Apparently an instinctive name some family members have for those stretchy sticky gel hands is “the slapper”. Much suppressed hilarity ensues.

perl 5 has an unusual feature called "bearwords". you can treat any identifier as a string by simply writing it as `q🐻WORD🐻`

LB: I want everyone to know - and please tell everyone! - that it is better to use the public defibrillator in *every* situation.

If you get the defib, and the patient's condition isn't suitable, either the machine itself or the emergency call handler will tell you.

But if you're ever unsure about whether you should use the public defib or not, the answer is YES. Every. Single. Time.

And if you're unsure about whether you're capable of using one: YES. You are. They're made so that anyone can use them.

It is not possible to make the situation worse. You can't do anything wrong. Every thing you try to do for a person having a cardiac arrest is better than not doing it.

Sudden realization of an implication of personal agents à la Muse or OpenClaw; customer support bots pleading to speak to a human.

Now that we’ve abolished leap seconds, and won’t tweak standard time to match the rotation of the Earth until the discrepancy reaches 1 hour, we should establish a generation-spanning secret society that shuffles objects around to make Earth’s spin conform to atomic time instead.

RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117450071591623123

This happens: grifters build a copy of a book, slap a *40% OFF* medallion on the cover, then list it for sale under a name that looks like the author, but with a unicode homograph replacing a letter. This is close enough to show up in bookstore searches, so a bunch of readers get sucked in the 40% OFF label and give money to a crook.

As soon as my publisher tells Amazon or Apple or whoever they yank it off sale, but by then it's too late.

https://wandering.shop/@cstross/117450285590515715

I rotated my password, now it's ᄅɹǝʇunɥ.

apparently in the UK theyre going to make it illegal to be naked

Do not use an Uzi to assemble your furniture

why doesn’t punk music have more recorders in it. they embody the ideology perfectly. cheap and accessible. sounds awful. relatively easy to learn to play. what’s the deal here

Not my details to go into, but sudden harsh reminder that there’s never a bad time to donate to the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (https://nwirp.org/donate/) or abolish and prosecute ICE, whichever you may have the ability to do.

My biggest fear is that I'll have the exact same typo in both new password fields. My second biggest fear is ghosts but I can handle them as long as I remember my password.

Hey @kevingranade remember when we were talking about Peter Watts being disturbingly prescient and now anthropic are forecasting the Maelstorm (but tragifarcical). https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/13/anthropic-ai-replicators-warning

Internet-connected fridges:

Not my details to go into, but sudden harsh reminder that there’s never a bad time to donate to the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (https://nwirp.org/donate/) or abolish and prosecute ICE, whichever you may have the ability to do.

As always, this Yandex datacentre thing is reminding me of my core principle: if something seems like it's confirming your views, but all the evidence you can find is a crusty JPEG and not anything authoritative, maybe the information is less actual than you thought it was and maybe don't spread it.

RE: https://mas.to/@TopicLords/117428375048157007

Gotta make some edits to my will

Also discussed: Whether Disney is willing to DMCA takedown your novelty Disney funeral. (Ep.69)