Philadelphia buddies!
Wanna know how I already voted in the November election safely and securely, without trusting the US Mail?

I went to a Satellite Election Office!

Any registered voter in the city can go in, tell them you want your mail-in ballot, get it there in about 5 minutes, fill it in then and there, and put it in the secure drop box on your way out!

Check the locations and hours. Most of them will be open over the weekend!

https://vote.phila.gov/about-us/satellite-election-offices/

But -- and this is a big deal -- you can only apply for a mail-in ballot until 5pm on October 27th. You can't combine voting with trick-or-treating.

Or if you already received your mail in ballot and don't want to put it in the US Mail, just fill it out at home and put it in a drop box! You don't need an election office for that, and there are a bunch of drop boxes around the city.

https://vote.phila.gov/ballot-drop-off/

#Philadelphia
#Philly
#PhillyVotes
#GOTV
#GetOutTheVote
#Vote

USians, how much money would you need in the bank to feel secure against the possibility that medical insurance won't pay your medical bills?

#HealthInsurance

I’m seeing very little info outside of narrow tech circles about the biggest & most established conference for women in computing being cancelled 2 weeks before it was scheduled due to lack of sponsors & registrants. I never attended the Grace Hopper Celebration, but heard only positive things about it & how important it was for young women in computing. I feel like I’m seeing every tiny bit of progress (and it’s truly minuscule) that I’ve seen in tech over my career get rolled back.

Elektrek: "Tesla confirms Autopilot/FSD was ‘engaged’ when car crossed a median and killed a man" (Oct 15, 2026)

"...A Tesla crossed the grass median of Route 55 in New Jersey, hit a tree, slid into oncoming traffic, and struck an SUV head-on. The SUV’s driver, 68-year-old Phillip Eastman, was killed.

Police reported it as a driver who lost control. What they didn’t say, and likely didn’t know, is that Tesla’s own report to federal regulators says the car’s driver-assist system was engaged."

https://electrek.co/2026/10/15/tesla-driver-assist-median-crossing-vineland/

#tesla #death

I feel like it should be a bigger national news story that Republican PACs are pouring resources into a potential spoiler candidate fronted by PSL (lmao forever, one of my former DSA political bullies was a dual carder with PSL and I have nothing but contempt for PSL) and they're funding tons of mailers showing this guy as basically Ohio's Mamdani, but he'll ultimately be a spoiler candidate against Sherrod Brown. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gregy-levy-ohio-senate

tried to capture the feeling of zooming through neighborhoods on a crisp fall day, with lots of joy and laughter. man i love bikes

#mastoart #art #biketooter

I still feel betrayed that they made multiple Highlander movies, since the premise of the original was "there can only be one!"

the central promise of “ai” is that nothing is worth doing and that community doesn’t exist. It’s individual entitlement as software. It’s Thatcherism.

That means for any software project to build for the long term, it must be explicitly political, not only by supporting the FOSS community (which is political!), but with clear policies against fascists and fascism, and methods for making good on those promises.

LLMs are a fascist project, so I certainly include LLM bans in this recommendation, but LLM bans are not sufficient for building community in the long run. Fascists can't build community, they do the opposite.

As @mcc says, in the long run there is only FOSS, because any software that cannot be picked up and maintained by the community will die wherever the founder loses interest. (Let's be real, handoffs to successors don't really work outside of FOSS, it is always some variant on "our incredible journey" where the buyout quickly leaves only a shell, then nothing.)

I propose that, similarly, in the long run only anti-fascist software exists, because fascists destroy everything they touch.

You know, I've been reading the terms #NoSlop and #NeverSlop as pretty interchangeably so far, but I think my brain just clicked on the difference between them, which is clarifying my goals to someday run an explicitly and completely Never Slop software stack on my machines.

The key word is "yet" - no slop *yet.* It's easier right now to run a fully No Slop system, because it's more permissive - it allows you to include software that doesn't have a policy about LLMs, or has a policy that permits LLM contributions but doesn't yet incorporate any in practice, or unmaintained pre-slop software. This would be a huge step in the right direction from my current daily driver.

But the problem with mere No Slop is that a lot of your dependencies are time bombs, and you don't know which. I fundamentally want to get out of this experience where I have to keep changing my workflow because of upstream dumbassery. I want to get to a place where I only use software explicitly committed to never, in the future, slop out.

@tine_schreibt those are all acronyms from DBT. STOP is "stop, take a step back, observe, proceed". TIPP is for "temperature, intense exercise, paired muscle relaxation, paced breathing" - skills for changing the mood with body chemistry. ACCEPTS is a skill about finding a way to tolerate the distress when it's not so acute, and IMPROVE is for when you can't escape the situation. Here is a random leaflet I found online that explains all the letters in the abbreviations. Some find these helpful, some don't - I feel DBT is a lot like "here's a bucket of tools, see if some of these work for you"

There is a concept that some of you might find helpful - "subjective units of distress".

Many years ago, I was struggling badly with my life, going through one mental breakdown after another. I asked my psychiatrist: "How can I live my life if my anxiety goes from 0 to 60 in the matter of seconds?". The psychiatrist said: "But Nina, no one, including you, goes from 0 to 60 instantly. It just feels this way."

So, he explained, human brain is silly and usually cannot tell the difference between not being distressed (SUDS 1) and quite distressed (SUDS 7). As long as we keep functioning, our internal brain state and suffering in it seems to be almost invisible for us.

If I am at SUDS 2, and accidentally spill morning coffee on my blouse, it will probably raise my distress to SUDS 4 or 5, but I will change to a new blouse and go to work.

If I am at SUDS 7 after a doctor's call, and spill coffee on myself, I'll go from being calm to a sobbing mess faster than you can say "therapy".

Keep track of your SUDS!

Kids today will never believe this, but it used to be an important user interface design consideration that buttons for controlling stuff (like a media player, or paging through a series of photos) not cover up the stuff that the buttons control.

Imagine: videos, where the play and pause buttons were not on covering up the playing video content for any amount of time. “See next photo” buttons that didn’t overlap any part of the current photo you are looking at.

We can have it all again some day, I believe.

:inaturalist: One iNaturalist-related project I love is this website that sorts my observations by the fewest global observations (in other words, the lifeforms I was luckiest to see!) https://elias.pschernig.com/wildflower/leastobserved.html?user=skyfaller

I'm one of only 9 people to have identified *Margaridisa atriventris*. This beetle is tiny and hard to photograph without a macro rig, but more importantly the iNat vision model doesn't seem to recognize it, perhaps because there are so few photos to train on.

#iNaturalist

They're going to kill us all to build a beach resort.

What are the most #radical kids' #books? I'm most interested in board books, because of my kid's age and destructiveness, but I'll accept any books for #children.

By radical I mean challenging "business as usual", such as capitalism and climate collapse, patriarchy and hierarchy, but there are so many aspects of the status quo that deserve to be questioned that I don't want to limit what "radical" means; interpret it as you will. It should piss off fascists, tho.

#KidsBooks #BoardBooks

computers have replaced so many physical tools that now we can't even design skeuomorphic interfaces properly anymore, because the youngest generation aren't familiar with any of the objects the visual analogies are supposed to suggest

the guys who only learned C, insisted on C for everything, refused or failed to learn any other language, and put down anyone who tried to use anything else, are now fully in on LLMs because they think programming is too unpleasant and hard

ADHD affirmations:
- I will take my meds
- I will brush my teeth
- I will learn the difference between affirmations and a to-do list