I've had an icon on my phone I did not know what it was. Finally figured out that it was wifi-calling.
Problem is, that icon keeps showing up at home where the only internet connection I can get is a mobile internet connection. Somehow I suspect that wifi-calling over a mobile internet connection would be worse than a regular mobile call.
But maybe my router gets a better signal than my phone🤔
This in The Onion was six months ago ...
https://theonion.com/doj-to-bring-back-firing-squad-as-means-of-entertainment/
“We’re sending kids to school to memorize facts that ChatGPT can retrieve in under a second.”
:blobcatfacepalm: Yeah worst of all, gym classes are making them run a mile that Uber can cover in less than a minute
Many years ago I used to work on a Cobol-based application that ran over an 80x25 green screen terminal. People running 30 or 40 users on a 486 PC running SCO Unix hooked up to a multi-port serial card.
We'd never have tolerated the amount of waiting between actions or screens that is now considered absolutely normal on web-based cloud-hosted applications.
Weird how things change.
Them: Potions are so powerful in Harry Potter
JK: Yeah you can even use Polyjuice to turn into another person
Them: Awesome because I could turn into a girl
JK: Not like that!
I just saw a video of an AI executive saying that people will connect their brains to the cloud so they can have 1,000 times more thoughts.
Neurotypical people. Please listen to me. I promise you, with all the ADHD in my body-
You really do not want 1,000 more thoughts.
You may think you do, but you extremely do not.
The English word "relate" or "re-late" obviously means being late for the second/third/fourth/... time in a row.
'water is transparent only within a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum,
so living organisms evolved sensitivity to that band, and that's what we now call "visible light". '
"Cars replaced horses"
This is what people say about LLMs, but it's based on a myth.
Los Angeles used to have an excellent tram system, with its suburbs laid out along the tram line. It was bought by General Motors and scrapped to get people into cars. The Key System, which went from San Francisco to Fresno, was scrapped by a tyre company. Cars did not replace horses in cities. They replaced effective mass transit by leveraging capital to destroy a common good. If cars were actually better, this destruction would have been expensive and unnecessary.
In more rural areas, bicycles were extremely common. They were most associated with liberating women, who were more able to commute and meet with neighbours. Bicycles became a symbol of feminism - for sexists. When male students at Cambridge wanted to protest women's admission, the built an effigy of a woman student and burned it. The effigy was on a bicycle. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-45096690
This notion of women cyclists overstepping their place in society and being a menace to the social order appears in the 'Wizard of Oz'. In Kansas, a woman neighbour demands that the family give up Toto because he's been causing extremely minor mischief. Auntie Em tells the neighbour that she wishes to say what what she thinks of her, but can't as she is "a Christian woman". This places her in binary opposition with the neighbour who leaves on a bicycle. Toto escapes and as Dorothy goes to Oz, the woman transforms into a witch and the bicycle into a broomstick.
Bicycles fell out of fashion in the US until mountain bikes, which are loaded with male gender baggage and unsuitable to riding while wearing a dress or for commuting.
Households switched to cars which are expensive, so they tended to only have one, which men took to work and women were placed back in the home.
Cars are a malign presence. Their use was not the advance of technology, but deliberate concerted efforts to harm the public sphere and especially to disempower women. They only became practical because of massive subsidies for highways and roads. They are an inherently wasteful technology, ill-suited to a majority of their current use cases.
“The AI Pascal’s Wager”
https://ploum.net/2026-10-01-pascal_wager.html
> On the other hand, if you refuse AI-generated contributions to your project right now, the worst very hypothetical regret you could ever have is "I should probably have done it sooner".
Speaking of AI...
How well does Steam and games run on FreeBSD Linux emulation?
I'm so old, I remember when software that spread into the wild and infiltrated other people's computers and did harmful things to them that the users didn't ask it to was called "malware" instead of "AI" and the perpetrators were prosecuted instead of given billions in venture capital and government contracts.
Question: Do you have a todo-list app on your phone? Something for simple things like the shopping list - not for project management.
Boosts appreciated ;)
See also my bid: https://expressional.social/@anderslund/117337550246443917
@CoMaps #CoMaps
I would like to suggest a new feature:
HUD view.
It would consist of two things:
- A new map theme with the background and areas in true black, and roads and navigation in bright colors.
- The display being mirrored to be reflected in the wind screen.
There are other apps that do this for displaying speed, but I haven't seen any that show a map - and I believe the changes to CoMaps would be small (dark mode is already supported, so adding a third map theme shouldn't be a lot of work), and people would get the feature without having to install and learn a separate app.
What's an easy to use, preferably open source email program.
My father just turned 77, and only answers enails days later, even though I know he watches Youtube every day. My guess is that email has become too cumbersome.
