In pictures: CCIWA’s Diversity and Inclusion Awards gala night
The Chamber of Commerce and Industry WA’s second annual Diversity and Inclusion Awards gala recognised the businesses that go above and beyond. ⌘ Read more

How we got conned into recycling by Big Plastic
Rinsing that yoghurt tub was never going to solve the problem. We’ve all been fooled. ⌘ Read more

Lol, YouTube supports increasing the playback speed, but when you want to go to 4x, they want you to pay extra:

Android shopping list apps disappointed me too many times, so I went back to writing these lists by hand a while ago.

Here’s what’s more fun: Write them in Vim and then print them on the dotmatrix printer. 🥳

And, because I can, I use my own font for that, i.e. ImageMagick renders an image file and then a little tool converts that to ESC/P so I can dump it to /dev/usb/lp0.

(I have so much scrap paper from mail spam lying around that I don’t feel too bad about this. All these sheets would go straight to the bin otherwise.)

Trump’s dollar delusion: how trade war risks ending the US’s ‘exorbitant privilege’
Eduardo Porter,  Contributing Economic Analyst  -  The Guardian (U.K.)

_Stephan: For as long as you have been alive the U.S. dollar has been the world’s benchmark currency. Now, some in “king” Trump’s administration seem to want that to end. This report in The Guardian, a British publication, describes what is going on, and is almost entirely being missed or not d … ⌘ Read more

When Tesla’s FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn’t, you get blamed
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Password to Louvre video surveillance system was ‘Louvre’, according to employee
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Thank you for the encouragement and love and kind words, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt and others along the way I’m not sure of their feed uris 💕 I’ll keep at it, but for the time being I will keep my distance, mostly off IRC, because I don’t have the energy to spare in that kind of engagement (what//if the worst happens, it’s so draining). I need to remember what I ever did any of this for, it was back in ~2020 and I wanted really to build small interconnected communities that any non “tech savvy” person (more or less) could also benefit from ane enjoy. Even if there are aspects of the specs we’ve built/extended over time that aren’t “perfect”™, they’re “good enough”™ that they’ve last 5+ years (I believe this is 6 years running now). I want to spend a bit of time going back to why I did any of this in the the first place, and get a little micro-SaaS offering going (barely covering running costs) so encourage more folks to run pods, and thus twtxt feeds and grow the community ever so slightly. Other than that, I plan to get the specs “in order” to a point (with @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s help) where I hope they’ll stand the test of time – like SMTP.

Thank you all ! 🙏

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org an advent of code, I love it! Go, Lyse, go!

I should work on my client again and add some new features. Like adding a new feed directly in the client and not having to go to the config first. And showing a preview of a feed before actually adding it. Also, a search would be something to add. And finally combining my User-Agent analyzer with my subscription list to spot new feeds automatically.

The Medicaid Program That Saved Money, Turned People’s Health Around — and Got Killed
Lisa Rab,  Contributing Writer  -  Politico

Stephan: As Congress continues to cease to function, and “king” Trump spends his time visting with fellow authoritarians, and going to parties that would make the most debauched Roman emperor envious, the lives of millions of Americans are coming apart, as Medicaid comes apart.

![](https://www.schwartzreport.net/ … ⌘ Read more

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Shifts Bulk of Philanthropy, ‘Going All In on AI-Powered Biology’
The Associated Press reports that “For the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused part of their philanthropy on a lofty goal — ‘to cure, prevent or manage all disease’ — if not in their lifetime, then in their children’s.”

During that decade they also f … ⌘ Read more

Opencloud – an alternative to Nextcloud written in Go
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opencloud - an alternative to nextcloud written in Go
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KDE Plasma 6.6 Shaving Off 100MB Of Memory Use, Fixing DrKonqi Crash Reporter Crashing
KDE developers were off to a busy start for the month of November. A lot of feature activity continues happening for Plasma 6.6 while a lot of bug fixing is still going on for Plasma 6.5 and related KDE components… ⌘ Read more

Lawmakers are ditching Congress at a record pace
Stef W. Kight , Hans Nichols , Andrew Solender,  Staff Writers  -  Axios

Stephan:

_Tuesday’s election is, I predict, is just the first phase of a trend that is going to restructure Congress. It is not going to be just political parties; it is also going to be a generational change. My hope is that the Democrats, in spite of all the Republican election rigging, are still going to take the majority in both the House and Senate … ⌘ Read more

Amazon lakes hit ‘unbearable’ hot-tub temperatures amid mass die-offs of pink river dolphins – study
Phoebe Weston,  Biodiversity Staff Writer  -  The Guardian (U.K.)

_Stephan: We are beginning to see more and more reports about the effects of climate change. The fact that we have a President, a Vice President, and an entire party – the Republicans – that think climate change is a hoax, is a major reason why the 2040 is going … ⌘ Read more

BREAKING: Supreme Court Blocks Order Requiring Trump to Pay SNAP Benefits
Aaron Parnas,  Commentator  -  The Parnas Perspective

_Stephan: The Supreme Court literally made its ruling on SNAP as I was preparing SR. Here it is. It is just more gray area, and I am increasingly concerned that millions of American families are not going to be able to have a family Thanksgiving dinner. The sheer nastiness of “king” Trump’s attempt to starve tens of millions o … ⌘ Read more

WINE gaming in FreeBSD Jails with Bastille
FreeBSD offers a whole bunch of technologies and tools to make gaming on the platform a lot more capable than you’d think, and this article by Pertho dives into the details. Running all your games inside a FreeBSD Jail with Wine installed into it is pretty neat. Initially, I thought this was going to be a pretty difficult and require a lot of trial and error but I was surprised at how easy it was to get this all working. I was really happy to get … ⌘ Read more

Zelenskyy vows to block Russian oil to Hungary — Hungary’s MOL says it can already go 80% non-Russian ⌘ Read more

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I’m going to bed, but I’ll have a closer read/think tomorrow 🤞

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

US flight cancellations accelerate as airlines comply with government shutdown order
JOSH FUNK and RIO YAMAT,  Reporters  -  Associated Press

_Stephan: I just got an email from a reader who has spent two days trying to get out of Chicago, but her flight has been canceled again and again. I have been warned not to fly because I would have to go through a security check and publishing SR may cause me to be detained, so I don’t have any person … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I am genuinely curious as to why you think Geminis summarization and the categorization of your gopher post was and is as you say misunderstood?

I asked this very genuinely because before reading @bender@twtxt.net’s comments and Gemini summarization I actually went and unplugged your post into flood gaps go for proxy, and then listen to the text intently with my own human ears 👂

My cat is happy when I decided not to leave to go to work today. ⌘ Read more

HAP v2 - a declarative HTTP framework for rapid API service development
1 points posted by xrfang ⌘ Read more

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang Says China ‘Will Win’ AI Race With US
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has warned that China will beat the US in the AI race, thanks to lower energy costs and looser regulations. From a report: In the starkest comments yet from the head of the world’s most valuable company, Huang told the FT: “China is going to win the AI race.” Huang’s remarks come after the Trump administration maintained a ban o … ⌘ Read more

‘I’m not going to represent our country there’ — Trump to skip G20 summit, dashing hopes of brokering meeting between Zelensky, Putin ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net that poke will go no where. It is 502d. 😅

I miss my deceased Ollie so much. I can’t go on ⌘ Read more

Gov Shutdown: US Army is advising its soldiers in Germany to go to food banks
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The US Army is advising its soldiers in Germany to go to German food banks because of the shutdown. ⌘ Read more

‘No one is entitled!’ MAGA congressman shames SNAP recipients for ‘life choices’
Alexander Willis,  Staff Writer  -  Raw Story

Stephan: This is the heartless Republican scum the Americans in Florida’s 6th District chose to represent them.

Image

As 42 million Americans go without federal food assistance, including 16 million children, Rep. Randy Fine … ⌘ Read more

10 Fictional Kings Who Go from Good to Bad
It’s always sad when heroes fall from the light. They often start with the best intentions, but in trying to act on them, they clash with the world at large. That clash mires their journey in hardship. The heroes grow to resent their circumstances, turning to extreme measures to right those wrongs. This fate can […]

The post 10 Fictional Kings Who Go from Good to Bad … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net wanna trade? I would be willing to become celibate to go back to my 20s, and believe me, if there is something I don’t want to do is becoming celibate, so that ought to tell you something! 😅

The Emissions Gap Report 2025 brings us no news, but unfortunately that means it just confirms the very bad trajectory we keep choosing to take.

https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2025

Words fail sometimes, but I think this graphic summarizes well the situation and my current mood.

