It's #MountainMonday lets celebrate #Yukon today!
On this multi-day backpacking trip we had maybe 6hrs of sunlight over a full week as the late summer storms hit us every day. This was one of the fleeting moments of brilliant light that pierced through the rain clouds. An absolutely breathtaking moment.
#landscapephotography #lpw #naturephotography #nature #mountains #canadianphotographer
Blog post: How early SunOS did diskless workstations before NFS, in which an exchange with @rk inspires me to share the wonders¹ of SunOS 1.0's 'nd'. https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/SunOSDisklessWithoutNFS
Among other things, you can marvel at the lengths that people were willing to go to in the early 1980s to save some CPU cycles.
¹ in a very specific sense of 'wonder(s)'.
New Zealand forests are just built different. I spent hours in this place among chest-high ferns, just taking it all in, letting nature do its thing while I watched with a camera & a huge smile on my face.
Bonus points for no leeches - Aussie forests seem to want a blood sacrifice
Tech: Single hand-held shot at f/11, ISO 400, 125sec at 14mm
anyway this is a post about programming and community-building, have a nice day
my previous job (which was also my last job pre-transition but that’s just a coincidence) involved writing maintenance and diagnostic scripts for a series of medical laboratory analyzers that had been in the market for like 15 years by that point. if you’re in the business you’ll recognize the company name but it’s not important here.
what was important was that as a result of working on these machines, the office had several literal clinical-chemistry labs with several of them set up to do QA and such. i didn’t have to go into the lab very often, but because i did, i had to take all the trainings on how to properly use the lab space. things like proper use of PPE, how to handle a sample, various types of hazards, etc.
one of the most useful ones mentioned the Hierarchy of Hazard Controls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_hazard_controls
basically, there are tiers of approaches to accommodating a hazard and ensuring the safety of the humans who need to work around them. from most- to least-effective, they are:
- physically removing the hazard to render it impossible
- substituting a hazardous situation with an equivalent, less-hazardous one
- creating a physical separation between the worker and the hazard, like a fume hood or a guard rail
- implementing a procedure or a ruleset to manage the hazard, like requiring training
- providing Personal Protective Equipment for the workers to mitigate the hazard, like hearing protection or respirators
the early items are considered better than the later ones because they rely less on the attentiveness of the workers to ensure safety. the more you can render a hazard moot, the better work you can perform without having to worry about accommodating a hazardous situation.
so #emacs has a temporary ban on LLM contributions, but only while they wait for GNU to finalize a policy for the whole organization
myself and many other Emacs users don't have a lot of faith in GNU at this time; the ethically sound policy is very simple, and we feel that if they were going to the right thing, they would have done it by now
with that in mind, in the event that they do allow LLM code in Emacs, we will continue to use and develop a separate version of Emacs which is not contaminated
if you feel the same way, please join us and add your name to the list
Today I learned that SunOS¹ nd is even more cursed than I had vaguely remembered it as. It explicitly uses its own IP protocol instead of UDP so that it doesn't have to checksum the data.
¹ I really mean 'SunOS' here, not Solaris. I believe that Sun dropped nd no later than SunOS 4.
RE: https://mastodon.world/@ombialik/116906966255667244
The thing a lot of people don't seem to realise about scientific definitions in biology is that they're names we humans have slapped on the vaste chaotic diverse richness of the natural world out there for our convenience, they don't correspond precisely to objective reality. They're just like common definitions except have had a few more drunken conference arguments go into their choice. Green seaweeds aren't vascular plants, red ones probably aren't plants at all depending on who you ask and where they draw the lines, but the shape of the category "plants" is being constantly redefined to fit our growing knowledge and for most people at the beach or considering making sushi of them it doesn't really matter.
1/🧵
Technically we're all fish because there's no evolutionarily sensible group you can draw that excludes terrestrial vertebrates and includes everything that most people would recognise as a fish, but most of us don't bob around in the ocean with a gormless expression except in the very worst of the heatwaves.
2/🧵
RE: https://mastodon.online/@sarahtaber/116907540433115065
As someone who leads group bike rides for my bike club, this video on heat induced brain fog (and other signs of heat stress) has definitely given me some things to think about. I certainly can feel that my brain has gotten foggy toward the end of longer rides in Toronto heat, and that's not sounding like a good thing.
(Toronto doesn't get to quite southern farm temperature levels of heat & humidity, and biking is not farm work, but still. I know I usually don't drink enough water.)
One of the greatest achievements of feminism was teaching the world that women are more than their bodies.
Women are not wombs. They are not vaginas. They are not chromosomes, breasts, hips, fertility, or the ability to bear children. Womanhood has never been reducible to anatomy.
Feminism fought against exactly that reduction. It challenged the idea that biology determines destiny. It insisted that women should be valued for their humanity, intellect, agency, and lived experience—not for the body parts society assigned significance to.
Which is why I find it so bitterly ironic that TERFs, who claim to be feminists, have returned to defining womanhood almost exclusively through reproductive anatomy and assumed physical characteristics.
Reduce a woman to her womb? Feminism rejected that.
Reduce a woman to her vagina? Feminism rejected that.
Tell women their bodies determine who they are? Feminism rejected that too.
Whether a woman is infertile, post-menopausal, has had a hysterectomy, was born with differences in sexual development, or is a trans woman, reducing her to a checklist of anatomy is not a feminist act. It is the very essentialism feminism spent generations dismantling.
TERFs may call themselves feminists, but defining women by their reproductive organs is not a continuation of feminism, it is a return to the biological essentialism feminism has spent decades fighting against.
Equality has always meant seeing the whole person.
Not just the body.
To clarify: when I went out, I had my hair in a ponytail, so it was somewhat under control. Completely loose, my hair is uncontrollable even inside, so I have it in a ponytail or braid almost all the time.
(Aided by the ponytail being the starting point of the braid, because I'm not braiding my hair with it starting completely loose, that would probably be a disaster with my dexterity. I'd have to braid much more than usual with my hands completely behind my head and uh no.)
Lazily going out without bothering to braid my hair is a useful reminder of why I bother to braid my hair. Everything went everywhere. On the positive side, it's now very air dried after washing it earlier today, and going outside was undoubtedly good for me.
(I'm not out biking this weekend for reasons of heat plus the bike club's Saturday and Sunday rides not being among my favorites, to put it one way.)
No jets in the Toronto downtown airport! The densest residential area in the country shouldn't be building an unnecessary airport right next door. It's bad for the people. There is a direct train that takes you from downtown to the big airport.
The island should be a park.
Let the Government of Canada know.
https://tc.canada.ca/en/corporate-services/consultations/public-consultation-future-billy-bishop-toronto-city-airport
I was reading an essay about the way the centralized powers won the copyright wars of the 1990s and early 2000s. (essay was linked to from p2panda documentation)
https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/this-is-fine/
and ran across this quote:
“How the fuck do so many Zoomers not know how to torrent things?” @Ex_AnarchoAnon
So poll time
Monsterdon can have a smooth, quiet, and altogether delightful experience, as a treat
New grass parade!
Things I'd like to bring back:
- every link being underlined and blue until I click it, at which point it changes color to indicate that I have visited the link
- visible scroll bars that are big enough to click, use for scrolling, and show me where I am in the page
- pages that end
This is a beautifully cynical take on dependency management and resolution and it is beautifully written (as usual) and now I really need to add @andrewnez 's blog to my feed reader because I'm pretty much reading everything new there anyway.
Package Management as Org Chart - Conway's Law applied to dependency management designs.
https://nesbitt.io/2026/07/10/package-management-as-org-chart.html