I installed Thunderbird for him years ago, but he quickly went back to the Gmail web interface because that was easier, so I'm clearly looking for something much easier than both.
(He's on Windows, but with the amount of trouble Windows these days cause even seasoned power users, we might have to change that some day).
So, I have a bone to pick (so to speak).
There's this idea running around that in trans women, breast growth stops around the 2 year mark. That idea is completely incorrect.
(Note that, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to refer to "cis girls" and "cis women" a lot, but what I really mean is "anyone who went through an estrogen-primary puberty and had roughly normal breast development" which is a lot to type out every time. And by "trans women" what I mean is "anyone who went through a testosterone-primary puberty without notable breast growth, and starts taking exogenous estrogen which stimulates breast growth." Also too much to type out every time.)
This completely incorrect idea is based (as far as I can tell) on a study by Meyer et al. in 1986: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3013122/
It says, right there in the abstract:
Maximum breast growth required 2 years of [hormone] therapy.
I'm not going to pay $40 to read someone's out-of-date opinions on a cohort of 60 "transsexuals" and equine estrogen (aka premarin, aka the stuff we stopped using years ago), so I won't try to prove to you that this is true, but I have heard and fully believe that this study was funded for, yes, two years' time. That is, they ran the study for two years, then stopped.
Then they published their results.
And, sure enough, they saw the maximum breast growth after 2 years. Because that was the end of their study.
Now, unfortunately, a bunch of doctors who have "done their research" on trans medicine think that breast growth "plateaus" at 2 years (it says that in the study, too). They tell their transfemme patients this, resulting in a panicked frenzy when, at 2 years, said misinformed patient is freaking out over having barely any breast growth, much less what they were hoping for.
If you look up Puberty on Wikipedia, it includes this sentence:
On average, females begin puberty at age 10½ and complete puberty at ages 15–17
Now, I kinda hate math in this sort of message, but I'm gonna hit you with a bit of math here.
15 - 10.5 = 4.5
17 - 10.5 = 6.5
That is, on average, Wikipedia's authors think puberty lasts at least 4.5 years in cis girls, and can, again on average, last 6.5 years. There's no mention of outliers, but the phrase "on average" should tell you a lot (no one is actually average).
Now, let us turn our sights on the Wikipedia article titled Breast Development. It has this gem for us:
[Breast development] occurs across several phases, including prenatal development, puberty, and pregnancy. At menopause, breast development ceases and the breasts atrophy.
(Emphasis mine)
Hmm, how long is it between the onset of puberty and the start of menopause for most women? What's that, typically 35-45 years? Thanks, Wikipedia article on Menopause!
Now, obviously trans women aren't going around getting pregnant (if you are, let a girl know, I know a couple thousand trans women whose attention just got riveted). So that's not a useful factor for us.
But, like, let's look at the numbers again.
Onset of puberty is around 10 1/2 years of age in cis girls. Puberty is considered "done" around 16 years, roughly. Pregnancy changes things, typically between 18 and 30, for most people who get pregnant (I'm guessing, don't @ me). Menopause typically starts in the 45 to 55 range. During that entire time, breast development is happening.
If you compare cis women who are 16, and those who are, let's say, 22, you will typically see substantial differences in their bodies, without factoring pregnancy in. The colloquial term is "filling out." Their bodies change, and one of the things that fills out is typically their breasts.
But wait, I hear you shouting loudly at your computer monitor, 22 years old? That's [I count on my fingers] almost 12 years! Yes, that's right.
12 or so years of development gives cis women adult looking breasts.
Gee, I wonder if trans women, who are undergoing exactly the same puberty process as cis women, just later in life, might have a similar timing?
Like, I don't know how else to say it, my lovely transfemmes. At 2 years, your breast development is just getting started. Don't let Meyer et al, from 1986 -- under-funded science from fully forty years ago -- tell you how your body works. Don't let under-informed doctors tell you how your body works.
Yeah, 10-12 years is a long time. Even four and a half years seems pretty long. Of course, you can get surgical augmentation any time you like, it's your body, that's the whole point. Wear the push-up bra. Use those cutlets (silicone breast forms, if you don't already know the term). Cis women certainly do. You should too, if you want to.
But it's going to take a while for your breasts to fully develop, and you might be really happy with the result, if you can be patient and run the marathon without trying to sprint through it. My main point is, don't panic about some mythical yet oft-repeated 2 year number. It's absolute garbage.
Social media bans exist to prevent young people from organizing on climate change, Palestine, and LGBTQIA+ rights.
Did a slapt-get --upgrade
Slapt-get tried to update aaa_glibc-solibs
Upgrade script removed /lib64/ld-linux*
Only one thing to say... Than you #BusyBox developers.
Tanker om automatreaktioner på PISA undersøgelser: