For some reason, this made me cry a little.

https://www.tumblr.com/lizclimo/830304176725803008

Looks like Epic is going ALL IN on AI. 🤮 In related news, I won’t be buying any games from Epic for the foreseeable future.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/programming-is-hard-epic-games-leans-on-vibe-coding-for-its-new-launcher-app/

🎵 IT’S MY BIRTHDAY AND I’LL CRY IF I WANT TO, CRY IF I WANT TO, CRY IF I WANT TO 🎵

Not-so-fun fact: Google’s US Holiday calendar dropped Indigenous Peoples’ Day, so I swapped it for Apple’s, which thankfully still retains it. It was a sad reminder that dealing with calendars outside the Apple ecosystem can be a massive pain in the ass sometimes. (It’s also a sad reminder of how tech companies have been kowtowing to the regime’s “anti-woke” policies.)

It sure would be nice if Linux and Windows had a central calendar store and an API to access it. Please, PLEASE copy Apple’s approach to this, I beg you! 🙏🏻

(Contacts too, while you’re at it!)

A question posed by someone smarter than me: “If Trump were a Russian agent, what exactly would he do differently?”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/10/ukraine-russia-strikes-war-trump-diesel-deal-zelenskyy

Yay! Tokodon no longer crashes on startup! Now I have a Mastodon client that integrates well with my @kde Plasma desktop.

Speaking of which—and fun fact—KDE and I share a birthday! But even if that wasn’t the case, it would still be my favorite desktop environment. I’ve watched it evolve over the past few years into the gorgeous, well-designed, highly-customizable gem that it is today. Seriously, the overall experience leaves Windows in the dust. (It doesn’t have to be this way. Microsoft’s Fluent design system is actually pretty good, but they’re weirdly reluctant to use it, which makes me sad.)

Next week’s 6.8 release brings even more refinement to an already refined experience. Looking forward to it!

#KDE #Plasma #Linux

On one hand, yeah, people should NOT be relying on LLMs like ChatGPT for voting advice. Holy hell!

On the other hand, voting is hard! Yeah, sure, voting for a state governor or POTUS is relatively easy, especially if you have strong political opinions. But good luck sorting through all the down-ballot races and ballot initiatives. It’s a goddamn minefield. In California, we have one proposition (the one-time billionaire tax) followed by two propositions designed to weaken it. If you don’t know that going in, you might wind up effectively nullifying one of your votes. (And yeah, this is done on purpose, because power-hungry oligarchs LOVE making the democratic process harder. They don’t want us fighting back against their nigh-unchecked impunity.)

I do my homework because I want to do it right, and also, because I’m a massive nerd who actually enjoys research. But not everyone is like this! There are people who want to exercise their civic responsibility in a reasonable manner, but don’t have a ton of time or anything approaching my level of obsession. They’re not well-served by existing resources. We need something far better than AI to fill that gap.

https://www.npr.org/2026/10/05/nx-s1-5977852/ai-chatbots-midterm-election

Ironically, I spent YEARS complaining about Siri and longed for greater capabilities. Now here I am, telling y’all to avoid the new Siri like the plague. (Or more so than the plague. The COVID-19 pandemic and the anti-vax movement revealed that some people refuse to avoid a plague. Fucking morons.)

Truly, we live in interesting times.

Pro tip: If you want to keep classic Siri whilst still deleting the local AI models, here’s how:

1. Enter `removemacai off` in Terminal. When prompted to review and install the device management profile in System Settings, do so.

2. Verify that Siri is off and that the local AI models are deleted with `removemacai status`.

3. Enter `removemacai off --keep siri` in Terminal. Once again, you will be prompted to review and install a device management profile in System Settings. Delete the previous one, then review and install the new one.

4. Go to System Settings > Siri and turn Siri back on. (But don’t enable the Siri AI beta!)

System Settings will say, “Adding support for Siri is in progress. Siri will be unavailable until the update is complete.” This is certainly true at first. However, despite the continued presence of this warning, I’m now able to summon Siri and ask basic questions. (In my case, I asked about the weather and a conversion between Celsius and Fahrenheit.) All I had to do was wait for about ten minutes. YMMV, but try it!

HELL YEAH, LET’S FUCKING GOOOOO! Apple removed the on/off toggle for Apple Intelligence in macOS 27. But when there’s a will, there’s a way, and someone found a way!

