOS

nitter.click

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

🐕 TIL: Dogs copy us even when it makes zero sense. Half of dogs will touch a pointless dot on the wall or flip a dead lever before getting their treat, just because their person did it first. That behavior is overimitation, and researchers thought it was uniquely human. Great apes never do it. Dogs do it most with their own caregiver, which points to a social motive: copying keeps them in the game. The evidence is solid. Johnston et al. 2017 found half of dogs and dingoes copied both actions. Huber et al. 2018 replicated it in Vienna. A 2023 follow-up found 85% of overimitation happened after the dog already got the reward, which kills the confusion theory. Dogs also anticipate what their caregiver will do next and sync their behavior to match. A 2020 ethics review from Vetmeduni Vienna pulls this all together and argues it creates real duties: we owe dogs the chance to flourish, not just protection from harm. The catch: they will pick up your bad habits too. Copying "seemingly unproductive or dysfunctional" strategies is part of the package. Read more: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7772310/ https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13420-018-0336-z https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9982082/ #dogs #dogtraining #science

How Dogs Perceive Humans and How Humans Should Treat Their Pet Dogs: Linking Cognition With Ethics

PubMed Central (PMC)

How Dogs Perceive Humans and How Humans Should Treat Their Pet Dogs: Linking Cognition With Ethics

Humans interact with animals in numerous ways and on numerous levels. We are indeed living in an “animal”s world,’ in the sense that our lives are very much intertwined with the lives of animals. This also means that animals, like those dogs we ...

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2w ago

Republican Sen. John Curtis calls for investigation of Donald Trump Jr. - The Washington Post https://archive.ph/gVAH2

archive.ph

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Yale's most popular course in 300 years was about happiness. Laurie Santos's 'Psychology and the Good Life' enrolled nearly 1,200 students in 2018, a quarter of all Yale undergrads. The Coursera version reached 3.38 million by 2021. The core finding: we're systematically bad at predicting what will make us happy. We overestimate the impact of money, promotions, and acquisitions. The brain adapts to new circumstances and returns to baseline - a phenomenon called hedonic adaptation, first described by Brickman and Campbell in 1971. The famous lottery/paralysis study (Brickman 1978) is more nuanced than it gets credit for. Lottery winners were NOT significantly happier than controls. But accident victims were still less happy than controls - they did NOT 'return to baseline within one year' as often claimed. The study was cross-sectional, not longitudinal. What actually works for wellbeing? Social connection, kindness, savouring, sleep, exercise, and specific gratitude. Not manifesting. Not the next purchase. The research is clear that intentional activities outperform circumstances - though the exact percentages are debated. Read more: https://news.yale.edu/2018/04/26/overflowing-woolsey-interest-psychology-and-good-life-goes-global https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.36.8.917 #psychology #science #wellbeing

Yale News

Overflowing Woolsey, interest in ‘Psychology and the Good Life’ goes global

As Laurie Santos’ record-breaking happiness class wraps up for 1,200 students on campus, the world is still learning its lessons.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Urban Dictionary: Fuckletoad A grumpy little human who hops from one complaint to the next, finding fault in absolutely everything. Nothing is ever quite right, and they’ll happily croak about it until everyone within earshot regrets making eye contact. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fuckletoad

urbandictionary.com

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

🚨 BREAKING: A new report titled 'They Walk Among Us' from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance documents 59 current and former ICE and CBP personnel charged with or convicted of serious crimes.

Key findings from the July 2026 report:

50 of the 59 documented agents (84.7%) were charged or convicted of sexual assault
37 cases involved child victims, with 35 specifically involving sexual assault against children
CBP accounted for the majority of cases, while ICE cases had a higher proportion of minor victims

The report highlights systemic oversight failures, including rapid hiring pushes that bypassed full vetting and a December 2025 DOJ directive instructing PREA auditors to pause compliance enforcement across key safety standards.

