Google AI Overview does not know that we fall back!

Sunset on Sunday will be 5:09 PM, not 6:09.

These are some snowy egrets I saw on a short walk at the Bair Island reserve on the San Francisco Bay. They are usually solitary, I don't often see groups (there were five in the group, though only four made it into these shots). #BairIsland #SnowyEgret #birds #sfba

RE: https://mastodon.social/@heidilifeldman/117525616365098060

I thoroughly enjoyed this rant from Wonkette.

This photo is from a hike a few days ago at Henry Coe State Park, in the mountains southeast of San Jose, California. A great #mosstodon shot; there will be more moss once the wet season starts. I did about 10 miles / 16 km with a steep climb back up at the end. Great weather for a hike. #hiking #HenryCoeStatePark

🐙📚 A little excursion into critical theory: Erich Fromm, the Frankfurt School, and the appeal of authoritarianism

Ever heard of Erich Fromm?

Fromm was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of thinkers who set out to understand why modern capitalist societies produced not only technological progress and material wealth, but also alienation, conformity, and authoritarian politics.

The Frankfurt School brought Marxist social criticism into conversation with psychology, philosophy, and sociology. Its thinkers wanted to understand not merely how societies reproduce inequality, but why people sometimes accept, defend, and even enthusiastically participate in systems that subordinate them.

Fromm had a particularly uncomfortable question: Why do people sometimes flee from the very freedom that was supposed to liberate them?

In "Escape from Freedom", published in 1941, also known as "The Fear of Freedom" he explored how the collapse of traditional structures, social isolation, and feelings of powerlessness could make authoritarianism attractive.

And goodness, does that question still have teeth.

Look around. People are struggling with economic insecurity, unaffordable housing, precarious work, social isolation, and the feeling that the world is changing faster than they can make sense of it. They are told they are free to choose, while many of the choices that actually shape their lives remain beyond their control.

And then somebody arrives with a wonderfully simple explanation.

Your problems are caused by immigrants. By feminists. By queer people. By intellectuals. By some imagined enemy supposedly conspiring to destroy everything you love.

The solution? A strong leader. A return to an idealised past. Fewer inconvenient rights for the people you've been taught to resent. More obedience, more hierarchy, more certainty.

Fromm helps us understand why this can be appealing. Authoritarian movements offer more than political programmes. They offer belonging, identity, and relief from the burden of uncertainty. They promise to replace the difficult work of autonomy with the reassuring simplicity of obedience.

And there's a particularly nasty little trick involved: you can be made to feel powerful by participating in somebody else's domination.

You may have little control over your working conditions, your rent, or your future. But you can be encouraged to feel superior to someone more vulnerable. You can identify with the powerful rather than question the system that keeps you powerless.

This is one reason authoritarian politics can flourish alongside economic inequality. Instead of asking who holds power and who benefits, people are encouraged to fight over who deserves dignity.

But Fromm's argument cuts deeper than a diagnosis of the far right.

A society can formally guarantee freedom while making people too exhausted, isolated, frightened, or economically dependent to exercise it meaningfully. Democracy requires more than the right to cast a ballot. It requires the material security, education, social connections, and confidence that allow people to think and act independently.

And this is where the lesson becomes uncomfortable for the political centre, too. If democratic institutions leave people feeling powerless while treating their insecurity as a public-relations problem, they create space for movements that promise to restore agency through exclusion and control.

Understanding that does not excuse fascism. It means taking seriously the conditions in which authoritarianism recruits its supporters.

We cannot build a freer society merely by telling people to appreciate their freedom. We have to make freedom something they can actually experience.

Less fear. Less dependence on arbitrary power. More solidarity. More democratic control over the conditions of our lives.

Because the alternative to authoritarian belonging cannot simply be loneliness with a constitution attached.

Fromm's question remains worth asking: Are we creating people who can live freely, or a society in which surrendering freedom increasingly feels like the only way to feel safe?

🐙 Leslie's marginalia: If a politician promises to make you great again by taking somebody else's freedom away, perhaps ask why your greatness requires a victim.

[https://ko-fi.com/post/Fromm-the-Frankfurt-School-and-the-appeal-o-B1H02912BJ]

Today I did a hike in Castle Rock State Park, a favorite of rock climbers. But this was a Tuesday afternoon so I had this spot, at Goat Rock, all to myself (at least for a bit, a group of three young guys came by shortly after this). It's a beautiful place, not far from where I live, but almost 3000 feet (900 meters) higher in elevation. #hiking #photography #CastleRockStatePark

LLM-based agents don't have to be super-intelligent to cause massive damage. After all, the Black Death killed 1/3 of Europe and no one thinks it was conscious. It suffices to have large numbers of agents pounding away at the Internet, powered by millions of dollars in compute power, trying to reach odd corners to satisfy a goal, using every tactic they copied from Stack Overflow or hacking contests, with no knowledge of the side effects their actions may cause. Internet-connected systems have massive numbers of security holes and really stupid attacks can produce bot farms even before LLM AI came along.

Enough life-critical systems are connected to the Internet that a massive, stupid agent-based attack where neither a person nor an agent "decided" to cause harm could produce a disaster.

So I don't think AI is going to become super-intelligent and kill us all, but do think that stupid AI could make the Internet unusable at some point.

Trailer of Musk, the much awaited and discussed documentary, scheduled for release theatrically in the U.S. on October 9.

Let's share it far and wide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY_8SyndC10
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musk_(film)
1/n

#PhotOfTheDay is another sign that caught my eye, this time on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Explanation in the ALT.

