capacitive multitouch was so influential that google instantly shit themselves internally and reworked android from a clone of blackberry’s hardware and software* into a clone of the original iphone’s hardware and software

if you can’t tell the difference between that and a gimmick to the point where you think anything about the iphone duo, which copied every part of its design from existing phones, you shouldn’t be doing tech journalism

* don’t reply guy to me that this isn’t accurate, I used prerelease android before the redesign

Look, I'm not saying that a Christian *can't* be loyal to the United States, but until they can swear an oath to our US Constitution and accept separation of religion and state, I can only conclude they support Christian Shariah Law. Christian isn't a race, so it isn't racist to say we don't want Christian Shariah Law here in the United States.

Foly huck. A small story about LLMs.

For historical reasons, I have a spare cassette for road bikes and it is not compatible with any of my own bikes so I want to sell it. Decided it would be helpful for buyers to include the teeth count of the smallest and largest sprocket in the ad, and was in a lazy Saturday afternoon mood so took a picture, gave that to #chatgpt and asked it to do the counting for me. Answer: 36 teeth.

That sprocket size doesn't exist in the Shimano universe.

So I tried to verify its count by asking it to add an increasing number next to every tooth. It complied, and the numbers ran from 1-36. That pictures is included below. You can stop reading now, look at the picture and count along.

If your ADD is not too bad, you'll notice it skipped 18, so we have 35 teeth. Not 36.

However that also doesn't exist in the Shimano universe.

Being as confused as the average republican, I demanded a #recount! It told me 36 again.

Sigh. Decided to do a manual recount while holding the sprocket in my hand. 28. That is a valid size.

Then I looked at the photo with counts again. Turns out the clanker took my original photo as inspiration, and fabricated a photo of a sprocket with 35 teeth. I am not sure what triggered it to do that and I do not want to know.

Your average #LLM is still as bad at counting as they were a year ago. Maybe worse.

Also, do not invest in that stuff ok?

UKIP's lurch into to Christian Nationalism has led them to declare "our nation won't be colonised!" - which international observers will consider ironic because, you know, 🇬🇧

But, we very much have been colonised. Multiple times. We even recognise this considering we still refer to William I as "The Conquerer" and but "the totes legit indigenous ruler". Also, many reasonable readings of what the industrial revolution did supports the assertion that the first country Britain colonised was itself.

Finally we have created the random number "4" from the famous XKCD strip "do not just make your random number 4"

Meme of the year.

#CA

"TorrentFreak: Judge Orders Meta to Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting Anna’s Archive and LibGen. “Meta will have to name the people who greenlit its torrenting of pirated books. A federal magistrate judge has ordered the company to identify everyone who approved sourcing books from LibGen and Anna’s Archive. This goes beyond the employees who ran the downloads and includes whoever decided whether to seed the books to others.”"
https://researchbuzz.me/2026/10/23/childrens-safety-online-scotland-castles-japan-video-game-industry-more-friday-researchbuzz-october-23-2026/

Welp, I was holding off on the iPhone Duo for a reason: and now I'm actually interested in the next Apple product announcement due this week—the next iPad Mini—because it'll probably have an OLED screen for the first time, complement my existing iPhone, and not crease in the middle when you fold it! (Also, it'll be about a quarter the price of the Duo.)

@cstross @Remittancegirl

It seems clear from the UK government’s disaster preparedness rhetoric and from its abject lack of public engagement with the National Emergency Briefing that they don’t think a systemic buffer is their job. Which is a hell of an indictment of Westminster in general

There are few things that so perfectly represent the capitalist mode of production as generative AI. It’s theft. It’s plagiarism. It’s an attack on labor. It destroys the environment. It produces junk. It’s harmful to consume. It concentrates wealth. In short, it’s a catastrophe for society.

#PennedPossibilities 1165: Can the dead truly return to the “land of the living” in your universe?

(Starter Pack): Aristocrats in the Permanence who have their brains scanned in an uploading pod then have their personality and memories imprinted on one of their descendants, overwriting a harmless six year old with a tyrannical nobleman. It's how the aristocracy retains its death-grip on power from beyond the grave.

Of course, this is a capital offence for commoners—like our protagonists …

Attempts to create a “distinctively British” AI hit an early stumbling block when developers discovered that none of the servers would talk to each other because they hadn’t been introduced.

#WritersCoffeeClub 25 Oct. Tell us about inspiration from an unlikely source.

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis! Without it, I'm pretty sure I'd never have written "Neptune's Brood", which is a space opera about financial fraud on a scale so vast the perpetrators had to colonise 200 new star systems to launder the proceeds.

I don't think even Elon Musk is thinking that big … yet.

desperately hoping the merch held value better than the NFT did

https://www.ebay.com/itm/226927712030
https://www.ebay.com/itm/226927707896
https://www.ebay.com/itm/326401365477

Many interactions on mastodon are like:

Me: Wow, my microwaved popcorn was too hot and I burnt my tongue!

Responder A: You could maybe put the popcorn inside a bucket made of ice to quickly cool it.

Me: I don't want to do that and I also don't have any buckets made of ice.

Responder B: A bucket of ice can be made by putting water between an inner form and an outer form and freezing it.

Me: Ok, but I don't want to do that and it would also take many hours to freeze the water. I am eating popcorn right now.

Responder C: Liquid nitrogen will freeze water in as little as a few seconds and can be purchased at many welding-gas suppliers

I was in a taxi the other day, an electric Toyota, and it was constantly bugging the driver with various “driver safety aids”, like literally a stream of bongs and chimes and sirens. And half of them were “driver inattention! Sit up and look forwards!” He was sitting up and looking forwards, but also he was black, so the car’s interior camera was not registering him properly. But hey, tech is neutral and AI doesn’t encode bias.

RE: https://mastodon.scot/@andrewducker/117497585708793727

"My eleven-year-old daughter has cancer, and while I love her very much, I am struggling to justify the expense of her chemotherapy when the same money could be used to improve the welfare of tens of millions of farmed shrimp. This is an uncomfortable conclusion, and I want to emphasize that I did not arrive at it lightly …"

A masterpiece of longtermist rightthink! You read. Doubleplusgood rationalism!

The longest running soap opera in the UK had a trans person in it for about 20 years and no one gave a shit.

Fuck JKR

Normal people do not give a shit how people live their lives.