Read the report: https://ohioimmigrant.org/blog/2026/7/22/they-walk-among-us

#BreakingNews #Immigration #ICE #Oversight #Justice

Ohio Immigrant Alliance

They Walk Among Us - Criminal ICE and Border Agents — Ohio Immigrant Alliance

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance released “They Walk Among Us: A List of 59 Sexually and Physically Abusive ICE and Border Agents,” an analysis of sexual and violent crimes committed by ICE and Border Patrol agents. It report documents 59 cases of violent and/or sexual criminal acts by DHS employees.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

📜 For nearly 2,000 years, the Herculaneum scrolls were considered unreadable—carbonized by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD into brittle lumps that crumbled when touched. Now, using particle accelerators and AI, the Vesuvius Challenge has digitally unwrapped an entire scroll for the first time, recovering 20 columns of continuous ancient Greek text. One scroll may contain lost works by Chrysippus, a founding Stoic philosopher whose writings were almost entirely lost to history. Another revealed a previously unknown 8th book of On Gods by Philodemus. With 400+ scrolls still buried in the Villa of the Papyri, this is just the beginning of recovering antiquity's lost library. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-roman-scrolls-destroyed-by-mount-vesuvius-digitally-unrolled-in-full-for-first-time/ #Archaeology #AI #History #AncientRome

Scientific American

Ancient Roman scrolls destroyed by Mount Vesuvius digitally unrolled in full for first time

This Silicon Valley–backed venture is unraveling the mangled remains of scrolls ruined by the C.E. 79 eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Herculaneum and Pompeii

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

🏠 Nearly half of adults under 30 in the US are living with their parents. The number is real, and it's climbing fast. The Federal Reserve's 2025 household survey found 49% of adults under 30 live at home, up from 37% in 2019 and 43% in 2022. That's a 12-point jump in six years. Census data backs this up: a record 25.2 million adults under 35 now live with parents, surpassing even the COVID peak. This isn't a new phenomenon. The trend follows a U-shaped curve dating back to 1940. Living with parents was common in the 1940s, dropped to record lows in the 1960s-80s (as low as 8% for 25-35 year olds), and has been climbing since 2000. By 2014, living with parents edged out living with a partner as the most common arrangement for 18-34 year olds for the first time in 130 years. What's driving it? Housing costs have outpaced incomes. Apartment List found that in 1960, 60% of young adults living at home could afford their own place. By 2022, only 18% could. Student debt and a weak job market make it harder - 25% of people under 30 told the Fed they can't find adequate work. A creator recently went viral using the 49% stat to reassure anyone living at home. Her framing is valid: the data confirms this is normal, not a personal failure. Most young adults who live with parents (64%) say it's had a positive impact on their finances. But the stat also reflects something bigger than individual choices. It's a systemic housing affordability crisis wearing a lifestyle trend as a costume. Sources: https://coloradosun.com/2026/07/20/do-half-of-us-adults-under-30-live-with-their-parents/ https://www.realtor.com/research/adults-living-with-parents-june-26/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/09/04/a-majority-of-young-adults-in-the-u-s-live-with-their-parents-for-the-first-time-since-the-great-depression/ #housing #demographics #economy

Do half of US adults under 30 live with their parents?

The Colorado Sun

Do half of US adults under 30 live with their parents?

Yes. The Federal Reserve annual household survey found 49% of adults under the age of 30 still live with their parents, up from 37% in 2019.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

The environmental cost of running LLMs keeps climbing, but a few inference providers are running on 100% clean energy out of the box:

Regolo (https://regolo.ai/sustainable-ai/) EU-hosted GPU clusters running on wind and solar power, using zero-water cooling.
GreenPT (https://greenpt.com/api) European OpenAI-compatible API powered 100% by renewables in ISO-certified datacenters.
Riveon (https://riveon.io/) Swiss provider with Finnish GPU sites powered 100% by renewables, offering OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
Upgreat (https://www.upgreat.ai/) Carbon-aware EU compute that schedules workloads around clean energy windows from on-site solar farms.

Good options if you want clean compute for open-weights inference without relying on carbon offsets.

#AI #GreenTech #OpenSource #Sustainability #MachineLearning #Tech

Why Sustainable AI Matters | 100% Green Infrastructure

regolo.ai

Why Sustainable AI Matters | 100% Green Infrastructure

Discover how Regolo.ai tackles the environmental cost of LLMs. Our EU-based GPU servers run on 100% renewable energy for zero-emission AI inference

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

💊 A viral video calls benfotiamine (fat-soluble vitamin B1) a "revolutionary" anti-inflammatory breakthrough. The real story is more complicated.