#photo #photography #hawaii #explore

I assumed that Fediverse could really be an open, progressive environment where to discuss ideas and grow up, with different points of view. But what I'm finding lately, is something different. Narration going from "pro AI / glasses" to "no AI / glasses" so if you don't maintain a position, you are just in favor of fascists or perverts.
The last one I had a discussion with, called me "a waste of time" because I made him realize that a sighted pervert can use his own eyes, without glasses, while I fasten my shoes strings, bent over. Instead of joining me, thinking of a proposal to satisfy blind people's needs while protecting privacy, no. The problem is me.

Same for github/codeberg stuff: do AI-built pull-requests ruin open source software? Yes.
Is AI-generated code dirty and unreliable? Yes.
Have hand made coders the right to prohibit automated code? Yes, of course.
But same coders, went on for years saying "I'm an independant coder, a small company, I have no resources to make it accessible to blind, if you need it, make it yourself".
Now, thanks to assisted coding, many of us blind are doing exactly this: trying to solve their gaps by having the bots fix the issue. Then, to help other users (and the coder himself), they place the fix in form of pull request, into the repository. And it's often refused.
But, would the original coder ever solve accessibility? No. I'm alone, it's a small company, you're the first blind user I hear, and similar bullshit.
What, the fuck, should, we, do?

From far-right, I know what to expect: they're racist, ableists, and all the worst. They don't hide it. But I couldn't definitely expect such behaviours from people caring for freedom, ethics, open technologies, etc. I'm fed up of being considered an object who can gladly be sacrificed for purity of something or someone.

UPDATE: on blindness, coding and AI, please read this story, wrote by an experienced blind guy, about the topic:

https://mosen.org/ai

And as the discussion must be complete, I also add another point of view, together with the one pro vibe-coding.

On the link below, Robert (another experienced blind person) talks about "disability dongle", meaning those super-tech hardwares made for disability, but are more for inspirational videos than for real time usage. Expensive and uncomfortable.

Robert talks about hardware but it can easily be applied to AI as well: it's far from affordable, not with disability in mind, it must be well trained and you use more tokens to get what you want...

I'm not pro, I'm not against, I'm in the middle. Appreciate good, hate the bad. And want the discussion to be more balanced.

https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/disability-dongle/

#ableism #accessibility #ai #fediverse

Monarch slo-mo. I had the big lens with me but was able to get this with my phone. This butterfly was hungry!

🧵Spotted A little While Ago in Aotearoa New Zealand:

A young human (9?)
is listening to a busker play
a rather good
acoustic version
of Dolly Parton's Jolene.

She asks her mum,
"Hey Mum,
do you know
what this song
is about?"

Her mum doesn't skip a beat
when she answers,
"Your aunt."

Gonna miss you Dolly. ❤️❤️❤️
Today's gonna be a little bit sad I think.
Hugs to anyone else out there who might need it.

A man talks to a therapist. Says he’s depressed. Says the world feels hollow and unreal. Says he no longer knows whether anyone truly understands him.

The therapist says, ‘The remedy is simple. Talk to ChatGPT. It’s endlessly patient, reassuring, and always knows what to say.’

The man bursts into tears.

‘But doctor,’ he says. ‘You ARE ChatGPT.’

The therapist nods. ‘You’re absolutely right to feel that way.’

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117099997704043547

How could this be? Donald Trump insists that magnets don't magnet when they get wet. Fake news!

Astronomy Picture of the Day
2026 August 13

'Total Solar Eclipse Over Spain'

Image Credit & Copyright by Ruiyu Zhang

Image Alt Text by Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II)

source: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

#TotalSolarEclipse #Eclipse2026 #Astronomy #Photography #BreathtakingViews #RuiyuZhang #KeighleyRockcliffe #NASA #APOD

yay, Elastica are back and going to release new music.

Elastica... the band who almost run my sorry homeless ass over when I was sleeping in the Hacienda car park in late 1993, and apologised by feeding me from their rider before then shooting me a lot during Laserquest.

I went on tour with them many times, and they never made one bad record and in Justin Welch they have the best drummer I ever saw, and in Annie one of the best bassists (ignoring problems with drugs)... and in Donna a gem of a person so creative on guitar...

and Justine. Justine was so unfuckingbelievably kind, like, you don't know how much. I called her up one time as I needed to sell some records at the tape exchange so that I could eat yet I didn't have any ID so they wouldn't accept the sale. she came and met me, refused to give her ID but instead just gave me more money than I needed.

she also had this really strong cohort of intelligent women as friends, you definitely know some of them (now famous artists and musicians)... and she never wanted fame.

yet that first album... every song is excellent. and because I know the people behind a lot of the songs I like the songs even more (usually the reverse happens when you know the people).

my favourite song on that album was called Blue, which became the name of a fanzine I sold to keep myself alive and feed myself.

Today is Venn Day, in celebration of the mathematician John Venn, born on this day in 1834. To commemorate the occasion, here’s a poem in the form of a Venn Diagram.

@redsad

i hate the reflexive dreary "that's AI" kind of comment under everything that seems too good to be true, but i admit at first i thought this was AI

nope

it's a reversed image of a still from the Charlie Chaplin film "Pay Day" (1922)

https://youtu.be/qWmoHvYhl4k

(at exactly 21 seconds in)

which is quite incredible

This is very niche, but I am crying with frustration over my @#$%&* RA getting to the point where I now drop things every day, and spill drinks too often. I hate HATE the idea of an adult sippy cups "for the elderly" but I'm also tired of the clean-up.

Is there a brand, you or your parents, or grandparents use that doesn't look like you brought it home from the hospital? I'm looking for something as spill proof as possible, lightweight and easy to grip and hold, with handles, where every part is top rack dishwasher safe.

#DisabilityAid

This is from a recent hike at Long Ridge Open Space Reserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains, looking toward the sea. #sfba #hiking #photography