#ClimateCrisis #EmissionsGapReport

Image

Charm’s Fantasy: Build AI agents with Go. Multiple providers, multiple models, one API
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@prologic@twtxt.net Nothing, yet. It was sent in written form. There’s probably little point in fighting this, they have made up their minds already (and AI is being rolled up en masse in other departments), but on the other hand, there are – truthfully – very few areas where AI could actually be useful to me.

There are going to be many discussions about this …

This is completely against the “spirit” of this company, btw. We used to say: “It’s the goal that matters. Use whatever tools you think are appropriate.” That’s why I’m allowed to use Linux on my laptop. Maybe they will back down eventually when they realize that trying to push this on people is pointless. Maybe not.

Linux 6.19 Will Finally Support Intel’s Adaptive Sharpness Filter “CASF” With Lunar Lake
Going all the way back to early 2024, Intel Linux engineers have been working on supporting an Adaptive Sharpening Filter new to Lunar Lake. While Lunar Lake later launched in September 2024, the Linux patches for this feature remained under review and discussion. Besides the Intel driver implementation itself for Lunar Lake and newer, it also ushers in a new DRM sharpness property to help standardize such functionality … ⌘ Read more

No high-level US representatives will go to UN climate talks, Trump officials say
Oliver Milman,  Environment Reporter  -  The Guardian (U.K.)

_Stephan: ”The Trump administration has confirmed that no high-level representatives will be sent by the US to upcoming UN climate talks in Brazil, underscoring the administration’s hostile stance towards action on the climate crisis.“  Think ab … ⌘ Read more

Merz Says Syrian Refugees in Germany Must Go Home ⌘ Read more

The Fantastic Chemistry Behind Why 10 Popular Foods Taste So Good
We all enjoy eating foods that taste good, but we often don’t fully understand the chemistry that makes them so delicious. In this list, we’re going to take a deep dive into ten foods that everybody loves. We’ll look at the chemistry that creates incredible flavors, textures, and ultimately, unforgettable dining experiences. Eating is an […]

The post [The Fantastic Chemistry Behind Why 10 Popular Food … ⌘ Read more

10 Futuristic Fungal Technologies
Fungi are miraculous. They provide us with food, alcohol, medicine, and the essential decomposition that keeps life going. And yet, their potential may be far greater. Fungi can be made into computer chips, bio-batteries, circuit boards, insulation, self-repairing building materials, and reactive clothing. They can even devour plastic, absorb heavy metals, and clean pollution. Make […]

The post [10 Futuristic Fungal Technologies](https://listverse.com/2025/11/03/1 … ⌘ Read more

@kiwu@twtxt.net I wouldn’t go that far haha 🤣 I’m not sure I’m all that wise 😂

** Autumnal week notes **
Someone I grew up with happened to go to the same college as me, and now we happen to live in the same relatively small city. We’ve been totally casual but pretty consistent mainstays of each others’ lives for going on 20 years at this point. She’s also one of the few people that I run into who knows that I can’t actually see well enough to reliably tell people apart from any further away than like 4 or 5 feet, and I always feel really appreciative whenever she waves that she also always says“hi” and who … ⌘ Read more

Donald Trump: ‘I doubt’ US going to war with Venezuela, but Maduro’s days numbered ⌘ Read more

Debian to add hard Rust dependency to APT
It seems like a number of Debian ports are going to face difficult times over the coming months. Debian developer Julian Andres Klode has sent a message to the Debian mailing lists that APT will very soon start requiring Rust. I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem. In particular, our code to parse .deb, . … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft breaks Task Manager in Windows 11, hard
Let’s take a look at how things are going at Microsoft, whose CEO claimed a few months ago that 30% of their code was generated by “AI”. After installing Windows Updates released on or after October 28, 2025 (KB5067036), you might encounter an issue where closing Task Manager using the Close (X) button does not fully terminate the process. When you reopen Task Manager, the previous instance continues running in the background even th … ⌘ Read more

Bath time didn’t go as planned. ⌘ Read more

A deep dive into deeply recursive Go
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