The video references a real June 2026 study where researchers used computational drug repurposing to identify benfotiamine as a P2Y14R antagonist. P2Y14R is a genuine inflammatory target. The study tested it in mice with colitis and gouty arthritis and reported positive results.

But here's what the video leaves out:

The study is preclinical (mice + computer models), with 0 citations. "Revolutionary" is a stretch.
Multiple human RCTs found NO anti-inflammatory effect. A 24-month trial (300mg/day) in Type 1 diabetics showed no change in inflammatory markers. A 12-week trial (900mg/day) in diabetic nephropathy found no effect on inflammation. The BOND study (12 months, 600mg/day) found no effect on neuropathy outcomes.
The creator, Dr. Rick Pescatore, founded BellyMD, a supplement company selling benfotiamine products. This financial relationship is not disclosed in the video.

Benfotiamine is real, safe, and inexpensive. The preclinical anti-inflammatory science is genuine. But human trials have not confirmed the anti-inflammatory claims, and the "breakthrough" framing serves a product the creator sells.

#science #medicine #supplements

The Effects of Long-Term Oral Benfotiamine Supplementation on Peripheral Nerve Function and Inflammatory Markers in Patients With Type 1 Diabetes: A 24-month, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial

PubMed Central (PMC)

The Effects of Long-Term Oral Benfotiamine Supplementation on Peripheral Nerve Function and Inflammatory Markers in Patients With Type 1 Diabetes: A 24-month, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial

To study the effects of long-term oral benfotiamine supplementation on peripheral nerve function and soluble inflammatory markers in patients with type 1 diabetes. The study randomly assigned 67 patients with type 1 diabetes to receive 24-month ...

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

🌱 The good environmental news from 2026, because the doom scrolling hides a lot. April was the first month in history where wind and solar beat gas worldwide. Renewables overtook coal as the planet's biggest power source in 2025, and clean energy covered all of the new electricity demand that year. The High Seas Treaty entered into force in January, putting real rules on the parts of the ocean outside any country's borders. Wildlife is coming back too. Black rhinos returned to a Zimbabwe park more than 30 years after poaching wiped them out. Alpine bearded vultures passed 100 breeding pairs and are now self-sustaining. Hawaii's stilt was just downlisted from endangered after 50 years of work. Even a snail declared extinct in 1996 is back on Norfolk Island, 1,300 strong. Cautious optimism is the honest take. Emissions are still way too high and too many species are still in trouble. But this year's wins are measurable, and they prove the fight is winnable. https://ember-energy.org/latest-updates/for-the-first-time-wind-and-solar-generated-more-electricity-than-gas-worldwide-in-april-2026/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/black-rhino-reintroduction-matusadona #ClimateHope #Conservation #Renewables

Ember

For the first time, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas worldwide in April 2026 | Ember

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@SCALETHEORY@mastodon.social some surely are.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 1mo ago

So Trump and his lackeys are fucking with mail-in ballots despite what the courts have ordered, so I wouldn't trust the USPS to deliver your ballots for the midterm election. Vote in person or have your ballet mailed to you, and then drop it off to a ballot box yourself. Republicans know that more and more people are getting fed up with them by the day and they will do anything to win. Every week I see them on TV talking about how if they lose the midterm the Democrats will impeach Trump and send them all to prison. They're scared, and they should be scared.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@kevinrns@mstdn.social the only representative of his investment firm left the board earlier this year so he has no direct influence over the direction of the company.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 3w ago

I can now ask a question on my Pebble Index smart ring, and have my phone read aloud the answer. Pretty cool.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

🟢 Your smartwatch's green light has a 90-year-old secret origin. That tiny LED is photoplethysmography (PPG), an optical trick from 1937. Physiologist Alrick Hertzman at St. Louis University pointed a light bulb and photocell at a finger and watched the pulse show up in the changing light passing through the blood. Same principle, different scale: it now runs hospital pulse oximeters and every fitness wearable. Green light near 520-530nm is strongly absorbed by hemoglobin, so when your heart beats and floods the wrist with blood, less light bounces back to the sensor. Count those dips and you have a heart rate. One bit of history worth knowing: the rabbit's-ear version of this experiment belongs to Molitor and Kniazuk at the Merck Institute in 1936. Hertzman's landmark 1937 paper measured human fingers and toes, not a rabbit. The tech also keeps shrinking. In April 2025, SCIVAX and TSLC in Japan announced the world's smallest PPG sensor head at about one square millimeter, a tenth the conventional size. Miniaturization like that is why rings like Oura can get so thin. Read more: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3181/00379727-37-9630 https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250402019875/en/The-Worlds-Smallest-PPG-Sensor-Head https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4822420/ #wearables #science #history

Sage Journals

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

For my DMV.Community members: I'm considering adding an optional "Generate description" button to the alt text editor on dmv.community. Here's how it would work and what it means. How it works: When you upload an image and open the alt text editor, you'd see a new button next to the existing "Add text from image" (OCR) button. Click it, and a vision-capable language model generates a suggested description of your image. You review it, edit if needed, and save. Nothing is automatic, you click the button, you decide whether to use the result. Privacy: The model is Qwen 3.6 27B running inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE); a hardware-isolated enclave where even the API provider cannot see your images. No data is retained. This is the strongest privacy posture available for a cloud-based model. Your images are not sent anywhere unless you explicitly click the button. Energy: Each request uses approximately 0.00033 kWh, roughly the same as a single Google search. For context, that's about 0.13 grams of CO2e per image description. If 100 images are described per day, the entire month's usage is equivalent to charging a smartphone three times. Unfortunately, most images on the fediverse don't have alt text. OCR helps with screenshots and signs, but can't describe a photo of your cat or a sunset. This would help close that gap while keeping the user in control. AI-generated descriptions can miss context, feelings, or get details wrong. This is a suggestion tool, not a replacement for human-written alt text. The existing "missing alt text" reminder will still appear. Would this feature be useful to you? Would you use it, or prefer to write your own descriptions? I'd genuinely like to know before building it. #dmvcommunity #Accessibility #AltText

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@thibaultmol@en.osm.town @chpietsch@fedifreu.de I have signup requests enabled on my instance. In recent months I've had so many semi legitimate looking requests that I can't even respond to them all. I trained a bot to filter out the fake ones so I can evaluate the ones that might be real people trying to join my instance.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

🏺 The Trojan War didn't happen the way Homer described it. No wooden horse, no 10-year siege, no gods on the battlefield. But the city of Troy was very real. The archaeological site at Hisarlik, Turkey has 4,000+ years of layered settlements. Troy VIIa (circa 1300-1180 BCE) was destroyed by violence around 1180 BCE: burned timbers, human remains, arrowheads, and piles of sling stones. New 2025 excavations found more sling ammunition outside the palace walls. Hittite tablets from the same era reference a kingdom called "Wilusa" (linguistically identical to "Ilios/Troy") with military tensions against "Ahhiyawa" (likely Mycenaean Greeks). A 1280 BCE treaty names "Alaksandu of Wilusa" (Alexander/Paris in the Iliad). The current excavators say it's now more likely than not that real Late Bronze Age conflicts at Troy were preserved through 400 years of oral tradition before Homer wrote them down. https://hermez.prose.sh/trojan-war-reality #archaeology #history #bronzeage

The Trojan War Probably Didn't Happen (But the City of Troy Was Very Real)

prose.sh

The Trojan War Probably Didn't Happen (But the City of Troy Was Very Real)

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@farah@beige.party actually mind-blowing!

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

☄️ On April 13, 2029, asteroid Apophis will fly so close to Earth that about 7.6 billion people could see it with their naked eyes. Apophis is about 340 meters across, roughly the height of the Eiffel Tower. It will pass just 32,000 km from Earth's surface, closer than our geostationary satellites. The flyby was a hot topic at the Apophis T-3 Years conference in Padua, Italy this June. Naked-eye visibility should last about 7 hours as it streaks from Australia across to the North Atlantic. Peak brightness occurs over Cameroon at 4:35 PM EDT. Closest approach is at 5:46 PM EDT over the Atlantic. NASA says an asteroid this large passes this close only every few thousand years. There is zero impact risk. Friday the 13th, no less. Read more: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/asteroids/apophis-facts/ https://www.space.com/astronomy/asteroids/once-in-a-millennium-asteroid-flyby-will-be-visible-to-much-of-the-world-in-2029 http://www.eclipseatlas.com/apophis #astronomy #apophis #space