Alas, it doesn’t hide or remove that damned Image Playground app, which remains protected by System Integrity Protection. But it does delete the local AI models that Apple forces on you, freeing precious disk space!

https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI

Sam Altman wants us to accept “bad things” in return for the supposed benefits of AI. Trouble is, the bad far outweighs the good. All we’ve seen so far is an avalanche of slop, misinformation, CSAM, war crimes, job losses, and hyperscale data centers that guzzle water and power like there’s no tomorrow.

The only “benefit” to AI as we know it is that it makes Altman and his ilk, who are already billionaires, even richer. In case you needed a reminder: their lust for wealth is insatiable. They take and they take and they take and they take, and it will never, ever be enough.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/05/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt-benefits-risks

Hey, still more not-exactly-hippies casting side-eyes on the financial prospects for #GenAI, in this case the Wall Street Journal, in “Will America Spend 9% of Its GDP on AI? The Industry Is Counting on It
To justify staggering investment sums, Americans will have to spend as much of their income on this one technology as they do on food”

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/will-america-spend-9-of-its-gdp-on-ai-the-industry-is-counting-on-it-3501bb4f?st=eJNL7P&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Today was absolutely the wrong day to go to Costco. The parking lot is sheer madness, the warehouse is packed, and it’s 38°C/100°F out. Goddess, give me strength. 😬

Trump said that George W. Bush’s war in Iraq was a quagmire that grew out of bad decision-making. Seriously, those were the words out of his stupid mouth, more or less. It’s as if he didn’t start yet another senseless war of choice in the Middle East, on dubious grounds, with no end in sight.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/30/pentagon-formal-withdrawal-troops-iraq

In case you wanna get a better sense of who I am: I’m a cranky-ass bitch who hates Arial with a burning passion. So I installed the Stylus extension, and on my Windows PC, wrote CSS overrides that replace Arial with TeX Gyre Heros for websites that insist on using the former. Goddess, what an improvement! It restored a small but significant portion of my sanity.

(This wasn’t necessary on my Linux and Mac machines. My Linux laptop does the substitution at the system level, and my Mac has name-brand Helvetica.)

Once again, the American conservative compulsion to back the fossil fuel industry wins out over good sense. Even though gas prices are at record highs, they’re not looking for ways to reduce our dependence. Instead, they’re looking to fill the pockets of their industry friends. And it’s not like the industry needs the help. They’re reporting record profits!

So yeah, look forward to more of the broken incentive structure that fills our streets with ginormous, gas-guzzling, child-killing trucks and SUVs. And also, look forward to even more pollution, even more extreme weather due to climate change, probably more wars in the Middle East, and skyrocketing prices on everything. That doesn’t just affect Americans. It affects everyone, everywhere.

(One more, slightly related thing. I had a stray thought about this notion, buried deep in the American psyche, that absolute dominance is the only true path to safety—and how this manifests in everything from our choices as consumers to foreign policy. But I should save that for something like a doctoral dissertation. That won’t fit in a toot, even one on hachyderm dot io with its 2,263 character limit.)

https://gizmodo.com/trumps-transportation-dept-rolls-back-fuel-efficiency-standards-despite-surging-gas-prices-2000818562

Ironically, Biden tried something similar. He kept boasting about a strong economy whilst ignoring the pain of ordinary Americans struggling to make ends meet.

Of course, there’s one significant difference between then and now. The statement is even more laughable coming from Trump, because conditions are significantly worse than they were under Biden. Inflation is even higher, and prices keep rising and rising because of his tariffs and his stupid, pointless war against Iran. And because he doubles down when he’s backed into a corner, there’s no end in sight. Six-dollar diesel is only the start.

I admit, I didn’t see the war coming. But the economic mismanagement? Saw it plain as fucking day, as did anyone else with a lick of sense. But of course, corporate media loves to tell us that Republicans are better on the economy, even when the available evidence says otherwise. So a bunch of people swallowed this claim whole, without seriously interrogating it, as is the American way. Now here we are.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/sep/28/trump-us-economy-midterm-elections

Well, that’s just great. I live a good distance away from the beach, but it’s close enough for me to feel the knock-on effects.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/28/california-kelvin-wave

To every site demanding that I disable my ad blocker: Nope, not happening! Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. It’s basic endpoint security, and I’m not gonna leave myself vulnerable.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/09/google-ads-caught-delivering-convincing-scareware-ads-to-unsuspecting-users/