RE: https://cosocial.ca/@LauraleeDukeshire/117457497499064516

This Doctor (MD, emergency room physician) nails it:

What’s the point of epidemiological surveillance if public health does not act in a timely fashion on the data?

So what does the data say? OH NO:

Fraser Health and Vancouver Coastal Health are respectively reporting two and three times the epidemic threshold of 5% test positivity for influenza A in the pediatric population

And

Public Health’s failures affect the whole health-care system.

And

Buildings that do not bring in enough fresh air, that do not adequately filter the indoor air and simply recirculate stale air others have breathed, will make occupants sick. The engineers have been sounding the alarm for years now.

B.C.’s public health leaders have refused to listen.

British Columbians deserve better.

If you wonder if she's qualified to speak, please consider

For 15+ years, she served as VGH Emergency Department Quality Improvement director

https://surreynowleader.com/2026/10/15/column-b-c-flu-and-covid-vaccine-rollout-is-too-little-too-late/

#CleanAir #CleanTheAir #COVID #COVID19 #Influenza #PublicHealth #FLU #MaskUp

As complaints go, it's tiny, but I find it shitty that good writing that's florid, colourful, or extravagant,or even that contains a single "it's not" triggers mental alerts at the possibility that it might be LLM-written, and violently yanks me out of the work.

And it's reflexive, not intentional (see what I did there?): it happens on pre-2020 material which I rationally know is human written.

2/2 🧵

LLMs are poisoning areas of literature by training readers to recoil from whole ways of writing.

A cut and dry topic might have no problem.

But an author with less linear prose, or more metaphors? It will be much, much harder to instill a mental state that takes nuance, with evanescent feelings cold logic can't evoke, where a direct approach would pop the bubble.

1/2 🧵

#LLM #writing #literature

Looking for a manual.

manufacturer's website - slow, wasted a minute of my time with their captcha, can't find the product and their search enters a permanent captcha loop (maybe bots have been slamming that input??), search engines surface only unrelated pages. They stopped making this in 2024 or so.

archive.org - search completed immediately, 3 results, each is a crisp PDF of the user manual with live view and a no-hassle one click download link. :green_heart:

I was wondering if maybe I'd made a decaf or something. No worries, I'll just make another, easy solution. Grab the mug and - oh, it's full. Well that explains it!

RE: https://disabled.social/@tomkindlon/117368466611363215

[ME/CFS] was present in 61.4% of Post-COVID Syndrome and absent in controls"

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

(deep breath)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

Can we please stop carelessly spreading precursors of debilitating disease? Please? Please?

At least can we enact protections for kids and schools, since kids aren't intellectually developed enough to risk model? Please?

61-swearing-percent! Aaaaaaaargh!

#PublicHealth #MaskUp #CleanTheAir #CleanAir #CovidIsAirborne

And this, in the headline!

It’s made getting laid a whole lot harder.

is just - really, you're really going to frame it like that? It's a problem about "getting laid"?!

Wired headline: "no one wants to date tech bros" because of how they "are now widely regarded", as if there's a faddish opinion

Body of article:

23-year-old Gary ... explained to a woman why he took an engineering job at Palantir, ... Raking in a $250,000 salary would allow him to help pay off his parents’ mounting medical bills, he explained.

4 paragraphs later:

sometimes he makes up stories out of thin air to justify working for Palantir—like that line about the medical debt. His parents don’t have any, nor are they ill

Maybe, just MAYBE people don't want to date people like this for reasons beyond perception and regard. Maybe it has to do with what they are ok doing? Lying in a first conversation, working for Palantir - maybe these are not fully separate?

https://archive.ph/hhdcf

RE: https://universeodon.com/@jaykuo/117258548966777085

Hey Canadians! 🇨🇦 👋 Have you considered that defunding Canada Post might hurt us?

See how right now de-servicing the USA mail system is used to subvert democracy?

Take note!

#Canada #CDNPoli #Politics #CanadaPost

This is not a new story. Nelson Mandela — whose statue stands today in Parliament Square, facing the Houses of Parliament — was described by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as a terrorist, and the movement he led as a terrorist movement. If this Act had been in force in those decades, that movement would have been proscribed — and anyone in Britain who wrote “we should congratulate them” would have been at risk of standing exactly where I am standing now. Mandela himself said:

“The West sees liberation movements as terrorist movements — and that is why I am accused of supporting terrorism.”

Now let me be precise about what I am saying, because it is not what the prosecution may pretend I am saying. I am not comparing any organisation to Nelson Mandela. The comparison is not between organisations at all. It is between governments — then and now — and how easily they attach the word terrorist to whoever opposes the policy of the day. Today, Mandela is widely admired. The label of terrorism should be applied to those who are terrorists not those who are not.

https://greghadfield.medium.com/tony-greenstein-the-most-important-half-hour-of-my-life-d03f7877a492

2/2 🧵

#GoodNews #Politics

A UK man was acquitted of terrorism charges after delivering his own closing argument:

The devil exists amongst those who deliberately starve children to death because they rationalise that those children will only grow up to be terrorists. It exists among those who bomb tent encampments and literally burn children and their parents alive. It exists amongst those who call Palestinians “human animals” the same phrase used by Himmler, the head of the SS about Jewish children in a speech on October 4, 1943 to senior SS Generals.

https://greghadfield.medium.com/tony-greenstein-the-most-important-half-hour-of-my-life-d03f7877a492

1/2 🧵

#GoodNews #Politics

The air outside is clean. Like, actually clean - not "only three cigarettes a week" but clean. No smell of exhaust, no slight tickle in the nose and throat, just cool fresh clean air.