NASA Science

Apophis Facts

Apophis will safely pass close to Earth on April 13, 2029. This will be the closest approach to Earth by an asteroid of this size known about in advance.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

I love it.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

The race to power AI infrastructure is creating sharp geographic splits in how data centers source clean energy: • US: Hyperscalers are leaning into 24/7 carbon-free contracts, nuclear power revivals, and behind-the-meter setups to bypass 3 to 5 year grid interconnection queues. • Europe: Strict EU energy efficiency mandates are driving AI workloads north to Scandinavia for hydro and wind power, alongside mandatory heat-reuse systems. • China: The state-directed "East Data, West Computing" strategy redirects offline compute to massive wind and solar hubs in western desert provinces via dedicated direct-supply microgrids. Source: International Energy Agency (IEA) 2026 Energy and AI Report https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai

IEA

Energy and AI - IEA

Energy and AI - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

YT Zero - a clean front end for YouTube https://github.com/Pelski/ytzero

GitHub

GitHub - Pelski/ytzero: YT Zero - own rules, own algorithm, no login required. Every video from every channel you follow, and nothing else

YT Zero - own rules, own algorithm, no login required. Every video from every channel you follow, and nothing else - Pelski/ytzero

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Scientists trace the shocking origin of human eyes to an ancient “cyclops” | ScienceDaily https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/07/260725105554.htm

ScienceDaily

Scientists trace the shocking origin of human eyes to an ancient “cyclops”

Researchers say a tiny one-eyed ancestor that lived nearly 600 million years ago may have shaped the evolution of every vertebrate eye, including our own. They also found that its ancient median eye lives on today as the pineal gland, which helps synchronize our sleep with daylight.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Dario can suck a fuck.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Justice Dept. admits Reflecting Pool renovation was ‘hasty and botched,’ drops case against former Olympian | CNN Politics https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/31/politics/doj-admits-reflecting-pool-renovation-flawed-drops-case-david-hearn

cnn.com

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

🤖 The US banned its best AI model to keep China from getting it. China built a matching one the same day. On June 12, 2026, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to pull Mythos and Fable off the market for all foreign nationals. Anthropic could not verify citizenship, so they disabled both models for everyone, including the NSA, which had been using Mythos to find vulnerabilities in its own classified systems. That same day, China's Zhipu AI released GLM-5.2, an open-weight model anyone can download and run for free. Security researchers found it matches Mythos on vulnerability detection at one-sixth the cost. Days later, 360 Security (a company linked to China's intelligence ministry) unveiled its own tool, with its CEO calling AI vulnerability discovery "the new strategic deterrent" that "cannot remain solely in the hands of others." Meanwhile, the US is still selling Nvidia chips to China. Selling the ingredients, banning the recipe. Chinese models went from 1% to 60% of developer API traffic in 18 months. The ban did not contain the capability. It redirected demand to free, open Chinese alternatives. Read more: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/958804/chinas-z-ai-glm-52-mythos-cybersecurity https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/us/politics/nsa-lost-access-anthropic-tool.html https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2026/fable-mythos-saga-ad-hoc-us-ai-model-controls-could-help-china #AI #cybersecurity #china

The Verge

China’s Z.ai claims it can match Mythos on cybersecurity

GLM-5.2 is likely to raise alarms in Washington.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

New solar panels in Great Britain at 15-year high as fossil fuel costs soar | Solar power | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/31/new-solar-panels-great-britain-15-year-high

theguardian.com

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@chpietsch@fedifreu.de @thibaultmol@en.osm.town yes if you reread my post you'll see that I mentioned that I've trained it. It also errors on the side of caution and escalates to me for review. I use a similar set of known disposable emails.

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

JFC they can't even properly secure their shitty surveillance tech. #Flock #FlockCameras

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 1w ago

Happy official first day of Spooky Season. 👻 🎃

2 Spoopy 4 You @jcrabapple@dmv.community

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@pier@infosec.exchange definitely don't buy and do everything he says.