Las Vegas Strip, Paradise, NV, 2023.

All the pixels, but no comped rooms or meals, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/53029334521

#photography

@orva @brib @algernon @onewheelgeek @gotosocial it fetches thread context by looking up and down through the thread for ancestors and descendents but it relies on remotes properly serving the "replies" collection etc. https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/v0.22.0/federation/posts/#conversation-threads

But indeed it doesn't fetch all a user's historical posts or anything.

Every now and then on my wanders around Glasgow, I come across one of these upside down T-shaped keyholes on the door of a Victorian building. It's for an Odell Night Latch Key, of the type shown on the right.

Cont./

#glasgow #odelllatchkey #doorfuriture #keys #locks

The movement to ban Chinese models to preserve the business models of Anthropic and OpenAI continues apace.

It’s just a matter of time before we hear that paying high AI token prices for Mythos and Fable is important for national security instead of using GLM or Qwen.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/08/chinese-ai-models-probe-us-lawmakers.html

😂😂😂 taken from https://github.com/Vandivier/ladderly-3/issues/639 #satire #ai

Mastodon is great and all, but if you want Fedi to be more than just one dominant server, I urge you to consider financially supporting GoToSocial, a lightweight ActivityPub software.

@gotosocial is halfway to their modest funding goal. Developing open source software is labor and deserves to be funded. Even if you don't use GoToSocial, I cannot overstate how important it is to fund projects like this which advance the protocol we all use. Even a buck a month is helpful.

https://opencollective.com/gotosocial#category-CONTRIBUTE

@nickapos @AkaSci That would imply that there still are sane people within the US military, which is somewhat reassuring (until he tells his drunken henchman to remove them, that is)

(Edit - by David Abruzzese, one of the best rock drummers on earth)

This Australian's reply to Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.
"Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth."

People don’t realise that “Just get a Brother laser; it’s fine” is the highest possible compliment for printers. If you want a printer to (1) sit near-dormant in deep sleep for weeks or months on end, and then (2) immediately print what you send to it, properly, every single time and then go to sleep again, then… just get a Brother laser printer. Somehow, in this world of madness, it does the thing you buy it for with no bullshit. If you can even remember what that’s like.

Australia is introducing free daytime power in July. They’ve installed so much #solar that the challenge is to use it effectively. People who can shift their electricity usage to the day (think retirees or people that work from home) can save a lot even if they don’t have solar. Anyone with a battery or two installed could see their power bill for many months go to almost zero.

Batteries are the key to having an economy that can run on solar and wind all the time.

https://lenergy.com.au/free-daytime-electricity-is-coming-heres-how-it-actually-works/

There's a few pictures currently going around of a group of Patriot Front fascist paramilitaries on Washington DC public transport.

A lot of people are worried by this. Some have talked at length about their worries.

As someone who spends a certain amount of time in black bloc, let me talk you through some things I haven't seen said about these pictures but that I think are very relevant.

(EDIT: people who know much more about PF as a group have commented below, please read what they have to say.)

In 1901, divers pulled a lump of corroded bronze out of a two thousand year old shipwreck. It took the next century to understand what it was, and the answer broke the timeline of human history.

It's called the Antikythera Mechanism, and it is the oldest known computer on earth.

It was built by the ancient Greeks, around 100 BC, and it should not exist. Nothing else of its sophistication would appear anywhere in the world for more than a thousand years after it...
@JamesLucasIT #globalmuseum

"Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing."
- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Good morning fellow Mastos and hello to Saturday. It's hot again. 31C today. I'm covered up and factored to buggery! We're on a sightseeing trip on a boat all day today, not sure what WiFi will be like!

Have a great day folks. Have fun, have laughs, have a beer! Take care.

Today's photo is a fledgling House Martin peeking out from it's current home. Stuck to the side of our hotel.

Dependency injection isn't complex - it's just passing dependencies as parameters instead of creating them inside functions. Makes testing easier because you can pass mock objects. #DesignPatterns

More adventures in Carob - Since Ceratonia siliqua can grow north of Albania, I was expecting to see more of it. However, knowledge of it seems limited to southern Albania along the coast.

I had pretty much given up on seeing it in the capital city, but after years spotting carob street trees, my eyes are pretty sharp for it and I spotted one today over the wall to the Italian Embassy (fittingly enough).

#Botany #Ethnobotany #Albania

@smsm1 @nickapos I’m on the Octopus Cosy tariff because I have a heat pump. That has eight hours at 12.96p and the spacing between the low price periods is such that I can use my home battery to buy all of my winter time electricity at that rate. In summer it’s moot because the system draws less than 0.2kWh spread over the whole day. I also get to export at 12p/kWh so that earns income that offsets the winter load.

Translation for people that didn't take divinity classes when they were younger:

By "traditionalist" they mean "pro-fascist." As in, the super racist part of the Catholic Church whose founder actually helped nazis round up Jews in Lyon for the Holocaust, and who was mad when France was liberated.

https://apnews.com/article/vatican-traditionalist-pope-latin-st-pius-6570c6bcc0784f4b9229e20bdec4e5aa

As recently as a few years ago, their bishops were still denying the Holocaust publicly, and making super racist comments about muslims entering France.

The Pope says "You can't just make new bishops yourself! We need to filter out your worst ones! The pope approves bishops!"

They kept doing it.

So the Pope said, "Fine. You can keep doing that, but now you're not Catholic anymore.*"

(*Technically still Catholic, but excommunicated)

I used to work at the zoo and one time a gorilla died of old age.

The problem was it was the only gorilla in the zoo because the zoo wasn't very profitable. The gorilla was by far the most popular attraction and they couldn't afford to go a single day without it being there.

So the zoo owner came up to me and said, “listen, for an extra hundred bucks, do you want to just put on this gorilla costume until we can afford a new gorilla?”

“Of course,” I said, “go on then.”

Pretty quickly, I became the biggest hit in the zoo. Everyone wanted to see this human-like gorilla. After about a month, the craze started to die down, but they kept pressuring me to get people's attention again. So in a desperate attempt, I climbed over to where the lions were and started hanging off the net. Suddenly a massive crowd gathered and everyone looked terrified. I could feel my grip slipping, I couldn't hold any longer. I started screaming, “help, help.” Then I fell.

The lion rushed towards me and just as I thought it was over, he leaned over and whispered, “shut the fuck up before we both get fired.”