I'd say it's heavenly but this was the norm for > 99.9999% of humanity's existence. (Not a typo.)

But it is SO NICE to only have to mask around humans who want to exchange lung juices through the air, and not around trees and moss and ferns whose respiration is the breath of life.

It is SO NICE to look at the sky and not see a burgundy tint!

Meanwhile just a short distance over the mountains, the wildfire smoke is still piling up. I hope the wildfires extinguish quickly so the rest of Canada soon can get this extraordinarily luxurious clean air soon.

Hey, it seems the Fediverse has more Linux users and developers than most places, and also a lot more people with strong and informed ideas about LLMs.

So maybe https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002 is something that people here want to vote on. Options are:

• No LLM contributions to Debian via Social Contract
• Allow AI-Assisted Contributions with conditions
• Reject LLMs as far as practical, update Code of Conduct
• Accept AI contributions for Debian specific work
• Responsible Use of Generative AI
• A cautious approach to generative AI
• Debian is created by humans
• Avoid the use of LLM: climate destruction is a deal breaker

[edit: voting closes in one week, on Aug 28th]

#Debian #Linux #vote #LLM #AI

Burgers for scale? If your doctor says "don't eat more than 2 burgers a day for your health", this would be like sitting down to eat 667 burgers at once. If you eat a burger every 5 minutes, that'd be 55 hours of nonstop eating burgers.

#AirQuality #Smoke #health #MaskUp #CleanTheAir #CleanAir

The worst air quality in the world? Chilliwack and Sunshine Valley AQI > 300, Hozomeen AQI reaching 3000. [1]

For scale, 3000 ug/m3 is hundreds of times the recommended limit:

The EPA is setting the level of the primary (health-based) annual PM2.5 standard at 9.0 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/ m3) [2]

Awful, terrible, no-good air.

Wear a mask! Run air purifiers! Trust your nose if you smell smoke, and your eyes when you see haze!

[1] https://map.purpleair.com/air-quality-standards-us-epa-aqi?opt=%2F1%2Flp%2Fa10%2Fp604800%2FcC0#8.79/49.0254/-121.2742/-55.2/59
[2] https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-02/pm-naaqs-air-quality-index-fact-sheet.pdf

#AirQuality #Smoke #health #MaskUp #CleanTheAir #CleanAir

Hey Canadians. Isn't it illegal to pay someone to commit a crime? Can we not criminalize the owners and operators of a service that in reality will pay people to commit crimes so long as they don't get caught?

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/17/climate/betting-wildfires-polymarket-prediction-market-platforms

@tod you have many connections, if this seems like a good idea to you you're very welcome to run with it. (So is anyone else!)

#CDNPoli #wildfires #Canada

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@robinadams/117024166817030983

This deserves the Streisand Effect. Suppressing information is a sure sign the information is important to disseminate.

Even if a complete neuron doesn't die, if a huge chunk of the synapses are destroyed, whatever that neuron was doing before, it's doing a fraction afterwards:

a measurable, consistent, and symptom-correlated loss of dopamine nerve terminals averaging 18 percent across the long COVID group.

with localized damage to areas that match Long COVID symptoms:

“In other illnesses this magnitude of loss is associated with symptoms: loss in one region is associated with trouble with motivational energy problems, loss in another region is associated with some slowness of movement, and loss in a third region is associated with memory trouble.”

in short,

the terminals are gone, the loss is measurable, and it correlates with the symptoms patients have been reporting for years.

https://tech-paper.com/scientists-finally-have-a-biological-explanation-for-why-long-covid-patients-lose-motivation-and-cant-think-clearly-they-scanned-their-brains-and-found-the-dopamine-system-was-physically-damaged/

#neuroscience #neurology #science #LongCOVID #PASC #health

Thinking about @giflian 's "Run the dishwasher twice" and

there are no rules. Peel the veggies lying on a couch. Hell, peel the veggies while lying on the floor if you want! Set the slow cooker to low with enough water to last days and leave it until you need it. Sleep anywhere if a crash hits and a bed is too far away. Wash white clothes with dark clothes (in cold water).

Conserving spoons is real, social conventions are not. Better to do what works than to do what "everyone else" is doing and run out.

As people said in the original thread, there is no right or wrong way to do things that don't hurt other people.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@TheBreach/116975197576096434

The picture The Breach uses to illustrate this article about CBC News ignoring climate change is so 🔥

(For vision impaired folks: the image is a CBC logo in its usual glowing-coal red, engulfed in fire from behind, and it's really visually effective.)

#wildfires #CBC #CDNPoli #Canada