Aleksander Nijal, founder and president of a Bronx food bank that feeds anywhere between 7,000 and 8,000 community members each month, was abducted by ICE while attending a court hearing.

"The pantry said it will not be distributing food until Nijal's return, because they cannot handle the workload without him. They said if he does not return, the pantry will close indefinitely."

https://bronx.news12.com/bronx-food-pantry-rallies-behind-founder-after-he-was-detained-by-ice

Thank you to everyone who has offered suggestions. For a workaround, i can reinitialize wine every time I need to work with ywriter.

It's a pain, but it works and I have all the commands in a text file on the desktop.

Long term, I'd like to figure it out, but at least I have a solution for now.

Did I just write almost 5000 words about why generative "AI" should be resisted, going through every single one of my reasons?

Yes. Because I need this article to exist so I can point people to it.

Enjoy and share widely.

https://estherweidauer.com/articles/why-resist-generative-ai.html

suggesting that people give up their ability to learn a skill in order to instead rent it out from an unauditable, unknowable, unquestionable third party that has disempowered people who already have that skill

is not fucking democracy

that is the opposite of democracy

that is creating a central, unquestionable authority that is not beholden to you.

also?  "democratizing skills"?  You do not have a *right* to the skills of other people.  So even if this authoritarian style enclosure wasn't already making a mockery of the term, the fact that it's literally built on the stolen labor of the individuals who it is disempowering (by removing their ability to gain pay for their work) IS NOT DEMOCRACY.

“Why are all of these evil billionaires…”

Well, let’s start with the billionaire part. Would someone who hasn’t a phenomenal asshole just keep accumulating wealth after the first couple hundred million? They don’t need it. They can’t use it. A human with empathy and a desire to do good would be spending it lifting others out of suffering.

A 17-year-old in Turkey built a free disaster app that keeps people connected when cell networks fail.

Emirhan Duman started working on Crisis Connect after the devastating 2023 earthquakes in Turkey and Syria knocked out communications when people needed them most.

The app lets phones send messages and calls over Bluetooth, hopping from device to device until they reach the intended recipient.

Users connect with family and neighbors ahead of time by scanning a QR code, so the network is ready when disaster strikes.

It also includes an SOS beacon, compass, digital whistle, live location sharing, and an offline mode that works without a central server.

Duman is candid that it won’t replace satellite links or emergency radio, but says it can fill a critical gap in the first hours after a disaster.

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/teens-disaster-messaging-app-can-hop-across-bluetooth-when-cellular-networks-collapse/

I was out walking with my girlfriend, and we found a new Fedi reaction pic.

Today's vibe

#Life

We've been hearing the Republicans wrong. It's not "thoughts and *prayers*," it's "thoughts and PAYERS," that is, the people bribing them to not do anything about guns in the U.S.
#politics #USPol #guns #GunControl #GunViolence

Is there someone smarter than me in the ways of linux who can explain why wine would work perfectly fine and let me run yWriter on the Linux Mint laptop until I reboot at which point it errors out and won't run.

Until I uninstall wine and reinstall it. This has happened twice.

Aargh.

#Linux
#LinuxHelp

Tomorrow will be a long day and I will be running on too few hours of sleep.

I had a laptop emergency (my laptop flat out refused to charge - troubleshooting revealed there's something wrong with the charger port) and I'm heading to Toronto early in the morning for a 6 day writing retreat.

I ended up staying up far too late, but was able to configure an old laptop running Linux with everything I need, including access to my cloud-stored files and the ability to run yWriter in wine.

Setting up wine was a PITA.

But I have a working computer instead of a computer shaped paperweight.

Goodnight Fedi!

I was accused of being sensationalist or exaggerating when our 2022 research paper predicted one in 15 visible points in the sky would be a moving satellite. I think maybe we were actually too conservative.

I hate this so very very much.

#InarticulateLiberty quilt top is finished!

It’s been a while since I did a design this scrappy and I really enjoyed the freedom to cut loose (pun intended 😉)

Also pleased with the chain link border that I had to add when the original design was too small - looks like I planned it all along!

My next quilt isn’t going to be scrappy tho because my rotary cutter and my arm need a break 💪🏻 after all this

#Quilt #ToBeQuilted

@MissConstrue The horror stories are compounding. One of the more terrible things is that these reports, no matter from where, are utterly believable because we know how these corporations/hyperscalers/broligarchs behave. They’ve taught us to trust nothing and turned a lot of the internet adversarial, or into outright oubliettes of abuse.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@joeyomahoney/117457518183438409

My husband @joeyomahoney has been a #skateboarder since he was 12, just passed his final exam to be a licensed professional #LandscapeArchitect, has sixteen years of experience (general practice and #skatepark design/build) and wants to design a skatepark for your town. (He does residential landscape design, too.) #skateboarding

If you haven't seen the Abdul El-Sayed confrontation with a far-right Christian supremacist who tried to paint him as a Muslim terrorist, it's absolutely worth your time.

Be sure to watch all the way to the end for the climax of the argument, and to see Tommy slink away in shame.

And in case you were wondering, Tommy is a professional evangelical Republican activist, and a former employee of Christian supremacist Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)

Background:
https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/tommy-teepell-abdul-el-sayed-viral-video-town-hall-josh-hawley

Here’s the thing. It looks like a political cartoon, but it’s real. The slices of the pizza are exactly mathematically proportional to reality. We are being screwed every single day by rich oligarchs. And we know it. It’s time to fundamentally change the power structure in our economy. Nothing will change if we continue to allow money to be the ultimate goal and arbiter of power.

I had three participants at today's #darning workshop, none of whom had darned before. I found it very amusing that one of them, who had been actively knitting a sock when I entered the room, told me she'd never darned before because she found it intimidating. And she was knitting a sock! That's like darning a whole entire sock at once!

People were emboldened by trying out the skill on my socks, so I count that as a win. Plus I have less darning to do now.

#visibleMending #fiberarts

If you are considering making a flier, and thinking of using AI, know that I would much rather see plain, black text on a white background than AI slop.

And if you use AI, yes, it is slop.

📰 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐂𝐡𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐧𝐮𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐁𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐱 𝐙𝐨𝐨 𝐀𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐚 𝐂𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐲

🌎 NYC: The American chestnut — once the giant of Eastern forests — has been planted again at the Bronx Zoo, the very place where its devastating blight was first documented about 100 years ago.

🌳 This symbolic homecoming marks a hopeful turning point: science, stewardship, and persistence are helping restore a species long considered functionally extinct in the wild.

🔬 Researchers and conservation partners are working to rebuild resilient chestnut populations, blending genetics, ecology, and community care to bring a foundational tree back to the landscape.

🔗 More https://newsroom.wcs.org/News-Releases/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/26704/American-Chestnut-Trees-Functionally-Extinct-in-the-Wild-Return-to-the-Wildlife-Conservation-Societys-Bronx-Zoo-for-the-First-Time-in-More-Than-a-Century.aspx

#SolarPunkSunday #AmericanChestnut
#Ecology #Restoration #Conservation #Environment #EcologicalRestoration